HERE WE ARE: 2012

Saturday, December 29, 2012

Teaching Citizenship

To say that, over the past few years, our federal government has failed to govern is an understatement. Congress has become polarized by ideologues who see their role not as finding workable solutions to problems, but simply to stand by their ideologies at all costs. Our representatives are beholden to corporations--who are NOT "people" as some have suggested and are NOT citizens--rather than to the voters who they were elected to represent.

There are many reasons for this failure, but one that has not been discussed much is the fact that our children receive very little by way of civic education as part of the secondary school curriculum. When I was in high school in the 1960s, one class in ninth grade was devoted to Pennsylvania History and Civics--an introduction to the Constitution and the structure of our federal government. Then, in 12th grade, we had a full year of "Problems of Democracy," a course that looked at how the government worked to solve problems. Sadly, it appears that many schools have dropped these requirements over the past generation. As a result, fewer voters know what to demand of the people they elect to represent them.

So, I was delighted to learn that the Pennsylvania Department of Education will require a graduation exam in "Civics and Government" beginning in 2020, with the exam available to schools as early as 2016. It seems like a long time to wait, but I am nevertheless happy that the Commonwealth has acted to ensure that all Pennsylvanians receive some level of citizenship education.

Now, then, it would be great to see our colleges and universities require a capstone general education course in all professional curricula that gives students a sense of what the citizenship responsibilities are of professionals in different fields.

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

MOOCS and the Land Grant Mission

MOOCs—Massive Open Online Courses—have captured the imagination of many in higher education since several leading research universities began to offer their large lecture courses in this format. At the most basic level, these courses enhance the lecture hall, providing video lectures with opportunities for interaction among students and between students and instructors. In the process, they maintain the old notion that education is about knowledge transfer. However, perhaps it is best to see these early MOOCs as just that: early innovations with a new generation of online learning.

In the November 29, 2012 issue of Inside Higher Education, W. Joseph King and Michael Nanfito of the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education, make that case. “The MOOC,” they write, “. . . is essential a high-tech extension of the traditional industrial age university lecture-hall experience.” However, they add that one can look beyond MOOCs as a simple delivery mechanism and see its potential as a “connectivist” tool that gives institutions the ability to integrate four functions:

1. Aggregation, allowing students to bring together different sources of knowledge provided within the course as well as beyond the course.

2. Remixing information and ideas by communicating with peers about what they are learning.

3. Repurposing information to create new knowledge.

4. Feeding forward their learning by applying it to new situations and publishing the results.

“The key here,” they write, “is thinking of the MOOC not in the standard way, as asynchronous video lectures and course readings, but in the connectivist way . . . to provide participatory space.”

Embedding MOOCs in the Land Grant Mission

I would add that another key to ultimate success with this new model is to base it firmly in the institution’s mission. Some of us can remember how, at the beginning of the online learning revolution, Fathom—a project that involved some of the same institutions as are now innovating with MOOCs—failed because the initiative simply was not within the institution’s core mission and culture. Today, I would argue that institutions should not simply emulate what Harvard and others are doing with MOOCs but ask how this new generation of online learning can best extend their own missions.

I have spent my entire career—from student to administrator—in land grant universities. There are several ways that MOOCs can advance the land grant mission at a time when that mission is being challenged by radical changes in the society it serves. Here are a few:

Revitalizing General Education – Like the big private research universities, our land grant universities offer large lecture sections for many of its general education courses. Obviously, MOOCs have the potential to make these courses more engaging and relevant. However, they also hold potential for transforming general education from a discipline-based distribution curriculum to a more comprehensive interdisciplinary curriculum by providing a “participatory space” where faculty from multiple disciplines can share ideas around common themes and encourage students to create new knowledge to address major societal problems. When I was an undergraduate at Penn State in the 1960s, the general education curriculum included interdisciplinary core courses in the humanities, social sciences, biological sciences, and physical sciences, as well as innovative Science, Technology, and Society courses that focused on the interaction of disciplines around major social issues. MOOCs could support this approach at scale for large, multi-campus institutions like Penn State and other land grants.

