What do you do when 500 applicants are competing for 60 seats in your nursing program? If you're Riverside Community College, you don't just turn those students away. You scramble your technology leaders and launch a distance learning program to help meet the demand.
Wisconsin's Saint Norbert College uses video games in the classroom to correlate gaming behaviors with learning behaviors.
By virtually every measure, electronic learning is experiencing unprecedented growth and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. A new analysis and forecast released this month by research firm Ambient Insight bolstered previous research in this area, showing that electronic learning, by dollar volume, reached $27.1 billion in 2009 and predicting this figure will nearly double that by 2014, with academic institutions leading the way.
Two companies are teaming up to create mobile applications for education. Moodlerooms, which develops education programs that run on the open source course management system Moodle, will be working with DubMeNow, which creates mobile software.
The Louisiana Community & Technical College System has reported enrollment success in an initiative to help working students statewide earn college degrees online. Launched in January 2009, LCTCSOnline enrollments have jumped 43 percent from the spring 2009 to spring 2010 semesters, to 424 current enrollments. Total enrollment system-wide--nearly 70,000 students--grew by an average of 16 percent over that same period.
A Web site that connects prospective online students to colleges and universities reports that business administration and MBAs top the list for inquiries and that "caring" professions are making a big showing.
New York Institute of Technology's videoconferencing capabilities have brought the school closer to its overseas learning partners.
Theological education will get a makeover in fall 2010 at Lexington Theological Seminary when it begins offering its masters programs through a hybrid online model using a combination of video, audio, and PowerPoint presentations. The seminary, based in Kentucky, expects to deliver a mixture of short courses online and on-campus intensives to students.
Hope College, a liberal arts institution in Michigan, isn't afraid to put technology in the classroom and to get faculty involved in the process.
Intellidemia is updating its online syllabus application to include files and generate real-time alerts. The company's newest release of Concourse includes functionality that enables users to embed file content directly in the syllabus and notify students automatically when edits or changes have been made.