Monday, April 25, 2011

Check out the New NISOD Newsletter

You can read the latest issue of the NISOD newsletter here.

In this month's issue, you will find information on the NISOD's new YouTube Channel, the upcoming conference, Cuyahoga Community College's new Hospitality Management Center and lots more!

Monday, April 18, 2011

The Top 100 Tools for Learning

The Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies' website features lists of the top online tools for learning. Some of these products are freeware while others boast an education discount.

Some really innovative applications made the lists. For example, there is a software called Yugma that functions as a web-conferencing, online meeting and desktop sharing tool. Another stand-out is Diigo, a social annotation tool that allows the user to clip, highlight and sticky-note web pages and then share with others.

Check out the lists here:
The Top 100 Tools for Learning - 2007-2010
The Top 100 Tools for Learning - 2011 (this list is currently being built)

Do you already use any of these applications or, are you going to start using any? Comment below to share how you plan to use these!

Friday, April 15, 2011

Manipulating the Blackboard Navigation Panel

Curious about how to manipulate the Blackboard Navigation Panel?

Check out this short video for info on how.

Colleges Aren’t Keeping Up With Student Demand for Hybrid Programs, Survey Suggests

From the Chronicle of Higher Education

By Marc Parry

Students want hybrid programs that blend online and face-to-face experiences. But colleges don’t seem to be providing enough of them to meet the demand.

That’s one message that emerges from the results of a national survey of more than 20,000 current and prospective adult students that were just released by Eduventures, a consulting firm.

The finding is notable because blended education has been hot lately. In 2009, the U.S. Education Department released a report praising it. And this year, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is pouring millions into supporting it.

But the Eduventures survey found a gap between supply and demand: 19 percent of respondents said they were enrolled in blended programs, while 33 percent of prospective students listed that format as their preference.

The report on the survey, which is not available free online, questions whether some students are being “forced” into studying entirely online because of a lack of hybrid programs.

“Schools have jumped on the online bandwagon, and students end up with this rather unnuanced choice between more-or-less wholly on ground and more-or-less wholly online, when many of them actually want something that’s a more nuanced combination of the two,” says Richard Garrett, a managing director at Eduventures.

Mr. Garrett argues that offering that nuanced combination makes sense because of broader trends in online education. As wholly Web-based learning grows more popular, providing it becomes riskier for lesser-known nonprofit colleges. That’s because it pushes them into a highly competitive national market. Increasingly, he says, the opportunities to draw in online students will be local.

“There’s a strong rationale for many nonprofit schools that lack national brands to use a form of hybrid to get the best of both worlds—to play to consumer interest in online but tack onto it some kind of high-value, on-ground, institution-specific, face-to-face component that allows them to differentiate in an otherwise very commoditized market,” he says.

That isn’t a new idea. Some universities have been working on it for years, in part through a program that the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation created to help colleges attract local students online.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Daytona State College Offers Free Conference

Matter of Life & Death
Suicide Prevention Conference for Educators


Daytona State College is proud to present a FREE day and a half conference for Educators and for anyone who works with young people on June 2 & 3, 2011. It will be held at the News-Journal Center in quaint, downtown Daytona Beach, Florida. Our Key Note Speaker will be nationally known suicide researcher, Dr. Thomas Joiner, from The Florida State University. We will also be offering several suicide prevention workshops where you will receive practical suicide prevention strategies to implement on your campus or with your organization. For more information or to register on-line please check out our webpage at: http://www.daytonastate.edu/projectspeak/MatterofLifeandDeath.html