Our partners at Penn State World Campus and The Corner of College and Allen answered the top questions about paying your bill as a World Campus student. Visit their blog to read more.
Welcome to the Spring 2016 Semester!
The new year, winter season, and spring semester have arrived! Welcome to Penn State’s Spring 2016 semester. We are happy to have you join us. Happy New Year, and we wish you the best in health, happiness, and education.
We are happy that our Learning, Design, and Technology online programs are growing. Our online courses are filled to capacity, and we will increase our offerings to accommodate the upcoming waves of new students. The growth is due in great part to the support and recommendations that we have received from our current students. The increased enrollments will allow us to develop new courses and tracks, improve the student experience, and enhance the technologies infused into our courses.
In the upcoming months we will remind our students about their responsibility to register for courses as soon as they are eligible to register. We are committed to serving our degree and certificate students first, and we do this by offering tiers of priority registration. Students should remember that they do not need to pay for courses at the time that they register—billing occurs after registration, so students should register for their desired courses during the timeframe when they first become eligible.
We are excited to bring two new courses online:
- LDT 581 – Theoretical Foundations of Learning, Design, and Technology
- LDT 550 – Design Studio
We have already rolled out a substantial revision to EDTEC 566 – Computers as Learning Tools. And we look forward to rolling out two major course revisions in the Summer 2016 semester:
- EDTEC/LDT 561 – Measuring the Impact of Technology on Learning
- EDTEC 440 – Educational Technology Integration
This will be a great year, a great season, a great semester, and a great experience for our students and faculty. Thank you for your continued support of our program.
To read all of the LDT Online Programs Newsletter Items for January 2016, click here.
Enhancing LDT Online Program Communications
Over the past year the LDT program has explored methods to better support and communicate with the students of our online programs. Our L-EDTEC mailing list continues to be a primary outlet for pushing information to our community. But there are so many other channels that are more fun, rich, and conversational. We have posted and discussed a number of LDT program details on our Twitter feed (@psuldt). We have videos of interviews with our faculty and students (with more videos forthcoming) on our YouTube channel. And now, at the center of it all, we have this blog, LDT Online FAQs and Figures, as the landing page and eventual go-to source for news and updates.
We will still use our L-EDTEC mailing list to push information to our students, but the e-mailed newsletters will serve as summaries of ongoing communications on this blog.
Summary of Spring 2016 Course Registration
As of the date of this posting, the LDT program’s World Campus courses for Spring 2016 are filled to capacity.
Here are the World Campus courses that we’re ultimately offering for the Spring 2016 semester:
- LDT (EDTEC) 467
- LDT 505
- LDT (INSYS) 527
- LDT 550
- LDT 566
- LDT 581
Notes about Spring 2016 registration:
- Priority registration for students with 20+ credits in our program started October 13, 2015.
- Priority registration for students with 9+ credits in our program started October 20, 2015.
- Registration for students accepted into our certificate or degree program, but who had 8 or fewer credits began October 27, 2015.
- Registration for students outside of our program and for the general public (not admitted to a program) began November 17, 2015.
- LDT total course availability was 95% filled before Thanksgiving 2015.
- There were only 3 total seats remaining by Christmas 2015. They filled by January 4, 2016 at 9:00 AM.
- Two courses were canceled due to low enrollment after November 4 (after the timeframe when our current students were eligible to register).
Registration lessons for our students:
- Register as soon as you are eligible. Plan ahead.
- Once our courses become available to the general public, they usually fill to capacity.
- If the students admitted into our programs register early and a course fills before being open to the general public we will explore options to add additional seats to support our enrolled students.
Study Recruitment: Mothers from Rural PA Studying Online
Posted on behalf of a Penn State doctoral student conducting a research study of interest to the LDT program:
Hello!
My name is Michelle Covert and I am a PhD candidate in the Adult Education program at The Pennsylvania State University. I would like to invite you to participate in my study called Towards an Understanding of the Experiences of Rural Student-Mothers Pursuing Higher Education Online. If you live in rural Western or Central Pennsylvania, and are a student and a mother in a 100% online undergraduate or graduate program at Penn State, you may be eligible to participate.
You will be asked to take part in two to three aspects of the study. All participants will be asked to complete up to three interviews, via telephone or in person, lasting a minimum of one hour each. All participants will also be asked to write in a journal documenting your schedule and thoughts about your work/life balance. The journal will require a minimum of ten to fifteen minutes each day and will be completed over at least one week. Additionally, some participants may be asked to be observed in your homes while studying or working on assignments for your online programs. The observations will last from one hour to five hours, depending on your schedule and what is most comfortable for you.
The data collected in this study will be used in a dissertation but may also be used at professional conferences or symposia, and may be published in professional publications. All participants will remain anonymous.
If you are interested in participating, please contact me via email at your earliest convenience at mlf164@psu.edu.
Thank you for your time!
Michelle Covert, PhD Candidate
Adult Education program
The Pennsylvania State University
M.Ed. Degree Checklist for 30-credit Program
We have created a checklist to help students track their progress through the 30-credit Master of Education in Learning, Design, and Technology degree program. This file was updated in November 2015.
Certificate Students: When to Apply for the M.Ed.
If you are a student in the Postbaccalaureate Certificate in Educational Technology Integration program and you intend to continue into our M.Ed. in LDT master’s degree program, we encourage you to begin your application process during or as you complete your fourth of the five courses in the certificate. If students wait too long into their fifth course of the certificate program, and then there’s a delay in finalizing your admission, there could be additional obstacles to your admission. If you have questions about transitioning from a certificate to a degree student, please talk with your advisor or write to Dr. Kirby. We aim to make your transition as smooth as possible.
M.Ed. Degree Program Choices
Students currently enrolled in the 33-credit M.Ed. in LDT—Educational Technology Option program are eligible to transition to the 30-credit M.Ed. in LDT (no option) program. However, such a move does not benefit every student. Anyone who moves to the 30-credit program will be required to complete all of the 30-credit program’s requirements, which may in turn require more courses to be completed than if the student simply continued their 33-credit program. Ultimately, students in the Ed Tech Option should be aware that making the transition is possible, but any consideration of the transition should be made with the consultation of your advisor and Dr. Kirby. If you have questions about this, please ask your advisor.
LDT at PETE&C
The LDT program will be exhibiting at the Pennsylvania Educational Technology Exposition and Conference (PETE&C) in Hershey, Pennsylvania (USA) on February 21 to 24. We would love to have current LDT World Campus students work with us at our booth to talk with prospective students and industry professionals about our online programs. We also hope to have a meet-up of all LDT students and faculty who are attending the event. So, if you’re planning to attend PETE&C, please write to Dr. Kirby.
Request for Interviews with Current Students
Our social media team would like to interview current LDT-World Campus students via video conference. We are looking for all types of LDT students—just beginning, nearly complete, international, domestic, etc.—to feature on our social channels. Please write to Dr. Kirby if you would like to share your Penn State student story!