Extending the Impact of Research and Technology Transfer -- MOOCs offer a particularly powerful way for research faculty to connect with the communities that can most benefit from applying their research. Imagine videos or other media that present the results of research, combined with the ability for individuals in the community (whether it be industry, business, government policy makers, other educational sectors, health care, etc.) to explore the impact on their own practices and to share ideas among each other as well as with the faculty researchers in order to identify new practices that effectively build on new research.

Re-Imagining Cooperative Extension – Cooperative Extension was created during the Industrial Revolution to ensure that American agriculture would keep pace with industrialization and urbanization. The idea was to distribute expertise to the county level, so that academic specialists could work directly with farmers in their fields. Cooperative Extension remains essential to quickly translating agriculture and environmental research into effective practice. MOOCs could greatly facilitate the university’s ability to bring practice communities around agricultural research and issues (new strands of plant and animal diseases, the impact of climate change, etc.) to greatly enhance the ability of agriculture and environmental resource professionals to respond to new needs.

Continuing Education and Outreach – Just as MOOCs offer new opportunities to create change communities around agriculture and technology transfer, they can be used to better empower relationships with other community stakeholders normally managed through the university’s continuing education or outreach function. Examples: small business development centers, urban renewal centers, teacher in-service programs, etc. One of the great advantages of MOOCs in this environment is that geography is no longer a restraint; these online programs can create communities of people who share common problems or common environments, even though they are separated by geography, government boundaries, etc.

Institutional Collaboration – Our land grant universities have already shown great willingness to work with each other across state boundaries to improve the resources available to their in-state clientele. A good early example is the American Distance Education Consortium, which encourages sharing of Extension resources across states. Similarly, the CIC’s CourseShare initiative is using online learning to aggregate student audiences for courses in rarely taught languages and other specialties, while the Great Plains Inter-institutional Distance Education Alliance (IDEA) allows large state universities in the Midwest to offer graduate programs that share expertise from multiples institution. MOOCs can be used to enhance these relationships and build new ones where two or more institutions share a commitment to a distributed clientele.

In the long run, the initial use of MOOCs to open access to large lecture courses may or may not transform undergraduate education. However, it is clear that this new generation of online learning has the potential to help transform our institutions to meet the needs of individuals and communities in the new knowledge economy.

Reference

King, W. Joseph, and Nanfito, Michael. “To MOOC or Not To MOOC?” Inside Higher Education, November 29, 2012. http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/11/29/essay-challenges-posed-moocs-liberal

Saturday, November 17, 2012

Richard Alley and James Kasting: Global Warming

The following editorial by Richard Alley and James Kasting makes a solid case that we need to begin planning NOW in order to avoid the extreme changes that will otherwise come about due to global warming. They use the analogy of planning for retirement: it can be disastrous if we start too late.

The printed version in the Centre Daily Times included a graph that illustrates how average world temperaturs have increased dramatically since the 1980s. I recall the summer of 1988, when global warming became apparent for the first time to most of the public. For my generation, 1980 is not very far away, but it is a generation ago. We've lost a full generation in planning to avoid global warming. This fall, hurricane Sandy demonstrated what global warming can mean to our highly populated coastal cities. We are losing time and, while we dally, the energy industry is pushing us toward fracking to get more fossil fuel rather than investing in green energy.

One implication is that we can no longer let short-term profit-seeking interests dominate policy discussions about what is becoming a public safety issue. Let's get the oil companies out of the policy room and demand that our elected officials do their job with our interests--not private interests--in mind.

We have already lost a generation. Let's be sure our grandchildren do not look back on us with dismay over our selfishness.

We must move toward a cleaner environment | Opinion | CentreDaily.com

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Online Learning: New Opportunities for University-School Partnership

The Obama administration set a goal that, in order to sustain a workforce for the global information society, 60 percent of high school graduates in the United States should continue their educations to earn a college degree. Since most high school students who are eligible for college admissions already continue on to higher education, this goal requires that we greatly increase the percentage of high school graduates who are, in fact, qualified to enter higher education directly out of high school. This may be the most important challenge that both our schools and higher education must face in the coming decade. Meeting that challenge includes an incredible opportunity to re-vision the education continuum to better fit it to today’s society and, in the process, an opportunity to further integrate online learning into what may well be the new mainstream.

