LESSON 12 ASSIGNMENT
Katherine Squires

I first visited the website of UNEXT.com (http://www.unextcom) because of my own personal interest in online courses for professional and continuing education and their relationship with Columbia University. UNEXT.com offers an online MBA program through Cardean University (http://www.cardean.edu) with courses developed by Columbia University, University of Chicago and other business school faculty. Cardean University states on their home page that "Cardean University offers next-generation business courses online to companies and individuals around the globe. In association with our world-renowned academic consortium members, we have created an interactive, engaging learning environment designed around real-world business problems. They have some very innovative courses and are using technology to enhance the learning environment.

I then visited UCLA Extension, once again because of my personal experience and background. Briefly in 1989 I formed a legal education and publishing company in California that worked with the continuing education divisions of major universities to design and develop law and business-relate programs. We designed, developed and implemented the first legal assistant program at San Diego State University and the University of Houston-Downtown. UCLA was one of the schools that offered the love version of our 6-week introduction to law school program. UCLA's extension program at that time was quite voluminous and continues to grow extensively. To view information about their online programs visit http://www.uclaextension.org/index_online.html. You can also visit http://www.onlinelearning.net/ to learn about their online continuing education programs. Their programs are very diversified, provide a variety of learning approaches and support IT development needs.

The third Site I visited was http://www.petersons.com an affiliate of Thomson Learning. Peterson is well-known in the learning world for providing education aids and career education guidance in text form and has developed a rather extensive online university. I was particularly interested in their training and executive education area (since that is my primary career area at this time) and found an exciting search engine that can locate many types of professional development opportunities (http://www.seminarinformation.com/index.cfm?refer=PTR). The search capabilities were user-friendly and their major categories made it easy to find various programs, conferences, trade-shows etc.

In summary, it is apparent from these Sites that strategic partnerships are mainstream in online education. Traditional text providers such as Thomson are recognizing the opportunities provided by the Internet and telecommunication access and availability. As we read in the lesson, "the growth of these technologies make it possible to readily deliver a range of interactive instructional programs across home, school and work settings in both synchronous and asynchronous modes that are more in-tune with the new student constraints of time, resources and convenience, as well as highly competitive marketplace for access to postsecondary education, lifelong and continuing professional development and workforce retooling" (Ingle, p. 10 - Lesson 12).