Syllabus News Update for Tuesday, April 13, 2004

• 04/13/04

Visions for IT-Enabled Learning at Syllabus2004
http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=6463

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News for Tuesday, April 13, 2004

* Sen. Clinton to Lead "Non-Traditional Students" Webcast
* Xerox Selects University Alliance as Online Education Provider
* Blackboard and Dutch Open University form Tech Alliance
* Texas Lutheran U. Becomes National Scientific Monitoring Site
* New Tech: ASP Updates Web-based Technical Lab Features

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Sen. Clinton to Lead "Non-Traditional Students" Webcast

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D- N.Y.) will lead a live
interactive Webcast addressing the needs of non-traditional
students, on April 21, at 3:00 pm EDT. The session is part
of an online conference on “Teaching in the Community
College 2004,” sponsored by online conference organizer
Learning Times.

Non-traditional students make up 47 percent of undergraduates
today, and include people balancing education with full-time
jobs and parenting. Sen. Clinton and Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.)
have sponsored legislation to assist these students by
increasing access to financial aid, rewarding schools for
more flexible scheduling and expansion of remedial programs.

"Unfortunately, many of our current higher education policies
make it harder for non-traditional students to complete
their degree," said Clinton, "I look forward to addressing
these issues with a global online audience of educators
during this interactive Webcast."

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Xerox Selects University Alliance as Online Education Provider

Xerox Corp. signed an agreement with the University Alliance
Online division to provide higher education degree programs
and training services to its 65,000 employees. The Alliance
works like an online aggregator of higher ed online programs,
including AA, BA, BS, Master’s degrees, and innumerable
certificate degrees. Universities represented by the
Alliance, a division of Bisk Education, include Villanova
University, Tulane University, University of South Florida,
Regis University, St. Leo University, Jacksonville University,
Nova Southeastern University and Florida Institute of
Technology.

Xerox Tuition Aid Administrator Penny Achille said the
company is committed to the “spirit of “life-long learning”
for its employees and that the Alliance provides them
“another alternative to standard classroom instruction [with
coursework designed to dovetail into busy personal lives and
work schedules."

Blackboard and Dutch Open University form Tech Alliance

Course Management System developer Blackboard Inc., and the
Open Universiteit Nederland (OUNL), a leading open university
with a focus on self-tuition and technology enabled learning,
signed a deal to integrate OUNL's e-Learning player, Edubox,
with the Blackboard’s enterprise learning and portal systems.
Blackboard and OUNL will integrate Edubox and the Blackboard's
Learning and Portal Systems through Blackboard's open
Application Programming Interfaces (API's).

The partners want to combine the functionality of Blackboard's
products with advanced features from Edubox, including
compliance with the new international standard for Learning
Design. Edubox is a student-centered e-Learning player with
advanced capabilities and is based on a universal language
for Learning Design. The new language has been developed by
OUNL and has been adopted and converted into the international
standard IMS-LD. Since September 2003, OUNL's Edubox has
been deployed for nine open and distance learning (ODL)
academic courses.

Texas Lutheran U. Becomes National Scientific Monitoring Site

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has added Texas Lutheran
University to its network of ultraviolet monitoring sites.
TLU’s Moody Science building was equipped with a set of
broadband and shadowband sunlight radiometers to start
monitoring south-central U.S. regional UV radiation. The USDA
UV-B network forms a grid across the continental United
States, Alaska, Hawaii and Canada. Data from each site are
automatically sent to Colorado State University every night
and made available on the Web by the next morning where
scientists can access the information.

Data gathered allows the assessment of the potential impacts
of increasing ultraviolet radiation levels on agricultural
crops and forests as well as on human health, ecosystems and
materials.

New Tech: ASP Updates Features on Web-based Technical Lab

Mentoring Solutions, an application service provider for
Web-based technical labs, released an update of Real Time
Labs, software which provides real-time student progress
reporting. The new version 2.5 of the software, which is
marketed to education, government, and commercial
organizations, includes improvements for enterprise security
and for building job-critical skills.

The systems will provide learners immediate feedback after
lab sessions on successful task completion, and highlights
areas needing further reinforcement and study. The system
also corresponds directly with course curriculum and
certification tracks such as Cisco and Microsoft MCSE. Labs
can replicate a company's unique environment and proprietary
systems, helping learners build and reinforce job-critical
skills. The ASP platform also provides what the company
calls a "virtual sandbox" where students can build and
reinforce skills on live technology in a separate Real-Time
Labs environment - without compromising the organization’s
own infrastructure.

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IT Compliance World, May 17–19, Boston: Compliance Solutions
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Syllabus2004 July 18-22, San Francisco: Technologies to
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