Methodologies of Online Education

There were many myths and misconceived notions about online education until recent past. Some people believed that online learning is a good option only for students who have a good track record. It was also believed that only those students having access to computers and modern means of communication would benefit from online education. However, with time such notions are giving way to an open acceptance where people have started accepting online education as a viable alterative for conventional education.
Not all online education options have a similar methodology and approach. There are various modes of online education available and it would be better if you have an understanding of different methodologies in use by online education providers so that you can select the course with the methodology that suits you the best. Here we are discussing the learning methodologies for online education:
Online Education Methodologies- Different Options
Live: This methodology is also known as synchronous mode of learning. In this mode of online education, there is instant communication between the students and teachers and at times even among different students. Herein all the participants get access to information simultaneously. Virtual classroom using the facility of video or audio conferencing and real-time chat are some examples of this mode of online education.
This learning methodology has its advantages and disadvantages. This mode is more akin to the conventional education except for the fact that the students don't have to travel to the classrooms. The biggest advantage of synchronous method of online education is that it allows instant feedback for the student's performance and allows active interaction among the students and teachers. Thus the students can get the training and education that is tailored suit their needs. Moreover, live education also facilitates the setting up of learning communities and groups for a better interaction among the learners.
This method has the disadvantage that the students cannot plan their schedule and they are bound by the pre-set schedule.
Asynchronous: Asynchronous mode of online education is popularly termed as store and forward education. In this method, the communication between the student and teacher is not instant. Self-paced courses are the examples of asynchronous online education where the students communicate with the teachers and amongst themselves by exchanging emails and posting messages on online bulletin boards and discussing groups. This is the more popular mode of online education because it offers more convenience and flexibility to the students and they can decide the pace and schedule for their education and training.
Despite of the advantages, this mode of online education has its disadvantages too. The students in this mode of learning, lack discipline and motivation and generally tend to develop a lackluster attitude towards education.
The mixed mode of learning in online education combines the advantages of both the modes and it is a combination of personal lectures or face-to-face interaction learning through online activities.
Now that you have a better understanding of different methodologies of online education, you can pick up the right one for you and enhance your skills.

The Writing is on the Oil Well

American education has to become more competitive yesterday.As published in Discover Magazine, January 2006:

The performance of U.S. students in middle and high schools on international math and science exams is below the average of 38 other countries. Even advanced American math and physics students score near dead last among students in 20 tested countries, the panel reported. Since 1990 the number of bachelor's degrees in engineering has declined 8 percent; in mathematics, 20 percent. While 32 percent of U.S. students graduate with degrees in science and engineering, the figure in China is 59 percent.

With the American economy so dependent on oil and oil related products it is absolutely imperative that America stop lagging behind in education and take the lead once again.

With countries in the Middle East like Qatar having vast oil and natural gas deposits making a huge effort today to start the transition of their economy from an oil based one to a knowledge based economy should be a significant warning sign to the United States. These people have some of the largest oil reserves in the world and they are aggressively planning for an economy not based on oil.

As was stated in April 7, 2006 issue of the journal Science "This small Persian Gulf emirate is preparing for life after oil and gas by pouring wealth into education and research"

For example:

In Education City in Qatar the RAND-Qatar Policy Institute has helped Qatar to make tremendous changes in the country's educational institutions. And Qatar Science and Technology Park will be an incubator where private companies can partner with government agencies and academic institutions, developing research into commercial applications and driving Qatar and the region toward a diversified, knowledge-based economy.

What American Institutions are participating?

Prominent signs indicate the presence of educational heavyweights, including Weill Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, and Texas A&M.

It is also noted in the journal Science that "Qatar's primary and secondary schools, which have begun to dispense with traditional rote learning, Al-Hajari reports, replacing it with curricula designed to stimulate creative and independent thinking. And it extends to Qatar University, which was founded in 1977 and is independent of Education City."

Why should we as Americans worry about Qatar?

The fact is that America is ranked 39th world wide in math and science education. Consider that Texas was just ranked, as a state, 24th in a country that was just placed as 39th.