A Quick Look Back

Let me begin by describing a historical analogy, for there once was a system in virtually State to ensure that schools had access to media-based learning resources. From the 1960s through the 1980s, when technological change made the system untenable, public television stations worked with local school districts, state departments of education, and regional and national public television distributors and networks to ensure that all schools had access to high quality media-based learning materials across virtually all disciplines and grade levels. I am not proposing to bring back this structure; however, a quick review of this once-vital system may help to identify some major elements that should be built into new collaborations around e-learning.

Most public television stations had a formal relationship with school districts in their viewing areas, and a professional staff to support selection and support of programs designed to be used in the schools. In my experience at WPSX-TV (now called WPSU-TV, Penn State’s public television station), the organization was the Allegheny Educational Broadcast Council (AEBC), a nonprofit membership organization that maintained a management contract with the station. Membership fees (based on student headcount) funded some central staff, the cost of providing teacher guides for series, professional development for teachers, and the cost of maintaining the consortium itself. Staff included a “utilization coordinator” who visited schools to help teachers learn how to use series in their classrooms. Each member school district appointed a representative who serve as the main contact with the station.

Every spring, the station would broadcast previews of programs so that the member schools could review them and vote on programs that they would like to use the following year. During the school year, the station’s daytime schedule—from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.—was devoted to broadcast of these programs for use in local classrooms. The Pennsylvania Department of Education centrally funded the cost of licensing television series for the daytime “in-school” schedule. In addition, they often funded production of new series that addressed unmet needs. As a university-licensed station, WPSX-TV worked with faculty from a variety of colleges to develop series on topics that included elementary science, Pennsylvania history, art, and our most popular program, What’s in the News, a weekly social studies series that engaged viewers in essay-writing contests.

The in-school service was a multi-level collaboration. Similar arrangements existing across the United States, varied based on the nature of the public TV station (for instance, whether it was licensed to a school district, a community college, land grant university, a state network, or community organization). It was driven nationally by the Public Broadcasting Service and state and regional public broadcasting networks that facilitated program acquisition and distribution. In Pennsylvania, for instance, the Pennsylvania Public Television Network brought instructional TV coordinators together into a statewide committee that included representatives from the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

A New Kind of University/School Collaboration

Today, universities involved in online education have the opportunity to forge new relationships with schools to ensure that more students graduate from high school prepared to succeed in postsecondary education. Services that universities can provide to schools include:

· Repackage content from their own online courses as OERs that teachers can use in local school classrooms.

· Seek out OERs from other institutions that meet the needs of teachers in participating school districts.

· Offer appropriate online general education courses as dual enrollment courses with local schools and, where needed, identify appropriate courses from other institutions that can be offered locally to schools.

· Develop and offer complete online high school courses in college-prep areas, such as STEM, where local schools are not be able to provide courses locally.

· Develop, in collaboration with schools and local employers, accelerated degree programs that begin with dual enrollment courses, in addition to summer courses and internships with local employers that give students a head start toward a degree.

· Provide in-service training to teachers in participating schools on how to use online educational resources in their classrooms.

· Serve as a clearinghouse for online professional development courses for teachers and other school personnel.

Needed: A Business Model

Many colleges and universities are already doing some of this—offering a few dual-enrollment courses, for instance. What is needed to realize the full potential of university-school collaborations is a strategic approach that encompasses most or all of the elements listed above. While we can learn from the public broadcasting experience, we should not expect to simply re-create that model. Today’s online learning environment is far too decentralized and diverse. For some institutions, a purely local initiative could be successful, sustained by revenue from tuition fees and/or OER use fees. However, there are areas where a national effort could stimulate more activity and encourage quality. A national clearinghouse could help institutions and local schools find online high school courses, OERs, and teacher education courses, for instance. It could also share effective business models for university-school partnerships and models for sharing OERs, helping to stimulate local activity.

