Online College Course Forum

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.

I'm attending a conference about professional graduate qualifications at the moment, and one of the workshops I've elected to attend is about the role of online learning in graduate programs. Apparently they are going to discuss both online programs, and the emmergence of blended learning in graduate programs, so it should be interesting.

I'm going to take particular note of how online programs at graduate level gain acceptance in the wider academic and business community, and the way that they can be used to change career and build on prior experience of both learning and of work.

This stuff is about giving people the opportunity to change their lives, and once you put it into this context, it becomes not only exciting, but enormously important as well.

I've been looking at some games technology that is being used to write new e-learning packages for online programs. This kind of approach can be really effective if you want to study and acquire skills of a more practical nature online.

One package that we are developing allows machinery to be taken to pieces and put back together again. The initial application was a coffee machine - used in a coffee house. The real machine was large and very expensive, but by trial and error we discovered that students who could take the e-machine to pieces and put it back again found doing the real thing very easy, and made very few errors.

Shame that they couldn't make really good virtual coffee.