By Kathryn Foxhall
A minimum of required health IT standards and centralization of data is what’s needed to foster the best climate in which to develop a learning health system and provide a foundation for its expansion, according to the Institute of Medicine.
These were some of the main conclusions garnered from various workshops held throughout 2010, sponsored by the IOM and Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, which focused on ways to promote technical advances in health care, generate and use information, and engage patients.
A report on the workshop results--Roundtable on Value and Science-Driven Health Care-- was published Dec. 20, and laid out various strategies for using IT to accelerate progress in improving healthcare.
One approach to a digital infrastructure for the learning health system is an “ultra-large-scale system,” in which a few key elements, such as requirements for health information exchange, are standard. At the same time, participants would have flexibility for innovations, and incremental advances in functionality would be the product of “architectural precepts, incentives, and compliance assessment, but not by centralized control,” according to the report.
“[By] incorporating decentralization of data, development, and operational authority and control, this approach fosters local innovation, personalization, and emergent behaviors,” the report said.
Participants in the workshops also endorsed incorporating services and research in a “continuous learning loop” in which the generation and use of knowledge are integrated in healthcare delivery, research, quality improvement and population monitoring.
Health IT also presents an opportunity to improve patients’ access to health information so they and their caregivers can take a more active role in decisions. Integration of data across various sources, including clinical, public health and commercial, is also central to improving care for both individuals and populations, the report said.
This article was originally posted at http://ping.fm/O5xKk
Monday, January 31, 2011
Friday, January 28, 2011
Who Needs Textbooks?
Jessie Sellers, a student at Tacoma Community College in Washington state, was puzzled when he logged onto his school’s website last December to figure out which book he needed for his upcoming English class. Whereas for all his previous courses, the 24-year-old education major could simply click on a link to view the name of the required textbook, this time there were no books listed at all. It was no mistake: thanks to an ambitious pilot program aimed at reducing the cost of textbooks at public colleges, Sellers and hundreds of other students across the state won’t have to buy textbooks for more than three dozen courses offered this winter.
Washington’s Open Course Library is the largest state-funded effort in the nation to make core college course materials available on the Web for $30 or less per class. Financed with $750,000 from the state of Washington and a matching grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the goal isn’t just to reduce student costs, says program architect Cable Green. It’s also to create engaging, interactive learning materials that will help improve course completion rates. By the time the project is completed in 2012, digitized textbook equivalents for some 81 high-enrollment classes will be available online for the more than 400,000 students enrolled in Washington’s network of community and technical colleges. Even better, the materials can be shared across the globe, largely for free, because they will be published in an open format that avoids the most onerous licensing restrictions. To keep costs at a minimum, the teachers developing the materials are relying primarily on either existing material in the public domain or embarking on the painstaking task of developing materials from scratch.
Creating high-quality, interactive course material isn’t just a cut-and-paste job off the Web. From avoiding copyright-protected sources to finding material that is written at the appropriate level for beginning college students, the task of culling online materials is no elementary endeavor. Professor Phil Venditti, who is designing a public- speaking course to be piloted in the spring at Clover Park Technical College in Lakewood, Wash., plans to link students to online speech banks, such as American Rhetoric’s and even the videos on the White House website. But he says he wrote the main text for the class himself because preexisting resources were either copyright protected or not concise enough for his needs. “We only have 50 to 55 hours of class time together, and I would like my students to become top-notch speakers,” says Venditti. Adds another teacher, Ralph Dawes, who is designing the materials for an introductory geology course: “You have to find a balance between explaining enough but not having too much information.”
Although designing complete course materials from scratch is undoubtedly a big task, the idea is that any instructor who teaches the same course on another Washington State campus will then be able to use the new materials designed by a colleague. Instructors are also free to add or subtract content to suit their needs. What’s more, the $30 budget for each course enables teachers to use a limited amount of materials with copyright restrictions, should they be needed. As for concerns that material that is freely available may not be of the same quality as that which teachers must pay for, project head Green says, “the intellectual property license on content has absolutely nothing to do with quality of content. “ It would make it tough, however, to teach a class on, say, great works of modern American fiction, since classics like J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye still have strict copyright protection.
