Blog Post #3 - E-learning

This week's reading is of special interest to me.  I feel as though we are headed into the world of e-learning whether we like it or not.  Stories like the of the Fennell's (Bonk, pp.98-104) exhibit the mass amounts of flexibility that can be provided in learning experiences.  What's more is that the learning can go on in remote places without compromising the amount of knowledge gained. 

As students begin to experience such flexibility and customized learning in K-12, there will be great expectations to have similar course offering in higher ed.  These expectations are not unfounded and no longer have to be expensive options for higher ed.  Open University (OU) is a great example of this.  They are an institution that is accredited by the Middle States commission in the U.S. and they offer a lot of remote learning courses, degrees, etc. for its students.

Lehigh University has benefited from the size and scale of OU.  They are the creators of an open source blog tool that is available for use in our course management system (OU blog).  Because the university is so large and running Moodle as at least one of it's learning management systems, funds are used to produce modules and activities that are subsequently shared to the rest of the Moodle community.  Currently OU has a competitive advantage from an e-learning perspective over Lehigh, but as demand for this type of learning increases and school's like Lehigh move beyond the physical barriers of learning, the competition will be about where a student can learn the most in an efficient and effective way.

Having access to more learner means that the pool of student learners applying to schools will certainly increase. This will clearly change the role of teachers as time goes on, and it might even spark a surge in positions for instructional technologists and instructors with expertise in e-learning.  It is important to emphasize that although change may come, e-learning does not mean that universities will become like puppy mills, pumping out diploma after diploma. It also does not mean the teachers should be expected to deal with hundreds of students from all over.  A lot of work goes into these courses and the quality of the courses will weed out competition as time goes on.

Bonk, Curtis J. (2009) The world is open: How web technology is revolutionizing education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

The Open University. (2010, September 13). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved September,13 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_University