This is an issue that should be high on the agenda for our national associations and for foundations that are committed to supporting innovation to help schools meet STEM goals and to produce graduates who are ready to move on to higher education.

Friday, September 7, 2012

Updated E-Learning Definitions

Below is the latest version of the definitions of e-learning that Frank Mayadas and I have been working on. This version reflects comments from several readers. Please take a look and let us know what you think.

Definitions of E-Learning Courses and Programs

Version 1.1

Developed for Discussion within the Online Learning Community

Frank Mayadas

and

Gary E. Miller

As e-learning has evolved into a global change agent in higher education, it has become more diverse in its form and applications. This increased diversity has complicated our ability to share research findings and best practices, because we lack a shared set of definitions to distinguish among the many variations on e-learning that have arisen. This paper is designed to provide practitioners, researchers, and policy makers with a common set of terms and definitions to guide the ongoing development of the field. Our hope is that it will move us toward a set of shared, commonly understood definitions that will facilitate the sharing of research data and professional standards in our field. In developing the definitions below, we have tried to incorporate existing definitions developed by others and have incorporated comments from colleagues who have reviewed earlier drafts. We do not present these as the ultimate definitions, but as a step toward more commonly held standards as our field continues to evolve. Additions and revisions will be published as needed.

The Impact of E-Learning

While e-learning has become the primary form of distance education, it is also transforming instruction on campus. Higher education historically is a campus-based institution. Many students live on campus for the duration of their studies; others live near campus and commute to campus to take classes and to receive campus-based support services. This physical connection has defined the relationship between the student and the institution. It has also helped to shape the curriculum itself. E-learning has blurred these traditional relationships, removing geography as a defining element in the student-institution relationship.

Technology-enhanced learning has evolved both from enhancements to earlier generations of face-to-face teaching and enhancements to earlier generations of distance education. Engaged intentional design of learning experiences has also evolved to promote the most effective design to serve the learners, their life experiences and the opportunities and limitations of the particular environment. For example, many graduate programs have deliberately designed programs for working adults, which are predominantly offered online but also include short-term face-to-face residencies.

At the same time, it is becoming increasingly difficult to define a common measure for instruction. The “seat time” measure on which common understanding of a “credit hour” is largely based, is being challenged as new instructional models and alternatives to traditional classroom lectures become more widely accepted. However, the credit hour remains the most widely accepted measure used to compare courses across different delivery environments. Continued growth in the number and diversity of learning environments will increase the need for a common standard by which different learning environments can be compared. The following definitions assume the credit hour as the primary means by which courses are defined, regardless of delivery environment.

As e-learning has matured, it has begun to be used in different ways to address diverse goals. Several models have emerged that have different geographical and curricular implications. It is important to be able to distinguish among these factors in order to compare practices and to understand and be able to effectively apply research findings. Shared definitions will also empower students to make better decisions. The major goals of e-learning include: improving access for both traditional-age and nontraditional students who are not otherwise able to attend a traditional, campus-based program; improving efficiency and effectiveness by using e-learning media and methods to control cost or provide other efficiencies or to make large-enrollment courses more effective for students; and improving student choice over when, where, and how to engage in the learning process. In addition, we are assuming that courses and programs defined below are instructor-led experiences, distinguishing them from some corporate training models.

The following definitions are designed to help both faculty and students better understand the different kinds of e-learning that are now practiced in higher education and to provide institutions with some standard models to encourage effective sharing of data about e-learning, at both the individual course and the curriculum level.

COURSE-LEVEL DEFINITIONS

Below, we have distilled current practices into six categories that reflect the variety of applications that are in use today.

1. Traditional Classroom Course – Course activity is organized around scheduled class meetings.

Traditional courses are measured by the number of hours spent in required class meetings or other traditional activities, such as laboratories, field trips, or internships. Such courses may involve some sort of computer usage—for example, a software simulation or laboratory or design software for art or engineering applications—but the course is still anchored to the normal time spent in classes. For the purposes of this paper, courses that use technology at this level are considered to be “traditional classroom” courses.

