Techno-News Blog

by AnnMarie Kuzel, CLO

Learning should fit into an employee’s work day and workflow – not take them out of it. The checklist of questions that learning leaders ask themselves before deciding which learning technology best fits their organization is long; which vendor is the best? What kind of platforms are available? What kind of content is most appropriate? What are the organization’s most important needs now and in the future? But CLOs often forget to ask one very important question: “Does the learning technology work cohesively with an employee’s everyday workflow?” Iain Scholnick, CEO of Braidio, a collaborative learning platform, talked to Chief Learning Officer about the importance of incorporating learning into an employee’s everyday workflow.

http://www.clomedia.com/2016/08/08/the-importance-of-day-to-day-learning/

by Building Design and Construction

The construction industry has welcomed e-learning with companies, suppliers and construction sites registered with the Considerate Constructors Scheme undertaking 3,600 courses so far. The construction industry’s online platform for sharing best practice, the Best Practice Hub, has launched a number of free e-learning courses which are designed to help raise industry standards. Companies, suppliers and construction sites of all sizes registered with the Considerate Construction Scheme can undertake the e-learning courses, which are designed to improve their knowledge of the scheme in order to meet and exceed the expectations outlined by the scheme’s Code of Considerate Practice. The e-learning courses are eligible for CPD and were launched to all users registered with the Best Practice Hub during May.

http://www.bdcmagazine.com/property-development/education-healthcare/e-learning-hit-construction-industry-12470

by Diogo Costa, Tech.co

The Internet is an amazing tool that can make our lives much easier and put us in contact with the entire world. At the same time, it’s also an excellent way to procrastinate with lots of memes and jokes to look at. But, if we want to, we can take advantage of the Internet’s best features to our personal improvement. The web can be used to learn about investment, to enhance technical skills, learn a new language, complement studies and develop a hobby, or even focus on entrepreneurial skills. The advantages are – just like the possibilities – endless. Here are some ways to learn a new skill online right away.

http://tech.co/ways-learn-new-skill-online-2016-08

by ALIZAH SALARIO, Metro

At Udacity, tech-savvy students earn nanodegrees for a fraction of the cost of a traditional degree. We live in tiny houses, make micropayments and use mini fridges. Naturally, now we can also earn micro-credentials. As the name suggests, micro-credentials quailfy individuals to execute specific skills, often in the fields math, science and technology. They’re earned in far less time than traditional degrees — and for a fraction of the cost. Think of them as the next generation of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), only more comprehensive, and with a credential at the finish line.

http://www.metro.us/lifestyle/are-micro-degrees-the-future-of-higher-education/zsJphh—Czgpd0JKEyP8E/

By Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed

More colleges are issuing digital badges to help their students display skills to employers or graduate programs, and colleges are tapping vendor platforms to create a verified form of the alternative credentials.Digital badges aren’t replacing the bachelor’s degree any time soon. But a growing number of colleges are working with vendors to use badges as an add-on to degrees, to help students display skills and accomplishments that transcripts fail to capture. Illinois State University is an early adopter. Students in the university’s honors program have earned roughly 7,400 digital badges as part of the experiment, which just began at full scale last year. The university brought in Credly, a badging platform provider, for the project.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/08/09/digital-badging-spreads-more-colleges-use-vendors-create-alternative-credentials

by eCampus News

College and universities can see how they stack up in terms of social media engagement using a new study that ranks the effectiveness of social media across higher-ed institutions. The study of 338 colleges and universities revealed key insights in who is driving the most engagement with social media–including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram–and showed which universities are winning at engaging their audiences via social. Engagement is defined as “measurable interaction on social media posts, including likes, comments, favorites, retweets, shares and reactions.”

http://www.ecampusnews.com/technologies/social-networking/social-media-engagement/

by eCampus News

The Internet of Things (IoT) is coming (well, actually, it’s here), and with it, a demand for skilled graduates who know the ins and outs of connected devices. As colleges and universities work to address the challenges the IoT presents from an IT perspective, they also are addressing the needs of their students who will pursue IoT-related careers. Developing a comprehensive IoT strategy still remains the biggest challenge for industry adoption, according to 46.3 percent of 200 IT professionals surveyed at the Sensors Expo in San Jose by Northeastern University-Silicon Valley. Another top barrier for wide scale adoption involves security concerns (38.8 percent).

