DISTANCE LEARNING RESOURCE LINKS

USDLA - United States Distance Learning Association - A non-profit association formed to promote the development and application of distance learning for education and training. Includes K-12 education, www.usdla.org           

Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) - The purpose of the Sloan-C is to help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs, according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines.

 http://www.sloan-c.org/

National Science Foundation (NSF) - A independent federal agency promoting the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense. http://www.nsf.gov/about/

e-Learning Tool Box – Providing a suite of solutions which help manage a distance learning program. We provide tools to assist schools with finding faculty, assessing learner readiness, identifying testing proctors, tracking end-of-course evaluations, ensuring testing integrity, and more ...http://www.elearningtoolbox.com/           

McGraw-Hill Online Learning - McGraw-Hill Online Learning offers a complete range of online solutions, including the most comprehensive, engaging, thought-provoking online courses available in the market. http://onlinelearning.mhhe.com/

The League For Innovation in the Community College - The League is an international organization dedicated to catalyzing the community college movement. We host conferences and institutes, develop Web resources, conduct research, produce publications, provide services, and lead projects and initiatives with our member colleges, corporate partners, and other agencies in our continuing efforts to make a positive difference for students and communities. http://www.league.org/index.cfm

Monterey Institute of Technology and Education - The Monterey Institute for Technology and Education is an educational non-profit organization committed to improving access to education. MITE (pronounced "mighty") sponsors a range of projects from establishing development standards and specifications for online courses, to educational research and multimodal content development.  http://www.montereyinstitute.org/index.html    

NN2 (National Network of Healthcare Career Programs in Two-Year Colleges - The purpose of the National Network of Health Career Programs in Two Year Colleges is to promote and encourage innovation, collaboration, and communication among two-year colleges sponsoring health career programs. http://www.nn2.org/  NN2 is dedicated to:

• Promoting and encouraging innovation, collaboration, cooperation, and communication with two-year colleges sponsoring health career programs

• Developing new leaders in health career education

• Expressing and advocating the interests of health career programs in two-year colleges (i.e., accreditation issues, practice issues, federal policy issues, etc.)

• Working collaboratively with other professional communities of interest to further policy related to health career education and higher education in general.

Distance-Educator.com - The place to start looking for everything ...Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration. www.distance-educator.com/   

Distance Learning Resources and Links - It also has a listing of other distance learning resource pages; PBS On-Line: This site contains information on PBS courses and television programs. http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~cfche/distance.html 

Home Education Resource Directory – A comprehensive resource for the home educator http://www.homeeddirectory.com/

News Release:  February 2007

Hands-On Labs, Inc., (HOL) the nation’s leader in developing and selling single student, single use laboratory LabPaqs for distance education science courses, is stepping forward to help teachers learn how to make science more fun for their students.

HOL’s new General Science Methods LabPaq with integrated lab, exploration and discussion activities is designed to prepare a new generation of science teachers by combining asynchronous learning and high quality, hands-on experiences.

Research indicates that approximately 90% of teachers teach as they were taught. If pre-service teachers are introduced to science in a strictly text-based fashion, they are likely to teach their students in the same manner. Such an approach turns what should be a meaningful hands-on process into rote learning and destroys the spirit of inquiry and wonder that is inherent in humans at an early age.  

The General Science Methods LabPaq developed by Hands-On Labs, Inc. combines 14 micro-scale laboratory activities with an interactive website and text created by Dr. Phil Ice of West Virginia University.  This combination provides an easy to understand, fully integrated experience for learning and teaching science methods.

In the lab portion of the course, students are introduced to inquiry in biology, chemistry, physics and geology. Next, students are asked to explore concepts related to cognition, developmental psychology and curricular theory which are then applied to the course lab activities. Finally, students integrate theory and practice to present a framework for guided discovery in the classroom that is compliant with the intent of state and federal guidelines.

With the trend in teacher shortages accelerating as practicing teachers retire, many states are turning to alternative certification programs to fill their growing need for adequately trained teachers.  By taking on students who have already completed a Bachelors degree or higher, and providing them with a program of study in educational foundations, pedagogy and observational/placement experiences, colleges and universities are hoping to cut the alarming 50% attrition rate that’s the norm during the first four years of entering the teaching profession.

Increasingly, such programs are being offered in partial or fully online formats to meet the needs and time constraints of these returning students. The overwhelming body of research indicates that online learning is at least equally effective to and usually more effective than face to face instruction, but alternative teacher certification programs still face one major hurdle.  Specifically, how can future teachers be adequately prepared in the use of science laboratory methods from a distance? 

Addressing this concern, from the point of view of teacher preparation programs, is the goal of the new program created by Hands-On Labs, Inc.  and Dr. Ice.  The General Science Methods LabPaq, its accompanying manual, and the website can easily be integrated into virtually any learning management system used for online course delivery.

 The HOL program even addresses the standards and demands placed on teacher training programs by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE).  With respect to science education standards,  (http://www.ncate.org/ProgramStandards/ACEI/ACEIstandards.doc) NCATE states:

Candidates engage students in the science inquiry process that involves asking questions, planning and conducting investigations, using appropriate tools and techniques to gather data, thinking critically and logically about relationships between evidence and explanations, constructing and analyzing alternative explanations, and communicating scientific arguments and explanations.  

At the college’s program level, this mission is typically developed in terms of the state’s content goals and objectives. The section of the mission dealing with investigations and data collection, translates into hands-on inquiry or experimentation. HOL’s new General Science Methods program gives science teachers the tools they need to make science inquiry both fun and meaningful for their students.

 Dr. Philip Ice is an instructor/instructional technologist at West Virginia University . His doctorate is in Curriculum and Instruction with minors in Instructional Technology and Science Education.  Drawing upon each of his fields of study, Dr. Ice has worked with HOL to create an General Science Methods course that incorporates high quality hands on lab experiences with a media-rich, pedagogically sound series of online learning activities.

Dr. Ice is interested in conducting research in this area to enhance the quality of alternative delivery methods in science education. His other research interests include immediacy behaviors, pedagogy and multimedia applications in online courses.

Science Methods LabPaq:   SM-1