Techno-News Blog

by Uma Kannan, Deccan Herald

Coursera, a California-headquartered education platform, has been adding about 60,000 members every month with 1.7 million learners already on board in India. Coursera Chief Business Officer Nikhil Sinha, who was in the city recently, told DH that a quarter of its Indian learners are interested in technology skills (Computer Science courses). “Technology and Data Science are the top two areas that are in demand in India, and they are followed by business. India is a very prominent learner market for us because of the combination of a young population with significant aspirations, and where education is the most important mechanism for social mobility, and where there is a large English-speaking workforce, and where people are willing to invest in education,” he said, adding that 20% of Coursera’s users learn only on mobile.

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/576035/online-learning-coursera-adds-60k.html

by IU Kokomo

How do you take an online class on a field trip? Stanley, visiting lecturer in health care management, creates and teaches online classes for one of Indiana University Kokomo’s newest programs, the Bachelor of Applied Science (B.A.S.). Though her classes don’t meet on campus, she wants her students to connect with her and with one another, and to experience the high-quality instruction expected from an IU degree. “When we’re connected, and have trust, they’re willing to take more chances,” she said. “Their papers are richer, and their responses are richer. Some people have the idea that an online class is like a correspondence course. It’s not just power points, a webpage, and a textbook. My online classes are interactive. I want students to feel comfortable reaching out and asking questions. If they’re intimidated or unsure of me, they will avoid making contact. Part of that effort includes virtual field trips.

http://newsroom.iuk.edu/articles/2016/10-oct/online-instructor-creates-rich-learning-environment.php

by Ryan Craig, Forbes

In 2014 the California Community College system created the Online Education Initiative (OEI), managed by Foothill-DeAnza Community College District and Butte-Glenn Community College District with $77M in new state funding over five years. The goal was straightforward: create an online “Course Exchange” by pooling resources across colleges, providing students greater access to the courses they need. While we’re still in the early innings, OEI stands in stark contrast to the failed initiatives of California’s online past, and could provide a roadmap to system-wide initiatives of the future.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryancraig/2016/10/14/californias-new-playbook-for-online-education/#56bfb41c1884

by Lauren Delorenzo, Daily News

Online classes have become increasingly popular at Ball State mainly because of their convenience. With many of Ball State’s courses offered both in the traditional classroom setting and online, around 38.9 percent of students chose to participate in online learning last year. The traditional classroom setting isn’t for everyone so some students have turned to the option of taking classes online. Online classes at Ball State have become increasingly popular, with around 38.9 percent of students participating in some form of distance or online learning last year, according to collegefactual.com. Over 3,000 students took classes exclusively online. Many of the classes available at Ball State are offered both online and in the traditional classroom setting. Students say one advantage of online classes is the convenience.

http://www.ballstatedaily.com/article/2016/10/news-online-classes

by Ashley A. Smith, Inside Higher Ed

California community colleges unveil online program that allows students to take courses across multiple campuses, a project that replaced a failed attempt to tap for-profit online course providers to meet student demand. The California Community Colleges Online Education Initiative will debut this fall. Unlike typical online class systems, the OEI is a collaborative program that allows students to register and participate in online courses across multiple colleges. The program also provides online counseling to students. “Community college systems have actually done a lot with online courses, but it’s always been in silos and each campus having their own program,” said Phil Hill, an education technology consultant and co-publisher of the “e-Literate” blog. “But this is a coordinated systemwide approach where they’re all working together for the first time.” Not only is this the first time the community colleges have teamed up for something like this, but they also created the online exchange.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/10/13/californias-online-education-initiative-connects-community-college-classes-across

BY LAURA DEVANEY, eSchool News

New report forecasts that more than half a million students will be enrolled in competency-based education programs by 2020. The number of students enrolled in competency-based education programs is expected to reach more than 500,000 by 2020–meaning it will have more than doubled from the roughly 200,500 enrollments in 2015. By 2020, students age 25 and older will account for approximately 44 percent of the tertiary education student population, meaning the potential for the competency-based education market is huge, according to technology research and advisory company Technavio.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/alternative-pathways/competency-education-skyrocket/

by FIONA MACDONALD, Science Alert

Learning to program according to the most popular languages at the moment is great, but being able to program with the coding languages of the future is even better. We’ve partnered with StackCommerce to find not just one, but nine of the top-rated online programming modules, which you can study from the comfort of you own couch right now at ScienceAlert Academy. The “Programming into the Future” bundle contains more than 30 hours of lectures that will put you ahead of the curve when it comes to programming, and will teach you a range of different new and emerging languages. The modules include the Angular 2 Crash Course and Python Web Programming.

http://www.sciencealert.com/this-online-programming-course-lets-you-pay-what-you-think-it-s-worth