Countries like Qatar, Singapore, China & India are readily getting some of the best researchers that have been educated and trained in America to relocate to their countries.

For example the Journal Science Reports that:

Texas A&M is setting up joint research with the oil industry and studies related to clean air, while Weill Cornell will concentrate on biomedical projects relevant to local health problems. (Diabetes Research) To accelerate the process, (Qatar) plans to bring interested scientists from Weill Cornell's New York base and recruit postdocs. For his part, (Qatar) hopes to lure back expatriate Arab scientists currently flourishing in the West. "Many diaspora researchers are interested in going back if the infrastructure is there," says Hassan. To capitalize on the research, the Qatar Foundation is building the Qatar Science and Technology Park right next door to Education City.Already, big players in industrial R&D, including GE, Microsoft, and ExxonMobil, have signed up and are waiting to move in.

What is happening? Foreigners are coming to America and getting education and training and then exporting that knowledge and experience out of the country.
American researchers and educators are leaving America to be able to do the research that they are either denied or do not have funding for in the United States.
The drain is affecting the quality of education and research in America.
America is losing it's competitive edge in a global economy in the area of research to product development.
The quality of educational facilities in the United States is falling below that of the competitive countries, as are the salaries and benefits which lure our leading researchers away.

These well funded research facilities are in countries that do not hold back development and research in controversial areas like Stem Cell Research. In fact they encourage it and fund it. These countries are leaving the United States behind and will reap the financial rewards and the health benefits of such research before the United States. They will generate jobs and wealth. The Unite States will just lose.

In an article from February 24, 2006 in the Journal Science:

"At an elite science high school in Dallas, Texas, President George W. Bush told the assembled students that the United States "needs a workforce strong in engineering and science and physics" to remain the world's top economic power. His words would seem to bode well for precollege activities funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the only federal agency with an explicit mission to improve science and math education. But 3 days later, the president unveiled a 2007 budget request that would cut--for the third straight year--a 4-year-old program at NSF aimed at doing exactly that." "If the (Education and Human Resources) EHR budget stays flat, there's no hope of accomplishing what corporate America says is needed to improve the U.S. workforce,"

In his Sate of the union Address on January 31, 2006 President Bush Stated:

"And to keep America competitive, one commitment is necessary above all: We must continue to lead the world in human talent and creativity. Our greatest advantage in the world has always been our educated, hardworking, ambitious people -- and we're going to keep that edge. Tonight I announce an American Competitiveness Initiative, to encourage innovation throughout our economy, and to give our nation's children a firm grounding in math and science."

However, on February 27, 2006 President Bush comes out and announces his plans for the budget: (Washington Post By Mike Allen and Peter Baker 02/07/06)

"President Bush plans to unveil a $2.5 trillion budget today eliminating dozens of politically sensitive domestic programs, including funding for education, environmental protection and business development, while proposing significant increases for the military and international spending, according to White House documents."

These problems that are highlighted above are at the heart of the problem.

Now get into the "No child Left Behind" program which has altered public education and forced it into a rote learning model by demanding testing performance at the sacrifice of building critical thinking skills.

According to Wikipedia Rote Learning is defined as: a learning technique which avoids grasping the inner complexities and inferences of the subject that is being learned and instead focuses on memorizing the material so that it can be recalled by the learner exactly the way it was read or heard. In other words, it also means learning just for the test.

For a Texas school to achieve the academic acceptable rating (the lowest passing standard)

According to the TEA's own 2005 Accountability Manual:

Schools must have passing rates of:

50% percent in Reading Tests

50% in Writing Tests

50% in Social Studies

35% percent in Math tests

25% percent in Science tests

The aspects of learning that involved critical thinking and questioning what is being taught are dieing on the vine so that we reflect an acceptable passing rating as defined by the TAKS test standards for Texas.

I find it horrifying that such low standards are required of students to pass the TAKS test in order to get an academically acceptable rating for the entire school.

No single student would be allowed to pass a single test with a 60%, 40% or 35% grade. The Government is telling us Schools are getting better and more schools are meeting the acceptable rating than they were two years ago. The only reason that is true is because they have lowered the standard and created loop holes that specifically allow for test scores of minorities to be excluded in the reporting.