http://www.ecampusnews.com/curriculum/iot-colleges-curriculum/

by Carlos Rivers, Evolllution

A major issue that we have seen for current innovative educational models, particularly for Competency-Based Education, is that we have not agreed upon a common framework to measure the effectiveness of these programs. At the Institute for Competency-Based Education, we are currently building a Metrics Framework for our CBE program in Organizational Leadership at Texas A&M-Commerce (TAMU-C). Our framework analyzes three key components since program inception: 1. Student Demographics 2. Program Performance 3. Program Efficiency. The landscape of higher education comes with immense complexity. There can be no one-size-fits-all approach, and therefore we believe this is the perfect starting point to which you can then adjust your parameters to meet the specific needs of your program(s).

http://evolllution.com/programming/program_planning/competency-based-education-the-importance-of-metrics-and-data-collection/

by Christina Sax, Evolllution

The number of unique professional job postings in the higher education sector with “innovation” in the title or description rose 211 percent from 2010 to 2015 (from 75 postings in 2010, to 233 in 2015, according to Burning Glass Labor InsightTM). In addition, it appears that a new interdisciplinary field of academic innovation is also emerging within higher education.[2,3] As a provost or dean, is your institution ready to take on an innovation agenda?[4] And if so, where do you start when it comes to building an innovation engine? This article provides a set of five first steps to establish, nurture and sustain an engine of academic innovation.

http://evolllution.com/managing-institution/operations_efficiency/five-steps-to-building-an-academic-innovation-engine/

By Julian Wragg, IT Pro Portal

The Science and Technology Committee recently published a report stating that the digital skills gap is costing the UK economy £63 billion a year in lost GDP. It’s a time of turbulent change, both politically and economically and fostering home grown talent with the most up to date digital skills is more important than ever. We caught up with Julian Wragg, EMEA Managing Director at online IT learning provider Pluralsight, to see what can be done to address the STEM and IT skills gap in the UK. It’s the lack of synchronised technical skills training at a college and university level which is struggling to keep pace with accelerated technology change in industry. There’s also a great array of learning resources available, both free and paid for, including online learning platforms such as Pluralsight.

http://www.itproportal.com/2016/08/07/qa-how-can-we-address-the-stem-skills-gap/

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

A summer-time enrichment experience for high schoolers at Penn State has taken on a heightened level of excitement with the use of the same development toolset behind the global phenom Pokémon Go. Penn State and five other institutions host multi-week programs that give students a chance to taste university life while getting intensive introductions to subjects ranging from art to sports marketing. The video game development program is led by Madis Pihlak, an associate professor of art and architecture at Penn State, who has taught the two-week class for four years. Besides Unity, the platform used by Niantic to create Pokémon Go and other popular games, the course also introduces students to AutoDesk’s Maya, a program used for 3D animation, modeling, simulation and rendering.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/08/04/summer-program-intros-teens-to-software-behind-pokemon-go.aspx

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

New software from researchers at MIT could make even the most complex databases easier for non-experts to use. The program’s home screen looks like a spreadsheet, and it allows users to create database queries and reports by combining functions familiar to spreadsheet users rather than forcing them to learn SQL or some other data scripting language. The research project, underway in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, lets people use drop-down menus to pull data into the tool from multiple sources; then they can sort and filter that data, perform integration and tuck away unneeded columns and rows. From those activities the program generates the database queries that deliver results.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/08/05/mit-software-greatly-simplifies-tough-database-querying.aspx

by Shobita Dhar, the Times of India

Thanks to online courses and the initiatives of a few individuals, youngsters from underprivileged backgrounds are learning to crack the code. Helping some of them do so is Francesco Stasi, an Italian national who heads India operations for CodersTrust, a Danish learn-and-earn platform for freelance coders. “Coding doesn’t need formal education. Anyone can learn it. This makes it attractive to students from poorer backgrounds who often haven’t completed their formal education,” says Stasi. “A cook in urban India earns up to $50 (about Rs 3,000) a month while a coder can earn around $15 (Rs1,000) an hour,” points out Stasi, who set up the trust’s India arm in Gurugram in March. It has enrolled more than 1,000 students from both privileged and underprivileged backgrounds and subsidizes education for bright students from poor families.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-times/Cook-to-coder-How-low-income-youth-are-writing-a-better-future/articleshow/53575603.cms

by CBC News

New moms can turn to their smartphones for quick answers to important breastfeeding questions with a new online video developed by two Saskatoon nurses. Cindy Leclerc and Jana Stockham developed the online teaching tool in response to queries from moms-to-be who weren’t able to get to pre-natal classes. The video covers topics such as the benefits of using breast milk, how to know if the baby is getting enough milk and the most comfortable positions. Stockham said it was designed to build confidence in new mothers by helping them prepare for when the baby arrives.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/online-breastfeeding-course-saskatoon-1.3710461

