The aim for the International Journal on Innovations in Online Education (IJIOE) is to provide the most updated information in the field of online higher, with specific emphasis on what is new and likely to affect this field of education.IJIOE focuses on Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) online education, including related fields such as healthcare.IJIOE is the purveyor of "WISDOM" about the field, providing short articles, discussions with expert authors and reviews of methods for moving the field forward in selected areas.The scope of IJIOE includes all of online higher education, but has a loose focus on STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) and healthcare.Articles are managed by "stream editors," experts in specific streams of interests within this scope, including disciplines within the above content areas.

CALICO '95 Annual Symposium Keynote AddressMiddlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont

For many people, the public image of higher education is the classroom: faculty talking, with students intently listening and taking notes. Students' progress toward a degree is measured by time spent in classrooms. The daily pulse of a college or university is largely dictated by the classroom schedule as bells ring and the halls fill with students and faculty rushing to the next class. Many educators, however, increasingly argue that such classrooms are largely ineffective as learning environments and that they should not continue to be built. 1 But what should take their place? In considering the future of the learning space, we will discuss (1) a few of the reasons why traditional classrooms are inadequate and need to change, (2) some ideas that break with these traditions, and (3) suggested areas for the planning team to keep in mind so that the team can come up with ideas for future learning spaces that are pioneering rather than imitative.

Read this before you spend that or make that academic program change! Taking LongView:Ten Recommendations about Time, Money, Technology, and by Stephen C. Ehrmann is reprinted with permission from Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning 42 (5): 16-22. This article is reprinted by permission of publisher, Taylor & Francis (www.informaworld.com). How can a degree program, general education program, or other course of study make substantial, widely appreciated improvements in who learns, what they learn, and well they learn it? Under right circumstances, such improvements are possible. What follows are suggestions, some counterintuitive, that increase chances of their being successful and sustained. * Don't implement a change strategy by delegating each part of it to a different stakeholder - this recommendation for faculty, that one for information technology unit, a third for administrators, a fourth for assessment staff. Instead, work with a team composed of people from all those groups and more. * Simultaneously upgrade content, deepen learning, and improve program's ability to attract and retain a variety of students. * But in doing so, take your time. * Use technology as a lever for change, but slow down. Don't leap from one hot technology to next. * Find ways for faculty and students to save time. Before elaborating on these suggestions, I'll explain why they allude to time so frequently. Two Working Assumptions About Time First, to really take hold, any change initiative needs to be sustained for perhaps a decade. That's long it can take to improve outcomes and then for potential students, employers, benefactors, and other stakeholders to recognize that program is now producing better graduates. Second, any improvement strategy must cope with fact that many key players would prefer not to get involved until they have more time and money, a day that will never come. As C. Northcote Parkinson (1955) once observed, work expands to fill time available. That's especially true when people are energetic and committed. The best faculty and staff will already feel over-committed by time someone approaches them with a grand idea for improving their programs. Similarly, spending tends ?? expand to use up all available revenues. Howard Bowen (1980, p. 19) called this phenomenon the revenue theory of costs: Universities will raise all they can and spend all they raise. Spending is determined by local revenue history, not by some fundamental truth about much must be spent in order to achieve a particular level of educational quality. These local spending patterns don't change much from year to year, because budgets are embodied in skills and routines of current staff and in facilities. Parkinson's and Bowen's theories help explain why, at institutions rich or poor, any proposal for dramatic action is likely to greeted by a sincere, Sounds intriguing, but at moment I don't have time to think about it, and anyway don't have enough money. Once a pattern of spending is established, it seems a necessary condition for getting work done. But there's a surprising corollary to Bowen's rule. The conviction that we can't improve results unless get new money can be overcome if changes are made slowly enough. Therefore major improvement can begin even when budgets have recently been cut and everyone is feeling desperate. In fact, financial duress can be a powerful motive to pull together and move in a new direction. And if change also offers a way to save time, effort may attract faculty and staff who would not otherwise give it time of day. The first five recommendations that follow are designed to achieve kind of educational improvement that could meet these requirements: time saving in short term and ultimately beneficial for who, what, and how of learning. …

ePortfolio progress has been slowed at many institutions by a technology-first attitude: a platform is chosen and then wider use of that platform is encouraged. One flaw in this strategy is that ePortfolios can be used for a variety of activities, each of which has somewhat different support needs (often including different technologies). A planning team at the University of Queensland decided to widen the engagement of the academic community by focusing attention on the activities, rather than on the software. The team's innovative planning process has many points of interest including the involvement of international expertise, the list of ePortfolio-supported activities, the workshop's tasks, and the use of Google spreadsheets to make small group breakouts work more quickly and effectively. The resulting half-day workshop has energised wider interest in ePortfolios at the university.

