ACCREDITED HIGHER ED QUESTIONS PETERSON'S NEW DIRECTION - Many administrators of mainstream institutions are worried about the new direction Peterson's Guide to Distance Learning Programs has taken. The word is that the guide's researchers are now collecting information about unaccredited colleges. The concern is that the unaccredited colleges will be listed in future guidebook editions. Rocco Russo, the vice-president for institutional research and relations at Peterson's, said the fall guidebook will still list only accredited institutions that have online and other distance-learning offerings and that they are now simply collecting both types of information. He added that the new information could be the basis for a second book. Kay J. Kohl, the executive director of the University Continuing Education Association (UCEA), stated that, "Over the years Peterson's has developed an excellent reputation as being a reliable source of information, and obviously it is a concern if that position shifts." For the full article CLICK: http://chronicle.com/free/2001/04/2001041801u.htm

QUALITY MATTERS - Education consulting firm WorldClass Strategies recently conducted a survey of 110 college and university faculty members engaged in online learning projects and studied 100 online courses. WorldClass Strategies President Lee Alley, formerly a college professor at University of Wisconsin System, said the study revealed that such programs have a great deal of progress to make. "We found the great majority of courses online are not very high quality pedagogically," he said. Online programs seemed to be paying more attention to how the sites looked and functioned than to how they worked as vehicles for instruction. In other words, Alley said, faculty members were being asked to be Web masters, not educators. He pointed to a number of ideas that educators must grasp if the online learning phenomenon is to grow. First, educators must accept that online learning will, for the most part, be self- directed by students. Also, educators must be willing to engage online students at a different level, treating them more as "cooperating instructors." Finally, Alley stressed the importance of piloting these types of programs before introducing them to a general audience. (Online Learning, Mar 01 - Edupage 30 Mar 01)

NAPSTER MAY HERALD A REVOLUTION IN DISTANCE LEARNING - Napster may turn out to be the harbinger of a new era in distance learning if Sun Microsystems cofounder and Chief Scientist Bill Joy has his way. According to a recent report in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Joy and his team are now field testing a prototype peer-to-peer (P2P) computing technology at technical universities in the U.S. and Asia. "We see the potential of P2P specifically in the way online education will be delivered to students in an academic setting," Marc Hamilton, director of technology at Sun, told the Inquirer. The P2P model promises to provide more flexible delivery at a lower cost by eliminating the need for network servers and expert system administrators. In a P2P learning model, courses may reside on the personal computers of one or more instructors, questions and completed assignments on student computers, and grades on a registrar's computer, with these resources being shared among the individuals involved in a given course or program. One potential benefit is that instructors will find it much easier to customize course content to meet the needs of their students. And, faculty will be able to share research and scholarship simply by providing P2P access to designated files on their personal computers, converting the Internet into the most comprehensive and accessible research library ever created. However, a host of potential pitfalls, including security, need to be addressed by the team before the technology is ready for implementation. Read more about the potential of P2P on The Philadelphia Inquirer website CLICK: http://www.inq7.net/inf/2001/mar/16/inf_3-1.htm (E-News From UCEA, no 41, 2 Apr 01)

MIT FREE COURSE PLAN - Plans are to make courses from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology freely available on the Internet over the next ten years. Included on the Web site - MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) - would be lecture notes, course outlines, reading lists and assignments for each course. The project expects to provide materials for more than 2,000 courses across MIT's entire curriculum - in architecture and planning, engineering, humanities, arts, social sciences, management and science. A large-scale pilot program would begin over the next two years. The pilot would include the design of the software and services needed to support such a large endeavor, as well as protocols to monitor and assess its use by MIT and worldwide faculty and students. At the end of the pilot, it is expected that materials for more than 500 courses would be available on the MIT OCW site. For more information CLICK: http://web.mit.edu/news/ (New York Times, 1 Apr 01)