Our schools are being forced onto a path of intentional failure by placing the appearance of demands and accountability without funding. The current administration in Washington and our representatives across the United States all talk about how important education is but their actions of undermining those initiatives by cutting the money out of education only speak to their real agenda of forcing public education to fail so that they can privatize education.

This agenda is being achieved at the sacrifice of this generation of children that are in school today. The damage that is being done will take decades to repair. Our economy will suffer and the quality of life for your children might actually be less than yours for the first time in American history.

As a nation we need to stop wasting time with foolish projects like School Vouchers and we need to stop spending money and resources on trying to get intelligent design into science classes. These distractions only drain valuable resources and time from the educational system while exasperating the problems at the expense of the education of our children. We need to fix the problems - not create new ones.

We need:

To hold elected officials accountable for sacrificing education.

Better pay for teachers.

More Teachers.

Better resources for education.

Properly fund "No child Left behind"

Modify "No Child Left Behind" to promote critical thinking.

Abandon the method of Rote Learning.

Increase funding for "Head Start".

More involvement of higher learning institutions through the entire educational life of a child.

To spend more money on students per year than we do on prison inmates. ($13,000 per prisoner vs. $6,000 per student)

Stimulate more research in higher education.

Open up Stem Cell research and other programs to lure the leading minds.

Restore incentives to bring the brightest and most talented researchers to America.

To be number 1 in education world wide.

For Texas to lead the United States in education as well.