This chapter describes one particular type of open source innovation—middleware called iLabs (supported largely by the Microsoft-MIT iCampus Alliance) that enables users to run experiments remotely over the Web. First, we will briefly describe the development of remote labs at MIT and the development of the iLabs middleware. Then we will discuss some of the factors that have hindered the spread of this potent use of the Web, and draw a few tentative conclusions about how these issues affect the dissemination of educational innovation based on open source software.

EPortfolio progress has been slowed at many institutions by a technology-first attitude: a platform is chosen and then wider use of that platform is encouraged. One flaw in this strategy is that ePortfolios can be used for a variety of activities, each of which has somewhat different support needs (often including different technologies). A planning team at the University of Queensland decided to widen the engagement of the academic community by focusing attention on the activities, rather than on the software. The team's innovative planning process has many points of interest including the involvement of international expertise, the list of ePortfolio-supported activities, the workshop's tasks, and the use of Google spreadsheets to make small group breakouts work more quickly and effectively. The resulting half-day workshop has energised wider interest in ePortfolios at the university.

Instruction in higher education must adapt more rapidly to: changes in workforce needs, global issues, advances in disciplines, and resource constraints. The pace of such improvement depends on the speed with which new ideas and materials are adopted across institutions. In 1999 Microsoft pledged $25 million and staff support for iCampus, a seven-year MIT project to develop pioneering uses of educational technology. The TLT Group studied five iCampus projects in order to identify factors affecting institutionalization and widespread dissemination. Among the factors impeding adoption: lack of rewards and support for faculty to adopt innovations; faculty isolation; and a lack of attention to adoption issues among projects selected for funding. The study made recommendations for universities, foundations, government agencies and corporations: 1) continue making education more authentic, active, collaborative, and feedback-rich; 2) create demand to adopt ideas and materials from other sources by encouraging all faculty members to improve and document learning in their programs, year after year; 3) nurture coalitions for instructional improvement, across and within institutions; 4) create more effective higher education - corporate alliances; and 5) improve institutional services to support faculty in educational design, software development, assessment methods, formative evaluation, and/or in sharing ideas with others who teach comparable courses.

For many people, the public image of higher education is the classroom: faculty talking, with students intently listening and taking notes. Students’ progress toward a degree is measured by time spent in classrooms. The daily pulse of a college or university is largely dictated by the classroom schedule as bells ring and the halls fill with students and faculty rushing to the next class. Many educators, however, increasingly argue that such classrooms are largely ineffective as learning environments and that they should not continue to be built.1 But what should take their place? In considering the future of the learning space, we will discuss (1) a few of the reasons why traditional classrooms are inadequate and need to change, (2) some ideas that break with these traditions, and (3) suggested areas for the planning team to keep in mind so that the team can come up with ideas for future learning spaces that are pioneering rather than imitative.

This chapter describes eight potential educational uses of institutional portals (e.g., helping instruction become more spontaneous and adaptive; supporting learning communities; reducing cost of service delivery). It then describes a long-term program of data collection that can improve the educational effectiveness of portals, and control the costs and stresses of portal operation. Studies include: a. baseline data (how well are those goals being met without a portal?), b. debugging studies (what factors are tending to block portal effectiveness?), c. cost studies (what aspects of portal development, operation and use are so costly, time-consuming or stressful that they threaten system success?) and d. outcomes assessment (is portal use contributing to outcome improvement?). The non-profit Flashlight Program has developed a number of evaluation tool kits that can be helpful in doing studies of these kinds.

The cyber-revolution will force students to pick up new skills, institutions to collaborate, and interactions to become more meaningful. If this doesn't happen, the academic community might just fly apart.