2. Synchronous Distributed Course—Web-based technologies are used to extend classroom lectures and discussions to students at remote sites in real time.

These courses use web conferencing or other synchronous e-learning media to provide access to a classroom experience by students at off-campus locations (such as places of employment, other campuses, etc.) while otherwise maintaining a traditional classroom structure. These courses may mix on-campus and remote students.

3. Web-Enhanced Course – Online course activity complements class sessions without reducing the number of required class meetings.

The University of Central Florida was among the first institutions to adopt this term as an official category. When Internet access is required to complete course requirements, and when this Internet-based work augments classroom activity or supplants less than 20 percent of the traditional classroom activity, the course is considered a “web-enhanced course.” Traditional courses and web-enhanced courses are very similar, but are placed in separate categories because web-enhanced courses require additional faculty and student support, and very likely additional technology. Web-enhanced courses are not normally considered to be e-learning courses, but are described here because they may be a step toward a hybrid or online course. The National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) calls this a “supplemental” approach, in which some technology-based, out-of-class activities are used to encourage greater student engagement with course content.

4. “Emporium” Course – This model, designed for on-campus use, eliminates all class meetings and replaces them with a learning resource center featuring online materials and on-demand personalized assistance.

This model was developed through several innovations funded by the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) designed to give campus-based students control over when they study. The purpose is to allow students to choose when they access course materials, to choose what types of learning materials they use depending on their needs, and to set their own pace in working with the materials. It assumes that students have access to sophisticated instructional software and one-on-one on-site help. It replaces formal class meetings with increased access to instructional assistance and allows institutions to combine multiple lecture sections into one large section.

A variation on the Emporium model is the Flex Course, developed at Herkimer Community College in New York State, in which students have available to both classroom-based and online options for all or most learning activities and may choose to participate entirely online, entirely in class, or mix online and in-class sessions.

5. Hybrid Course – Online activity is mixed with classroom meetings, replacing at least 20 percent, but not all required face-to-face meetings.

When the technologies used for education and communication outside the classroom are used to supplant some of the classroom work, reducing the time actually spent in the classroom, the result is a hybrid course. For example, if a course traditionally meets in a classroom three times per week, a hybrid version might use online sessions to replace one or two of the traditional weekly classroom sessions or to eliminate all but a few key face-to-face sessions for laboratory work or examinations. A general rule is to classify a course as hybrid if online components replace a minimum of one class meeting per week in a typical three-credit course or to replace all but a few key face-to-face sessions for laboratory work or examinations. Some institutions use hybrid courses with traditional on-campus students to improve efficiency in the use of limited classrooms. For example, replacing 50% of classroom experiences with online experiences would allow an institution to schedule a second course in the same room. The National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) describes this as a “replacement” approach, in which online activity replaces some class meetings. The Sloan Foundation required that funding for such courses use online experiences to offset at least 30 percent of traditional classroom experiences.

A variation—call it Hybrid-Plus—identifies courses that are mostly online but that require a small number of scheduled classroom or other on-site group events. These courses are at least 80% online.

Hybrid courses are one component of E-Learning. They are particularly relevant in programs that serve students within commuting distance of campus. They increase flexibility but do not totally eliminate the need for students to have physical access to a campus facility. Hybrid courses will be attractive to many traditional full-time students, in addition to non-traditional learners, typically working adults who are within commuting distance and who wish to earn a degree.

Note that, in the past, the terms “blended” and “hybrid” have been applied at both the course level and the program level without differentiation. This has created a degree of confusion. Our definitions use “hybrid” at the course level and “blended” at the program level to allow for clearer distinctions in usage.

6. Online Course – All course activity is done online; there are no required face-to-face sessions within the course and no requirements for on-campus activity.

Online courses totally eliminate geography as a factor in the relationship between the student and the institution. They consist entirely of online elements that facilitate the three critical student interactions: with content, the instructor, and other students.

