Technology & Instruction for UNEX

Online schools in K-12 are growing fast and they raise new issues for college admission counselors. Chronicle.com has an interesting article about some of the challenges involved in determining quality in online programs, although not much in the way of answers. The comments about the article are equally interesting. The issues of cheating and rigor are mentioned and these are two of the same issues I have concerns about with regard to online courses at UC Riverside Extension. I think answers are easier to find when it comes to rigor. There are solutions for some of the cheating concerns (proctored tests), but that doesn't cover everything. On the other hand, similar issues exist for face to face courses, so the discussion shouldn't be limited to online courses.

We did a little testing with the Moodle plugin for Elluminate this week. The plugin doesn't do too much, but the two things it does should make it much more convenient to use Elluminate as part of a Moodle course. We currently use Elluminate for a small number of live online/webcast courses, but the plugin won't be used for those since they typically meet once a week for 10 weeks and are best scheduled all at once. The Moodle plugin allows you to schedule a single Elluminate session and creates a link which doesn't require students to login again. That makes it great for adding online office hours or live chats or presentations to a Moodle course. The instructor can set up the session at any time. The next step will be helping instructors use Elluminate in ways that go beyond the lecture format and take advantage of some of the collaborative features –– the whiteboard and application sharing.