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Guri-Rosenblit, Sarah
- Professor
- The Open University of Israel
- Department of Education and Psychology
- Israel
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| Prof. Sarah Guri-Rosenblit is a Professor
at the Department of Education and Psychology at
the Open University of Israel. She is heading the
master degree program on "Technology and Learning
Systems". She received her PhD from Stanford
University in 1984 in education and political science.
In the last fifteen years most of her studies are
conducted in the field of comparative research of
higher education systems with a special emphasis
on distance education. She published books and dozens
of articles in this field.
She has participated in the last decade in many
national and international forums related to various
aspects of higher education. From 1995 to 1999
she was the director of the "Rethinking Higher
Education Program" co-sponsored by three
venerable Israeli institutions: The Academy of
Sciences, The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and
the Council for Higher Education. In the last
decade she was a member of several committees
nominated by the Council for Higher Education
for examining various aspects of broadening access
to higher education and accreditation. She was
an appointed fellow in 1995 to the Salzburg Seminar
on "Higher Education: Institutional Structures
for the 21st Century", and a member of the
task committee on "Past, Present and Future
of Liberal Education" nominated in 2000 by
the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and the Carnegie
Corporation of New York. Since June 2003, she
is a member of the Scientific Committee of Europe
and North America in the UNESCO Forum of Higher
Education, Research and Knowledge.
She has been awarded recently by the Rockefeller
Foundation a residency at Bellagio Study and Conference
Center in September 2005.
Selected Publications
- Guri-Rosenblit, S. (2005). Eight Paradoxes
in the Implementation Process of E-Learning
in Higher Education, Higher Education Policy,
18, 5-29.
- Guri-Rosenblit, S. (2005). 'Distance Education'
and 'E-learning': Not the Same Thing, Higher
Education, 49 (4), 467-493.
- Guri-Rosenblit, S. (forthcoming). Higher Education
in Transition: Horizontal and Vertical Patterns
of Diversity, in: Nata, R. (Ed.), New Directions
in Higher Education, New York: Nova Science
Publishers.
- Guri-Rosenblit, S. (2005). Diverse Models
of Distance Teaching Universities. In: Howard,
C., Boettcher, J., Justice, L., Schenk, K.,
Rogers, P. L., Berg, G. (Eds.) Encyclopedia
of Distance Learning, Hershey, PA. : Idea
Group, Inc., 674-680.
- Guri-Rosenblit, S. (1999). Distance and
Campus Universities: Tensions and Interactions:
A Comparative Study of Five Countries, Oxford:
Pergamon Press & International Association
of Universities (298 pp).
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| Impacts of the Digital Technologies
on Shaping Higher Education Environments
Digital technologies affect nowadays most spheres
of life, including higher education environments,
and their effects are likely to grow in the future
in all domains of academic activity. In the last
decade dozens of conferences were devoted to examining
a broad spectrum of uses enabled by the new technologies,
hundreds of scholarly articles and books were
published on various aspects of e-learning, and
multiple ventures have been undertaken by many
actors in the academic and the corporate worlds
applying a variety of uses of the new technologies'
potential. However, there seems to be a wide gap
between the rhetoric in the literature describing
the sweeping effects of the digital technologies
in higher education settings and their actual
implementation. This international comparative
project aims at examining the failures, as well
the successes, of the various applications and
uses of the new technologies in various higher
education settings. It is based on a meta-analysis
of hundreds of studies conducted in over twenty
countries. It analyzes the many variables that
account for the differential impacts of the digital
technologies on different higher education settings,
such as: the technological infrastructure in developed
versus developing countries, different academic
cultures in different national contexts, different-type
higher education institutions, different fields
of knowledge, diverse student clienteles, cost
calculations (and miscalculations). Understanding
some of the erroneous assumptions behind the technologies'
implementation and the crucial parameters that
affect their use is essential for policy makers
at institutional and national levels of higher
education systems, as well as for researchers
and practitioners in this field, in the process
of planning a macro-level comprehensive strategy
for the efficient and effective applications of
the new technologies in the academic world. Moreover,
the employment of the new technologies is closely
interconnected with at least four other topic
areas of the NCS Program: widening of access and
equity in higher education; globalization and
internationalization of higher education; diversity
of institutional models (such as virtual online
universities, "brick and click models",
consortia type ventures, etc.); and the public-private
mix of higher education.
The collection of data from hundreds of studies
on the applications of the technologies has started
already in 2002 while staying for a short sabbatical
at the Center for Studies in Higher Education
at UCBerkeley. The final goal is to publish the
findings and conclusions of this wide comparative
study as a book. A three-month stay at the University
of Maryland University College (UMUC), which is
the largest and most successful public university
in the US in the field of distance education (it
has nowadays around 91,000 students in nearly
160 locations worldwide), will assist me greatly
in analyzing the reasons of its success in online
teaching, in the face of so many failures in this
field in many leading US universities, and comprehend
more fully its multiple learning/teaching formats,
and its successful mix of being a very large public
comprehensive university and operating a successful
for-profit corporation.
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