UO has a few programs with online classes delivered by using various lecture capture options, but no central direction. At UO, online education was another of Jim Bean’s pet projects, so the disarray is hardly surprising. Economics comes in for special mention as the [CAS] department with the most online students. They report the online courses are more difficult than the regular ones, and they tend to be taken by good, motivated students who want a faster pace. There’s no mention in the story of VPAA Doug Blandy’s AAD 250-252 courses and his daring $1M credit hour heist – 65% A’s! [AAD now has about 1500 UO students taking these online courses – great for their GPA’s.]
Please post a link and comments if you know of any particularly good general studies or reports on on-line ed – there’s a lot of stuff in the Chronicle etc., but I haven’t dug through it.
Looks like UO may have missed a boat that isn’t going anywhere. There’s been a lot of hoopla about MOOC’s but now even their strongest proponents seem to be backing down, based on some disastrous experience. See this detailed article on Sebastian Thrun’s second thoughts (he is the founder of Udacity).
It’s unclear to me that UO wants to go the online route. Just because OSU is doing it is no good reason for UO to imitate. I don’t hear much demand for online among the students with whom I’m in contact. If OSU goes to 50,000 students via the online route, so what? It will be as mediocre as ever, probably worse.
(By the way, looking forward to the UOM scoresheet when the civil war game comes up. At least, I don’t think there will be much the usual pitched battle about comparing pension benefits! Maybe cost of living in Corvallis and Eugene? Which place is better to live in. Where do you have better access to the Coast and the Cascades? Housing subsidies, lol! Big time civil war stuff, not all that trivia about bleeding Kansas and all that!)