I'm still at my conference, and we've been discussing impressions about how different students enjoy and benefit from online learning.
One clear conclusion we have come to is that older students are better at putting the hours in for online courses, but younger students are really good at research - a major need for many online programs. Another conclusion we have come to is that if online learning is to continue to appeal to younger students, we are going to have to work out how we can reasonably use mobile technologies for "sound bite" learning - or at least SMS messaging type technologies.
More and more educational establishments are delivering the same courses in traditional fashion and online, and enrolling students onto a program and then letting them decide how they are going to study each course. The same staff members give instruction in the classroom and also support the online learning, so that the learning experience may be different, but the substance is the same. It seems to me that this movement is going to gain ground, and we are going to move into a period where the student takes much more control over their learning experience.
# posted by Mary @ 4:15 PM
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