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eCornell Named to List of Top 20 Leadership Training Companies

eCornell has been named to Training Industry, Inc.’s 2010 list of The Top 20 Leadership Training Companies. The first annual list was assembled by Training Industry’s review committee to include companies that have demonstrated experience and excellence in providing leadership training services to a variety of clients.

A complete list of the Top 20 Leadership Training Companies can be seen online at www.trainingindustry.com/leadership/top-companies-listings/2010/2010-top-20-leadership-companies.aspx.

Selection of the Top 20 Leadership Training Companies was based on the following criteria:

  • Thought leadership and influence on the leadership training industry.
  • Industry recognition and innovation.
  • Breadth of programs offered and audiences served.
  • Delivery methods utilized.
  • Company size and growth potential.
  • Strength of clients.
  • Geographic reach.
  • Experience in serving the market.

“Leadership training represents one of the broadest content segments of the training industry,” said Ken Taylor, Chief Operating Officer of Training Industry, Inc. “Our list of the Top 20 companies highlights the best in class organizations focused on the leadership skills critical to driving business performance.”

“It is certainly rewarding to be considered in the top echelon of leadership training providers,” said Chris Proulx, CEO of eCornell. “This is a strong affirmation of the significant capabilities, resources and experience we have assembled at eCornell and brought to bear on our clients’ leadership and management development initiatives.”

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New Study: Online Education up 17% to 4.6 Million

The 2009 Sloan Survey of Online Learning reveals that enrollment rose by nearly 17 percent from a year earlier. The survey of more than 2,500 colleges and universities nationwide finds approximately 4.6 million students were enrolled in at least one online course in fall 2008, the most recent term for which figures are available.

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“Online education continues to establish itself as demand remains strong and new applications materialize, such as contingency planning for campus emergencies,” said Frank Mayadas, special advisor, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “We believe demand will fuel sustained growth especially within public universities and community colleges, raising the need to share research, optimal methods for faculty training, and other best practices to new levels of importance.” The survey is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The complete survey report, “Learning on Demand: Online Education in the United States, 2009” is available on the Sloan Consortium Web site.

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Predictions for 2010

At the start of each year, contributors to eLearn Magazine predict what changes are afoot for the coming 12 months. This year’s installment features the thoughts of such e-learning luminaries as Stephen Downes, Roger Schank, Jay Cross, Elliott Masie, Allison Rossett, Clark Quinn, and others.

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Princeton Review Partners with Penn Foster, Aims to Create Largest Online College Ever

A month after completing its first foray into online higher education by acquiring the distance education provider Penn Foster, the Princeton Review has set its next goal: to help create the largest online college ever. And it thinks it can do it in five years.

The company announced yesterday that it is entering into a joint venture with the National Labor College — an accredited institution that offers blended-learning programs to 200 students, most of whom are adults — to establish what would be called the College for Working Families. The college would offer courses tailored to the needs of union members and their families, beginning this fall.

. . . The new institution would start off awarding associate degrees, with aspirations to running bachelor’s and master’s programs down the line. Tuition would be similar to that at most community colleges.

Read the entire article.

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How the iPhone Could Reboot Education

How do you educate a generation of students eternally distracted by the internet, cellphones and video games? Easy. You enable them by handing out free iPhones — and then integrating the gadget into your curriculum.

That’s the idea Abilene Christian University has to refresh classroom learning. Located in Texas, the private university just finished its first year of a pilot program, in which 1,000 freshman students had the choice between a free iPhone or an iPod Touch.

The initiative’s goal was to explore how the always-connected iPhone might revolutionize the classroom experience with a dash of digital interactivity. Think web apps to turn in homework, look up campus maps, watch lecture podcasts and check class schedules and grades. For classroom participation, there’s even polling software for Abilene students to digitally raise their hand.

The verdict? It’s working quite well. 2,100 Abilene students, or 48 percent of the population, are now equipped with a free iPhone. Fully 97 percent of the faculty population has iPhones, too. The iPhone is aiding Abilene in giving students the information they need — when they want it, wherever they want it, said Bill Rankin, a professor of medieval studies who helped plan the initiative. . . .

The traditional classroom, where an instructor assigns a textbook, is heading toward obsolescence. Why listen to a single source talk about a printed textbook that will inevitably be outdated in a few years? That setting seems stale and hopelessly limited when pitted against the internet, which opens a portal to a live stream of information provided by billions of minds. . . .