While these courses may appeal to on-campus students, they are designed to meet the needs of students who do not have effective access to campus. They may reside near the campus, or they may reside quite a distance away in other states or even in other countries. Over the years, universities have sought to serve this “non-traditional” population through a variety of media—from correspondence courses to satellite teleconferences—but only since the mid-1990s has technology enabled easy and continuous communication—interaction—among the learners and instructors at a distance. The Internet also has made library and other information resources available to this group. Improvements in basic technology also permit this user group access to complex data as in precision images, mathematical visualizations and simulations of various kinds. Social networking applications allow these learners to participate in both formal and informal learning communities.

PROGRAM-LEVEL DEFINITIONS

Similar distinctions among delivery environments can be made at the program level. Degree and certificate programs can be designed with a mix of traditional and e-learning courses in order to serve populations who have different levels of access to campus. Currently, there appear to be four major kinds of practices in wide use:

1. Traditional Classroom Program—The program may include a mix of traditional, web-enhanced, or hybrid courses, but all courses require some face-to-face sessions.

These programs take advantage of web-based applications to enhance learning, but without changing the traditional requirement that students attend classes on campus or in other traditional learning environments. As a result, online elements do not significantly improve access to commuting or distant students.

2. Multi-Format Program – A program mixes, along with traditional classroom courses, other formats that use a variety of different delivery modes, web-enhanced, hybrid, fully online courses, synchronous distributed education, etc., without a specific access goal.

These programs use a variety of technologies and course designs to provide a variety of learning experiences. Typically, choice of technology is less related to the geographic or time needs of students than on curricular goals or instructional needs.

3. Blended Program – A significant percentage, but not all of the credits required for program completion are offered fully online. Typically, up to 30 percent of the curriculum may be offered as face-to-face or hybrid courses or other face-to-face formats or as independent study.

These programs provide increased access to distant students who are able to come to campus for some courses, laboratory work, intensive residencies, or other occasional group sessions. Ideally, face-to-face sessions will be organized to minimize travel requirements for distant students. Some academic support services should be available to distant students as well.

4. Online Program – All credits required to complete the program are offered as fully online courses. Students can complete the program completely at a distance, with no required face-to-face meetings.

Fully online programs are designed with the truly distant student in mind. Institutions that offer fully online programs should also take care to provide support services—registration, testing, advising, library support, etc.—at a distance.

Implementation

The authors are indebted to the many colleagues too numerous to list individually who have contributed to these definitions by providing feedback on earlier drafts and who, in some cases, have pioneered in developing innovative applications of technology to create new learning environments.

These definitions are a work in progress that will be updated annually as needed. The authors welcome comments and anticipate that they will prepare occasional companion pieces to add new definitions as the field evolves, in the hope the community will come together around a common set of definitions that will guide research, practice, and policy. We encourage researchers and professional associations to adopt the definitions with the goal that a shared vocabulary will facilitate the sharing of research data, increase the transfer of research into practice, and, ultimately, promote standards of excellence for the field.

Your comments are welcome in this ongoing discussion.

Version 1.0 8/2/2012

Version 1.1 9/7/12

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Definitions of E-Learning Courses and Programs

NOTE: SEE MY SEPTEMBER 7, 2012, POSTING OF "UPDATED E-LEARNING DEFINITIONS" FOR A REVISED DRAFT OF THIS DOCUMENT INCORPORATING CHANGES SUGGESTED BY READERS.

Colleagues: The following draft document is posted here for your comment and feedback. Our goal is to evolve some standard definitions surrounding online distance education to encourage better sharing of research data and effective practices. Please review and leave your comments below. Thanks.

Definitions of E-Learning Courses and Programs

Version 1.0

Developed for Discussion within the Online Learning Community

Frank Mayadas

and

Gary E. Miller

As e-learning has evolved into a global change agent in higher education, it has become more diverse in its form and applications. This increased diversity has complicated our ability to share research findings and best practices, because we lack a shared set of definitions to distinguish among the many variations on e-learning that have arisen. This paper is designed to provide practitioners, researchers, and policy makers with a common set of terms and definitions to guide the ongoing development of the field. Our hope is that it will move us toward a set of shared, commonly understood definitions that will facilitate the sharing of research data and professional standards in our field. In developing the definitions below, we have tried to incorporate existing definitions developed by others. We do not present these as the ultimate definitions, but as a step toward more commonly held standards as our field continues to evolve. Additions and revisions will be published as needed.