Jessie Sellers’s English professor Jacqui Cain doesn’t have that problem, however, because her class focuses on basic reading, writing, and grammatical skills. To redesign her course, she began by replacing the $85 We Are America textbook (which includes Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and an excerpt from the 1989 Amy Tan novel, The Joy Luck Club, for example) with five of her favorite Sherlock Holmes stories, which she downloaded for free from the Project Gutenberg library. Next she enhanced the online text with pop-ups that define and illustrate bygone words such as “gasogene,” a Victorian-era, handheld gadget used to carbonate water. She even found MP3 recordings of each story that students can download and listen to on portable music players. “I tried to make it as immersive as I could,” says Cain, adding, “detective stories are especially good because they motivate students to figure something out from a reading.” They also teach deductive reasoning skills that improve reading comprehension, she says.
Green estimates that the initiative could save Washington State students up to $41 million in textbook costs per year. This dollars-and-sense argument helped legislator Reuven Carlyle convince the state to pony up some $750,000 in financing last year, despite its multibillion-dollar budget deficit. Washington taxpayers currently pay about $74 million to fund grants to low-income college students, many of who enroll in community colleges. About half of that money goes toward covering the cost of textbooks, according to Carlyle. Reducing the cost of materials, he argues, could free up funds to go toward improving the quality of public education itself. “It is the ultimate win-win,” says Carlyle, who criticizes textbook makers for the high costs of books: “It is an outrage that we allow this monopoly to crush common sense and to crush students’ wallets and not fight back.”
While Washington’s pilot program has received the most state funding of any project, it’s not the first project of its kind. Rice University has hosted Connexions, a vast, online database of open-source educational modules from elementary school though post-graduate level material on topics ranging from algebra to literary criticism since 1999, but this global site (which is funded by some $7 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation) can be difficult to navigate. In September 2010, the Open University of the Netherlands opened a similar database of Dutch-language educational resources for teachers, dubbed Wikiwijs, which is being funded by a $10.9 million (€8 million) grant from the Dutch Ministry of Education. Similar projects aimed at reducing the cost of textbooks are in the works in Brazil and Poland.
Perhaps the most cautionary lesson about the risks of developing open libraries of course materials comes from Utah State University, which launched a similar project in 2005 and currently offers free materials for more than 80 courses, ranging from cultural anthropology to avalanche and snow dynamics. While Utah State received $200,000 in funding from its state government, along with $400,000 from the Hewlett Foundation, it ceased developing new online course materials in 2009 due to a lack of funding. “The economy is partly to blame, and consequently the program is currently in hibernation,” explains the program’s former head, David Wiley, who is now working on a similar initiative aimed at lowering the cost of high-school course materials in Utah.
The abrupt cessation of the Utah State project serves as a warning. While recruiting teachers to create original online course materials may save schools money initially (by reducing the amount of state grant money used to foot the bill for pricey textbooks), the programs still need to make sure they are sustainable in the future. That means everything from allocating funds to update the materials to minimizing the amount of updating needed in the first place. Christopher Gildow, an art teacher at Everett Community College (just north of Seattle) who is developing the interactive materials for an art-appreciation course, says he hopes to reduce the number of dead links that accumulate on webpages over time by steering clear of dotcom websites altogether. For an image of Dorothea Lange’s iconic 1936 photo of a migrant farm worker, for example, Gildow links to a page from the Library of Congress.
The true measure of Washington State’s initiative will be how willing other teachers are to adopt the new materials created by their colleagues and whether more students pass the classes in which they are being used. The first 42 courses, which are being tested and tweaked through June, will be available to Washington State’s entire community and technical college network in the fall. “We have a big hope that faculty will be including more interactive, engaging material into their courses. We know that students who are engaged learn more,” notes Josh Jarrett of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which donated more than $50 million to post-secondary education in 2010. “If nobody uses them, that’s obviously not an ideal outcome,” adds Jarrett.
So far, Tacoma Community College student Jessie Sellers seems sold. “The class is actually pretty good,” he says. His one complaint: “I wanted to get a little bit ahead, but the teacher only posts things online about half a week in advance. So I have to wait.” Sounds like he’s hooked.
This article was originally posted at http://ping.fm/ZrH99
Washington’s Open Course Library is the largest state-funded effort in the nation to make core college course materials available on the Web for $30 or less per class. Financed with $750,000 from the state of Washington and a matching grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the goal isn’t just to reduce student costs, says program architect Cable Green. It’s also to create engaging, interactive learning materials that will help improve course completion rates. By the time the project is completed in 2012, digitized textbook equivalents for some 81 high-enrollment classes will be available online for the more than 400,000 students enrolled in Washington’s network of community and technical colleges. Even better, the materials can be shared across the globe, largely for free, because they will be published in an open format that avoids the most onerous licensing restrictions. To keep costs at a minimum, the teachers developing the materials are relying primarily on either existing material in the public domain or embarking on the painstaking task of developing materials from scratch.
