Dear Commons Community,

I gave a two-hour presentation today entitled, Blended Learning Meets MOOCs:  Higher Education’s Digital Future, to a group of faculty mostly from the School of Economic Sciences and IT.  It is a presentation I did earlier this year at the EDUCAUSE ELI Conference. The presentation examines the influence of two developments in online learning namely blended learning and massive open online courses (MOOCs) on the future of higher education.    Its thrust is that the pedagogical value of blended learning combined with the scalability of MOOCs will be major drivers in education for the foreseeable future.  The audience provided good questions more geared to blended learning than MOOC issues.

In the evening, I traveled to the Potchefstroom Campus and had dinner with Prof. Manie Spamer, Executive Director of Open Distance Learning of North-West University.  Prof. Spamer is a dedicated and experienced distance educator.  The unit he heads provides training mostly for teachers in rural areas of South Africa where there is  little if any Internet connectivity.  He has established a network of training centers manned by small teams of facilitators who assist teachers who have received training materials or “course-packs”.  He has an enrollment of more than 30,000 students in his program.  It was an excellent dinner and the conversation first-rate with a distance educator who has provided a valuable service to teachers in South Africa.

Tony