With more than one million page visits to the UW-Madison Continuing Studies online Distance Education Resource Library so far in 2011, no one can dispute that interest in online education is flourishing.
Any one in the community as well as faculty and students are invited to use this ever-expanding online resource focused on research and best practices in online teaching and training. The library is filled with proceedings papers and presentation resources from 2001 onward and videos of invited speakers from 2004.
The library is an outgrowth of the Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning, held in Madison for the last 27 years and attended each year by nearly 1,000 national and international professionals.
“UW-Madison’s Distance Education Resource Library is the largest available online that is open to anyone.” said Jane Terpstra, outreach program manager in Continuing Studies. “We were early adopters in the open education movement, making our resources available before projects such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare.”
The database is fully searchable by keyword, name, type of event, and date. Terpstra added that there were more than 255,000 resource downloads in the first 11 months of 2011.