ExtensionEngine Blog

Goldie Blumenstyk’s recent column, “Online Learning Is Misunderstood. Here’s How,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, raises compelling issues about online learning.

At the New Teacher Center, we work with educators every day to provide them with support to be truly effective. We understand that students are unique — individual learners with individual needs. Teachers and teacher leaders must have an arsenal of approaches to be able to respond to their students.

If you’re a leader or an educator at an academic institution, you’re already well acquainted with the many benefits of digital learning:

One of the most important, and complex, decisions to make when building online training to generate revenue or impact comes upfront: what online learning platform should you use?

As 2017 has proven, online learning has been top-of-mind for many institutional leaders. Scaling offerings through online programs or courses has become an inherent part of growth for public, private, and non-traditional colleges and universities.

As an end of the year tribute to the evolution of online learning in 2017, here’s a recap of a few topics that resonated with us, our perspective on those topics, and a few topics that we hope to see discussed more broadly in 2018.

ExtensionEngine was one of two sponsors of the Learning with MOOCs 2017 conference, held October 8–10, 2017 in Austin, TX. Furqan Nazeeri, Partner at ExtensionEngine, participated as a panel member in the session “What should drive the design of MOOCs? What is driving current trends?”, where he discussed how online learning has evolved to be more adaptive, customized, and engaging.

The value of online program management (OPM) companies is much debated these days. The piece at the top of everyone’s minds is a highly critical report produced by The Century Foundation which suggests these profit-driven companies “present potential risks to quality and value in the education.”

We would like to bring your attention to a webinar we recently presented with one of our clients, Fitch Learning. The webinar, Choosing a Platform for Revenue-Generating Online Training, provides a succinct and understandable breakdown of when to develop a custom learning experience — such as those we create — versus relying solely on a traditional learning management system (LMS).

Here’s a thought we ran into recently in an article in Edsurge regarding the future of online learning development:

“Transformative change will always depend on a small number of risk takers.” - CHLOE 2017 

A welcome and impressive piece of research crossed our desk last week, one that we look forward to revisiting far into the foreseeable future. The Changing Landscape of Online Education (CHLOE) is the result of a partnership between the research and advisory firm, Eduventures, and Quality Matters, an international nonprofit dedicated to support organizations’ quality assurance goals.