About Online Learning Consortium
The Online Learning Consortium (OLC) is a collaborative community of higher education leaders and innovators, dedicated to advancing quality digital teaching and learning experiences designed to reach and engage the modern learner – anyone, anywhere, anytime. OLC inspires innovation and quality through an extensive set of resources, including, best-practice publications, quality benchmarking, leading-edge instruction, community-driven conferences, practitioner-based and empirical research and expert guidance. The growing OLC community includes faculty members, administrators, trainers, instructional designers, and other learning professionals, as well as educational institutions, professional societies and corporate enterprises. Visit http://onlinelearningconsortium.org for more information.
The Back Story
The partnership between OLC and DUO has deep roots, going back to a seed grant provided by the Consortium more than 20 years ago that inspired Drexel’s move into online education, leading it to create its wholly owned subsidiary, Drexel University Online. Under the new partnership, OLC will provide its community access to DUO’s “Virtually Inspired” website, which features a series of high-quality videos highlighting how educators are inventing the future of connected learning, using the latest technologies – from virtual reality, robotics and holography, to real-time videoconferencing, gamification and wearables.
“Virtually Inspired was created to showcase some of the brightest minds and best practices in online and blended education, with the goal of building an evolving repository of replicable ideas,” said Susan Aldridge, Ph.D., President, Drexel University Online. “We are delighted that our partnership with OLC will help expand the reach of Virtually Inspired to those who can most benefit from its lessons.”
Between now and OLC’s Innovate Conference in April, the partnership will continue to gain momentum. An expanding number of video case studies featured on Virtually Inspired are the product of dozens of interviews conducted by DUO with faculty, administrators and training officers worldwide to uncover pockets of innovation in the technology-enhanced education arena.
The website will also incorporate interviews with online learning experts, a section for visitors to share their own leading-edge practices and a space for reviewing published books and articles in the field.