The Impact of E-Learning

As e-learning has matured, several models have emerged that have different geographical and curricular implications. The following definitions are designed to help both faculty and students better understand the different kinds of e-learning that are now practiced in higher education and to provide institutions with some standard models to encourage effective sharing of data about e-learning, at both the individual course and the curriculum level.

COURSE-LEVEL DEFINITIONS

Traditional Course – Course activity is organized around scheduled class meetings.

Traditional courses are measured by the number of hours spent in required class meetings. Such courses may involve some sort of computer usage—for example, a software simulation or laboratory or design software for art or engineering applications—but the course is still anchored to the normal time spent in classes. For the purposes of this paper, these course are considered to be “traditional” courses.

Web-Enhanced Course – Online course activity complements class sessions without reducing the number of required class meetings.

The University of Central Florida was among the first institutions to adopt this term as an official category. When Internet access is required to complete course requirements, and when this Internet-based work augments but does not supplant classroom activity, the course is considered a “web-enhanced course.” Traditional courses and web-enhanced courses are very similar, but are placed in separate categories because web-enhanced courses require additional faculty and student support, and very likely additional technology. Web-enhanced courses are not normally considered to be e-learning courses, but are described here because they may be a step toward a hybrid or online course. The National Center for Academic Transformation calls this a “supplemental” approach, in which some technology-based, out-of-class activities are used to encourage greater student engagement with course content.

Hybrid Course – Online activity is mixed with classroom meetings, replacing at least 20 percent, but not all required face-to-face meetings.

When the technologies used for education and communication outside the classroom are used to supplant some of the classroom work, reducing the time actually spent in the classroom, the result is a hybrid course. For example, if a course traditionally meets in a classroom three times per week, a hybrid or blended version might use online sessions to replace one or two of the traditional weekly classroom sessions or to eliminate all but a few key face-to-face sessions for laboratory work or examinations. A general rule is to classify a course as hybrid if online components replace a minimum of one class meeting per week in a typical three-credit course or to replace all but a few key face-to-face sessions for laboratory work or examinations. NCAT describes this as a “replacement” approach, in which online activity replaces some class meetings. The Sloan Foundation required that funding for such courses use online experiences to offset at least 30 percent of traditional classroom experiences.

“Emporium” Course – This model, designed for on-campus use, eliminates all class meetings and replaces them with a learning resource center featuring online materials and on-demand personalized assistance.

This model was developed through several NCAT-funded innovations designed to give campus-based students control over when they study. The purpose is to allow students to choose when they access course materials, to choose what types of learning materials they use depending on their needs, and to set their own pace in working with the materials. It assumes that students have access to sophisticated instructional software and one-on-one on-site help. It replaces formal class meetings with increased access to instructional assistance and allows institutions to combine multiple lecture sections into one large section.

Online Course – All course activity is done online; there are no required face-to-face sessions within the course and no requirements for on-campus activity.

PROGRAM-LEVEL DEFINITIONS

Traditional Classroom Program—The program may include a mix of traditional, web-enhanced, or hybrid courses, but all courses require some face-to-face sessions.

Multi-Format Program – A program mixes, along with traditional classroom courses, other formats that use a variety of different delivery modes, web-enhanced, hybrid, fully online courses, synchronous distance education, etc., without a specific access goal.

Blended Program – A significant percentage, but not all of the credits required for program completion are offered fully online. Typically, up to 30 percent of the curriculum may be offered as face-to-face or hybrid courses or other face-to-face formats or as independent study.

Online Program – All credits required to complete the program are offered as fully online courses. Students can complete the program completely at a distance, with no required face-to-face meetings.