Educating Yourself to Succeed

The Question
Education is held by our society to be one of the keys to success. Certainly, there are certain professions in which formal academic education is a prerequisite not to success itself, but rather just to get into the front door of the profession.
The question we need to ask is whether or not formal academic education as offered in the current structure of our society is in fact a prerequisite, or even a significant help in achieving success in general (as opposed to within a specific profession) and what are the underlying reasons for this.
What is Success?
Before we can do this we need to decide exactly what we mean by success. It has been defined by some as 'the progressive realisation of a worthwhile dream, goal or ideal', and this is a good definition, but lacks some of the specificity we need to truly determine the role of education in achieving it.
For the purposes of this article I am going to define success as the following.
Achieving a progressively improving state of making a meaningful contribution with integrity, good health, good relationships, material abundance, and self determination.
To further explore what this actually means, what I am saying is that;
To be successful is to be making a positive difference in some way, whilst acting in good faith, looking after your health, enjoying and building strong meaningful relationships, being able to do all of this without concern caused by lack of resources, but rather based on what is good and right, and finally, to be in control of your own life and not reduced to unwilling servitude by slavery, ignorance or an oversized mortgage.
Does Formal Academic Education Teach Us to Do This?
If we judge by the results in our western societies, where nearly everyone has had some education, the majority have finished High School, and a great many have gone on to college. We have to seriously question the true value of formal education to the success of the individual.
By the rates of suicide, drug use, depression, and hopelessness in our society, we can infer that there are some deficiencies in our education system in so far as teaching people to make a contribution they see as meaningful.
By both the increasing obesity, diabetes levels and drug problems in our society we can judge that the education system is ineffective in teaching people to be healthy.
By the divorce rates and level of violence we can make an indicative judgement as to the effectiveness of our education system in teaching people to get along and build strong relationships.
By the level of dependence on welfare, the levels of homelessness and the levels of relative poverty in the richest nations in the world, we can take a good guess as to effectiveness of our education system in teaching people to create material abundance in their own lives.
By the by the mere existence of Blue Monday and TGIF (Thank God It's Friday), we know there are enough people who are forced to do something at least 5 days a week that they would rather not have to do, so we can gauge the effectiveness of our education system to teach people self determination.
I hope this is not too harsh for you, but it is the way it seems from where I sit.
Why is Our Formal Education System so Ineffective?
What nobody tells us is that our existing formal education system is either unable to teach us how to be successful, nor designed to teach us to become successful.
The education system as it currently exists, is based on the needs of an industrial aged society. In the industrial age our own personal interests were in conflict with those of the larger society and of those in power.
Let's look at Relationships
During the early industrial age, when the current system of education took its early froms, we lived in a predominantly patriarchal society in which very few women ever dared to leave their husbands, and husbands therefore didn't actually need to know how to keep their wives happy, similarly, wives just had to be submissive and obedient and that was enough, the marriage lasted for life.
Nowadays, when we have so much freedom to enter and leave relationships without for the most part significant repercussions, we actually need to know how to keep the other person happy. Yet we as a society still don't have a structured means of educating everyone to have functional, long term, meaningful relationships.
What about Material Abundance and Self Determination?
What our industrial age government and society needed was producing tax payers. Society needed some entrepreneurs and business people to assume the risks, acquire the skills, employ these workers and provide capital, but there was still a need for the majority of people to be part of the working underclass.
To keep people going to work to produce for the country and pay taxes to the government, it was necessary to NOT teach them how to create financial independence, in fact it was necessary to actively teach them to be lifelong employees and live from paycheck to paycheck.
One of the effects of encouraging people to manage their long term financial position poorly, is the rise of the attitudes necessary for today's consumerism, buy it now pay for it later, keep up with the Jones's , my identity is created by what I own, and I want it all for me!
This mentality is great for keeping people in debt, keeping people locked into jobs, stimulating the economy, and, you guessed it, raising more taxes. It does not serve the individual in terms of creating long term financial independence, truly sustainable material abundance or achieving the self determination that comes with not being up to your eyeballs in debt.
How about Health?
I don't really understand how our society can be so poorly educated about health as to be so unhealthy, I guess our addiction to (among other things) high fat, low nutrition fast food is tied in with our consumeristic, I want it yesterday lifestyle and attitude.
Whatever the cause, there is obviously money in unhealthy food and where there is money there is power to influence society, which of course means there is yet more money in unhealthy food, and in turn more power to influence.
A bit of a vicious circle, but one that at this point can only be broken by educating our children from a young age to exercise and eat healthy food, something that is obviously not being done in the current system, as evidenced by the growing problems with childhood obesity and type 2 diabetes.
just based on this simple set of observations we can begin to see that a formal education is simply not teaching people to be successful.
The Point
The purpose of this article is not to whine about the formal education system, I only go down that path to make you aware of the need to take matters into your own hands, success education is one of the few areas of life where 'vigilante' action is a good thing.
The point of all of this is that if you are going to learn the skills, attitudes and knowledge you need to be truly successful you are going to have to seek that information out for yourself!
The information is out there, you just need to look for it, in biographies of successful people, in the countless books and audio programs on the market by the many experts in the world.
How do I Educate Myself to Succeed?
Reading
Reading books (both traditional hard copy and now days electronic) is the most powerful way to educate yourself.
Learning from the experiences of others who have gone before you can help you avoid making many of the same mistakes these pioneers have already made, it can stimulate your own thinking and help you find creative solutiosn to your own problems, and it can certainly broaden your thinking and your mind.
So start reading! Read a good mix of 'How to' books in your chosen field, biographies of great people, motivation books, books about success principles, philosophical books and make sure you read some of the classic self help books too (they may be old books but the principles they teach are timeless)
Listening
Whilst reading is vital, the problem with reading is that it takes dedicated, focused time, and in our busy world, listening to audio books, seminars, and other audio programs offers a great way to educate yourself in time that would otherwise be largely wasted.
If you have to sit in traffic twice a day, don't just let that time be wasted time, stick a tape/CD/MP3 program on and use the time to teach and motivate yourself. Zig Ziglar calls this enrolling in 'automobile university'. In my time in the military we used a principle called concurrent activity, which essentially means deliberately accomplishing multiple outcomes simultaneously, or "killing two birds with one stone" as the old cliche goes.
You can use this same principle by enrolling in Zigs University and making double use of your travel time.
Association
One of the greatest powers for human change is that of association. basically we have a strong tendency to become like, assume the attitudes of, and start to think and act like those we hang around.
This is why parents instinctively want to keep their children away from 'the bad crowd', however we can use the exact same principle to our advantage by deliberately hanging around the 'good crowd'.
If we want to be healthy, we are better to hang around 'health conscious' people at a gym than 'anesthetised unconscious' people in a bar.
If we want to be wealthy, we need to make a deliberate effort to associate with wealthy people, not because we want them to give us anything, but because the way they think has led them to be wealthy, and we want to learn to think like them so we too can make ourselves wealthy.
Any group of people with the values and results you want to foster are candidates for association, however one of the best sources around are seminars and workshops on subjects relevant to what you are trying to accomplish.
Mentoring & Coaching
Having someone to whom you are held accountable for your performance or non performance is a great help in disciplining yourself to do what you need to do to get the results you want.
Coaching however is much more than that, a good coach will be able to give you ideas, encouragement and when you need it support to get you through the journey you are on. They can give you feedback from a more detached third party perspective, helping us see past our sometimes overwhelmingly personal involvement in a situation.
Getting yourself a good coach or mentor can definitely be a big help in educating yourself to succeed.
Go for it (and don't quit)
These four things, reading, listening, association and coaching will give you the necessary resources to educate yourself to succeed.
Keep in mind that your current 'education' has taken you many many years to acquire, so you can't expect change to be either instant or easy.
It is however very possible, and with your persistent determined effort definitely achievable, and when you start to see the results of your self administered success education, it is unquestionably worth the effort!