Creating high-quality, interactive course material isn’t just a cut-and-paste job off the Web. From avoiding copyright-protected sources to finding material that is written at the appropriate level for beginning college students, the task of culling online materials is no elementary endeavor. Professor Phil Venditti, who is designing a public- speaking course to be piloted in the spring at Clover Park Technical College in Lakewood, Wash., plans to link students to online speech banks, such as American Rhetoric’s and even the videos on the White House website. But he says he wrote the main text for the class himself because preexisting resources were either copyright protected or not concise enough for his needs. “We only have 50 to 55 hours of class time together, and I would like my students to become top-notch speakers,” says Venditti. Adds another teacher, Ralph Dawes, who is designing the materials for an introductory geology course: “You have to find a balance between explaining enough but not having too much information.”
Although designing complete course materials from scratch is undoubtedly a big task, the idea is that any instructor who teaches the same course on another Washington State campus will then be able to use the new materials designed by a colleague. Instructors are also free to add or subtract content to suit their needs. What’s more, the $30 budget for each course enables teachers to use a limited amount of materials with copyright restrictions, should they be needed. As for concerns that material that is freely available may not be of the same quality as that which teachers must pay for, project head Green says, “the intellectual property license on content has absolutely nothing to do with quality of content. “ It would make it tough, however, to teach a class on, say, great works of modern American fiction, since classics like J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye still have strict copyright protection.
Jessie Sellers’s English professor Jacqui Cain doesn’t have that problem, however, because her class focuses on basic reading, writing, and grammatical skills. To redesign her course, she began by replacing the $85 We Are America textbook (which includes Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and an excerpt from the 1989 Amy Tan novel, The Joy Luck Club, for example) with five of her favorite Sherlock Holmes stories, which she downloaded for free from the Project Gutenberg library. Next she enhanced the online text with pop-ups that define and illustrate bygone words such as “gasogene,” a Victorian-era, handheld gadget used to carbonate water. She even found MP3 recordings of each story that students can download and listen to on portable music players. “I tried to make it as immersive as I could,” says Cain, adding, “detective stories are especially good because they motivate students to figure something out from a reading.” They also teach deductive reasoning skills that improve reading comprehension, she says.
Green estimates that the initiative could save Washington State students up to $41 million in textbook costs per year. This dollars-and-sense argument helped legislator Reuven Carlyle convince the state to pony up some $750,000 in financing last year, despite its multibillion-dollar budget deficit. Washington taxpayers currently pay about $74 million to fund grants to low-income college students, many of who enroll in community colleges. About half of that money goes toward covering the cost of textbooks, according to Carlyle. Reducing the cost of materials, he argues, could free up funds to go toward improving the quality of public education itself. “It is the ultimate win-win,” says Carlyle, who criticizes textbook makers for the high costs of books: “It is an outrage that we allow this monopoly to crush common sense and to crush students’ wallets and not fight back.”
While Washington’s pilot program has received the most state funding of any project, it’s not the first project of its kind. Rice University has hosted Connexions, a vast, online database of open-source educational modules from elementary school though post-graduate level material on topics ranging from algebra to literary criticism since 1999, but this global site (which is funded by some $7 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation) can be difficult to navigate. In September 2010, the Open University of the Netherlands opened a similar database of Dutch-language educational resources for teachers, dubbed Wikiwijs, which is being funded by a $10.9 million (€8 million) grant from the Dutch Ministry of Education. Similar projects aimed at reducing the cost of textbooks are in the works in Brazil and Poland.
Perhaps the most cautionary lesson about the risks of developing open libraries of course materials comes from Utah State University, which launched a similar project in 2005 and currently offers free materials for more than 80 courses, ranging from cultural anthropology to avalanche and snow dynamics. While Utah State received $200,000 in funding from its state government, along with $400,000 from the Hewlett Foundation, it ceased developing new online course materials in 2009 due to a lack of funding. “The economy is partly to blame, and consequently the program is currently in hibernation,” explains the program’s former head, David Wiley, who is now working on a similar initiative aimed at lowering the cost of high-school course materials in Utah.
