Conferences+with+Visiting+Experts

Our visiting experts for this semester included:

1. Prof. Greville Rumble, March 10-16 Greville Rumble is Professor of Distance Education Management at the Open University, UK. He has extensive international experience as a consultant in the planning, management, costs and economics of distance education.

2. Prof. Tony Bates, March 24-30 Tony Bates a renowned scholar and prolific writer in the field of distance education. Since he left the University of British Columbia in 2003, he has been working as an international consultant to governments and universities, mainly on strategic planning of e-learning.

Our pre-read for this conference was an article dated March 22, 2011 by Tony entitled "The cost of online learning: $12.50 an hour?" []



A question I posed to Tony in the conference: //"As DE continues to grow, and technologies continue to develop, 1) would you add/delete anything to the ACTIONS framework or 2) change their order of importance?//

Tony reponded that he is currently rewriting his book now (his 2005 book we used for this course), but he keeps putting it off - he can't keep up with the technology! He has problems writing the book as new technology comes along; has to think about Web 2.0, so in these circumstances, believes the SECTIONS framework works better, where the characteristics of the students is most important. However, he also stated that not only is technology changing, but pedagogy is changing as well!

Source: [|Master of Distance Education & E-learning (MDE): Who are my teachers?]