eCornell

eCornell Voted “Best Leadership Development Program” by Readers of eLearning Magazine

eCornell’s suite of online Leadership & Strategic Management Certificate Programs has been named “Best Leadership Development Program” at the 2009 Best of eLearning Reader’s Choice Awards hosted by eLearning magazine. The winners in 16 categories were announced at the virtual eLearning! Summit on November 5.

eCornell was also a finalist for “Best Software-as-a-Service Learning Management System (SaaS LMS).” Readers nominated and voted for products and solutions via eLearning magazine’s online ballot. The 2009 program received 1,755 nominations, twice the volume from a year ago.

“The Best of eLearning Awards program is the only reader’s choice awards in the market,” said Catherine Upton, group publisher of eLearning and Government eLearning magazines. “Recognition of this type is increasingly important as more companies deploy e-learning initiatives to impact business and improve efficiencies. The Best of eLearning program offers professionals a reliable resource to learn from users and gather information that influences their future purchases.”

eCornell offers more than 20 online certificate programs, and six in Leadership & Strategic Management that received the honor:

• Business Leadership Skills
• High Performance Leadership
• Leading Management Teams
• Executive Leadership
• Change Leadership
• Managing for Execution

Selected voter comments about eCornell will be published in the January 2010 issues of eLearning magazine and Government eLearning magazine and include:

• “Their method of teaching is very suitable and meets the students at their very point of need. It’s also very applicable to the student.”
• “This is a brilliantly structured course. It encourages students to use discussion forums very efficiently and it’s almost like a live class discussion—even with a diversity of time zones in our class.”
• “I have learned a lot from eCornell online classes. It’s the best place to take courses and expert advisors are always available when needed to help with questions and answers.”

“It is extremely gratifying to be honored by our enterprise customers and students,” said Chris Proulx, CEO of eCornell. “This open vote enables the users of eCornell’s online training programs and those of our competitors to cast a ballot. It’s an important measure for the products and services in our industry. To be recognized among the top training providers validates that our solutions provide engaging learning for students and bottom-line performance results for our enterprise customers.”

5 Ways E-Learning Can Improve Your Leadership Development Program

Why Leadership Development is Important
Leadership development is a high priority and increasing as an overall percentage of training delivered in many organizations because of several positive business benefits:

• Financial return.
• Employee satisfaction and retention.
• Building bench strength.
• Strategic and competitive advantage.
• Enhanced productivity and faster resolution of problems.
• Continuous innovation.
• Organizational agility.

Leaders drive performance, and the higher the leader and the broader the scope of his or her responsibility, the greater the impact that the individual can have on an organization. So while it may difficult to measure exactly now much leadership development programs contribute to something like financial return, it is generally accepted that good leaders and managers produce higher performing teams that produce better results.

Demographic shifts are also forcing companies to focus on their leadership development efforts. With almost 80 million baby boomers approaching retirement in the next decade, there will be significant impact on pipeline of available leadership talent, and the cost of recruiting and retaining competent managers is going to increase.

E-Learning Can Improve Leadership Development Programs
While e-learning is not a complete solution when it comes to leadership development, it can be used to increase its effectiveness in several important ways:

Increased Reach
Traditionally, leadership training has been confined to employees who can attend a classroom event. This makes it difficult and/or expensive to reach geographically dispersed employees. The increasingly global and mobile nature of today’s workforce means that many employees may be left out of traditional classroom-based leadership training programs.

But technology-based learning content can provide basic soft skills training and information to any learner with an Internet connection. E-learning can effectively eliminate the barriers of time and geography.

Consistency
Ensuring a consistent approach to leadership often means instituting a talent management process based on a system of competencies that align with specific company objectives. If leadership competencies are identified for all levels and job roles, there can be a systematic process for assessing employees and recommending training interventions based on job role and level. Competency management gives organizations better visibility into their leadership strengths and weaknesses, and aids in long-term planning.