The abrupt cessation of the Utah State project serves as a warning. While recruiting teachers to create original online course materials may save schools money initially (by reducing the amount of state grant money used to foot the bill for pricey textbooks), the programs still need to make sure they are sustainable in the future. That means everything from allocating funds to update the materials to minimizing the amount of updating needed in the first place. Christopher Gildow, an art teacher at Everett Community College (just north of Seattle) who is developing the interactive materials for an art-appreciation course, says he hopes to reduce the number of dead links that accumulate on webpages over time by steering clear of dotcom websites altogether. For an image of Dorothea Lange’s iconic 1936 photo of a migrant farm worker, for example, Gildow links to a page from the Library of Congress.
The true measure of Washington State’s initiative will be how willing other teachers are to adopt the new materials created by their colleagues and whether more students pass the classes in which they are being used. The first 42 courses, which are being tested and tweaked through June, will be available to Washington State’s entire community and technical college network in the fall. “We have a big hope that faculty will be including more interactive, engaging material into their courses. We know that students who are engaged learn more,” notes Josh Jarrett of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which donated more than $50 million to post-secondary education in 2010. “If nobody uses them, that’s obviously not an ideal outcome,” adds Jarrett.
So far, Tacoma Community College student Jessie Sellers seems sold. “The class is actually pretty good,” he says. His one complaint: “I wanted to get a little bit ahead, but the teacher only posts things online about half a week in advance. So I have to wait.” Sounds like he’s hooked.
This article was originally posted at http://ping.fm/ZrH99
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Scorm Becoming Important to Higher ED
In a recent article for The Chronicle of Higher Education, SCORM’s limited value to eLearning and training has become more high profile.
As many of us in instructional design and eLearning know, SCORM has little to do with actual learning. Instead, SCORM represents a technical specification to help ensure that eLearning content survives different systems and upgrades. In order to take advantage of SCORM, learning has to be structured and meta-tagged appropriately so that it is retrieveable, or shareable.
The shareable factor is what I believe the government is after here. However, while much of eLearning emphasizes self-paced asynchronous training. Higher education rarely falls into this category. At the minimum, this highlights the basic difference between training and education. I believe the notion that one institution could build a SCORM-certified course and have it distributed and taught by another institution may in fact be flawed. Others may disagree with me. In either case, I would question whether the assessments are in fact aligned with the objectives and instructional methods for the content when the courses are shared. By way of the IMS GLC Public Forum, Rabel offers an extensive and deep analysis of the flaws of this thinking and follow-ups here..
Some may argue that what is being asked here is to generate generic learning content, that is content that lots of people need. Labeling content as ‘generic’ is also flawed. All learning content has a built-in theoretical perspective for how teaching and learning should occur. What SCORM most certainly fails to include is any identification of pedagogy or instructional methods. So, to believe that one faculty member’s philosophy of teaching that would be inherent to a SCORM-certified course is congruent with another faculty member’s philosophy of teaching fails to recognize the unique teaching skills of the individuals. I certainly do not assert that I could organize, teach, and assess the same course content the same way as another faculty would, which is what SCORM-compliant content would require.
What do you think? Can higher ed content be SCORMed?
This article was originally posted at http://ping.fm/ksg0B
The Chronicle reports:
Some higher-education leaders say a little-noticed technical note in a new $2-billion federal grant program could make it difficult for colleges to use the money to build free online course materials.
The issue centers around a single line of the 53-page grant guidelines for the program, known officially as the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grants Program: “All online and technology-enabled courses developed under this [program] must be compliant with the latest version of Scorm (Sharable Content Object Reference Model).”
As many of us in instructional design and eLearning know, SCORM has little to do with actual learning. Instead, SCORM represents a technical specification to help ensure that eLearning content survives different systems and upgrades. In order to take advantage of SCORM, learning has to be structured and meta-tagged appropriately so that it is retrieveable, or shareable.
The shareable factor is what I believe the government is after here. However, while much of eLearning emphasizes self-paced asynchronous training. Higher education rarely falls into this category. At the minimum, this highlights the basic difference between training and education. I believe the notion that one institution could build a SCORM-certified course and have it distributed and taught by another institution may in fact be flawed. Others may disagree with me. In either case, I would question whether the assessments are in fact aligned with the objectives and instructional methods for the content when the courses are shared. By way of the IMS GLC Public Forum, Rabel offers an extensive and deep analysis of the flaws of this thinking and follow-ups here..
