Techno-News Blog

by Kurt Wagner, Re/Code

LinkedIn is keen on getting college students onto its platform, especially college seniors about to enter the job market. Roslansky said the Lynda.com acquisition further promotes this focus, and could help get LinkedIn’s foot in the door of some of these classrooms. Lynda already works with 40 percent of the nation’s colleges and universities, including all of the Ivy League schools. “Colleges are [using] this platform to help students learn skills they need before they take a class or during a class or to augment some of the materials these institutions are using in their day-to-day,” Roslansky explained. “This platform reaches students.”

http://recode.net/2015/04/09/three-reasons-linkedin-broke-the-bank-for-lynda-com/

By Olimar Maisonet-Guzman, Devex

Every year, the international community comes together to commemorate the International Girls in ICT Day to raise awareness about the gender gap in the technology sector. Nonetheless, every year we continue to hear the same statistics: Women are 14 percent less likely than men to own a mobile phone. Moreover, 25 percent fewer women and girls are online than men and boys; this gap grows over 40 percent in sub-Saharan Africa. That begs the question: What does the international community still needs to do to solve the gender gap in the access and use of technology? Closing the usage gap between girls and boys is important for the promotion of the information society. As interactions between governments and society continue to rely more on information and communication technologies, it becomes crucial that the voices of women and girls continue to be represented in the digital world.

https://www.devex.com/news/3-ways-to-solve-technology-access-barriers-for-girls-85929

by Susan Adams, Forbes

The hiring picture keeps getting better for college graduates. According to a new survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), employers are planning to hire 9.6% more graduates for their U.S. operations than they did from the class of 2014. That’s a one percent hike from the 8.6% gain a year ago and a significant jump from 2013, when employers said they would boost hiring by just 2.1% over the previous year. A non-profit group in Bethlehem, PA, NACE links college placement offices with employers. NACE’s questionnaire asked employers to rate the academic disciplines they target for their college hires. At the top of the list: engineering degrees. Some 72% of companies said they want to hire students set to graduate in that discipline. Sixty eight percent are looking for business majors and 58% want computer science majors. At the bottom of the list: health sciences, education and agriculture. Here is a chart showing employers’ hiring expectations by major:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2015/04/15/the-college-degrees-and-skills-employers-most-want-in-2015/

By Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology

The volume of data captured by the Internet of Things (IoT) will exceed 1.6 zettabytes by 2020, according to a recent forecast from ABI Research. That’s a seven-fold increase from last year’s 200 exabytes of data collected by IoT devices. Still, only a small portion of that data has been accessible for analytics. “The data originating from connected products and processes follows a certain journey of magnitudes,” explained Principal Analyst Aapo Markkanen in a press release. “The yearly volumes that are generated within endpoints are counted in yottabytes, but only a tiny fraction of this vast data mass is actually being captured for storage or further analysis. And of the captured volume, on average over 90 percent is stored or processed locally without a cloud element, even though this ratio can vary greatly by application segment. So far, the locally dealt data has typically been largely inaccessible for analytics, but that is now starting to change.”

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/04/15/internet-of-things-data-to-top-1-6-zettabytes-by-2020.aspx

By John K. Waters, Campus Technology

Technology driven disruptive innovation in higher education “Disruption” is one of the most overused buzzwords in education today, according to education industry watcher Michelle R. Weise, and yet most people don’t really know what it means. “There is this tendency for pundits, policy makers and institutional leaders to take any kind of technological advancement, call it a ‘disruptive innovation,’ cram it into the classroom experience and then hope that somehow efficiencies are going to magically appear,” Weise said during her keynote presentation at the recent CT Forum conference in Long Beach, CA. “Obviously, it’s not that simple.”

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/04/16/disrupting-higher-education.aspx

by Computerworld Australia

Analyst firms like IDC, Forrester and Gartner are all in agreement that organisations of every ilk are being disrupted by the forces of digital technology: mobile, cloud, social and data analytics. Education, of course is not exempt, and according to Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst, Jan-Martin Lowendahl, traditional educational business models are being fundamentally challenged by digitalisation. “Social and economic pressures are forcing senior education leaders to rethink business models and consider a range of new technologies to bring down the cost of administering education institutions and scale the business,” Lowendahl says. “An increasing number of technical innovations and technology trends are emerging from within the industry, but most will emerge outside the industry, driven by major forces such as digital business and the consumerisation and industrialisation of IT.”

