How has Penn State’s World Campus

changed since 2000?

What are its current needs?

World Campus Today

Current Stats

Current Degree Programs

Genesis of Distance Education at Penn State

Attribution and thanks: Many of the points I make in the next pages are derived from the website, blog, and presentations of Cole Camplese, World Campus designer/faculty member.

New design approaches:

• Richer media

• Increasingly active and collaborative learning – Web 2.0 trends

– Synchronous and asynchronous communities

Current and planned implementations of “Digital Commons”

“Digital Commons”to offer 82,000 students a common platform

and high-end digital audio and video equipment

For more information:

Student body is mostly “digital natives”

Effect on World Campus

How goes the commitment to faculty development and support?

Faculty continue to learn

But still feeling “behind the curve”

• Key ideas in this blog post (from yesterday) – Committed to cause of

online learning– Want to work with

developers– Always playing catch-up

with technology– Once new tools are

explained, faculty have “something to offer” about how to use them

Current learning design issues

• Design issues are same: make achievement of learning greater than technology

• “How to” is “shattered” by new social networking software and other fundamental ways we use the web

Active Blog for Designers

• In this blog:– One designer sees that

online teaching practice lags behind students and technology

• Note:– Active sharing of design

issues among the IDD (instructional design and development) group within World Campus

Formal website for design issues

One designer’s angst

“In the world of the web back then, it seemed OK to build courses that were page turners – really just textbooks on the web with a few interactive (Flash) activities thrown in. Today that just seems wrong and the team on Friday came to that conclusion. If we are going to build a model for eLearning that we are proud of, then we are going to have to think very differently about how we go about doing this.”

So……how Penn State’s World Campus sees its design solutions to distance education has changed… …with the times…

…one thing hasn’t changed:

its focus on lifelong education for an information society*

* Ryan, J.H & Miller, G.E., “Penn State’s World Campus: Mainstreaming a Virtual Campus Initiative”, in Petrides, L.A. Case Studies on Information Technology in Higher Education: Implications for Policyand Practice.” 2000, p. 20.