Techno-News Blog

by Peter Todd, Forbes

The ever-accelerating pace of online technology has completely changed the way we work, entertain ourselves, communicate and connect. And now it is revolutionizing the way we learn. Of course, digital technology in education, and in particular, business education is nothing new. The iTunesU platform and MOOCs – both of which we have embraced at HEC Paris – have been with us for more than a decade now, and we’ve accompanied Learning Management Systems for almost 20 years. But what we are on the cusp of now is an ability to deliver a complete learning experience online which can compete directly with and, in some cases, may even supplant the traditional classroom delivery model. But how prepared is the international business school community to cope with this transformation?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/hecparis/2017/05/29/the-online-revolution-in-business-education-and-how-to-thrive-with-it/

By Michael Lev, Arizona Daily Star

For the first time, the UA is offering a class in sports analytics, a booming industry in the world of professional athletics. “MGMT 359 Sports Analytics,” part of the Eller Sports Management Program, provides students with an entry point to the data analysis that has become an essential ingredient in front offices across every major sport. Ricardo Valerdi, who created the curriculum and is teaching the class, is hopeful it can supply aspiring Billy Beanes with the tools they need to land jobs in sports analytics and similar fields. The class is taught online, so Valerdi, with the aid of Eller’s multimedia department, made short, lighthearted introductory videos for each “inning.”

http://tucson.com/sports/arizonawildcats/new-sports-analytics-class-proves-popular-at-university-of-arizona/article_d09f9d54-90d3-5d62-9133-30fc84032d05.html

The author of GenZ @ Work, Stillman presents with his 17-year-old son (and Gen Z member) Jonah and is armed with research from three national surveys he has done with members of Gen Z. The first is trait of Gen Z is “Phigital,” which Stillman explains means that the lines between physical and digital have been eliminated. The second Gen Z trait Stillman discussed is a quality he calls “hyper-custom.” Personalized marketing has given them opportunities for customized experiences as consumers. “FOMO” (fear of missing out) was the third Gen Z trait that Stillman discussed. Gen Z members have spent their lives connected to news sources 24 hours a day.

http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/news/2017/may/generation-z-enters-workforce-201716711.html

By Ken Tysiac, Journal of Accountancy

By Sri Ravipati, THE Journal

Schell Games, a full-service game design and development company based in Pittsburgh, recently released a video trailer for its upcoming educational virtual reality (VR) game that seeks to better engage high school students in chemistry concepts. SuperChem VR is supported by Phase I and II funding from the Institution of Education Sciences (IES) within the United States Department of Education (ED) as part of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The game was developed for use on commercially available VR systems that include headsets with controllers, such as the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift

https://thejournal.com/articles/2017/05/26/ed-funded-vr-game-simulates-chemistry-lab-experiences.aspx

By Dian Schaffhauser, eCampus News

Amid news that coding bootcamp graduates are finding work, Udacity has tweaked the formula for its popular introductory course in programming by adding three new projects. The “Intro to Programming” program launched in March 2015. Since then, according to the company, more than 1,600 students from around the world have completed the program, and 3,400 others are currently enrolled. The company has also announced a new pricing model. Started by MOOC pioneer Sebastian Thrum, Udacity offers free courses as well as paid courses that lead to “nanodegrees,” alternative credentials awarded for online training when an individual proves his or her competency.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/featured/featured-on-ecampus-news/technology-digital-5-years/

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

Experts in higher education, technology, government and research expect the future of workplace training to include new kinds of educational offerings that can train large numbers of workers in the skills they’ll need. That overall conclusion came out of a query on the topic posed by the Pew Research Center and Elon University, generating some 1,400 responses. The specific question people were answering was this: “In the next 10 years, do you think we will see the emergence of new educational and training programs that can successfully train large numbers of workers in the skills they will need to perform the jobs of the future?” Among those answering were education leaders, scholars, technologists, practitioners and other “strategic thinkers.” Seven in 10 respondents said, yes, that such programs would emerge and be successful.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2017/05/26/most-experts-predict-a-mix-of-models-for-future-of-ed.aspx

by A. Arnett, Education Dive

New data from the U.S. Department of Education shows private, for-profit institutions do the worst job of graduating Pell-eligible students. While 3 in 4 students at these institutions receive Pell grants, only 16% actually graduate with a bachelor’s degree in six years, and The Hechinger Report’s Jon Marcus and Sarah Butrymowicz noted in their analysis of the report that shorter-term for-profit programs (two years or less) see much greater success with getting these students a higher ed credential. Nonprofit institutions, by comparison, graduate between 50-55%, but they enroll significantly fewer Pell-dependent students.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/data-for-profits-worst-at-graduating-low-income-students/443570/

