Techno-News Blog

By Jarrett Carter, Education Dive

Research by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation offers a statistical profile of college students in America and includes details that may surprise some administrators about who they are serving. The report found 62% of students are working full- or part-time while pursuing their degrees, and nearly as many (59%) are commuting to class from off-campus residences. Two-thirds of all college students are full-time, non-Pell Grant eligible students who attend four-year institutions. The number of students who exclusively take courses online (13%) may also be surprising to some.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/gates-foundation-provides-snapshot-of-todays-american-college-student/420587/

by Leigh Spann, WFLA

“85 percent of people in this country will never step foot in a gym and cannot afford the cost in the average fitness industry,” said Keith Kochner, Co-founder of LiveStreamingFitness.com and Chief Visionary Officer. “What they’ve done very well is that they’ve leveraged the part of the population that can afford to pay the average cost,” said Kochner. He and his company saw an opportunity to bring much-needed fitness and health resources to the rest of the country. For $9.90 a month, LiveStreamingFitness.com offers various workout classes, nutritional education and cooking demonstrations for an entire family. You just log in and see which classes you want to take and when. The classes are taught on what seems to be a one-on-one basis. It can even be interactive. You can write a comment or question on the wall of the site, and a producer will relay that to the trainer who can answer your question.

http://wfla.com/2016/06/10/fitness-craze-streaming-workout-classes-online/

by Hillary Grigoni, Yahoo

Learning photography using Canon gear may have just gotten a bit simpler with the launch of the company’s new online learning platform. On Wednesday, the camera manufacturer announced Canon Online Learning, a platform for online classes and print materials suitable for several different skill levels. The new paid platform joins free resources like the Canon Community and blog that teach photographers both basic camera techniques and photography concepts. According to Canon, the new classes are designed for photographers from several different backgrounds and skill levels, from hobbyists and professionals to travelers and parents. While plans for additional materials are in the works, the online learning platform has launched with seven initial classes.

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/canon-launches-online-learning-platform-000911735.html

By Jarrett Carter, Education Dive

New research suggests wearable technology may grow by 46% in the next four years, and that colleges and universities may be among the largest consumer group for the technology in an effort to bolster student living and learning experiences. Schools like Oral Roberts University currently require first-year students to purchase and wear Fitbit devices to track fitness and activity levels. The school uses the synced data to build profiles of student academic, personal achievement. The projected boom in wearable technology presents additional challenges for campus IT officials, with potential threats to network security and data privacy increasing with the number of personal enterprise devices on campus.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/classroom-tech-may-become-question-of-what-to-wear/420584/

By Tamara Lytle, SHRM

When massive open online courses—better known as MOOCs—first came on the educational scene, nobody knew whether they would be the next big thing in learning or just another quirky acronym. MOOCs are Web-based classes that are available to all, and they’re often free. Today, along with MOOCs, other online learning programs have become common, and HR professionals are using all of them to develop new skills and advance their careers. The growth of online learning has been rapid. For instance, since MOOCs became popular around 2011, 35 million students have given them a try, says Dhawal Shah, head of Class Central, a San Francisco-area organization that tracks MOOCs and curates reviews of them

https://www.shrm.org/publications/hrmagazine/editorialcontent/2016/0616/pages/0516-online-learning-for-hr.aspx

By Dian Schaffhauser, THE Journal

TechSmith has updated its inexpensive screen, video and audio capture tool, Snagit. Version 13 for Windows and version 4 for Mac add personalization capabilities, a panoramic feature for capturing images that go beyond a single display, new tools in the editor and the ability to create animated GIF files. The latest releases give users the ability to configure many aspects of the utility’s functionality, including how captures are depicted and how the user toolbar is laid out. A “panoramic” feature lets the user capture an entire web page, large Excel spreadsheet or other tall or wide displays that stretch beyond what can be viewed on a single screen.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2016/06/09/techsmith-updates-snagit-with-gif-panoramic-features.aspx

By Frank DiMaria, Campus Technology

Writing for the Harvard Business Review in 2003, Nicholas Carr sparked a firestorm when he proclaimed: “IT is best seen as the latest in a series of broadly adopted technologies that have reshaped industry over the past two centuries — from the steam engine and the railroad … to the electric generator and the internal combustion engine.” Thirteen years later, it’s time to revisit Carr’s argument. Today IT directors and CIOs are more likely to debate the virtues of the cloud, when to use it and when to offer services locally. Regardless, said Keith Boswell, director of technology at North Carolina State University’s College of Engineering, IT needs to do a better job of justifying its existence as a strategic asset. “I’d like to see us proposing more projects designed to enable and multiply the efforts of our faculty and our students, rather than having to sit back and defend the resources that we already have — which is what happens.”

