Despite the growing popularity of online distance learning across all sectors, there is accompanying concern about the effectiveness of asynchronous learning. Is this learning effective? How engaged are the learners? Does anyone really learn anything? Is online learning any better than a correspondence course? Is this another educational fad? This presentation will provide an overview of some current assessment strategies in online learning and what is being gleaned from this assessment. It will also look at how the current love affair with online learning may impact all other areas of higher education, in both credit and non-credit arenas.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services grant to create the "Digital New Jersey Highway" is a collaborative project to build a distributed multi-media digital collection of resources freely available for instruction and research from multiple collections housed across New Jersey's cultural and educational institutions.

The early days of learning objects focused on making it easy for the individual educator to create web-enabled educational resources to share with students. As learning object technologies mature, the focus is shifting to leveraging learning objects for the good of a learning community, through a collaborative learning repository. An educational repository must make objects easy and intuitive to discover, understand and reuse but also safeguard the intellectual property of the creator from damage or misuse. This talk will focus on the standards and protocols needed to support and manage learning objects and the repositories that contain them.

Learning objects and understanding their use and reuse in sound pedagogical settings is currently of interest worldwide. Organizations such as FIPSE, the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative of EDUCAUSE, the New Media Consortium, Sloan Foundation's Asynchronous Learning Networks and the Academic Advanced Distributive Learning Co-Labs linked with the DOD and the elearning community all have a major focus on the importance of learning objects and their ties to learning pedagogy as it especially applies to customized delivery of learning objects to online learners according to their style of learning. Examples of learning objects will be presented and their use and reuse in different learning settings will be explored.

This panel will showcase innovative models of faculty development designed to guide and support faculty through the process of integrating technology into their special area of expertise, the college or university curriculum. Face-to-face, online, and hybrid approaches emphasize the primacy of the faculty in technology-enhanced teaching and learning, for both the distance learning environment and the conventional classroom.

Berkeley College: This presentation will provide an overview of the effective strategies employed at Berkeley College to ensure faculty engagement, including the all-inclusive Online Faculty Resource Center which she developed for online faculty. EDUCAUSE recently posted Berkeley's Online Faculty Resource Center on its Effective Practices and Procedures site.

Raritan Valley Community College: Holly Smythe will share her "Great Instructional Resources" faculty Website and briefly introduce "hot topics" such as Web Accessibility, Copyright, Academic Honesty, Learning Objects, and more.

William Paterson University: The purpose of this presentation is to describe a series of efforts that helped faculty at William Paterson University with technology initiatives designed to enhance teaching and learning in the form of support, training, and acknowledgement. The three-pronged approach to motivating faculty to integrate technology into their curriculum will be discussed.

This panel will highlight four unique distance learning programs as they have emerged at three institutions and an innovative consortium in New Jersey. Considered separately, each represents a compelling model of strategic implementation of institutional mission and vision. Considered together, they present a broad range of useful information and insights on curriculum development, student support, meeting the needs of the non-traditional learner, faculty concerns, technical issues, and many other important lessons learned.

ACC: Lessons learned in distance education.
Where Atlantic Cape Community college has been and what we look forward to in the future.

Global Education: How FDU uses distance learning to bring the world to our campuses The distance learning initiative at Fairleigh Dickinson University is a first-in-the-nation requirement that all students take one online course per year. These courses make use of global virtual faculty members and a variety of technological resources to help our students understand the world through the eyes of others. Our talk will highlight the use of distance learning as a creative pedagogical tool for enhancing the learning experience of our on-campus students.

The NJVCCC: OnLine, OnTime & OnTarget
The New Jersey Virtual Community College Consortium is a cooperative venture of the nineteen County/Community Colleges in New Jersey. It's objective is to allow colleges to 'share' on-line courses among it's members. This session will present a description of how the NJVCCC was conceived, created and operates. It began with a pilot semester in August 1999, which involved nine Colleges. It is now building its Spring 2004 semester schedule with over 400 courses and the participation of all nineteen Colleges in the state.

TESC - Testing at a Distance: How to Maintain Security
The ups and downs of keeping exams secure while making them accessible and available to students across the country and overseas.

This presentation will provide background and up-to-date news on key education and education technology policy and funding issues with which the Administration and Congress are occupied. It will focus specifically on: the implementation of and funding for the No Child Left Behind Act, the status of the E-Rate (especially waste, fraud and abuse issues), and the reauthorization of IDEA and the Higher Education Act, with special attention paid to technology-related provisions.

As a former President of ACUTA, this speaker will discuss emerging trends in the regulation of the telecommunications industry. Other topics will include a range of national policy issues, changes in the Federal Communication Commission and the Universal Service Fund.

Studies show that IT spending at colleges and universities has recently increased at a rate of about 15 percent per year, representing between three-and-a-half and 6 percent of annual institutional operating budgets. Yet, the demand for these services is growing. Today's campuses are dependent upon high-speed networks, comprehensive online student services and Web-based instructional systems to function effectively. Students of all ages are increasingly demanding IT services to help register for classes and make tuition payments, to communicate with one another and to access instructional materials. Against this backdrop, campus executives must ensure that technology investments across the institution produce measurable outcomes by effectively leveraging technology investments through a redesign of the organizational structure. This session will provide a detailed case study of initiatives implemented at Bergen Community College, a New Jersey institution that has enjoyed success improving student services and expanding access to campus technology while effectively cutting costs.

Enterprise portals form a key part of a Digital Campus initiative. In fact, enterprises that do not use a portal for their Digital Campus initiatives will find increased costs and reduced effectiveness. While there is significant hype in the portal market, the enterprise
portal does present real benefits by providing users with a single, easy-to-use interface to a variety of information and services. During this session, SCT will demonstrate the power or portals, and discuss out how colleges and universities are making personalized
delivery of information and services a reality. In addition, attendees will leave with a framework to begin evaluting portal capabilities and outlining their institution's portal project requirements.

Join Bob Cominsky, Vice President of Collegis, for a one hour presentation and discussion on the senior executive's role in administrative systems selection and implementation. This informal seminar will focus on ways in which institutional executives can ensure that administrative systems selection and implementation is a strategic initiative rather than a technical exercise. The seminar will present an overview of the typical administrative systems implementation project and highlight specific actions executives can take to generate strategic value from the effort. The seminar will also provide an overview of the budget requirements for major administrative systems implementation.

Executives attending this seminar will leave prepared to:

• Focus project participants on future effective operations, not just automating current practices
• Set institutional expectations that ensure a return on the considerable investment required by modern administrative systems
• Establish project structures that transform administrative operations and business infrastructure serving students and faculty
  

Open Source software has garnered a great deal of ink in the general, technical and Higher Ed press in the past year. What does it mean to you? Is it all hype? Is it a fad that you can safely ignore? What are the risks associated with Open Source systems? What are the rewards? This talk will provide an overview of the current state of Open Source and other related systems. We will discuss how Open Source systems affect Higher Ed in particular and how you can successfully take advantage of Open Source systems in your organization.