By Leila Meyer, Campus Technology

A professor at Texas A&M University is developing artificial intelligence (AI) technology for creating adaptive online courses. Noboru Matsuda, an associate professor of cyber STEM education in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Culture at Texas A&M is currently the principal investigator on three related research projects funded by National Science Foundation grants. In September 2016, Matsuda received his latest grant for a project that aims to develop a browser-based development environment to let teachers author their own adaptive online courses without specialized training. The technology will also enable researchers to gather data about how students learn from adaptive online courses.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/10/11/texas-am-prof-develops-ai-for-adaptive-online-learning.aspx

by JARED NEWMAN, Fast Company

Tucked inside one of Coursera’s 1,500 online classes, there’s a multiple choice quiz that’s not like the others. Instead of just asking questions and expecting answers, each challenge includes a text box with a “Run” button next to it. Here, you’re expected to enter the appropriate code in the SQL programming language, so you can grab the database information you need to make the correct choice. Essentially, Coursera has condensed an entire coding environment into a series of boxes on a web page. The hope is that computer science and data science classes will become much more interactive, with the ability to play with your own code in the middle of a reading assignment, video lecture, or quiz. “We want to help learners learn by doing,” says Tom Willerer, Coursera’s chief product officer. “We want people to apply and practice what they’re learning in the readings and the lectures, not just sit passively.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/3064213/coursera-brings-everything-you-need-to-code-into-its-virtual-classrooms

by VHS

This year, The Virtual High School (VHS, Inc.), a nonprofit empowering schools with the industry’s most comprehensive online learning programs, will reach its 20-year milestone. The past two decades have seen the organization grow from a small operation funded by a U.S. Department of Education technology challenge grant to an international, non-profit e-learning provider. Today VHS delivers online instruction to middle and high school students at 639 schools in 33 countries; there were more than 18,000 student enrollments in VHS courses in the 2015-2016 school year. “We’ve come a long way from the handful of schools that helped us pioneer our online learning program,” said Carol Ribeiro, President and CEO of VHS, referring to the 28 schools and 710 students who first partnered with the organization.

http://www.benzinga.com/pressreleases/16/10/p8547266/the-virtual-high-school-celebrates-20th-anniversary

BY LAURIE CARBO-PORTER AND DORCEY L. APPLYRS, eCampus News

Experts from Excelsior College discuss the endless opportunities for faculty and students to come together to address global issues thanks to distance learning. Leadership at institutions of higher education have historically embraced some level of commitment to the well-being of the communities where they are physically situated. This commitment is typically reflected in the institution’s mission and culture. Having campus-based programs naturally lends itself to this type of stewardship because students, faculty, and administrators live and work together in a relatively defined geographic area. For distance institutions of higher education that embrace community stewardship as part of their mission, the commitment is experienced differently, but with no less vigor.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/online-learning/global-community-distance/

BY MERIS STANSBURY, eCampus News

Today’s student opinions reveal what they really think about online learning, digital resources and much more. As colleges and universities become increasingly focused on student services in order to attract and retain students, it’s never been more important to gauge how students feel about some of the larger, innovative—and often tech-based—initiatives leadership spends copious amounts of time and money supporting on campus. Recent large-scale studies in 2016 have yielded surprising findings on how students feel about a number of trendy higher education projects and implementations, ranging from how they feel about the many components of online learning to the technology offered on campus overall. By informally examining a handful of recent eCampus News stories on these reports, there are five student opinions on growing higher education initiatives that seem especially noteworthy due to the studies’ representative size of students surveyed, as well as their topic focus:

http://www.ecampusnews.com/campus-administration/student-opinions-education/

by Shalini Rajvanshi, Indian Express

Technology is slowly and steadily making a foray in education. Knowledge is no more limited to books and the use of platforms such as websites, apps, videos, live chats, etc., have taken it to another level. A lot of schools and colleges – mostly in tier 1 and tier 2 cities – have embraced technology to make learning fun and interactive. Interweaving technology with education seems to be helping students at all levels. Many educators in the city swear by instructional videos while parents are gradually opening up to the possibility of a platform which may help their wards learn something new in an innovative manner.

http://indianexpress.com/article/education/edtech-how-important-is-technology-in-education/

by Vinay Umarji, Business Standard

With companies increasingly looking at developing leaders from within the cadres and opting for cost-effective avenues for the same, the executive education market in the country has seen introduction of longer duration online programmes which are finding many takers. Currently offered by the likes of Harvard, Wharton, MIT Sloan, and INSEAD, online programmes are finding interest among the IIMs who are mulling over starting the same too. Online programmes help companies look at long-duration learning journeys for mid- and top-level management personnel, as opposed to 3-4 days short duration classroom programmes.