5 Ways to Fund Your Child's College Education

Did you know that the cost of a 4 year degree program is around $20,000 dollars per year.
The cost of a college education is probably the most expensive item in bringing up children today. When you take into account tuition fees, exam fees, living expenses, accommodation, books and computers it's not surprising that the average cost of college education is over $20,000 per year and that's before the social side of college life.
Today we live in a world where only the best educated and most prepared can succeed. The Job market is probably the most crucial and competitive element of our society and having a college education and degree goes a long way towards succeeding in it.
When our children are ready to enter the world of work it will be even more difficult and a college education will be essential to succeed. Here are 5 ways to fund your child's college education.
1. The usual method of parental funding of college education is out of current income, that is out of your weekly or monthly salary.
Whilst this is the most common method of funding college education it is one that only the very rich or highly paid can afford to do with ease. Even if there are 2 salaries most families find it difficult and will require sacrifices, even more so if you have more than 1 child. At best most parents can only afford to contribute part of the costs of college education out of current income. Additional sources of income will be required.
2. Your child can work his or her way through college.
Many students have to work whilst studying but many find the experience of juggling a job, lectures and a social life very difficult. Often the result is that students drop out of college education, fail their exams or don't do as well as they could.
3. Your child may have the opportunity to take out student loans to fund their college education.
Today the vast majority of students are forced to take out student loans to fund all or part of their college education. Usually to subsidize parental contributions, student loans are the most common way of students funding their own college education. Many students however, leave college with substantial debt and even with interest rates at historically low levels today's students can expect to have to pay substantial monthly repayments for many years.
4. Your child may obtain a scholarship or be entitled to grants from either federal or local funds towards the cost of their college education.
There are many sources of student scholarships or grants and with a bit of research most students today can find some grant funding. These sources however cannot be guaranteed for the future. Whilst scholarships and grants do not have to be repaid and as such are preferable to loans they are not guaranteed or predictable and therefore relying on them for our children is a risk.
5. Take out an education savings plan to fund college education.
An education savings plan is a regular saving plan into which you and your children can contribute. The plans are administered by colleges or state authorities and can be taken out for any child including a newborn babies. Because of the effects of long term compound interest the earlier you take out your plan the easier it will be and the lower your contributions will be. Because the funds are built up prior to going to college students do not have to rely on scholarships, grants or loans and they can concentrate on their studies.
There are a number of options to fund your child's college education but the only way funds can be guaranteed is by you taking out an education savings plan. With the education savings plan you decide what you can invest and your child can also contribute to his or her college education. With luck scholarships and grants will still be available as will loans to top up if necessary. If your child does not go to college the fund can be cashed in.
Taking out an education savings plan early will give your child the real opportunity of a college education and the best prospects for a job when they leave college.