The University of Minnesota announced its new “digital campus” initiative today, unveiling a new Web site that consolidates all of its online learning opportunities into a single Web site.

In hopes of saving tax dollars and reaching more students, state leaders in Minnesota say they plan to offer a substantially higher percentage of their courses online in the next seven years.

I have been looking at some of the training programs that are being offered for aspiring Instructional Designers (ID) in India. I looked at these courses from the perspective of:

• An aspiring Instructional Designer who has no clue about Instructional Designing and wants to quickly gain instructional designing skills
• An Instructional Designer who has started with Instructional Designing at work, but has lots of queries and needs lots of inputs to improve his/her instructional designing skill.

Ken Allen follows up his comment on Rupa’s post on 6 Quick Steps to Create a Game Based E-learning Course with a full post on his example of how he has used some of the techniques in the past to build game based learning courses.

This is an article on Classroom uses of student Portfolios.

Imagine a world where people can change the color of their skin or the circumference of their waist, where gravity is just an option. A place where your surroundings are limited only by your creativity. A place where the University of Alabama doesn’t have a football team - yet. Some UA students next spring will begin attending class on a virtual campus being built in Second Life.

Some critics of distance learning say face-to-face classes give students a better learning environment, but a recent Indiana University study found that online learners reported deeper approaches to learning than classroom-based learners.

Japanese distance education has been slow to utilize the Internet, and mainly depends on the mail system and, to a lesser extent, television broadcasting as its mode of delivery. Since 2001, however, regulations have been relaxed to allow students to complete all course requirements for a university degree via online distance learning.Read the Full Article

If you play a lot of games, you will definitely be able to identify the standard pattern used.

Every game has a goal and the steps to solve it. The challenge of every game lies in how quickly and efficiently you reach the goal.

As the integration of community-centered teaching practices intensifies, an understanding of the types of relationships that manifest in this network and the associated impact on student learning is required. This paper explores the relationship between a student’s position in a classroom social network and their reported level of sense of community.