Universities battling to capture the worldwide market

By Jennifer Sharples

As demand for cross border education continues to grow, successes and failure abound.

Following the 2003 demise of Fathom, an online venture between prestigious British and American universities offering over 2,000 online courses, recently the acclaimed AllLearn e-learning venture between Yale, Stanford and Oxford Universities collapsed.

Founded in 2001, despite offering 110 online courses from three of the world's most prestigious universities to over 10,000 worldwide participants AllLearn failed to attract enough students to make the project viable.

AllLearn's president S. Kristin Kim stated the cost of offering top-quality enrichment courses at affordable prices was unsustainable but added that each university would use the experience gained to improve their own online courses. Indeed, barely pausing for breath, the University of Oxford plans on launching a number of new courses over the next 12 months ranging from statistics for health researchers to northern Renaissance art.

When it comes to success, Britain's flagship of distance learning, the indomitable Open University (OU) continues to blaze a trail.


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Going online for a better life-work balance

By Adrian Barrett

While the full-time, campus-based MBA is still popular, there is a growing recognition that not every student is willing to leave both home and workplace for anything between 12 months and two years.

As a result the distance learning MBA, whereby candidates can either study completely remotely or combine face-to-face tuition with home-based work, has become a tempting option.

According to a recent survey, some 2.35 million Americans are opting for online learning, while on the Pacific Rim the amount spent on online learning is expected to triple by the year 2008.

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Are You Ready to Go Hybrid?

Hybrid education is also a blending process that combines classroom-based education with technologically distributed teaching methods.
Using technology to distribute education includes a number of methods, such as CD-ROM, videotape, satellite and the Internet. These methods are collectively referred to as "distributed" or "distributive" methods. Regardless of the technology involved, the common denominator of distributed methods is that teaching and learning can occur without an instructor and student being together at the same time and place, which is what makes these methods so attractive to EMS administrators, educators and field providers...

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Learning From the Pros

Learning From the Pros

Every other Tuesday afternoon, from 2:30 to 3:30, Camilla Sanders-Avery's students at Carver High School, in Birmingham, Alabama, have a videoconference with some of the most successful animators in Hollywood.
The students display their animation projects and get immediate feedback from the experts. No sugarcoating here: "They tell you exactly what your work needs," says senior Eric Gates. "They don't hold anything back." The frank critiques can initially rattle kids accustomed to handing in assignments, getting a grade, and moving on. But many students rise to the challenge. Soon, they're revising their illustrations, storyboards, and film clips, laboring mightily to show the pros, and perhaps themselves, what they're capable of achieving.

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Encourage Distance Education says Commission for Higher Education:

We recommend that America's colleges and universities embrace a culture of continuous innovation and quality improvement by developing new pedagogies, curricula, and technologiesto improve learning...Do more to support and harness the power of distance learning to meet educational needs of rural students, adult learners and workforce development.

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