Have you heard about the recent grant opportunities for developing educational and career training for displaced workers at community colleges? As enrollments increase community colleges are looking for creative funding to provide quality courses for adult learners going back to college to obtain new skills. Online courses are a great option and provide the flexibility so many adult learners need. The SmarterMeasure™ learning readiness indicator is an assessment that measures the degree to which students are a good fit for online learning. Having a tool like SmarterMeasure™ in place is essential to helping students understand their strengths and weaknesses in relation to distance learning. Would you like to have your SmarterMeasure™ license funded through a grant? To learn more about the latest grant opportunity be sure to attend an upcoming session at the Innovations 2011 Conference sponsored by the League for Innovation in the Community College. SmarterServices has been a strong supporter of the League For Innovation in the Community College for several years and we are pleased to recommend this session. Stop by and say hello to Tara at booth #202 at the Innovations conference. We would love to see you.

WHAT COMMUNITY COLLEGES NEED TO KNOW ABOUT OER AND THE TAA COMMUNITY COLLEGE AND CAREER TRAINING (C3T) GRANT

When: Tuesday, March 1st, 1:00 - 3:00 pm Where: Indigo Ballroom, Level 2, Hilton San Diego Bayfront

The U.S. Department of Labor recently announced the Solicitation for Grant Applications (SGA) that provides up to $2 billion over the next four years to develop educational or career training programs for displaced workers. The SGA requires all learning materials developed with grant funds be released as open educational resources (OER), which represents the largest federal OER investment in history. While the target population of the program is workers eligible for training under the TAA, the openness requirement will help to ensure that a much wider range of traditional and non-traditional students will benefit from the program. Please join us for an informative session about openness and the C3T program. This session will bring together experts from the OER field, who will share their insights into best practices in open licensing, learning design and process, and cross-institution and large scale collaboration, that will help community colleges to better meet the OER requirements of the program. There will also be an opportunity to network with potential C3T grant collaborators. The panel will be moderated by Victor Vuchic, Program Officer at the Hewlett Foundation. The expert panelists include: Cathy Casserly, CEO of Creative Commons (effective March 1) Cable Green, President of the Community College Consortium for OER Candace Thille, Director of Open Learning Initiative This program is made possible with the generous support of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Please RSVP by clicking here or visiting http://www.league.org/i2011/CCCTPDOL/rsvp.cfm?innreg=434179800.

Grant Opportunities for Community Colleges

Carol Tucker of University of Houston-Downtown, won our drawing for $50 to charity at the recent TAIR conference.  She chose her local Humane Shelter - Houston Humane Society.  Thank you Carol and congratulations!

Congratulations Carol Tucker!

Mac Adkins and Jeff Worford are at the TAIR conference this week and things are going great!  We are meeting interesting people and promoting SmarterSurveys™ while highlighting SETE - Student Evaluation of Teaching Effectiveness from the University of North Texas.

TAIR Conference

Are you planning to attend the 16th Annual Sloan-C Conference in Orlando, FL next week?  You don't want to miss our presentation on Student Retention!  Don't miss out on learning about the 2010 Student Readiness Report!

Student Retention Presentation

It's only 1 month away!

November 3-5, 2010
Orlando, Florida

Features pre and post-conference workshops, keynote and plenary sessions, as well as over 200 featured sessions, best-in-track, panel and individual sessions as well as onsite and virtual poster sessions.  Register before October 15 for Early Bird registration pricing at http://www.regonline.com/Register/Checkin.aspx?EventID=860892

Venue: One of Orlando’s premier hotels, the Caribe Royale Hotel and Convention Center is located just twenty minutes from Orlando International Airport. Rates start at $159 for a double Queen room; for reservations http://sloanconsortium.org/2010aln/travel

Keynote Address
Peter P. Smith, Ed.D.

Colleges for the 21st Century: the New Ecology of Learning

Emerging information technology and Web 2.0 have permanently changed the possibilities and potential of higher education. With the decline of content as the critical determinant of quality, there are three over-arching quality indicators that support “merit for the many”: personalization, customization, and mobility.

Dr. Peter Smith will address these quality indicators in his keynote address. In the talent-friendly College for the 21st Century (C21C), he argues, services will be organized around the needs of the learner, not the habits of the institution. Sharing common characteristics, C21Cs will tap into a new ecology of learning that supports personalized and customized learning around the world. Their purposes will include recognizing, creating and then validating merit in each learner and making it portable

 
Plenary Speaker
Barbara Means, Co-director, Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International

Research on the Effectiveness of Online Learning: Insights, Controversies, and Gaps

Despite the rapid spread of online course offerings in higher education and other educational and training settings, rigorous research examining its effectiveness and the critical elements of effective online learning experiences is limited.

A meta-analysis of the online learning literature from 1996 through July 2008 found 50 independent effects from studies that contrasted (a) an online to a face-to-face condition, (b) measured student learning outcomes, (c) used a rigorous research design, and (d) provided adequate information for calculating the magnitude of the difference between online and face-to-face learner outcomes. The meta-analysis found that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed modestly better than those receiving face-to-face instruction. The advantage over face-to-face classes was significantly large in those studies contrasting blends of online and face-to-face instruction with entirely face-to-face instruction. The available research does not support the conclusion that blended instruction is superior as a medium of instruction, however. In the studies included in the meta-analysis, blended conditions often included additional learning time and instructional elements not present in control conditions. Several authors have suggested that results from such meta-analyses should not be generalized to full courses, and especially not to courses for students who have struggled academically. Responding to these criticisms, this presentation will describe the design principles for online learning that can be derived from available research and areas where further research is needed.

 
Plenary Speaker
Julie Young, President and Chief Executive Officer
Florida Virtual School

Through the Looking Glass:  Florida Virtual School's Journey to invent New Worlds of Learning

Join us as Julie Young, President of Florida Virtual School, shares insights from the development journey of the nation's largest and most successful K-12 public online learning program.  Learn how her team transcended traditional educational boundaries and reinvented the learning processes - and how they are continuing to do so.  Don't miss this glimpse of next-generation, tech-supported learning environments.

Attend virtually
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More information on the Sloan Consortium conference: http://sloanconsortium.org/aln

16th Annual Sloan Consortium International Conference on Online Learning