Speed & Efficiency
While leadership training must include “high touch” activities to be effective, e-learning can often be used to reach the training goal quicker and at a lower cost. There are numerous models for blended learning ranging from the very simple to complex. One of the most common is to use e-learning as a pre-requisite to classroom training. This can shorten the overall time needed for employees to complete training. It also ensures that learners arrive at the training event with a common understanding and baseline of knowledge, ready to take advantage of the unique benefits of being with other students and a live instructor.

E-Learning also shortens the amount of time that employees are physically away from their jobs. Online learning also offers the opportunity for learners to take classes when it is most convenient for them, and to progress as quickly or slowly as necessary.

Skills can also be assessed online prior to training, which may allow some learners to test-out of certain parts of training. Shortening time away from the job can be an especially important benefit in leadership training, which often involves key employees with significant responsibilities.

Reinforcement Over Time
Training impact tends to fade over time. But research shows that when learning is reinforced before and after the training event, the positive effects are greater and last longer. Managers can use e-learning to reinforce key points of training, thereby taking leadership development from a series of disconnected events to more of a continuous development process.

Support Collaboration & Relationship Building
Managing global teams is a reality in today’s workplace, and also one of the greatest challenges managers face. Technology such as the virtual classroom, blogs, wikis and social networks are being used to support collaboration for geographically dispersed teams. “Blended” does not have to imply “classroom.” Many of today’s leadership programs are exclusively conducted virtually. In this format, participants take online courses that are augmented with online collaboration sessions, conference calls or virtual collaboration exercises.

eCornell Named Finalist for “Best Leadership Development Program” & “Best SaaS LMS” by Readers of E-Learning! Magazine

eCornell’s  Enterprise Learning Solution has been named a Finalist in two categories of the 2009 Best of  E-Learning! Awards hosted by E-Learning! Magazine: “Best Leadership Development Program” and “Best Software-as-a-Service Learning Management System (SaaS LMS).”

The winners in 16 categories of the “Best of E-Learning” Reader’s Choice awards will be announced at the virtual E-Learning! Summit on November 5 and in the January 2010 issues of E-Learning! magazine and Government E-Learning! magazine.

“It is extremely gratifying to be honored by our enterprise customers and students,” said Chris Proulx, CEO of eCornell. “This open vote enables the users of eCornell’s online training programs and those of our competitors to cast a ballot. It’s an important measure for the products and services in our industry. To be recognized among the top training providers validates that our solutions provide engaging learning for students and bottom-line performance results for our enterprise customers.”

“The Best of E-Learning! Awards program is the only reader’s choice awards in the market,” said Catherine Upton, group publisher of E-Learning! and Government E-Learning! magazines. “This year, the E-Learning! Magazine Group received 1,755 nominations, twice the volume of last year’s program, making each category very competitive.”

Readers nominated and voted for products and solutions via E-Learning! magazine’s online ballot. All ballots were cast between August 1 and September 30, 2009. Each ballot was reviewed and validated by the editorial team.

How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education

Is a college education really like a string quartet? Back in 1966, that was the assertion of economists William Bowen, later president of Princeton, and William Baumol. In a seminal study, Bowen and Baumol used the analogy to show why universities can't easily improve efficiency.

If you want to perform a proper string quartet, they noted, you can't cut out the cellist nor can you squeeze in more performances by playing the music faster. But that was then -- before MP3s and iPods proved just how freely music could flow. Before Google scanned and digitized 7 million books and Wikipedia users created the world's largest encyclopedia. Before YouTube Edu and iTunes U made video and audio lectures by the best professors in the country available for free, and before college students built Facebook into the world's largest social network, changing the way we all share information. Suddenly, it is possible to imagine a new model of education using online resources to serve more students, more cheaply than ever before.

