Up the e-learning curve : ensuring quality online education within an Australian university

The paper describes the implementation of a project within Australian Catholic University designed to launch the Faculties into online education in a manner which ensured quality in all aspects of the teaching-learning experiences of academics and students. Key elements of the strategic approach adopted by the project leaders, including the involvement of a specialist commercial provider of web-based delivery systems as a partner in the project, mechanisms to support the initiative through the first stages, careful choice of the programs offered online, and staff development matched to the emerging needs of those involved in the teaching of courses, are described. Challenges encountered in the implementation process, and the factors which assisted in overcoming these problems are identified. The paper draws upon this experience to raise some important issues relevant to the successful introduction of online education as an integral component of the teaching repertoire of Faculties.

Gender, religion, and sociopolitical issues in cross-cultural online education

Cross-cultural education is thought to develop critical consciousness of how unequal distributions of power and privilege affect people’s health. Learners in different sociopolitical settings can join together in developing critical consciousness – awareness of power and privilege dynamics in society – by means of communication technology. The aim of this research was to define strengths and limitations of existing cross-cultural discussions in generating critical consciousness. The setting was the FAIMER international fellowship program for mid-career interdisciplinary health faculty, whose goal is to foster global advancement of health professions education. Fellows take part in participant-led, online, written, task-focused discussions on topics like professionalism, community health, and leadership. We reflexively identified text that brought sociopolitical topics into the online environment during the years 2011 and 2012 and used a discourse analysis toolset to make our content analysis relevant to critical consciousness. While references to participants’ cultures and backgrounds were infrequent, narratives of political-, gender-, religion-, and other culture-related topics did emerge. When participants gave accounts of their experiences and exchanged cross-cultural stories, they were more likely to develop ad hoc networks to support one another in facing those issues than explore issues relating to the development of critical consciousness. We suggest that cross-cultural discussions need to be facilitated actively to transform learners’ frames of reference, create critical consciousness, and develop cultural competence. Further research is needed into how to provide a safe environment for such learning and provide faculty development for the skills needed to facilitate these exchanges.

Real time, perceived time and time online : a review of student experiences of time over thirty years of distance and online education

This paper examines how students use and perceive time when studying in distance education modes and what affects this perception of time and the reality of time. We examine 30 years of student involvement on distance and online education, their comments on both their learning experiences, and the technology requirements of distance education/online learning. Our University has been involved in distance education since its formation in 1974. The online technologies offer increasingly sophisticated and immersive experiences for our students, both on campus and off campus, but many of our students continue to complain of time squeeze, and fail to predict the time it will take them to complete our subjects. We research how the technologies we use for online learning are contributing to this time squeeze perception and the student's "real" time to learn.
Research is drawn from both the Australian Bureau of Statistics and surveys of our students' experiences (we have 32,000 students online, with single online classes of over 1300 students), to examine student use and perceptions of their available time to study and how the technologies used in online learning affect this.

Technographic research in online education : context, culture and ICT consumption

Technologically-mediated learning environments are an increasingly common component of university experience. In this paper, the authors consider how the interrelated domains of policy contexts, new learning cultures and the consumption of information and communication technologies might be explored using the concept of technography. Understood here as a term referring to “the apprehension, reception, use, deployment, depiction and representation of technologies” (Woolgar, 2005, pp. 27-28), we consider how technographic studies in education might engage in productive dialogues with interdisciplinary research from the fields of cultural and cyber studies. We argue that what takes place in online learning and teaching environments is shaped by the logics and practices of technologies and their role in the production of new consumer cultures.