http://www.computerworld.com.au/mediareleases/22106/digital-disruption-meets-education/

by Bharat N. AnandJanice H. HammondV.G. Narayanan, Harvard Business Review

In June 2014, Harvard Business School launched HBX, to focus on solving real-world business problems. Videos capturing real managers discussing real problems would anchor the course offerings, to help students understand the applicability of even the most abstract and esoteric concepts. Encourage active learning. Students would engage with the material in “lean forward” mode, rather than passively watching video lectures. Students would not spend more than 3-5 minutes on the platform before being required to interact with the material. Foster social and collaborative learning. Students would engage meaningfully and regularly with others on the platform. We believed that such collaborative learning would not only make it more engaging, but would draw participants more deeply into a process of discovery. Here are some of the most important things we’ve learned since launching HBX, as it relates to creating a social, collaborative experience online.

https://hbr.org/2015/04/what-harvard-business-school-has-learned-about-online-collaboration-from-hbx

by MIT

Through its newly created Online Education Policy Initiative (OEPI), made possible by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, MIT aims to catalyze the national conversation on the future of education and online learning. Led jointly by Professor Karen Willcox and Dean of Digital Learning Sanjay Sarma, the initiative’s broad objectives are: to explore teaching pedagogy and efficacy, institutional business models, and global educational engagement strategies — and to present a cohesive report on these issues that can be used by policymakers and leaders in education; to engage in the public discourse surrounding online learning and to encourage productive discussion; and to aid policymakers in creating a welcoming environment for educational innovation. “There’s been much written about online education recently,” Sarma says. “OEPI is an opportunity to pause and have a thoughtful, scholarly discussion about everything from the cognitive psychology of learning to the policy implications of online courses.”

https://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/mit-creates-new-online-education-policy-initiative-0414

By MICHAEL BRINDLEY, New Hampshire Public Radio

A free online course this fall focused on the New Hampshire Primary is likely to attract political junkies from the Granite State and beyond. “FIRST! Understanding New Hampshire Presidential Primary” is the University of New Hampshire’s first Massive Open Online Course. It’s open to anyone, anywhere. It will explore the history of the First-in-the-Nation primary, and follow the 2016 primary as it unfolds. The course will be taught by UNH political science professors Andrew Smith and Dante Scala.

http://nhpr.org/post/online-course-offers-nh-primary-experience-political-junkies-across-globe

http://www.educause.edu/library/resources/7-things-you-should-know-about-visual-literacy

by EDUCAUSEVisual literacy is the ability to recognize and critically appreciate meaning in visual content and to use visual elements to create effective communication. Visualizations often provide better ways to tell a story or understand data, and some colleges and universities are making visual literacy coursework part of general education requirements. As the prevalence of visual communication expands, so does the need to develop a critical eye to evaluate visual content for its accuracy and validity. The demand for visual literacy is driving key changes in curricula as visual content becomes a presumptive component of our communication toolbox.

By Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times

California education poll reveals that core subjects might trump technology access. Providing computers to public school students is important to California voters, but not as crucial as other factors affecting education, including a more intense focus on math, science and the arts, according to a new poll. In the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times survey, voters were given a list of options and asked to select the top two that would have the most positive impact on improving public education in California. Nearly half, 49 percent, picked “increasing funding for math, science and technology instruction,” according to the poll. Nearly a third said funding should be increased for subject like art and music education.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2015/04/14/science-technology-poll-893/

by Kim Wilcox and Edward J. Ray, EDCUAUSE Review

On college and university campuses across the United States, we’re surrounded by a resource that leads to discovery, innovation, and growth—yet we don’t embrace it at the leadership level. That resource? Failure. Failure is happening every day in our labs and classrooms and is essential to the learning and discovery process in both settings. As our research scientists attempt to make breakthrough discoveries, they run through repeated trials that fail to deliver the hoped-for results, but each failure provides another clue pointing in the direction of a solution. In classrooms, we encourage students in every discipline to question and analyze the information we put before them. Have we ever criticized them for being “wrong”? Not at all. We congratulate them on having the courage to ask new questions, and we encourage them to keep going.

http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/embracing-failure-spur-success-new-collaborative-innovation-model

By David Raths, Campus Technology

The Open Cloud Consortium is working to meet the collaboration and data-management needs of multi-institution big data projects. In 2008, a group of researchers came together to form the nonprofit Open Cloud Consortium (OCC), a shared cloud-computing infrastructure for medium-size, multi-institution big-data projects. The OCC has grown to include 10 universities, 15 companies and five government agencies and national laboratories. In a recent interview with Campus Technology, OCC Director Robert Grossman discussed the organization’s relationship to research universities’ IT departments, as well as its business model and sustainability challenges.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/04/09/a-data-commons-for-scientific-discovery.aspx

By Leila Meyer, Campus Technology

As more and more instructors flip their classrooms or teach online courses, it’s become increasingly important to create videos that can hold students’ attention. Some instructors have experimented with new ways to make videos more interactive and engaging; for instance, including themselves in the picture along with their teaching materials. “Putting our face on the presentation allows us to offer nuances and to communicate with more richness and immediacy,” said John Lammers, professor of communication and director of the Health Communication program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Here are five ways to take lecture videos up a notch and better engage students.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/04/08/5-lecture-capture-hacks-for-more-engaging-videos.aspx?admgarea=News

