Sam Gladstein's List: ecomp7017

The Sloan Consortium is an institutional and professional leadership organization dedicated to integrating online education into the mainstream of higher education, helping institutions and individual educators improve the quality, scale, and breadth of online education. Membership in the Sloan Consortium provides knowledge, practice, community, and direction for educators. Originally funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Sloan-C is now a non-profit, 501 (c) (3), member sustained organization. Join with Sloan-C to lead higher education in meeting social needs for affordable access, quality innovations, and teaching and learning excellence.
The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) helps learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines. Sloan-C supports the collaborative sharing of knowledge and effective practices to improve online education in learning effectiveness, access, affordability for learners and providers, and student and faculty satisfaction.

A CourseSite is basically a no-cost online learning environment that you can set up to match your personal teaching style, curricula, and student needs. It can give you significant power beyond the traditional classroom. You can create CourseSites to post course materials, communicate with students, encourage collaboration, monitor performance, and manage grades. CourseSites are available to you and your students anytime, 24/7 via the Internet.

The flexible menu and course design capabilities give educators at all levels the ability to connect with learners of all ages—from K-12 all the way through to retirement and beyond. CourseSites support all types of teaching methods and learning needs—from lecture series to social learning and even employee training.

This is a FREE conference open to ANYONE organized by educators for educators around the world interested in integrating emerging technologies into classroom practice. A goal of the conference (among several) is to help educators make sense of and meet the needs of a continually changing learning landscape. Please see the "For Participants: Getting Started" page on our conference wiki to get started with the K-12 Online Conference. If you are a vendor or affiliated with a vendor, please see our Goals and Values page for clarification about vendor participation.

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K-12 Online Learning: A Survey of U.S. School District Administrators explores the nature of online learning in K-12 schools and establishes base data for more extensive future studies. This study was based on a national survey of American school district chief administrators during the 2005-2006 academic year. It is one of the first studies to collect data on and compare fully online and blended learning (part online and part traditional face-to-face instruction) in K-12 schools. The distinction between fully online and blended learning is a most important refinement of previous studies on this topic.

Creating a Web-based course from a current, successful on-ground course is difficult and, at best, can be considered a translation process. In the past, instructors have created Web-based courses by taking those courses that were being taught on-ground and posting the information online, then calling these courses "Web-based." Imitating a sound, successful on-ground course will not necessarily bring about the same success for students in a Web-based learning environment. Simply converting lectures and other course materials from on-ground courses to Web-based platforms may not be as effective as hoped. (American Federations of Teachers, 2000, p. 8).

(MY) THREE PRINCIPLES OF EFFECTIVE ONLINE PEDAGOGY
by Bill Pelz via Teaching and Developing Online. Original article published in Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks Volume 8, Issue 3 - June 2004.

Online teachers, this is YOUR Web site. Here you can connect with other online teachers. And find information and resources to help you be a better online teacher. Because YOU are the most important factor in your student's academic success.

Perhaps you have a special skill, talent, or knowledge-base that you want to share with others, and maybe you've heard that teaching online courses can make you a little extra money. The resources below will help you discover how to combine both what you have to offer and what you wish to gain by guiding you through creating and establishing an online course. No matter what age of student, subject you want to teach, or size of the class, you will find resources and information to bring your class online.

The Internet has expanded the scope of learning; students can quickly access information from around the globe. Although computers can deliver flexibility and convenience, they can also disconnect students from academic responsibility. The Internet proves easy access to unlimited sources and unfortunately focus is on quantity not quality; in the haste to get a paper written, some students will ignore basic ethical rules. Plagiarism is as easy as a click of a mouse. After spending years as an educator, Dorothy Mikuska has developed methods to turn passive learners into robust learners by utilizing technology in the learning space. Find out how to transform electronic learning into excellent learning while emphasizing information processing and ethical behavior

NACOL, The International Association for K-12 Online Learning, is a non-profit organization that facilitates collaboration, advocacy, and research to enhance quality K-12 online teaching and learning. What we do:

Facilitate the sharing, collection, evaluation, and/or dissemination of information resources and materials.
Facilitate and disseminate research, and identify research needs.
Advocacy and public policy that supports activities and legislation that removes barriers and supports effective online teaching and learning without respect to space and time.
Develop and facilitate national K12 online learning standards.
Create the voice of K12 within the larger education community with effective marketing, communications, and public relations activities.
Assist and facilitate funding efforts for online K12 learning.
Facilitate professional development for teachers and administrators.
Identify and drive future directions in K-12 online education.
Network and identify collaborative opportunities with other professional K-12 organizations.
Drive educational initiatives that incorporate online learning in ways that transform positive learning outcomes for students.

"The depth of your observations from last night is still resonating with me. I'm trying to think of another interview I've given where the questioner understood the material so well that he/she so regularly (and fluidly) went into new intellectual territory. I can't think of any. Pretty amazing. Thank you."

Who We Are
We are a non-profit 501(c)(3) membership association based in the Washington, DC area with over 3,800 members. We are unique; our members represent a diverse cross-section of K-12 education from school districts, charter schools, state education agencies, non-profit organizations, research institutions, corporate entities and other content & technology providers.

A new course teaching media, mass communication, and political identities in the Middle East and North Africa explored the use of social media in pursuit of effective learning.Using a variety of social media and other tools encouraged student engagement in and out of the classroom.Student responses varied from discomfort with the technology to enthusiastic adoption and continued use after the course ended

Putting Educational Innovations Into Practice
Find peer reviewed online teaching and learning materials. Share advice and expertise about education with expert colleagues. Be recognized for your contributions to quality education.