MOOCs may have snared most of the headlines, but traditional, credit-based online learning continued to chug along just fine last year, thank you very much. More than 6.7 million, or roughly a third, of all students enrolled in postsecondary education took an online course for credit in fall 2011, according to the 2012 iteration of the Babson Survey Research Group’s annual Survey of Online Learning… massive open online courses that have captured the imagination of the public and turbocharged the discussion about digitally delivered instruction in many quarters — the Babson survey for the first time queried institutional officials about their views about the courses. Given their relative newness, the answers are probably unsurprising: lots of uncertainty about whether to embrace them, and significant skepticism about whether the free open courses (at least as of the time when the survey was conducted) present a “sustainable method for offering online courses.” … More than three-quarters (77.0 percent) of chief academic officers rate the learning outcomes in online education as the same or superior to those in face-to-face courses, up from 57.2 percent when Babson first asked the question in 2003. Fewer than a third (30.2 percent) of CAOs believe that faculty members on their campuses accept the value and legitimacy of online education — lower than the rate in 2004.

Read full article [here].
by Doug Lederman , Inside Higher Ed.

Posted: January 13th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.