By Meris Stansbury, eCampus News

How universities are looking past incubators to future functionality. Are college and university investments in innovation worth the time and money? Only if your incubators lead to scalable, sustainable success, says new research. A recent report, conducted in 2014 by the American Council on Education (ACE) and Huron Education aimed to gauge some of the current thinking and practices of select institutions on taking innovation from a commonly passed around buzzword to actionable practice. ACE chose five institutions that had detailed case studies and data on their innovation incubators—each highlighting the goals, challenges, and outcomes of their own unique approaches to scaling innovation campus-wide.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/innovation-buzzword-practice-311/

by Tim Dodd, Financial Review

Students in massive open online courses (MOOC) who pay a modest amount for a “verified certificate” are just as likely finish their course as regular university students, according to a new large-scale study of online education. The study, from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) which jointly founded the leading MOOC provider edX, found those students who paid the usually less-than $US100 ($130) fee for a certificate, had a 59 per cent course completion rate, the same as the overall graduation rate for students enrolling in bachelor’s degrees in the United States.

http://www.afr.com/news/policy/education/fee-payments-lift-mooc-completion-rates-20150412-1mhw76

BY DANIEL AHN, Daily Bruin

UCLA, following the lead of many universities, is expanding an initiative to promote free, online course materials for students amid rising textbook costs. The Affordable Course Materials Initiative, a UCLA Library-led project which launched in 2013 as a pilot program, will become an official program fall 2015. The program, which UCLA recently decided to continue, seeks to encourage faculty members to compile online resources in a textbook-like form so they can be freely accessed by professors and students. The library will send out applications for the program this week, and instructors will be able to apply for a grant of up to $2,500 to help find resources and adjust syllabi and assignments. Since 2013, the UCLA Library has awarded $27,500 to 23 instructors. The library estimates that students enrolled in awarded courses saved more than $160,000 collectively since the program began.

http://dailybruin.com/2015/04/13/ucla-library-to-expand-program-promoting-free-online-course-material/

by Andrew Kelly, Forbes

The point is: all of these ideas are part of the future of learning. Because the set of prospective students is large and diverse, that future must be a “big tent” containing a variety of new ideas, not just online learning. Some of the tools (i.e., MOOCs) will be low-touch, low-cost affairs with little interpersonal contact. Others will feature short, intense doses of direct instruction and mentorship and cost significant amounts of money. In short, entrepreneurs will produce different products because learners have different preferences. While The End of College implicitly acknowledges this by talking about more than just MOOCs, other models always seem to take a back seat to the open online courses that Carey expects to dominate in the future.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/akelly/2015/04/08/the-university-of-everywhere-isnt-for-everyone-the-future-of-learning-will-be-a-big-tent/

By Kristen Hicks, Edudemic

Adaptive learning has long been a part of education. The basic concept is simple: Coursework should be adapted to meet the individual needs of each student. Every teacher has experience modifying curriculum in some way to help students access information. Nowadays technology can help make the adaptations easier and more streamlined. Many of the benefits that adaptive technology offers in online courses also apply to traditional classrooms. However, the nature of online learning means that some of the challenges adaptive learning helps to address are especially relevant to online students. When teachers and students don’t interact with each other regularly in person, as often happens with online courses, having a tool that helps pick up the slack becomes that much more important.

http://www.edudemic.com/how-adaptive-learning-technology-is-being-used-in-online-courses/

By Joshua Bolkan, THE Journal

A new study from Wainhouse Research finds that a large minority, 39 percent, of education stakeholders say their schools should be doing a better job of preparing students for the workforce. Among more than 1,000 administrators, teachers, students and parents surveyed from North America and the United Kingdom, “many” said they “believe that schools are doing a decent job focusing on the 3 R’s: reading, writing and mathematics, but are not doing as good a job focusing on other aspects of education essential to preparing learners for entering the workforce,” according to the report. Sixty percent of those surveyed said too little emphasis is placed on collaborations with other learners outside the classroom, while 46 and 40 percent, respectively, said there should be more emphasis on group achievement and working in teams.

http://thejournal.com/articles/2015/04/09/report-schools-should-focus-more-on-soft-skills.aspx

by Margaret Andrews, University World News

Over the past few years it seems you can’t read about higher education without thinking about how ripe it is for disruption. Rising costs, employer dissatisfaction with graduate skills, technology advances and new entrants are making the case for the need for new ways of thinking about and delivering education. Based on some recent developments, business schools may be the first to feel the heat. Clay Christensen, who popularised the idea of disruption, has written and spoken quite a bit about disruption in higher education in general, and the management education market in particular. So how is this beginning to play out in the management education sphere? There are many new initiatives afoot.

http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20150406140223800