But higher education remains, on the whole, a string quartet. MIT's courseware may be free, yet an MIT degree still costs upward of $189,000. College tuition has gone up more than any other good or service since 1990, and our nation's students and graduates hold a staggering $714 billion in outstanding student-loan debt. Once the world's most educated country, the United States today ranks 10th globally in the percentage of young people with postsecondary degrees. "Colleges have become outrageously expensive, yet there remains a general refusal to acknowledge the implications of new technologies," says Jim Groom, an "instructional technologist" at Virginia's University of Mary Washington and a prominent voice in the blogosphere for blowing up college as we know it. Groom, a chain-smoker with an ever-present five days' growth of beard, coined the term "edupunk" to describe the growing movement toward high-tech do-it-yourself education. "Edupunk," he tells me in the opening notes of his first email, "is about the utter irresponsibility and lethargy of educational institutions and the means by which they are financially cannibalizing their own mission."

The edupunks are on the march. From VC-funded startups to the ivied walls of Harvard, new experiments and business models are springing up from entrepreneurs, professors, and students alike. Want a class that's structured like a role-playing game? An accredited bachelor's degree for a few thousand dollars? A free, peer-to-peer Wiki university? These all exist today, the overture to a complete educational remix.

The architects of education 2.0 predict that traditional universities that cling to the string-quartet model will find themselves on the wrong side of history, alongside newspaper chains and record stores. "If universities can't find the will to innovate and adapt to changes in the world around them," professor David Wiley of Brigham Young University has written, "universities will be irrelevant by 2020."

Read the full article.

Tandberg, Cisco and Lecture Capture

The October 1 announcement of Cisco's offer of $3 billion to buy the video conferencing company Tandberg could potentially have significant implications in the lecture capture market. ...

Lecture and presentation capture will be as important in the higher education space as video conferencing is in the enterprise (and increasingly small business) sectors. Tools, platforms and services to easily record campus activity - whether this activity is a regular lecture, an invited speaker, or a voice-over recording made from a professors desk - are poised to become ubiquitous on campus. Students will expect the ability to time shift their learning. Faculty will come to understand that recorded presentations offer the potential to free class time for discussion and debate, as students escape the pressure of having to take exhaustive notes during the lecture. Parents will look for schools that record lectures as an aid to their child's learning, as students with diverse learning style can take advantage of recorded classes to review materials at their own pace.

Read the full article.

A Virtual Revolution Is Brewing for Colleges

Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges cannot survive. The real force for change is the market: Online classes are just cheaper to produce. Community colleges and for-profit education entrepreneurs are already experimenting with dorm-free, commute-free options. Distance-learning technology will keep improving. Innovators have yet to tap the potential of the aggregator to change the way students earn a degree, making the education business today look like the news biz circa 1999.

Both newspapers and universities have traditionally relied on selling hard-to-come-by information. Newspapers touted advertising space next to breaking news, but now that advertisers find their customers on Craigslist and Cars.com, the main source of reporters' pay is vanishing. Colleges also sell information, with a slightly different promise -- a degree, a better job and access to brilliant minds. As with newspapers, some of these features are now available elsewhere. A student can already access videotaped lectures, full courses and openly available syllabuses online. And in five or 10 years, the curious 18- (or 54-) year-old will be able to find dozens of quality online classes, complete with take-it-yourself tests, a bulletin board populated by other "students," and links to free academic literature.

Online qualifications cost a college less to provide. Schools don't need to rent the space, and the glut of doctoral students means they can pay instructors a fraction of the salary for a tenured professor, and assume that they will rely on shared syllabuses. Those savings translate into cheaper tuition ... Online degrees are already relatively inexpensive. And the price will only dive in coming decades, as more universities compete.

Just as the new model of news separated "the article" from "the newspaper," the new model of college will separate "the class" from "the college." Classes are increasingly taken credit by credit, instead of in bulk--just as news is now read article by article.

Because the current college system, like the newspaper industry, has built-in redundancies, new Internet efficiencies will lead to fewer researchers and professors. ... At noon on any given day, hundreds of university professors are teaching introductory Sociology 101. The Internet makes it harder to justify these redundancies. In the future, a handful of Soc. 101 lectures will be videotaped and taught across the United States. ... The typical 2030 faculty will likely be a collection of adjuncts alone in their apartments, using recycled syllabuses and administering multiple-choice tests from afar.

