Serendipity35

I'm not the greatest proponent of Distance Learning coures as they have been developed and implented at many colleges and universities (including NJIT). The idea of expanding a student population without having to budget the expense of building additional classroom space drove administrators and academic departments to shoehorn existing course offerings into a web browser accessible format and register additional "online" students. A result of those efforts was to produce online enrollments that sported (especially for undergraduate studies) drop out rates of about 45%. Oher attempts at improving distance learning courses and content delivery soon produced blended learning (or hybrid) courses that required students to attend classroom sessions that supplemented their online studies. The drop out rates improved and adult-oriented programs like Weekend University began to pick up some academic steam.

The usual notion of distance learning is to have a professor/instructor at some central location teaching students at remote locations, but what if students remainined in a classroom, and the teacher taught from a remote location?

The Spring, that question was asked by Bishop George Ahr High School and Continuing Professional Education provided the answer.

The well-accomplished Latin teacher at Bishop George Ahr High School was leaving for France before the start of the 2008 school year and, while they didn't want to replace that fine instructor, they needed a solution to provide four years of Latin educaton to their pupils. CPE at NJIT, using Moodle as a content delivery platform, provided detailed one-on-one staff training and course content conversion to place the curriculum materials in an effective distance learning format.

Beginning in the Fall of 2008, the Latin students at Bishop George Ahr High School will be able to view multimedia lectures from the classroom, home or any remote location, receive detailed feedback about their performance, participate in real-time chats with their instructor and take their examinations in a protected and proctored classroom environment. The administrators at Bishop Ahr tested this new program at the end of this school year and solicited feedback from students and parents and reported that everyone was excited and supportive of this new initiative for the start of the next school year.

If Web 2.0 technologies can usher in Latin instruction in a distance learning format, what could be next, English?