The information in multiple research studies and reports (such as  Babson’s Tracking Online Education in the US indicate that online learning is here to stay, in any of the forms it affords.

Discussing the five factors that encourage institutions to consider learning technologies, we were impacted by two: student demand (and their low tolerance for technology problems) and access to measurable data. It is interesting to come to the realization that educational institutions have not so been so keen on setting up their systems (enterprise, LMS, video repositories, etc) to collect data that would inform educational practice, until third parties partnered with institutions just because of the relevance of having access to data that shows  people’s approaches to learning online environments. As one person in the discussion pointed out, as an institutions we could get more information about our students’ use of the videos looking at Coursera data than going through our own institutional  video repository system that has been active for years. Because our system had not been set up to provide the data information service.

The models of course redesign  (fully online, blended, flipped, emporium, and others) are certainly been tested and adopted in our Illinois campus by our colleges. But one thing that is still not been addressed fully (here and in many other institutions) is related to policies that count seat time our instructor’s  time in front of student to calculate credit hour, compensation and other administrative functions. The course redesigners find a bump in the system when it comes to making decisions on policies based on the course format.

Take aways from our Chapter 1 discussion in form of wish list:

1. We wish that the abundance of online videos (including Coursera’s) and Open Educational Resources become the incentive for faculty to flip their classroom using excellent sources of information equivalent to good textbooks (but more affordable).
2. We wish that colleges start considering approaches such as  competency based education, to match  students’ readiness and experience in common core curriculum.

Our first meeting we discussed the Preface of Minds Online and our expectations for these 9 weeks of readings. The part of the Preface that I focused on was how technology helps to amplify and expand teaching strategies to elicit memory, attention, effort and engagement (p. xii).