Technology and community colleges

In a recent article in Community College Week, Edward Leach,
Vice President, Services and Programs; Director, Conference on Information Technology, with the League for Innovation in the Community College, summarizes the IT challenges facing community colleges over the coming two years. Here is the article reprinted by Leadership Abstracts.

Here is one challenge identified by Leach:

...questions remain about the quality of student support systems provided online, especially as the next generation of online students becomes larger and more diverse. Colleges must also take steps to assure equal access to quality online instruction for students with disabilities, as well as find ways to effectively assess quality in courses delivered at a distance. Just like their on-campus counterparts, online courses can be very good or very bad. But unlike in the on-campus environment, many colleges still struggle to identify an effective strategy for determining the quality of proposed online offerings, even as the increased availability of easy-to-use web authoring tools and increased demand for anytime, anywhere access causes more and more instruction to move online.

ON-line DL is often given additional scrutiny because it is a newer learning environment. This is as it should be. As technologies for content presentation and teacher-learner and learner-learner interactions evolve, adopting and teaching best-practices for on-line instruction is a constant challenge. And with our diverse demographic, with advanced to novice computer aptitude, we need easy to use on-line and person-to-person student support. How can we do these things better?