These are the specific educational problems Abilene is targeting with the iPhone. Instead of standing in front of a classroom and
talking for an hour, Rankin instructs his students to use their iPhones to look up relevant information on the fly. Then, the students can discuss the information they’ve found, and Rankin leads the dialogue by helping assess which sources are accurate and useful.

It’s like a mashup of a 1960s teach-in with smartphone technology from the 2000s.

Read the entire article.

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Hybrid Education 2.0

What if you could teach a college course without a classroom or a professor, and lose nothing?

According to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, there’s no “what if” about it. Earlier in the decade, Carnegie Mellon set out to design software for independent learners taking courses through the university’s Open Learning Initiative, an effort to make courses freely available to non-enrolled learners. But rather than merely making course materials available to non-students, like MIT’s famous OpenCourseware project, Carnegie Mellon wanted to design courses that would respond to the individual needs of each student. It currently has courses in 12 different subjects available on its Web site, mostly in math and science.

In the process of testing the software on Carnegie Mellon students to make sure it would “do no harm” if used, the researchers found that, over a two-semester trial period, students in a traditional classroom introductory statistics course scored no better than similar students who used the open-learning program and skipped the three weekly lectures and lab period. . . .

As intriguing it was to find that a computer program could prepare students to pass tests just as well as a professor, the researchers seem more excited by a hybrid application of the open-learning program that, instead of replacing professors, tries to use them more effectively. By combining the open-learning software with two weekly 50-minute class sessions in an intro-level statistics course, they found that they could get students to learn the same amount of material in half the time.

So what exactly is the pedagogical model Carnegie Mellon has discovered, that has inspired such faith? Essentially, it’s an online
program that teaches students itself, rather than just being the medium a professor uses to teach. Furthermore, it leverages the opportunity to interact directly with a unique student — an opportunity a professor addressing dozens of students in a lecture hall does not have. . . .

In other words, the software acts like a private tutor, quizzing students constantly as they work through linear lessons and adjusting in accordance with how quickly they show they are grasping different concepts. . . .

The virtual tutor takes care of the basic concepts that typically dominate lectures, leaving professors open to plan the face-to-face
component of the course according to what parts of the curriculum the software tells him students are picking up more slowly, and what concepts could bear reinforcement. For example, if a statistics professor notices in the data he receives from activity in the open-learning program that a great number of students struggled with the assessments the program gave while teaching conditional probability, the professor could use the class periods to hold a discussion with his students about that concept until he is confident they get it — a preferable alternative, Thille says, to rolling through concepts didactically and hoping they stick.

Read the entire article.

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Blackboard Drops Suit Against Desire2Learn

Blackboard, known for its tenacity in the e-learning market, announced on December 15 that it is backing off from its long patent feud with the Canadian company Desire2Learn.

The dispute dates back to 2006, when Blackboard sued Desire2Learn in a Texas district court for 38 counts of patent infringement, seeking millions in damages. The court only upheld three counts, and both companies appealed the parts of the decision they had lost to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which in 2008 dismissed all of Blackboard’s claims against Desire2Learn. But by then the industry giant had filed additional patent-infringement lawsuits against its smaller competitor, which were pending–until December 15, when the rivals announced the détente.

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Many advocates of open source learning management systems strongly backed Desire2Learn in the dispute, and feared that a Blackboard victory might open the way for the company to attack their products and give the giant in the market too much control over it. While Blackboard officials repeatedly said that their actions against Desire2Learn didn’t suggest any course of action against anyone else, the dispute led to much public bashing of the company.

Read the complete article.

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The Ever-Expanding U. of Phoenix

In the world of for-profit higher education, and higher education in general, the University of Phoenix has historically been viewed as the 800-pound gorilla.

As of Tuesday, it may be more like a 1,000-pound gorilla. As Phoenix’s parent company, the Apollo Group, reported its fourth quarter and annual earnings Tuesday, it announced that the university’s enrollment of degree-seeking students grew to 443,000 as of August 2009, up 22 percent from 362,000 in August 2008. The biggest growth in Phoenix’s enrollments, by far, came among students seeking associate degrees, which rose by 37 percent, to 201,200 from 146,500 in 2008.

About two-thirds of the university’s new students as of August are female, 27.7 percent are African-American, and about half are 30 or over.

The university attributed the sizable increases to a range of factors, including increased efforts in retaining students, expanded marketing, and the “current economic downturn, as working learners seek to advance their education to improve their job security or reemployment prospects.” Many community colleges and several of Phoenix’s major peers in for-profit career education, including Kaplan Higher Education (21.9 percent) and Corinthian Colleges, Inc. (24.4 percent), have reported sharp upturns in student enrollments this fall.