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/06/09/does-it-matter-now.aspx

BY HARRO TEN WOLDE, Reuters

Online education company Udacity plans to branch out of its core technology market to meet growing demand for digitally-skilled workers in areas such as banking and the car industry, its co-founder told Reuters as the company launched in Germany. The Silicon Valley start-up, now worth more than $1 billion, is betting its focus on vocational courses for professionals, as well as its work for global companies such as Google, will help it to stand out in the fast-growing online education industry. The market is expected to more than double to $97.8 billion in 2020 from $43.3 billion in 2015, according to research firm Research and Markets.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-udacity-bertelsmann-idUSKCN0YU1NY

By Michelle Pacansky-Brock, EdSurge

Recently, I received this message from a college professor in response to a blog post I wrote: “I truly believe in the benefits of online learning; but only for those who really want to learn. And unfortunately, those students are few and far between—maybe 5 to 10 percent … I have found many professors at my university and at conferences agree with this. We need to develop some sort of a methodology whereby taking an online course is seen as a privilege and an opportunity to learn a subject more deeply than in a face-to-face class. Until we do this, online course [sic] will continue to be considered by students as the easy way out—not seen, not heard, just getting by.” I’ve thought deeply about this message for a while and I’d like to unpack my reflections a bit more here. Learning online requires students to be more accountable, and online research shows that self-efficacy impacts student success online. But when we focus on lack of student motivation as “the” problem, we oversimplify a more complex and important issue.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-05-31-unpacking-the-problem-of-unmotivated-online-students

by EdSurge

Foreign college students cheat more than their domestic peers, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Looking at data from 14 large U.S. public universities, WSJ found five reports of alleged cheating for every 100 international students, compared with one per 100 domestic students. Cheating on campus is an issue regardless of students’ origins, but faculty report that “substantial numbers of international students either don’t comprehend or don’t accept U.S. standards of academic integrity.” The trend begs the question: Will academic integrity be impacted as schools enroll more foreign students, who often pay three times as much as domestic ones? “I can assure you that somewhere someone at the university is doing a calculus about how much tuition they would lose if they start coming down hard on students who cheat,” Beth Mitchneck, a University of Arizona professor of geography and development tells WSJ.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-06-06-cheating-on-college-exams-more-common-among-foreign-students

by Technavio

Technavio’s latest report on the global online language learning market provides an analysis on the most important trends expected to impact the market outlook from 2016-2020. Technavio defines an emerging trend as a factor that has the potential to significantly impact the market and contribute to its growth or decline. Technavio announces top three emerging trends impacting the global online language learning market through 2020. The top three emerging trends driving the global online language learning market according to Technavio education research analysts are:

• Deployment of language cloud services
• Outsourcing of services
• Advances in technology

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160607005134/en/Technavio-Announces-Top-Emerging-Trends-Impacting-Global

by Mariah Wellman, DesMoines Register

Why take classes as an adult student? Many adults already have a full-time job and don’t know if going to school for more education is the right fit for them. Does it work to fit classes around work? We talked with a few schools about the pros and cons of nontraditional coursework for both undergraduate adults and graduate learners. Nontraditional coursework is considered to be the courses offered online and on nights and weekends to students at a university or college. Students take nontraditional classes at a variety of levels and for many different reasons. Barbara Schultz, assistant provost for the Center of Distance Education at Upper Iowa University, said many adult students consider going back to school because something has triggered a change in their life.

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/education/2016/06/07/online-classes-night-weekend-classes-adult-education/85186622/

by CNBC

Few would argue that higher education has long been an industry in need of some fresh thinking. Which is why, in 2012, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, both former computer science professors at Stanford University, decided to launch Coursera. The company is a free online education platform that lets anyone, anywhere access courses from some of the best teachers and universities in the world, including Yale, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Edinburgh, to name a few. Courses cover the spectrum—from global health issues to data science, and most everything in between. Some of the 17.5 million learners around the world who have accessed any of the company’s 1,800 course offerings are there because they have a deep interest in a given subject.

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/06/coursera-2016-disruptor-50.html

by DEREK NEWTON, the Atlantic

In this marketplace, various reports suggest that students studying online at public and non-profit colleges give an average of about half of their tuition to for-profit companies known as online program managers (OPMs)—companies that design, run, and market the virtual programs for colleges. Because an online bachelor’s degree can easily cost $60,000, those for-profit companies, by taking 50 percent of student tuition, can make as much as $30,000 per student per awarded degree. And it’s often more. According to John Katzman, who founded one of the most successful OPMs, a 50 percent cut of online tuition money is just the average. “There are companies literally taking 80 percent or more of tuition,” contended Katzman, who disagrees with the practice of tuition-sharing.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/06/for-profit-companies-nonprofit-colleges/485930/