Anant Agarwal Interviewed By Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Ed

As a nonprofit, you want to have the biggest impact, not necessarily the biggest ROI for investors. You can do things like that. So we give our platform away for free. A second example is that on edX, we are still offering MOOCs, which are courses where people can do the whole learning for free. You may have to pay for a credential, but we still offer MOOCs, and virtually all our courses are MOOCs. Even for a MicroMasters and premium offerings, people can learn completely for free. A lot of the for-profits have pivoted and put up paywalls in their programs. And edX pretty much has and will continue to offer free courses and programs. And as a nonprofit, that certainly reduces the revenue that you can generate. But we have a very long-term horizon.

http://www.chronicle.com/article/After-the-Hype-Do-MOOC/240155

by Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

As IT departments become “brokers” rather than single-service providers, vendor management skills are becoming paramount. Here’s how two institutions deal with contracts, vendor relationships and more. When Educause called out “next-generation enterprise IT” as one of its top 10 IT issues in 2017, the higher education technology association also asked members of its advisory board to explain just what’s meant by that. Michael Quiner, CIO at Oregon’s Linn-Benton Community College, says “The new baseline for enterprise IT is to anticipate the needs of the institution and look outside the services and systems traditionally found in the IT department,” Quiner explained. “The new goal of enterprise IT is to make the college’s ‘Christmas list’ a reality by looking beyond what our campus already has on our IT shelves and by becoming a broker instead of a single-service provider.”

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2017/05/25/6-keys-to-working-with-vendors-in-a-next-gen-enterprise-it-world.aspx

by Marc Poirier, SEJ Journal

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have been highly predicted trends in marketing and SEO. But how are they changing the industry now? Read on to find out more about the influence of AI on the marketing world in this Search Engine Nerds episode. Marc Poirier, CEO and co-founder of Acquisio, joins SEJ’s Brent Csutoras to talk about how artificial intelligence and machine learning impacts online marketing. Poirier also gives us a primer on how AI is affecting local search, and shares his verdict on the battle between AI and humans in search and marketing.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ai-machine-learning-online-marketing-podcast/199462/

by Matthew Lynch, tech Edvocate

Being a teacher and being a technology expert are two very different professions, and although some teachers are also technology experts, many teachers are left in the dark with regards to technology. Where can teachers go for technology assistance in our very technology heavy 21st century? For some teachers, especially those who have more experience, and are inching towards retirement, advances in technology are happening too quickly for teachers to keep up with the changes.  The first place many teachers are looking for help regarding technology issues is the internet. Within the last 30 years, the internet has become the primary source of information sharing worldwide. According to a 2016 survey taken by the thejournal.com, 37% of teachers go directly online to look for help regarding the use of new technologies in the classroom. The second largest category where teachers seek help is not surprisingly peers at 23%.

http://www.thetechedvocate.org/teachers-turn-technology-assistance/

By Tania Kishore Jaleel, Fortune India

Until now, online MOOC courses were mostly popular with students and professionals on a budget looking for an Ivy League education. Thousands of young students took courses in everything from mathematical thinking to mechanics from leading U.S. universities such as Yale or Stanford without ever leaving Indian shores. But, now, leading online course providers such as U.S.-based Coursera and Simplilearn are looking beyond students and talking to the government on digital literacy programmes to help bridge the skill gap in India and prepare workers for the jobs of the future. Some online education providers won’t just train the growing work force but also government employees in the intricacies of everything from data analytics to cloud computing as the country goes increasingly digital.

http://fortuneindia.com/2017/may/going-back-to-school-online-1.10866

by TASNIM SHAMMA, NPR

A couple of years ago, Ashok Goel was overwhelmed by the number of questions his students were asking in his course on artificial intelligence. Goel teaches computer science at Georgia Tech, sometimes to large classes, where students can ask thousands of questions online in a discussion forum. With a limited number of teaching assistants, or TAs, many of those questions weren’t getting answered in time. So, Goel came up with a plan: make an artificial intelligence “teaching assistant” that could answer some of students’ frequently asked questions. In 2015 he built Jill Watson, his AI TA — named after one of the IBM founders, Thomas J. Watson. “Raising Jill is like raising a young child,” Goel says. “Initially when your child is very, very young, she just remembers all kinds of things she has heard from you, but she doesn’t understand it.” He says the newest version of Jill now understands concepts. Eventually he wants to export these artificial teachers to countries like India to try to boost literacy rates.

