The Online Degree Dorm Room

Engineering Degree Onine | Need help learning the language?

Posted by bposton on November 13th, 2006 — Posted in engineering degree online

OUt here in the online degree dorm I see a lot of folks struggling with the foriegn language that they’re taking.

So this news story I came accross might be of benefit. Read on…

Did you know that alot of what we know about our native language is in the sub-conscious?

YOu know how when you want to express something, correct phrases and sentences just come to you? Well that’s how -most of this process is unconscious.
So Stephen Krashen, a professor at the University of Southern California and a linguistics expert, put together a hypothesis to explain how this is possible. And he used that, which is called Input Hypothesis to create what he calls a “natural approach” to learning a language.

Here’s how it works (I think…)

You read and listen to words and sentences - i.e. the “input” If you understand these sentences, they are stored in your brain. More specifically, they are stored in the part of your brain that is responsible for language.

For example, using this hypothesis, here’s how a child learns his or her native language. The child listens to his or her parents and other people. As the child’s brain collects these words and sentences, he or she gets better and better at producing sentences on his or her own. By age 5, the child can already speak quite fluently.

Got it?

So according to Krashen’s theory, the way to learn and improve is to feed your brain with a lot of “input” which are correct and understandable sentences, written or spoken.

Now some cognitive scientists say that watching movies is one of the most natural methods of improving your language skills at any age. Learning English by watching movies is an example of  “learning by input.”

So go get yourself some French language movies and go to town

There’s a company that has taken this theory and put it into practice:

The company is called SFK Media Corp. SFK stands for Specially For Kids. They created a product called ReadEnt Reading Movies.

It used this technique with an innovative tool called “Action Captions.” As a child or adult watches the movie, each spoken word appears on the screen as text directly from the person’s mouth as it is spoken. ReadEnt’s Reading Movies are available as interactive DVD programs for use on the TV, computer, video-game console or portable DVD player.

For more information call (866) SFK-READ (735-7323).

Ben

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Engineering Degree Online|Is there a nurse in the house?

Posted by bposton on November 2nd, 2006 — Posted in engineering degree online

Check this out.

As of the fall of next year, the Florida Hospital College of Health Sciences (FHCHS) will no longer have a RN-BSN degree program on campus.

Why? Because they’re moving the entire program online!

In fact, students already enrolled in on-campus courses will be transitioned into the RN-BSN degree online program and as of the Fall 2007 term, no on-campus BSN courses will be offered. All future enrollments will be only for the RN-BSN degree to their online program.

The online RN-BSN program began in 2004 with 26 students, and has grown to 369 students.

The program helps working professional Registered Nurses (RNs) attain the education necessary to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in Nursing. Students enrolled in the program live in communities as close as Orlando and as far away as Okinawa, Japan.

Dr. Nancy Haugen, Chair of the Department of Nursing had this to say about this change in their offering:

“The number of students who are choosing the online program really shows how valuable the flexibility of learning at home is to nurses trying to balance personal and professional obligations. With this in mind, we feel it is important to focus our attention on developing the online program.”

So, score one for the online degree program!

Ben

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engineering degree online : Indiana distance learning skyrockets

Posted by bposton on October 24th, 2006 — Posted in engineering degree online

I read an article today that focused on the growth of distance learning just in the
state of Indiana.

Although the numbers here are specific to that state, I think they reflect the trend
across the nation - online education is growing fast and furious.

OK, so in Indiana alone, there were 104,000 student enrollments in distance-learning classes during the 2003-04 academic year, according to the Indiana Higher Education Telecommunications System.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Nearly 90,000 of the enrollments were for online courses, which for that state is a 57 percent increase from the previous year.

If you took those students that were taking online classes under what would translate to a full time status, and put them all together in one place, they would phycially represent the sixth-largest university in the state - over 10,135 students. By comparison, Indiana University-Purdue University in Fort Wayne this year has about 11,000 students.

I’m pretty sure this is a nation-wide trend.

Distance education has been around in one way shape or form for over 100 years, but of course the delivery and quality of this type of education has changed drastically in the past few years.

This came about With the rise of the Internet, and now students can get degrees from prestigious universities in the comfort of their own homes.

Nonetheless, there still appears to be a sort of stigma with this term “distance learning” or “distance education”, which I guess is a throw-back to the correspondence courses Sally Struthers used to promote on late-night television commercials as a way to make more money.

Unfortunately, this stigma has been helped in recent years by the growth of online diploma mills, which essentially sell diplomas with little or no college coursework. A dark underbelly of this trend which can also be associated to the rise of the internet.

But the trend is good because local colleges and universities are trying to erase that stigma while they try to increase their enrollments and provide students a way to get a degree who don’t have time for a traditional college education.

So think about it. The person you sit next to at work, the waitress at the cafe, the solider in Iraq, or Afghanistan; there are people from all over the country taking online courses and getting their degree. And they all have at least one thing in common. A desire to improve their lives while maintaining their current lifestyle and schedules.

Ben

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