Read the full article.

New Player in Course Management Software

It’s Learning, Inc., a Norwegian company, is looking to take a share of the U.S. market from Blackboard and other top learning-management software providers after cornering the learning-management markets in Norway and Britain, and gaining "substantial" shares in Sweden, Denmark, and Holland.

The company caters to professors who put a special emphasis on personal attention in the classroom. Many classrooms — especially those at community colleges — include students with a broad range of capabilities, said Jonathan A. Bower, the president of the U.S. branch of It’s Learning. And while Blackboard “does a superb job of supporting the delivery of lessons in the classic fashion” — that is, to everybody at once — it is less useful for professors who wish to simultaneously challenge advanced students and reach those who may need remediation.

“Instead of creating one assignment for everybody,” Bower said, “as I get to know my students, what I can do is create supplemental assignments, remedial assignments, extra credit assignments,” and assign them to different students — or groups of students, in a large classroom — in order to “deliver a dramatically more individual, nuanced, and ultimately successful individual experience.”

Read the full article.

Textbooks on the iPhone

The e-textbook company CourseSmart is making its books available on the iPhone through a deal with Apple, the Wall Street Journal reported. While company officials don't expect students to do heavy reading on their handheld devices, the application will make the full electronic texts and digital notes accessible when students are looking for answers in study groups, for example, they say.

(To read the full article, you must subscribe to the online edition of The Wall Street Journal.)

The Equal Opportunity Library

Google's ambitious book digitization project will democratize access to knowledge for members of minority and other underrepresented groups, said scholars and activists gathered at the Howard University School of Law on Wednesday.

Panel members at the historically black university applauded Google's plan to scan and index 10 million books for the Web. Among those who will benefit are African Americans and Latinos who attend inner-city schools and lack a quality education, said Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.

"This project is so incredible because it helps level the playing field at the fundamental intersections of rights, knowledge and advocacy," he said.   Read the full article.

Blackboard Loses on Appeal

On July 27, 2009, a federal appeals court invalidated Blackboard Inc.'s 1999 patent for its learning management software, overturning a lower court's decision last year finding that the Blackboard competitor Desire2Learn had infringed the giant's intellectual property.

...

Monday's ruling by the appeals court is the latest development in a several-year court battle initiated by Blackboard in July 2006. The behemoth accused Desire2Learn of infringing dozens of Blackboard patents for online course management and e-learning technologies, and sought $17 million in damages and an injunction barring the Canadian company from continuing to infringe the patent.

After a two-week trial in Lufkin, Texas, a jury in a district court seen as friendly to patent holders ruled that Desire2Learn's learning platform used technologies for which Blackboard received U.S. patents, known collectively as the " '138 patent," in January 2006. But its verdict gave the company far less than it was asking for, awarding Blackboard $2.5 million for lost profits and $630,000 in royalties. The district court invalidated 35 of the 38 claims that Blackboard made against Desire2Learn, but backed three other claims related to what constitutes a "user" of a learning management system.

Both companies appealed the parts of the case they'd lost to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which has nationwide jurisdiction over U.S. patent claims. Its highly technical decision upheld the lower court's conclusion that Blackboard's claims 1-35 were invalid. But the three-judge panel rejected the lower court's finding that Blackboard's patented learning system had originated the approach of giving a single user with a single log-in multiple roles, such as being a teacher in one course and a student in another.

But Blackboard has already initiated another lawsuit against Desire2Learn, accusing the Canadian firm in April of infringing new U.S. patents that the company received on its software. So while company officials continue to reassure higher education technology officials and others that Blackboard has no intention of asserting its patent rights against "open source or home-grown course management systems that are not bundled with proprietary software," they show no signs of retreating in the wake of Monday's stinging defeat.

Read the full article.