THE MATURING ONLINE EDUCATION REVOLUTION
The field of online higher education is growing exponentially. The reason is the ease of putting curriculum and programs totally online and being able to mirror a ground-based classroom as never before - live classes - interaction between students and faculty in real time and talking to the student and seeing them thousands of miles away. The revolution in higher ed is rolling on.
Many Leaner Management Systems aka Course Management Systems offer services of various degrees and dependability. All however are not equal or up to the standard noted.
In 2008, Global Academy Online research under the Direction of Dr. Fred DiUlus conducted an exhaustive study of online platforms the students believed were the easiest to navigate and the best in their opinion to provide the educational challenge and results they demanded that mirrored a regular classroom..
The study took place over six months in an area of the world not inhibited by faculty and administration prejudice, hype or preconceived notions about what a Learner Management System or Course Management System ought to or could not do. The task - find the best.
Today, such systems have proliferated and there are dozens of Learning Management Systems worldwide to choose among - most are paid for subscription type service providers. Yet, the very best, remain basically free. Meanwhile many overlook these services under the belief that if it costs a lot, it must be good. In this arena nothing could be further from the truth.
However,schools faced with the decision today to spend upwards of $200,000 to migrate and engage a learner management system for an entire student body of several thousand will find the cost usually covers training for faculty to set up courses, staff training to administer the financial and adminstrative system and promptly be forgotten after the traininng sessions; locking the school into long training modalities in essentially what is a Wonk-style complicated system.
The result in the long term is the adopted systems are nothing more than an attempt by providers to achieve and lock-up control of the student body and the school's records to ensure their arrangement continues making it too difficult to unravel without great expense. the cost of operation training and introduction skyrockets to three times the cost of implementation. Hundreds if not thousands of schools share this dilemma today in their rush to catch up and find themselves being held up literally by providers.
What they can do is freeze the system and start over with a paralllel system side by side controlled and operated within with a FREE baseline provided by online pioneers like MOODLE, the grandaddy of FREE systems.
Colleges need to slow down, step back and use their internal expertise to thoroughly investigate and not leap at a system that Dope U down the street implemented. They will find they can put in a far superior system with existing in-house IT abilities literally for free - A fact proven by undergraduate students in an obscure country in South America almost a decade ago.
Then, how does a school make an informed decision for the right online course management system?
The answer is simple. Let the students decide.They have far more experience than aged faculty and administrators who did not grow up with a computer starting at age 4.
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Fred DiUlus PhD, Founder and President of Global Academy (Online) an international higher education pioneer and the #1 builder of new online and blended non-profit accredited colleges. DiUlus is also widely known as the inventor and father of the annual ratings of colleges and universities that offer online degree programs.