What's Online Education All About?

By Patricia Deubel, Ph.D.

Unless you are directly involved with teaching online, have students taking courses online, or have taken an online course yourself, chances are that you find the concept of online education quite nebulous. You might not have any interest in it. Terms like distance education, fully online, blended courses, virtual courses, e-learning, hybrid courses, mixed-mode, asynchronous learning, distributed learning, Web-facilitated, and Web-enhanced learning add to the confusion. However, online learning is on the rise in K-12 education, and you should know some of the basics and issues surrounding it. It is adding flexibility to the traditional school experience, meeting the needs of specific groups of students, and increasing course offerings. If it has not already done so, it probably will affect your teaching scenario before too long. So, what's online education all about? Well ... it's all in who you ask or what resources you consult....

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Kaplan Buys Sagemont, Virtual Sage

Fort Lauderdale, FL-based education service provider Kaplan Inc. has purchased South Florida Sagemont Virtual, the company behind the University of Miami Online High School (UMOHS) and online high school course developer Virtual Sage....

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Smart Tech Kicks Off Showcase School Program

Smart Technologies has launched a new K-12 program that spotlights schools using classroom technologies in innovative ways. Dubbed the "Smart Showcase School Program" (SSSP) it launched this month with an initial roster of 22 schools and one district in the United States and Canada....

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Epson Aims New Projector at K-12 Teachers

Epson America has unveiled a compact multimedia projector designed specifically for educators. Targeted toward classroom environments, Epson's PowerLite 83c, ringing in at an estimated $899, delivers 2,200 lumens of brightness, a seven-watt speaker, built-in closed captioning, and LAN connectivity....

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The Internet's Second Coming

Imagine the chance for your students to make friends from around the world. Or receive music lessons from leading composers. These opportunities are part of the future of K-12 education, but they're also available now, thanks to the Internet2 K20 Initiative. Via the K20 Initiative, member institutions--schools, universities, libraries, and museums--deliver educational programming through 38 state and regional Sponsored Educational Group Participants (SEGPs) over a secure, nationwide "second Internet."...

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• JUNE 18-20, 2007
  Lexile National Reading Conference
  Fourth-Annual Event Hosted by MetaMetrics
  Lake Buena Vista, FL

• JUNE 24-27, 2007
  NECC 2007
  28th-Annual National Educational Computing Conference
  Atlanta, GA

Share Your Best Practices

T.H.E. Journal is currently looking for the following types of articles for future issues and for our eNewsletter, T.H.E. SmartClassroom:

• School Perspectives - discuss a specific topic, trend, or concern about education technology.
• Case Studies - have you implemented technology and learned a lot from the experience? If so, share your efforts about what worked -- and what didn't.

If you have a potential article, or questions about the above topics, please e-mail [email protected]

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