Some may argue that what is being asked here is to generate generic learning content, that is content that lots of people need. Labeling content as ‘generic’ is also flawed. All learning content has a built-in theoretical perspective for how teaching and learning should occur. What SCORM most certainly fails to include is any identification of pedagogy or instructional methods. So, to believe that one faculty member’s philosophy of teaching that would be inherent to a SCORM-certified course is congruent with another faculty member’s philosophy of teaching fails to recognize the unique teaching skills of the individuals. I certainly do not assert that I could organize, teach, and assess the same course content the same way as another faculty would, which is what SCORM-compliant content would require.
What do you think? Can higher ed content be SCORMed?
This article was originally posted at http://ping.fm/ksg0B
Online Learning Set for Explosive Growth as Traditional Classrooms Decline
By 2015, 25 million post-secondary students in the United States will be taking classes online. And as that happens, the number of students who take classes exclusively on physical campuses will plummet, from 14.4 million in 2010 to just 4.1 million five years later, according to a new forecast released by market research firm Ambient Insight.
Blended and Online Learning Growth
The report, "The US Market for Self-paced eLearning Products and Services: 2010-2015 Forecast and Analysis," predicted a five-year compound decline of 22.08 percent per year in students attending traditional classrooms exclusively. The number of post-secondary students taking some (but not all) classes online will grow at a compound annual rate of 11.08 percent over the same five-year period, from 12.36 million in 2010 to 21.13 million in 2015. But the real growth will be seen among students taking classes exclusively online. Ambient predicted a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.06 percent in that area, from 1.37 million in 2010 to 3.86 million in 2015.
By that time, the number of students taking classes exclusively online will be nearly equal to the number taking classes exclusively on a physical campus, with a gap of just 240,000 students (a figure that represents less than 1 percent of the entire forecast post-secondary student population, including degree-granting institutions, vocational training schools, continuing education institutions, etc.)
Further, according to the report, "If this trend continues, by 2018, there will be more full time online students than students that take all their classes in a physical classroom."
Top Institutions for Online Enrollment
The report also indicated that despite the high five-year compound annual growth figures, the annual growth of full-time and part-time online enrollments at the top-10 institutions seems to have slowed in the last two years, while growth at some of the smaller institutions accelerated. The report characterized the larger institutions as "pioneers in online learning with large numbers of students" that are "approaching enrollment saturation points" and aligning with previous forecasts.
In terms of the top institutions for full-time enrollment, all of the institutions in Ambient Insight's top-5 continued to experience growth over the last two years, though that growth declined for all but one.
A similar pattern emerged for the top institutions for part-time online enrollments, according to Ambient Insight. All of the institutions in the top-5 continued to experience healthy, double-digit growth from 2009 to 2010, just slightly less healthy than the growth experienced from 2008 to 2009.
Further details about the top institutions are available in Ambient Insight's report.
The report also spotlighted some of the smaller online institutions, many of which are also experiencing double-digit growth in enrollments. Some are using partnerships with commerical suppliers to accelerate that growth further. Ambient Insight Chief Research Officer Sam S. Adkins also pointed to a creative partnership between the state of Indiana and Western Governors University.
"An interesting partnership is the deal between the state of Indiana and Western Governors University (WGU) forged in August 2010," . "WGU set up a private portal called WGU Indiana allowing Indiana to launch an online school with very little upfront capital. WGU Indiana operates at no cost to the state. The Indiana governor refers to the new online school as 'Indiana's eighth state university.' As of January 2011, enrollment had tripled to reach 800 students, mostly working adults, just six months after launch. WGU Indiana indicates they are adding 'nearly 100 new students each month.' This is a unique business model that should appeal to other states if it is successful.”
E-Learning Expenditures Booming
Adkins said that all of this growth will help propel expenditures on electronic learning products in higher education to unprecedented levels (though it won't be the only factor driving spending).
The report focused on expenditures by academic institutions, businesses, and other organizations on a category of electronic learning products that Ambient Insight refers to as "self-paced e-learning products," which includes learning management, classroom management, and learning content management systems, along with student information systems and hosted learning platforms, among others. This category does not include mobile learning, gaming, or several other major e-learning categories. (Ambient Insight's detailed methodology and category definitions can be found here.)
In higher education in the United States, according to Ambient, expenditures on these types of products will grow at a five-year CAGR of 6.7 percent, reaching $6.1 billion by 2015. Combined with K-12, academic institutions in the United States alone will account for $11 billion in expenditures in this category by 2015.
