The Redgate Read On Online Learning

Have you ever thought how much the commute to your college class actually costs you?  If you are one of the thousands of adult learners who commute to day or evening classes, you might want to take a minute and do some cursory calculations.   When doing your calculations try to include those “hidden casualities.”  Here are some considerations:

1.  Actual commute to class (meets 2 or 3 times weekly) represents a 30 mile roundtrip.  Cost of gas and vehicle maintenance must be part of this equation.

2.  Time “suckage” associated with that commute due to sitting in “parking lots” called highways.  Remember, time equals money.  The unpredicatiblity is another factor since there are no consistent routines with the commute to class.

3.  Parking and ancillary fees associated with the commute.

4.  Lost wages because you have to “beat the rush” to class.

5.  What ill effects will the stress associated with the commute have on you today, this week, next month, next year?

6.  How does the commute and those evening classes negatively impact your family and the relationships that mean the most to you?

With all the advances in online education, the “zero commute” option is a viable alternative to earning your degree and enhancing your life.  What you are doing to improve yourself through earning your degree is hard enough.  Don’t add things that will make that journey more difficult.

CLEVELAND, Nov. 18 /PRNewswire/ — Dr. Steve Kerr is a business man, academic, author, advisor, and father to a six-year-old. He’s also a long-time friend of Jack Welch and is the newly appointed Executive Director of the Jack Welch Management Institute (JWMI) at Chancellor University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Before getting re-connected to Jack Welch through JWMI, Dr. Kerr was formerly the Chief Learning Officer at GE where he and Welch first collaborated. More recently, he is a senior advisor to Goldman Sachs, where from 2001-2006 he was a managing director and their Chief Learning Officer.

His academic credentials include being on the business school faculties of Ohio State University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Southern California where he was dean of the faculty and director of the Ph.D. program. He is also a former president of the Academy of Management, the world’s largest association of academicians in management. Read the rest of this entry »

If a school that is either wholly online or has a significant online presence is worth its salt, the key stakeholders of those institutions must constantly be strategizing on the emergence of new technologies for teaching and learning.  Just this afternoon, I participated in a demo of Ellimunate which is a live eLearning solution and collaboration software.  Although its benefits for asynchronous learning are not as broad as they are for synchronous, a tool like this has value.  Why?  Because it enhances the learning experience of the online learner and offers that person a better chance of meeting with success.

Also, as it relates to enhancing and improving online student’s learning experiences, in a recent Eduventures (www.eduventures.com) survey, respondents indicated that enhanced discussion boards and virtual lab simulations are technologies that faculty and online course designers will require in the next three to five years.  I also feel that other technologies that embrace the social networking forums will be key in the coming years.  

And don’t rule out this new phenomenon called Second Life (www.secondlife.com), which is the 3D online virtual world.  I am still trying to understand the “education regions” within Second Life, but it is certainly a platform favored by many institutions and instructors.