We did a little research about online colleges and universities, to find out which ones seem to be the most conscious of the fact that adult learners need flexibility in their graduate degree programs. After all, grownup students usually have jobs, spouses and often even kids to take care of. Here’s a look at which schools have masters and other advanced degree programs designed with the adult learner in mind.

The new odd couple in distance learning is The China Continuing Education Association (CCEA) and The University of Massachusetts. UMass recently announced it has signed an agreement with CCEA to develop courses to make available online in China. Don’t expect the courses to be available soon. According to UMass’ announcement, the new courses will be developed over the next five years. The American school has been given exclusivity by the CCEA, but China’s Ministry of Education has yet to approve any foreign school teaching in their country. Although the Chinese have apparently been slow to embrace online learning, there’s little doubt that their red-hot economic growth will boost demand for all types of learning over the next few years. Read UMass Announcement Here

One of Wikipedia’s co-founders, Larry Sanger, is making noise about the need to make online learning more available to K-12 grade children all over the world. Writing on his “Citizendium Blog,” Mr. Sanger offers a petition that everyone in the world is invited to sign, and send to a philanthropist. If you don’t happen to know who your local major philanthropist is, you may have trouble figuring out what to do with this. If you do, however, you can use the petition to add your voice to Sanger’s call the people donating money to improve education should seize the “low hanging fruit” by funding the transfer of textbooks and educational videos into high-quality, easy to use digital formats so that kids all over the world can have equal access to information. While there is free educational content available online today, Sanger says, most of it “lacks either detail or high quality.” Copyright owners may not agree with his assertion that rich philanthropists can digitize any content they want without asking anyone’s permission, but his passionate call for making the best information available to all school kids worldwide sounds pretty good. One can’t help but notice his comment that other things than a lack of digital content may, at times, be to blame for the sorry state of American K-12 education: “Perhaps it has to do with teachers being low-paid, or parents not being involved, or something else. We do not offer an answer to that.” Read Citizendium Blog & petition here

Arkansas ranks next to last among U.S. states in the number of college graduates (only West Virginia lags behind it). The numbers are a bit shocking: Right now, just 12 out of every 100 ninth graders in the state earn a bachelor’s degree within six years of finishing high school.

A big problem is that many students in the state start college but never finish. Arkansas Higher Education Director Jim Purcell wants to respond with a $30 million dollar education program that has a strong online learning focus. By offering distance learning courses to people who’ve failed to complete their college degrees, he hopes to boost the number of graduates and make the state more attractive to employers.

It’s interesting that online learning is being called to the rescue here, since a common criticism of it is that students often take an online course or two but never finish a degree. Check out this interesting article about the tough conditions in Arkansas higher education, and how the state hopes to fix them, partly through online learning.

Another blogger – this one on Inside Higher Ed’s website – commented a few days back that students shouldn’t be able to have laptops in classrooms because it simply distracts them from the teacher. Well, to see the comments this idea drew from readers, you can clearly argue this either way. Students and other professors chimed in with choice statements like:
“If you are a hopeless bore, banning notebooks won’t help you.”
“I don’t allow laptops in my classroom either. If you want to be entertained, do it on your own time.”
“Yes, technology can, and does, destroy important knowledge/social skills…”
“This has GOT to be one of the most stupid ideas I’ve heard of in all my ‘educational’ and ‘business’ life…”
Check out the blog post and the rather passionate replies about banning laptops in college classrooms.

Most articles about online learning tend to focus on chat rooms or other portal-type setups as the main tool that students use to communicate with the professor and with each other. But here’s an interesting article by a professor at the University of Hong Kong, about how blogs (set up in this case on Xanga) have proved to result in much more student communication. After setting up a blog at the beginning of the course, students are required to write minimum 200-word entries on a regular basis. But the students enjoy blogging so much that they tend to write far more. Additionally, they like to comment on each other’s blog posts, and on the blog posts done by the professor. The result is a kind of “instant social network” build around a single university class. Read More Here.

Read our overview here at “The Distance Learner.”

The Computer Research Association reports that the number of students taking degree programs in computer science has plummeted in recent years. According to CRA’s new “Taublee Survey,” about 7,900 undergraduate students are studying computer science right now. That’s only half the number that where going for degrees in this specialty in 2000. Experts point to two key reasons for the falloff: First, there has been so much “offshoring” of technology jobs that IT is no longer an attractive career path in the U.S. Secondly, some educators say that American colleges have not kept their computer science programs in step with the rapidly changing landscape of business technology. Some, for instance, still teach programming languages that are no longer used in the corporate world. On the other hand, Inside Higher Ed reports that the falloff has stabilized, because large tech companies like Microsoft are now hungry for graduates with advanced computer training.
Read more about the rebound on computer science student enrollments.
More on computer science and other tech degrees.

It’s very refreshing to see a college take the lead in disseminating knowledge over the web in new and exciting ways - especially when so many colleges and universities still have websites that look like the were designed, well, maybe during the Hoover administration. MIT’s “techtv” is still in beta, but you can already go there and view academic videos that range from weird to wonderful. Subjects go from “rat whisker micromotions” to “MIT students build a disco dance floor from scratch.” You can’t get a degree from MIT through this venue, but kudos to the school for democratizing knowldege. vist the MIT video site

I leave it to you to judge whether or not high school students pushing themselves to take tons of “AP” courses to boost their college admission chances is a good thing or not. However, it seems pretty clear that there’s no reason they shouldn’t have all of the same advanced learning opportunities as kids in brick and mortar high schools. That’s been a problem, because there’s an expectation that AP courses should be the highest quality courses offered, and lots of teachers have felt a little uncomfortable about trying to deliver that quality via elearning. Here’s an interesting article by a teacher who as found a portal application called WiZiO and made some lower-tech tweaks to the way his students work that have made his AP courses work beautifully. Read more about high school online advanced placement courses.