Higher education isn't the only segment experiencing growth in electronic learning expenditures. Across all industry segments, the market for these electronic learning products and services grew to $18.2 billion in the United States in 2010. That overall figure will climb to $24.2 billion in 2015, according to Ambient Insight's latest forecast--a relatively modest 5.9 percent compound annual growth comparable to that of Western Europe but lagging far behind Asia (at nearly a 30 percent five-year CAGR from 2010 to 2015), Eastern Europe (nearly 25 percent CAGR), Latin America (about 18 percent CAGR), and Africa (roughly 17 percent CAGR). Ambient said Asia's growth rate will propel it to become the second-largest consumer of these types of electronic learning products by 2015, just ahead of Western Europe and just behind North America.
Ambient Insight's latest report, "The US Market for Self-paced eLearning Products and Services: 2010-2015 Forecast and Analysis," is available now from Ambient Insight for $4,825 for an organizational site license. Further information, including a free executive summary with additional details, can be found here.
This article was originally posted at http://ping.fm/cjoiw
Blended and Online Learning Growth
The report, "The US Market for Self-paced eLearning Products and Services: 2010-2015 Forecast and Analysis," predicted a five-year compound decline of 22.08 percent per year in students attending traditional classrooms exclusively. The number of post-secondary students taking some (but not all) classes online will grow at a compound annual rate of 11.08 percent over the same five-year period, from 12.36 million in 2010 to 21.13 million in 2015. But the real growth will be seen among students taking classes exclusively online. Ambient predicted a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.06 percent in that area, from 1.37 million in 2010 to 3.86 million in 2015.
By that time, the number of students taking classes exclusively online will be nearly equal to the number taking classes exclusively on a physical campus, with a gap of just 240,000 students (a figure that represents less than 1 percent of the entire forecast post-secondary student population, including degree-granting institutions, vocational training schools, continuing education institutions, etc.)
Further, according to the report, "If this trend continues, by 2018, there will be more full time online students than students that take all their classes in a physical classroom."
Top Institutions for Online Enrollment
The report also indicated that despite the high five-year compound annual growth figures, the annual growth of full-time and part-time online enrollments at the top-10 institutions seems to have slowed in the last two years, while growth at some of the smaller institutions accelerated. The report characterized the larger institutions as "pioneers in online learning with large numbers of students" that are "approaching enrollment saturation points" and aligning with previous forecasts.
In terms of the top institutions for full-time enrollment, all of the institutions in Ambient Insight's top-5 continued to experience growth over the last two years, though that growth declined for all but one.
- American Public Education, which continued to be the largest institution in terms of full-time enrollments, climbed 31.3 percent from 2009 to 2010 (77,700 total), compared with growth of 49.2 percent from 2008 to 2009.
- Bridgepoint Education, in the second slot, saw the greatest growth among the top institutions in the same period, increasing 40.7 percent from 54,800 online enrollments in 2009 to 77,100 by the end of 2010. That growth, nevertheless, was a sharp dropoff from the 101 percent single-year growth experienced from 2008 to 2009.
- At No. 3, UMassOnline grew 14.5 percent to 45,800 in 2010. The institution had experienced 18 percent growth the previous year.
- On the heels of 17.1 percent growth from 2008 to 2009, Walden University experienced a smaller 12.6 percent growth from 2009 to 2010, climbing to 45,600 enrollments.
- Rounding out the top-5, Liberty University was the only top institution to see increased growth in the two-year analysis. Liberty U grew 24.3 percent from 2009 to 2010, reaching an enrollment level of 45,000. It had experienced significantly less growth, 15.6 percent, in the previous year.
A similar pattern emerged for the top institutions for part-time online enrollments, according to Ambient Insight. All of the institutions in the top-5 continued to experience healthy, double-digit growth from 2009 to 2010, just slightly less healthy than the growth experienced from 2008 to 2009.
- University of Phoenix Online experienced 16.8 percent growth from 2009 to 2010, down from 22.3 percent growth the previous year. Total enrollment of students taking at least one class online in 2010 was a dominant 362,500.
- State University of New York Learning Network saw 13.9 percent growth from 2009 to 2010, off slightly from the 17.6 percent growth experienced the previous year. Its total enrollment in 2010 was 111,400.
- The Ohio Learning Network saw 17.9 percent growth in 2010, down from 25 percent growth from 2008 to 2009. Its 2010 online enrollment figure was 110,400.
- Kaplan University experienced the greatest amount of growth among the top institutions at 36.4 percent from 2009 to 2010. It had experienced growth of 47 percent from 2008 to 2009. Its 2010 online enrollment figure was 75,000.
