Academic Computing & Technology

By JEFFREY R. YOUNG

For Christy LaBadie, a sophomore at Northampton Community College, the 30-minute drive from her home to the Bethlehem, Pa., campus has become a financial hardship now that gasoline prices have soared to more than $4 a gallon. So this semester she decided to take an online course to save herself the trip ???and the money.

"I would prefer to actually go to school and be there to do it," says Ms. LaBadie, a single mother working toward a degree in medical administration. "But it's hard enough paying tuition, much less the price of gas."

Students around the country are echoing Ms. LaBadie's complaint, and online education is booming as a result. Many institutions say their online summer enrollments have jumped significantly, compared with last summer's, and that fuel prices are a key factor in the increase.

The Tennessee Board of Regents, for instance, reports that summer enrollment in online courses is up 29 percent this summer over last year. At Brevard Community College, in Cocoa, Fla., summer enrollment in online courses is up nearly 25 percent. Harrisburg Area Community College, in Pennsylvania, saw its summer online enrollment rise 15 percent to 20 percent. At Northampton summer online enrollment is up 18 percent.

Read the whole article: Gas Prices & Online Courses

By Jeffrey R. Young

These days many professors make their lecture materials and even recordings of their class sessions free online for anyone beyond the campus to learn from. But a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas hopes to try to offer even more of his course to a wider audience this fall by allowing outsiders to participate in course discussions online.

“Serious, you can just take this class for free,” wrote the professor, David Parry, an assistant professor of emerging media and communications at the university, on a post on his blog AcademHack. The course is a graduate seminar on “Networked Knowledge,” and Mr. Parry had already planned to make recordings of class sessions available online. But he’s now offering to hold a weekly online discussion group by video chat for those tuning in remotely as well.

Read the full article here: http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3233/professor-proposes-taking-open-education-beyond-posting-course-materials

To check out the class blog, go here: http://outsidethetext.com/arche/thinking-thru-the-syllabus/

This from the College of Southern Idaho...

This tool was developed to help you create quizzes for Blackboard. It allows you to type up the quiz offline in a program like Word or Notepad and not have to go through the trouble of making long quizzes via the Blackboard web interface.

Simply type or paste your quiz in the text area and click the Create Quiz button. This will produce a zip file that you can import into the Pool Manager in Blackboard...
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I have tried this tool and recommend it. It is a quick way to created question pools for Blackboard. Read the documentation to see how to easily format your questions. The Quiz Generator will create six question types.

* Multiple Choice
* Multiple Answer
* True/False
* Essay
* Fill in the blank
* Matching

Recently, at the ConnectED summit, someone at Northwest College of Agriculture captured a demonstration of the upcoming Blackboard application for iPhone and iPod touch. The Blackboard rep explains the application will allow you to connect to your schools Blackboard server and get important information from your account and will not save your password on the device, but uses a single sign-on token. Also, the representative mentions the application will be free when it launches. Northwest College Agriculture also has a sharper photo of the layout on their Flickr page.