http://www.business-standard.com/article/management/executive-education-moves-out-of-classrooms-as-online-gains-traction-116100800288_1.html

by Science Daily

New research has demonstrated that a nanoscale device, called a memristor, could be used to power artificial systems that can mimic the human brain. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) exhibit learning abilities and can perform tasks which are difficult for conventional computing systems, such as pattern recognition, on-line learning and classification. Practical ANN implementations are currently hampered by the lack of efficient hardware synapses; a key component that every ANN requires in large numbers.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161007084748.htm

by Azzam Sheikh, Huffington Post

Learning through educational apps and digital environments can offer many more advantages than traditional learning styles, but personal factors such as a student’s familiarity with technology can have an impact upon learning preferences and effectiveness. The future for digital learning is certainly a trend that cannot be ignored, as the next generation who are native with digital technology will no doubt create more demand for it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/azzam-sheikh/are-educational-apps-and-_b_12390480.html

by Kim Kozlowski, The Detroit News

University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel on Wednesday challenged faculty and staff to venture further into digital technology and innovation, hailing them as the university’s next frontier in educating traditional students and lifelong learners. Launching the Academic Innovation Initiative during the annual Leadership Breakfast, Schlissel harkened to UM’s legacy of leadership and encouraged university researchers, teachers and practitioners to evolve further with students, their studies and university partnerships and networks around the world. “Academic innovation is where creativity, comprehensive excellence and our aspirations for societal impact all come together at the University of Michigan,” Schlissel said.

http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2016/10/05/schlissel-initiative/91597788/

by Timothy B. Lee, Vox

Andreessen: Udacity is growing very fast and doing very well, and has locked in on this concept of nanodegrees…. The big new course they have teaches how to design and code and build a self-driving car. Think about that. In 2005, a self-driving car was a DARPA grand challenge. In 2010 it was 1,500 people at Google doing this dark science thing that nobody understood from the outside. Now you can literally sign up on Udacity and take an online course to learn how to build a self-driving car and go work for Google or Uber or Tesla or any of these other companies. I think it’s pretty significant, number one that that’s happening, in terms of how fast it’s happening. But it’s also significant that it’s happening on Udacity and not at Harvard, or for that matter your local community college. Udacity is a software company. It has software-scale economics. As they refine their model, their ability to scale is present in the model. They’re not there yet, but they are scaling quite quickly now.

http://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/10/6/13092272/marc-andreessen-education-disruption

by Jordan Friedman, US News

For students considering a credential – or even an affordable online degree – from a respectable university, a MOOC-based option might be the way to go. After piloting the concept at MIT this year, edX announced partnerships with 14 additional universities around the world last month for 19 new MicroMasters programs exploring in-demand fields ranging from artificial intelligence to entrepreneurship. Students earn a MicroMasters by completing the equivalent of a quarter’s to a semester’s worth of a master’s degree, usually through four to five MOOCs and a capstone component, says Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX. They can then apply to finish the curriculum at the school in person and earn the graduate degree. Because the MicroMasters are “stackable” in nature, students can learn as much or little as they want, Agarwal says

http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/articles/2016-10-06/mooc-based-credential-options-expand-in-online-education

by Geoff Colvin, Fortune

Many CEOs tell me their greatest fear is being blindsided by a competitor they never even thought of as a competitor, threatening to make the CEO’s business irrelevant by using technology and a business model the CEO hadn’t imagined. That’s why I urge you to read Roger Parloff’s new cover story on deep learning, how it’s changing our lives, and how, as he says, it “will soon transform corporate America,” and business globally for that matter. We’ve all been reading a lot about artificial intelligence (AI), but we now must understand finer distinctions. Within AI is a set of techniques called machine learning, enabling computers to get better at tasks with practice. And within machine learning is deep learning, involving algorithms by which computers train themselves using multi-layered neural networks and vast quantities of data. If you don’t really understand that, you’d better read the article.

http://fortune.com/2016/10/05/ai-artificial-intelligence-deep-learning-employers/

By Roger Riddell, Naomi Eide, Education Dive

Security has often been an afterthought as technology evolved, and now many sectors are facing cyberthreats that are increasingly difficult to defend against. In higher ed, cybersecurity concerns are ever present as open networks create a broad attack surface, and limited budgets make defense a challenge. As the threat landscape evolves, there is only so much that campuses can do, but many defense strategies start with awareness, networking, enacting perimeter security and budgeting for the known unknowns organizations may face. IT security is “really about protecting your data and applications that matter most rather than endpoint devices,” said Sasi K. Pillay, vice president for IT services and CIO at Washington State University. “But in the meantime, we’re not there yet, so we have to come up with compensating controls.”

http://www.educationdive.com/news/cyber-threats-cybersecurity-higher-ed/427704/