- Finally, DeVry experienced a substantial 18.1 percent growth in 2010, off from the 26.7 percent growth it experienced in 2009. Total 2010 online enrollments were 66,500, Ambient Insight reported.
Further details about the top institutions are available in Ambient Insight's report.
The report also spotlighted some of the smaller online institutions, many of which are also experiencing double-digit growth in enrollments. Some are using partnerships with commerical suppliers to accelerate that growth further. Ambient Insight Chief Research Officer Sam S. Adkins also pointed to a creative partnership between the state of Indiana and Western Governors University.
"An interesting partnership is the deal between the state of Indiana and Western Governors University (WGU) forged in August 2010," . "WGU set up a private portal called WGU Indiana allowing Indiana to launch an online school with very little upfront capital. WGU Indiana operates at no cost to the state. The Indiana governor refers to the new online school as 'Indiana's eighth state university.' As of January 2011, enrollment had tripled to reach 800 students, mostly working adults, just six months after launch. WGU Indiana indicates they are adding 'nearly 100 new students each month.' This is a unique business model that should appeal to other states if it is successful.”
E-Learning Expenditures Booming
Adkins said that all of this growth will help propel expenditures on electronic learning products in higher education to unprecedented levels (though it won't be the only factor driving spending).
The report focused on expenditures by academic institutions, businesses, and other organizations on a category of electronic learning products that Ambient Insight refers to as "self-paced e-learning products," which includes learning management, classroom management, and learning content management systems, along with student information systems and hosted learning platforms, among others. This category does not include mobile learning, gaming, or several other major e-learning categories. (Ambient Insight's detailed methodology and category definitions can be found here.)
In higher education in the United States, according to Ambient, expenditures on these types of products will grow at a five-year CAGR of 6.7 percent, reaching $6.1 billion by 2015. Combined with K-12, academic institutions in the United States alone will account for $11 billion in expenditures in this category by 2015.
Higher education isn't the only segment experiencing growth in electronic learning expenditures. Across all industry segments, the market for these electronic learning products and services grew to $18.2 billion in the United States in 2010. That overall figure will climb to $24.2 billion in 2015, according to Ambient Insight's latest forecast--a relatively modest 5.9 percent compound annual growth comparable to that of Western Europe but lagging far behind Asia (at nearly a 30 percent five-year CAGR from 2010 to 2015), Eastern Europe (nearly 25 percent CAGR), Latin America (about 18 percent CAGR), and Africa (roughly 17 percent CAGR). Ambient said Asia's growth rate will propel it to become the second-largest consumer of these types of electronic learning products by 2015, just ahead of Western Europe and just behind North America.
Ambient Insight's latest report, "The US Market for Self-paced eLearning Products and Services: 2010-2015 Forecast and Analysis," is available now from Ambient Insight for $4,825 for an organizational site license. Further information, including a free executive summary with additional details, can be found here.
This article was originally posted at http://ping.fm/cjoiw
Monday, January 24, 2011
E-Learning Trends 2011
Learning Circuits recently polled readers on how they’re using e-learning in their organizations. Here’s what they had to say.
How does your company use e-learning? (check all that apply)
Please describe the types of learners using e-learning applications.
Select the types of e-learning tools, functionality, and infrastructure your organization currently uses.
What e-learning support services does your organization provide in-house? (Select all that apply)
Size of entire training budget for company for 2010 (in dollars):
In 2010, what percentage of your training budget was used for e-learning or blended learning programs?
What concerns does your organization have about using e-learning?
What is the primary focus of your day-to-day work?
In what industry is your organization primarily functioning?
Survey was conducted in November and December 2010. Results are based 348 responses.
This article was originally posted at http://www.astd.org/lc/0111_trends
How does your company use e-learning? (check all that apply)
| Customer service training | 34.2% |
| Enterprise transformations | 12.7% |
| External customers/clients | 20.3% |
| General business skills (leadership, sexual harassment, etc.) | 30.4% |
| IT (end user/desktop applications) | 39.2% |
| IT (network.infrastructure) | 12.7% |
| IT (programming languages) | 6.3% |
| Keeping staff up-to-date on acquisitions | 6.3% |
| Military | 2.5% |
| Product updates and rollouts | 20.3% |
| Regulatory/compliance issues | 35.4% |
| Salesforce training | 20.3% |
| Supply chain or channel partner training | 5.1% |
| Task-specific skills | 35.4% |
| Technical/manufacturing issues | 15.2% |
| We are in initial stages of implementing e-learning | 15.2% |
| Other (please specify) | 13.9% |
Please describe the types of learners using e-learning applications.