BY RONALD BETHKE, eCampus News

A much-needed accessible and easily understood system for viable credentials could have a major impact on learners, employers and education providers. What will it take to make credentialing an easier process for students? How can education stakeholders validate credentials? What do employers need from today’s credentials? How can minority learners better take advantage of these viable credentials? Those are just some of the issues addressed in a report from Lumina Foundation concerning the Connecting Credentials partnership, which aims to address problems that hamper students’ efforts to attain high-quality, viable credentials in the current higher education system. The report, “Connecting Credentials: Lessons from the National Summit on Credentialing and Next Steps in the National Dialogue,” details findings and suggestions from the summit that could lead to a reformed credentialing system boasting greater transparency and portability to better serve the needs of students, employers and educators.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/must-viable-credentials/

by Sangeeta Motiani and DurgaPrasad Karnam, Huffington Post

While you should not leave your kids alone with devices for hours at a stretch, neither is it correct to assume that all technology use will “fry their brains” as some well-meaning parents seem to believe. With some involvement and intervention from you, you can use technology as a tool to not only engage your child but also nurture their curiosity and desire to learn. So forget overpriced summer-workshops and regimented schedules and unlock myriads of ways to learn with freedom. We’ve done some research for you and zeroed in on a list of 50 technology tools (all tried and tested by us) for your kids to explore this summer.

http://www.huffingtonpost.in/sangeeta-motiani-/50-online-learning-tools-_b_10304812.html

by eCampus News

Worldwide tablet shipments are expected to decline for the second straight year in 2016, dropping 9.6 percent compared to 2015 volumes, according to a new International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker forecast. The tablet market in totality has seen its peak and will face down years in 2016 and 2017, followed by a slight rebound in 2018 and beyond driven by detachable tablet growth. Right now the detachable category only accounts for 16 percent of the market and IDC expects it to reach 31 percent in 2020.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/mobile-technology-2/tablets-increase-2018/

By Tara García Mathewson, Education Dive

Michael Meotti, a principal at Ed Policy Group, argues for The Evolllution that a focus on talent development, experiential learning and innovative partnerships will help colleges compete in an era of increasing choice for students entering higher education. Talent development marks the intersection between knowledge, which has long ruled higher education, and skills, which help students use their degree to get a new job — and colleges that want to rise to the top of a competitive pool have to excel at developing both. Experiential learning, including simulations and virtual reality, as well as partnerships with community-based nonprofits and other organizations that work for student success, give colleges an advantage in attracting, retaining and graduating students.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/3-key-trends-to-shape-the-future-of-higher-ed/420394/

by Elyse Wanshel, Huffington Post

Elder care is about to become much more empathetic. Embodied Labs has come up with a new virtual reality program called “We Are Alfred,” which allows young medical students to feel what it’s like to be an elderly individual experiencing audio and visual problems. “[Medical students] are usually in their early 20s and not experiencing those kinds of challenges yet, so we decided to create something that would give them the experience of what it might be like to go through the aging process,” Carrie Shaw, the program’s creator and master’s student in biomedical visualization told University of Illinois at Chicago, where she studies. This could be empathy 2.0 for the average med student, who is 24.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/we-are-alfred-embodied-labs-carrie-shaw-virtual-reality-medical-students-elderly-geriatric-care_us_57505bbce4b0c3752dccbeaa

by Steven A. Rosenberg, Boston Globe

Finding a textbook in Barbara McNulty’s communications class requires some sleuthing. That’s because the weighty volumes are stacked at the bottom of a dark closet and haven’t been used in 10 years. Pens, notebooks, and lectures? Also scarce. Instead, students in the Groton-Dunstable Regional High School class learn almost entirely through digital platforms. They use computers to research and create projects at their own pace, while McNulty serves as a guide, traversing the classroom and assessing students’ work in real-time from their laptops.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/06/04/paperless-education/LlHobGE7iRIZV3pwN0cR9J/story.html

by Tim Dodd, Financial Review

An online learning program which can tell when a student is becoming bored and inattentive is one of the key developments forecast to reshape university education in Australia in the next five years, according to a new report. The 2016 NMC Technology Outlook for Australian Tertiary Education says that so-called “affective computing”, which is able to use video imagery of facial expressions to discern human emotions, will soon be coupled with online learning platforms to encourage students to keep their minds on their work. The report says this is likely to be adopted by universities in the next four to five years. It forecast “online learning situations wherein a computerised tutor reacts to facial cues of boredom in a student in an effort to motivate or boost their confidence.”

http://www.afr.com/technology/apps/education/bored-with-study-the-new-wave-of-edubots-will-find-a-way-to-spark-your-interest-20160602-gpa9em