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The high cost of gasoline has created a surge in demand for online and hybrid courses. In a fully online course, the student doesn’t have to visit a campus or a classroom. In hybrid courses, students visit the classroom less frequently than in a traditional course. 

This New York Times article called High Cost of Driving Ignites Online Classes Boom offers some striking examples from students and academic administrators. No faculty members were interviewed for the article, even though administrators said they were assigning more faculty to teach online courses. 

I started teaching online courses in 2006, and I was posting web content for my courses back in 2003. I’ve found that an online course takes me about twice as much effort to develop and prepare as a F2F course. I can walk to my university office from my home, so I don’t really save any money by teaching online.

Universities should provide instructional design and technology support staff and resources to help instructors develop and publish successful course materials in an online environment. This doesn’t mean that the staff are teaching the courses. 

I started developing web sites back in 1995, but most faculty members in my generation are ill-equipped to develop their own sites. Most of us learned how to teach in classrooms, not on the web. The first time I ever used a Web browser was in 1994, a year after I earned my doctorate.

They have to rely on whatever resources their university provides for online learning. Newly minted doctoral students and retrained faculty have a better chance of succeeding in an online teaching environment. 

Image courtesy of Cali2Okie through a Creative Commons license. 

I’ve seen more bicycles, scooters and motorcycles in Honolulu as our gasoline prices stay above $4 a gallon, and popular routers on The Bus get more crowded.

In my nightmares, I’m running on the sidewalk, and there’s someone who is riding right at me:

• Going full speed 
• Ignoring the crosswalk signals
• Holding a lit cigarette
• Riding without a helmet
• Screaming into their mobile phone - bonus points if they’re cursing
• Listening to their iPod
• Wearing sunglasses, so I can’t see their eyes

Anyone who listens to an iPod while they’re riding looks like a candidate for a Darwin Award.  If they’re talking on a mobile phone,  they’re paying even less attention to where they’re going.

Once in a while, I see someone driving a motorized vehicle on the sidewalk. There’s a guy who I see almost every morning that I run on Ala Moana Boulevard. He guns his gas scooter down the mauka (ocean side) sidewalk on his way to Aloha Tower. He’s riding against the automobile traffic, but it’s a very wide sidewalk.

Then there’s the man I saw last month who rode his motorcycle up Beretania on the sidewalk behind Century Square and the Catholic Archdiocesan offices. He parked his bike next to the bicycle rack. Mopeds and scooters can park at a bicycle rack, but not motorcycles.

Sometimes I see people riding scooters and bicycles with one hand on the handlebar and the other hand holding a cigarette. Looks healthy!

Image courtesy of Thomas Hawk through a Creative Commons license. 

Related pages on billso.com

Honolulu mass transit

Andrew Grove, a co-founder of Intel and the man who coined one of my favorite concepts, the strategic inflection point (SIP), is rallying corporate and government support for electric cars in the US. He realizes that Americans are reluctant to buy an all-electric vehicle, however:

While car makers have been developing plug-ins, Grove says the nation should consider ways of retrofitting the 80 million low-mileage pickups, sport utility vehicles and vans on the road to make them capable of running on both gasoline and electric power.

Giving these vehicles “dual fuel” functions would be similar to changes made in other technologies. DVD players, for example, were often combined with VCR tape players when they were first introduced to help consumers make the transition.

See this Associated Press article titled Ex-Intel head pushes electric cars for more details.

Related articles and pages on billso.com

• Strategic inflection point
• 12 November 2007: I want a better television - but it’s not ready yet
• 7 March 2007: Microsoft vs. Google