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/.
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Professor Quinn Qiao and a research team from the College of Engineering and Computer Science received a $1.5 million award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and industry members to develop an Industry/University Collaborative Research Center…
As the field of forensics evolves, more complex evidence is being processed with greater precision, sensitivity and speed than ever before. To give a real-life example, consider a bank robbery where the perpetrator uses a pen, available to all customers,…
The concept of luck goes against the principles of engineering. Luck happens without design. The story behind most great careers may sometimes include luck, but the truth behind it is usually years of hard work, continued learning and the application…
Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) awarded research funds to twelve student researchers through its 2021 Summer Undergraduate Research Support Program. The program seeks to promote research participation among women in STEM fields, with awards supplementing students’ existing grants to…
Ever since Swedish naturalist and explorer Carolus Linnaeus developed the uniform system for defining and naming species of organisms, known as binomial nomenclature (e.g., Homo sapiens for human beings), scientists have wondered if they will ever be able to predict the…
If you need help with your subscription, contact sunews@syr.edu.
