Maritime courses developed for the Virtual University of Small States

Commonwealth of Learning (2010) Samoa workshop develops VUSSC maritime training materials Connections, February Vol. 15, No. 1

The Virtual University of the Small States of the Commonwealth is one of the more interesting international distance education consortia, and seems to be gaining some traction.

Twenty-five educators from 13 countries took part in VUSSC’s seventh International Training and [...]

Using online learning to increase enrolments and revenue

Kirk, A. (2010) Leveraging Technology to Increase Enrollment, Capacity, and Revenues University Business, February

This is quite a good article on what is involved in ramping up a campus-based institution into a national online learning provider (never heard of St Leo University? It has 35,000 online students across the USA). It is the best of several [...]

Review of book on disasters in teaching online

Smith, C. (2009) Who Let This Disaster in My Classroom? Eugene OR: Resource Publications (http://wipfandstock.com)

Subtitled: A Practical Guide for Online Instructors and Some Funny Stories Along the Way.

I’m not normally a procrastinator, but I’ve been putting off writing a review of this book for some time. The reason of course is that I wasn’t sure [...]

Will banning laptops in class work?

de Vise, D. (2010) Wide Web of diversions gets laptops evicted from lecture halls Washington Post March 9

An article about instructors who have banned the use of laptops in class, and why. I liked the comments by Professor Vaidhyanathan:

“If students don’t want to pay attention, the laptop is the least of your problems,” [...]

Can web 2.0 tools be legally used for education in Canada?

I raise this as a result of an interesting question from Ron Richard,of Meritus University, Canada. Ron asked Tony Vincent, who runs the excellent Learning in Hand site, and myself:

I have recently been researching some web-based resources for our faculty, who teach exclusively online, but who do not venture much outside the limited [...]