Read the full article.

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5 Ways E-Learning Can Improve Your Leadership Development Program

Why Leadership Development is Important
Leadership development is a high priority and increasing as an overall percentage of training delivered in many organizations because of several positive business benefits:

  • Financial return.
  • Employee satisfaction and retention.
  • Building bench strength.
  • Strategic and competitive advantage.
  • Enhanced productivity and faster resolution of problems.
  • Continuous innovation.
  • Organizational agility.

Leaders drive performance, and the higher the leader and the broader the scope of his or her responsibility, the greater the impact that the individual can have on an organization. So while it may difficult to measure exactly now much leadership development programs contribute to something like financial return, it is generally accepted that good leaders and managers produce higher performing teams that produce better results.

Demographic shifts are also forcing companies to focus on their leadership development efforts. With almost 80 million baby boomers approaching retirement in the next decade, there will be significant impact on pipeline of available leadership talent, and the cost of recruiting and retaining competent managers is going to increase.

E-Learning Can Improve Leadership Development Programs
While e-learning is not a complete solution when it comes to leadership development, it can be used to increase its effectiveness in several important ways:

Increased Reach
Traditionally, leadership training has been confined to employees who can attend a classroom event. This makes it difficult and/or expensive to reach geographically dispersed employees. The increasingly global and mobile nature of today’s workforce means that many employees may be left out of traditional classroom-based leadership training programs.

But technology-based learning content can provide basic soft skills training and information to any learner with an Internet connection. E-learning can effectively eliminate the barriers of time and geography.

Consistency
Ensuring a consistent approach to leadership often means instituting a talent management process based on a system of competencies that align with specific company objectives. If leadership competencies are identified for all levels and job roles, there can be a systematic process for assessing employees and recommending training interventions based on job role and level. Competency management gives organizations better visibility into their leadership strengths and weaknesses, and aids in long-term planning.

Speed & Efficiency
While leadership training must include “high touch” activities to be effective, e-learning can often be used to reach the training goal quicker and at a lower cost. There are numerous models for blended learning ranging from the very simple to complex. One of the most common is to use e-learning as a pre-requisite to classroom training. This can shorten the overall time needed for employees to complete training. It also ensures that learners arrive at the training event with a common understanding and baseline of knowledge, ready to take advantage of the unique benefits of being with other students and a live instructor.

E-Learning also shortens the amount of time that employees are physically away from their jobs. Online learning also offers the opportunity for learners to take classes when it is most convenient for them, and to progress as quickly or slowly as necessary.

Skills can also be assessed online prior to training, which may allow some learners to test-out of certain parts of training. Shortening time away from the job can be an especially important benefit in leadership training, which often involves key employees with significant responsibilities.

Reinforcement Over Time
Training impact tends to fade over time. But research shows that when learning is reinforced before and after the training event, the positive effects are greater and last longer. Managers can use e-learning to reinforce key points of training, thereby taking leadership development from a series of disconnected events to more of a continuous development process.

Support Collaboration & Relationship Building
Managing global teams is a reality in today’s workplace, and also one of the greatest challenges managers face. Technology such as the virtual classroom, blogs, wikis and social networks are being used to support collaboration for geographically dispersed teams. “Blended” does not have to imply “classroom.” Many of today’s leadership programs are exclusively conducted virtually. In this format, participants take online courses that are augmented with online collaboration sessions, conference calls or virtual collaboration exercises.

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University of North Carolina Moves Intro Spanish Class Entirely Online

After several years of experimenting with “hybrid” Spanish courses that mix online and classroom instruction, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has decided to begin conducting its introductory Spanish course exclusively on the Web.

Spanish 101, which had featured online lessons combined with one classroom session per week, will drop its face-to-face component in an effort to save on teaching costs and campus space in light of rising demand for Spanish instruction and a shrinking departmental budget.

Foreign language classes, like those in just about every subject area, have of course been offered online for years. And online courses have become a key way for some languages to be taught at smaller colleges that might not produce enough students to fill a section. … Advocates for such courses have generally said that they are essential when in-person instruction wouldn’t otherwise take place. What makes Chapel Hill’s announcement notable is that it’s about Spanish. And if there is one foreign language at American colleges and universities that never struggles to produce demand for in-person sections, it is Spanish.

Under the new system, a single professor would preside over four sections of the class, with support from graduate assistants. …

department officials said they don’t expect the online-only format to hamper learning.

Read the full article.