Cost effectiveness of an elementary school active physical education policy

INTRODUCTION: Many American children do not meet recommendations for moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA). Although school-based physical education (PE) provides children with opportunities for MVPA, less than half of PE minutes are typically active. The purpose of this study is to estimate the cost effectiveness of a state "active PE" policy implemented nationally requiring that at least 50% of elementary school PE time is spent in MVPA. METHODS: A cohort model was used to simulate the impact of an active PE policy on physical activity, BMI, and healthcare costs over 10 years for a simulated cohort of the 2015 U.S. population aged 6-11 years. Data were analyzed in 2014. RESULTS: An elementary school active PE policy would increase MVPA per 30-minute PE class by 1.87 minutes (95% uncertainty interval [UI]=1.23, 2.51) and cost $70.7 million (95% UI=$51.1, $95.9 million) in the first year to implement nationally. Physical activity gains would cost $0.34 per MET-hour/day (95% UI=$0.15, $2.15), and BMI could be reduced after 2 years at a cost of $401 per BMI unit (95% UI=$148, $3,100). From 2015 to 2025, the policy would cost $235 million (95% UI=$170 million, $319 million) and reduce healthcare costs by $60.5 million (95% UI=$7.93 million, $153 million). CONCLUSIONS: Implementing an active PE policy at the elementary school level could have a small impact on physical activity levels in the population and potentially lead to reductions in BMI and obesity-related healthcare expenditures over 10 years.

Engaging Faculty in Online Education: Rightsizing Incentives and Optimizing Support

: Colleges and universities of all types are pursuing increasingly ambitious goals for online education for a range of reasons—enhancing learning, increasing access, growing enrollment, managing costs. However, concerns about workload, support resources, autonomy, and course quality leave many faculty skeptical of online instruction, and most institutions expanding online offerings are struggling to get sufficient numbers of faculty both willing and prepared to teach online. This study presents best practices in managing the strategic and operational challenges associated with increasing the number of fully online and hybrid courses

Towards a more effective model for distance education

What is the most effective model for academic distance education, given that drop-out numbers in traditional distance education institutions are too high and the demands from the various stakeholders are changing? In this paper this question is answered from the perspective of the Open University of the Netherlands (OUNL). The OUNL has planned to redesign its educational model from the traditional guided self-study model towards a model of active online learning. In essence this means that education will be less content driven; more focus is put on activating students to engage with real world problems supported by tutors and peers using distance media. The drivers for change, the change process and the resulting redesign of the educational model are presented in this paper.

Assessment of Web Content Accessibility Levels in Spanish Official Online Education Environments

Diversity-based designing, or the goal of ensuring that web-based information is accessible to as many diverse users as possible, has received growing international acceptance in recent years, with many countries introducing legislation to enforce it. This paper analyses web content accessibility levels in Spanish education portals according to the international guidelines established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Additionally, it suggests the calculation of an inaccessibility rate as a tool for measuring the degree of non-compliance with WAI Guidelines 2.0 as well as illustrating the significant gap that separates people with disabilities from digital education environments (with a 7.77% average). A total of twenty-one educational web portals with two different web depth levels (42 sampling units) were assessed for this purpose using the automated analysis tool Web Accessibility Test 2.0 (TAW, for its initials in Spanish). The present study reveals a general trend towards non-compliance with the technical accessibility recommendations issued by the W3C-WAI group (97.62% of the websites examined present mistakes in Level A conformance). Furthermore, despite the increasingly high number of legal and regulatory measures about accessibility, their practical application still remains unsatisfactory. A greater level of involvement must be assumed in order to raise awareness and enhance training efforts towards accessibility in the context of collective Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), since this represents not only a necessity but also an ethical, social, political and legal commitment to be assumed by society.

Online Education: What Works in Mathematics

Florida State University and University of Helsinki Information technology has the potential to deliver education to everybody by high quality online courses and associated services, and to enhance traditional face-to-face instruction by, e.g., web services offering virtually unlimited practice and step-bystep solutions to practice problems. Regardless of this, tools of information technology have not yet penetrated mathematics education in any meaningful way. This is mostly due to the inertia of academia: instructors are slow to change their working habits. This paper reports on an experiment where all the instructors (seven instructors and six teaching assistants) of a large calculus course were required to base their instruction on online content. The paper will analyze the effectiveness of various solutions used, and finishes with recommendations regarding best practices.

Neuroangradogy in Online Education

The purpose of this perspective in practice essay is to address the effectiveness of online learning based on adult brain-based education. This essay attempts to answer the question: Do what we know about the brain (neurology) and adult teaching methods (andragogy) play a key role in learning in online courses?