More than one million K-12 students and nearly four million college students enroll in online courses each year, and those numbers are expected to rise, according to reports by the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) and Sloan-C.
In celebration of National Distance Learning Week 2009, the Syracuse University School of Information Studies (iSchool) is unveiling new Web resources for the University community, its peers, and the general public to promote and support online teaching and learning.
The iSchool has created a website, http://ischool.syr.edu/ndl, which features:
“By sharing our resources and experience, and encouraging others to do the same, we hope to promote excellence in online education and to provide a forum where educators can learn from one another,” says Katie Schisa, chair of the iSchool’s Task Force on Online Education and director of the Web-based Information Science Education Consortium.
“Online course resources are becoming part of the 21st-century student’s online universe,” says Peggy Brown, iSchool director of instructional design. “A course website is now often a stop along the path from Facebook to email to Google, all accessed from an iPhone or a laptop for on-the-go learning. Students are entering undergraduate and graduate programs with greater expectations of how technology will be used to enhance their educational experience, and institutions including Syracuse University are striving to meet these expectations.”
The iSchool has been offering exceptional online education since 1993, and today all of the school’s fully accredited graduate programs can be completed online. The iSchool annually offers more than 80 online courses to some 1,250 graduate students from 33 different states and five different countries.
In addition to the benefits for courses offered completely online, educational technology enables instructors to enrich campus-based courses with anytime/anywhere access to multimedia materials and online discussions. A 2009 DOE report notes that “students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face interactions.” Such studies show why the iSchool, like many others, is supplementing campus-based courses with online resources.
The U.S. Distance Learning Association will be hosting a series of free webinars on various online learning issues. For more information or to access an archive of previous webinars, visit http://www.usdla.org/.
“When am I ever going to use this in real life?” That is the oft-heard refrain from middle- and high-school science students, struggling through labs and formulas that feel as far removed from their day-to-day as, well, space travel. Sarthak…
Dusting for fingerprints, documenting blood stain patterns and measuring bullet trajectory—you might think this is a description of a recent episode from the popular television series “CSI.” While this may be true, these are also the daily lessons students are…
Matt Cufari, a senior physics major in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), a computer science major in the College of Engineering and Computer Science, a Coronat Scholar and a member of the Renée Crown University Honors Program, has…
Rajiv “Raj” Dewan, dean of the School of Information Studies, has announced he will conclude his deanship on June 30, 2022. Dewan plans to return to full-time faculty duties while continuing his research. David Seaman, dean of Syracuse University Libraries…
In 1948, Professor James Hope Birnie became Syracuse University’s first African American faculty member in biology, teaching here until 1951. He was also one of its first biology faculty members to be supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)….
If you need help with your subscription, contact sunews@syr.edu.