Select the types of e-learning tools, functionality, and infrastructure your organization currently uses.
| 3D Virtual worlds | 6.3% |
| Assessment/testing tools | 48.8% |
| Audio conferencing | 43.8% |
| Audio editing/development tools | 26.3% |
| Authoring tools | 45.0% |
| Blogs | 20.0% |
| Content integration tools | 18.8% |
| e-Labs | 6.3% |
| Games | 13.8% |
| Learning content management systems | 12.5% |
| Learning management systems | 55.0% |
| Mobile learning | 8.8% |
| Off-the-shelf courseware/libraries | 26.3% |
| Online mentoring/coaching | 15.0% |
| Podcasting | 12.5% |
| Simulations/Serious games | 7.5% |
| Social networking tools | 13.8% |
| Survey generation tools | 20.0% |
| Video conferencing | 32.5% |
| Video editing/development tools | 21.3% |
| Virtual classrooms | 35.0% |
| Web conferencing | 40.0% |
| Other (please specify) | 5.0% |
What e-learning support services does your organization provide in-house? (Select all that apply)
Size of entire training budget for company for 2010 (in dollars):
In 2010, what percentage of your training budget was used for e-learning or blended learning programs?
What concerns does your organization have about using e-learning?
What is the primary focus of your day-to-day work?
| Job Focus | Response Percent |
| Instructor | 10.6% |
| Instructional design | 28.8% |
| Curriculum development | 4.5% |
| Interface design | 1.5% |
| LMS/LCMS integration | 1.5% |
| Department/program manager | 28.8% |
| Online facilitator/instructor | 1.5% |
| Research | 3.0% |
| Subject matter expert | 6.1% |
| IT | 1.5% |
| Web development | 3.0% |
| Line of business/frontline manager | 4.5% |
| Other (please specify) | 4.5% |
In what industry is your organization primarily functioning?
| Industry | Response Percent |
| Aerospace | 1.5% |
| Commercial training (classroom or online) | 1.5% |
| Computer hardware | 0.0% |
| Computer software | 3.1% |
| Consulting | 1.5% |
| Custom instructional development | 3.1% |
| Energy and petroleum | 1.5% |
| Federal government | 1.5% |
| Finance and investment management | 9.2% |
| Healthcare | 4.6% |
| Higher education (Universities, Colleges, and Tech Schools) | 13.8% |
| Hospitality/food service | 1.5% |
| Insurance | 9.2% |
| K-12 Education | 3.1% |
| Manufacturing | 6.2% |
| Military | 1.5% |
| Nonprofit | 4.6% |
| Pharmaceuticals and biosciences | 3.1% |
| Publishing/advertising/media | 1.5% |
| Real estate | 0.0% |
| Retail | 1.5% |
| State/local government | 6.2% |
| Systems/network integrator | 3.1% |
| Telecommunications | 3.1% |
| Transportation | 3.1% |
| Utilities | 3.1% |
| Other (please specify) | 7.7% |
Survey was conducted in November and December 2010. Results are based 348 responses.
This article was originally posted at http://www.astd.org/lc/0111_trends
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Disrupting the Education Monopoly Through Digital Learning
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush told ReasonTV‘s Nick Gillespie that information technology, or digital learning, can help break the education monopoly by offering quality classes to students, no matter whether they’re enrolled in a public or private school or home schooled.
Bush championed school choice as governor from 1999 to 2007 and approved a school voucher program that successfully boosted student achievement until it was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2006.
Since leaving office, Bush founded the Foundation for Excellence in Education and serves as co-chair of theDigital Learning Council.
While attending the National Summit on Education Reform in Washington, D.C., Bush told Gillespie that digital learning exists on the margins of education but that, “Monopolies don’t like to have direct competition.”
“Any reform that’s worth its salt right now has to recognize that we’re in a decade long flat per student spending,” Bush said. “Anything that provides higher quality at lower cost, just as it is in the real world, will have great success in education.”
Learning where you are
I shared this concept video a few months ago to illustrate just one broad aspect of mobile learning. But it has been misinterpreted by at least one administrator that I know.
The point of the video is not about knowing where you are. The point is is learning where you are and using what you (and your students) already have.
This article was originally posted at http://ping.fm/um6FQ
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