“Taking the Distance Out of Distance Education” plus 1 more |
| Taking the Distance Out of Distance Education Posted: 09 Mar 2011 01:04 PM PST Posted on: Wednesday, 9 March 2011, 10:28 CST How one online university helps students stay connected and engaged SALT LAKE CITY, March 9, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- For an increasing number of adults returning to college to complete a bachelor's or master's degree, online universities offer the accessibility and flexibility they need to fit their busy lives. And, with a little research, they can find a quality, accredited institution that will allow them to achieve their educational goals without neglecting their work and family responsibilities. A wealth of information is available online to help students select an online college, but once they've enrolled, one of the most daunting challenges for both the students and faculty is establishing and maintaining a sense of community and connection to the university. In other words, how do you take the 'distance' out of distance education? Western Governors University, a non-profit, online university and an innovator in distance education, was founded by 19 U.S. governors to provide working adults with affordable access to a quality college degree. WGU is not only all online, it uses a unique competency-based learning model. This competency-based approach to learning allows students to advance in their online degree program by demonstrating their knowledge and skill, instead of logging hours in class. Rather than "attending" classes online, students have 24/7 access to a variety of learning resources for each course. They can complete their studies on a schedule that allows them to meet their job and family responsibilities. WGU faculty do not teach -- they serve as mentors, working one-on-one with each student to provide coaching, support, and guidance. Since the WGU "campus" is online, its nearly 24,000 students live and work in all 50 states, and WGU faculty members are also located across the U.S. Unlike universities established using a traditional, brick-and-mortar approach, WGU's academic model was designed for the online environment. Just as the university employs technology to teach, it also uses technology to bring students and faculty together in several ways:
WGU was designed for busy working adults who need to finish an undergraduate or graduate degree, but can't fit a traditional college or university into their busy schedules. WGU recognizes that its students are individuals with different needs, and as with its competency-based learning, the university offers students a variety of ways to connect. For more information about Western Governors University, go to www.wgu.edu, or call 1.866.225.5948. About Western Governors University "[WGU is] the best relatively cheap university you've never heard of."- TIME magazine Featured on the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, WGU is the only university in the U.S. offering competency-based degree programs and the only non-profit, fully online university with students in all 50 states. WGU offers 50 degree programs in Business, Education, Information Technology, and Healthcare Professions, including Nursing. Since its inception in 1997, WGU has grown into a national institution, serving nearly 24,000 students. WGU is self-sustaining on tuition, and does not rely on state or national support to fund its operations. On June 11, 2010, WGU Indiana, referred to by Governor Mitch Daniels as Indiana's eighth state university, was formed through a partnership with the state. A wholly-owned subsidiary of Western Governors University, WGU Indiana is open to all qualified Indiana residents, and its degree programs are accredited through Western Governors University. WGU is regionally accredited by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities and nationally accredited by the Distance Education and Training Council (DETC). WGU nursing programs have been accredited by the Commission for Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE), and its B.S. in Health Informatics is accredited by CAHIIM (Commission on Accreditation for Health Informatics and Information Management Education). WGU's Teachers College is the first and only exclusively online provider of teacher education to receive accreditation for its degree programs that lead to teacher licensure from NCATE, the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education. The university has earned the support of more than 20 leading corporations and foundations. They include institutions such as AT&T, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Dell, Lilly Endowment, HCA, Hewlett-Packard, Lumina Foundation, Microsoft, Oracle, Qwest, SunGard Higher Education, and Zions Bank. More information is available at www.wgu.edu. Contact for media inquiries: Contact for enrollment information: Joan Mitchell - Director of PR 866-225-5948 801-428-5463 www.wgu.edu jmitchell@wgu.eduFollow WGU: http://www.facebook.com/wgu.edu http://www.linkedin.com/company/western-governors-university http://www.youtube.com/WesternGovernorsUniv SOURCE Western Governors University Source: PR Newswire This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| New Platform Uses Social Features To Improve Online Education Posted: 09 Mar 2011 02:33 AM PST Buried within platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Wikipedia lies valuable educational content that can reinforce classroom lessons, help self-motivated learners teach themselves new concepts, and upend the way that the world looks at education. But it's hard to separate this content from the cat videos, ads and uninformed contributions that share the same platforms. Social learning startup Sophia, which launched its public beta Monday, aims to solve this problem by focusing exclusively on crowdsourced educational material and encouraging users to help sort the academically sound, engaging lessons from the sub-par lessons. Anybody can compile a "lesson packet" on Sophia using slideshows, videos, audio clips and text that they either upload or pull in from sources like YouTube. About 200 private beta users have already covered lessons ranging from Camera Angles & Shots to Coordinate Geometry of Quadrilaterals. The idea is to make it easy for students to find reliable knowledge on any topic quickly and efficiently. In the search options, for instance, students can even select specific text books to find corresponding packets. If students still don't understand something after viewing a lesson, they can post a question to a Q&A board attached to each packet. CEO Don Smithmier says one of the most common uses of the platform since the private beta that launched in November has been to curate the best content about a given concept from other social media platforms like YouTube. "There's a ton of good information on the web, but it's hard to find," he says. "And part of it is that if you don't already know what you're doing, it's hard to evaluate the good from the bad." After a packet is submitted, Sophia has multiple ways to gauge its quality. When users sign up for the site, they have an option to identify themselves as subject experts, if they hold a degree in that field or teach courses on it. Three such experts need to certify a lesson as "academically sound" before it is labeled as such. There is also a five-star user rating system similar to the seller ratings at Amazon.com, and lesson creators have lifetime "Sophia ratings" that gauge how successfully they've contributed to the community. Other rewards for providing quality content include earning followers via a Twitter-like feature and badges. Sophia.org is free, and the company is committed to barring advertising, as well as the content manipulations that come with it, from the site. But the project isn't purely a labor of love -- eventually the company will sell a white-label version of the product to schools and universities that want their own private, white-label versions of the product. For now, the project is backed by an investment from online education company Capella. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, enviromantic This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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