by Emerging Technology, MIT Technology Review

The first machine-based search of online hacker marketplaces identifies over 300 significant cyberthreats every week. In February 2015, Microsoft identified a critical vulnerability in its Windows operating system that potentially allowed a malicious attacker to remotely control the targeted computer. The problem affected a wide variety of Windows operating systems including, Vista, 7, 8 and various others designed for servers and mobile computers. The company immediately issued a fix. But it didn’t take long for details of the vulnerability to spread through the hacker community.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602115/machine-learning-algorithm-combs-the-darknet-for-zero-day-exploits-and-finds-them/

by Marilyn Siderwicz, MIT

Improving educational delivery is a core focus of MIT, and also a priority for training new generations of teachers in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE). On July 19, about 30 postdocs and graduate students attended a Workshop on Digital Education hosted by CEE to learn about digital education tools available to them as they prepare to teach undergraduate and graduate students, both at MIT and elsewhere. The instructor, Dipa Shah of the MIT Teaching and Learning Lab (TLL), was invited by the CEE Postdoctoral Committee to provide an overview about the latest online technologies and their use for delivering content to students and providing students with practice and feedback.

http://news.mit.edu/2016/using-educational-technology-enhance-student-learning-0805

by Eleanor Lamb, MeriTalk

Each year, 50,000 students participate in Carnegie Mellon University’s online academic courses as part of the institution’s Open Learning Initiative (OLI). OLI, which began in the early 2000s, is an online learning platform that features not only readings and videos, but also modules, problem-solving exercises, and virtual labs. Norman Bier, Director of OLI and Core Collaborations at CMU, said the initiative aims to create an enriching learning experience for CMU students. “We’re fairly proud of the approach we take,” Bier said. “Those smaller activities are embedded in the flow of watching videos and reading.”

https://www.meritalk.com/articles/carnegie-mellons-open-learning-initiative-draws-50000/

By David Weldon, Campus Technology

Technology has the potential to solve the affordability and access problem in higher education, according to the author of Revolution in Higher Education. Richard DeMillo, author and director of Georgia Tech’s Center for 21st Century Universities says “We’ve gotten to this state by choosing the most expensive – and least effective – way to run our universities…. The cost of tuition is rising at four times the cost of inflation. And I don’t think that will change anytime soon.” In order to be sustainable, universities must find new ways to deliver education, he said. “One way to think about it – you’ve got this fight between a method of teaching that is thousands of years old, and something that is very different.” In particular, he believes massive open online courses will be a key part of the transformation. DeMillo envisions is the broader use of MOOCs to enroll more full time students than was previously possible – for entire degree programs.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/08/04/demillo-on-moocs-and-college-affordability.aspx

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

A new brief from a public policy think tank suggests getting rid of the link between federal student aid and college accreditation and even allowing the market to choose which schools are worthy of staying open. The National Center for Policy Analysis, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization, wrote the brief to address the dual challenges of rising college costs and ill-prepared students who aren’t truly ready to join the workforce full time. PayScale and executive development firm Future Workplace that found that while almost 9 in 10 graduates (87 percent) considered themselves ready to go to work, only half of managers felt the same way about recent graduates. The alternative, as the report noted, was for students to attend alternative types of online courses, such as MOOCs or workforce-oriented classes.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/08/04/report-online-courses-and-free-market-can-crack-higher-ed-problems.aspx

by Janel Davis, Atlanta Journal Constitution

Efforts to cut college costs are paying off for Georgia students. Students in Georgia’s public University System saved the most money of any school or school system on textbooks last year through an open publishing program known as OpenStax, a Rice University-based publisher. The savings information released this week by Rice shows that the almost 36,000 University System of Georgia students participating in the textbook program saved more than $3.5 million during the 2015-2016 school year. OpenStax uses grants from nonprofit groups such as the Gates Foundation to publish textbooks in about 20 subject areas including biology, economics, and algebra that are popular on college campuses. The books are free for students online, and hard copies can be purchased at a much lower cost than traditional books.

http://www.ajc.com/news/news/local-education/how-much-are-georgia-college-students-saving-on-te/nr86k/

by George Lorenzo, EdSurge

Students in Art Goldberg’s English composition classes at Miami-Dade College and Broward College have a different experience than their peers in most introductory college writing courses. They’re role-playing as junior staff writers in a fictional newsroom, creating content for an upcoming broadcast—all within a digital game that aims to make learning grammar more engaging than memorizing Strunk and White. Are digital games viable tools for creating effective online teaching and learning environments in higher education, and, if so, is anyone using them?

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-08-04-digital-game-based-learning-in-higher-ed-moves-beyond-the-hype