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/05/08/524550295/when-youre-not-quite-sure-if-your-teacher-is-human

by Tom Ward, Futurism

Researchers at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, have produced an artificial intelligence (AI) that is naturally curious. They tested it successfully by having it play Super Mario and VizDoom (a rudimentary 3-D shooter), as the video linked below shows. Most current AIs are trained using ‘Reinforcement Learning’ — they are rewarded when they perform a task that helps them to reach a goal or complete a function. This is a useful and effective strategy for teaching AI to complete specific tasks — as shown by the AI who beat the AlphaGo world number one — but less useful when you want a machine to be autonomous and operate outside of direct commands. This is crucial step to integrating AI into the real world and having it solve real world problems because, as Agrawal says, “rewards in the real world are very sparse.”

https://futurism.com/researchers-have-created-an-ai-that-is-naturally-curious/

BY ADAM STONE , Converge

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/higher-ed/The-Rise-of-the-Online-Higher-Education-Leader.html

by Praggya Guptaa, Governance Now

MOOCs will not replace universities, but rather enhance the quality of education by incorporating blended learning. In future, education will be either blended or fully online. Pure face-to-face education will exist only in history books. In blended classrooms, the on-campus university course can leverage the power of MOOCs to free up classroom time for interactive collaboration and discussion, testing and problem-solving. This model creates better efficiencies in the classroom and can foster a better quality of education overall for the money.

http://www.governancenow.com/views/interview/in-future-education-will-be-either-blended-or-fully-online-amit-goyal-edx-digitisation

by Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead, Small Business Trends

Creating courses to sell online is a great way to funnel your expertise into a rewarding and profitable channel. If you’re an expert, specialist or highly knowledgeable in a certain area, why not share your knowledge to a global audience and earn some money as you do so? Of course, successfully creating and selling online courses takes time, knowledge and commitment. To shed some light on how to effectively create and sell courses online, Small Business Trends spoke to David Siteman Garland, the creator of The Rise To The Top and Create Awesome Online Courses. David helps people create and sell online courses, and has assisted more than 3,500 students in over 100 countries to create successful courses, on everything from baby sleep training to clarinet lessons for adults.

https://smallbiztrends.com/2017/05/creating-and-selling-online-courses.html

By Sarah Cordiner, Inside Business

I have over 40 online courses, have built close to 1,000 courses for other people and have more than 7,000 students enrolled in my online courses in over 130 countries. Here’s some tips I’ve used to grow my global student base. Break it up into its smallest parts. Consumers are now in control of their knowledge because they have the power to jump onto a search engine and ask “How to xxx.” A great way to rapidly go global is to start providing your audience with those answers. If your content appears as the result for every “how to” question your audience has, then it is your courses they are going to buy. Here’s what to do: Write down every question your audience has on your topic, write a simple “tip” answer to each question and record that answer as a video.

http://pilotonline.com/inside-business/news/columns/ways-to-make-your-online-course-go-global-expert-column/article_43264387-0816-5ae6-be49-7bff487d0b96.html

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

While a recent research project examined enrollment patterns for online courses, a new survey is looking at broader questions related to online programs, this one based on responses from “chief online officers.” Produced by Quality Matters and Eduventures, the “Changing Landscape of Online Education (CHLOE)” offers a “baseline” examination of program development, quality measures and other structural issues. Most institutions rely on asynchronous delivery for their fully online programs. In fact, 95 percent of larger programs (those with 2,500 or more online program students) are “wholly asynchronous” while 1.5 percent are mainly or completely synchronous. About three-quarters (73 percent) of mid-sized programs (schools with between 500 and 2,499 online program students) and 62 percent of smaller programs are fully asynchronous.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2017/05/22/asynch-delivery-and-the-lms-still-dominate-for-online-programs.aspx

by Matt Lynch, tech Edvocate

As smartphones have become more common, educators have struggled with the question of what to do with smartphones in the classroom. For K-12 educators, the answer has been to ban smartphones from the classroom completely. College professors have also banned smartphones in increasing numbers. But now there’s some evidence to suggest that banning smartphones in the college classroom isn’t such a good idea. A study conducted by researchers in Singapore found that undergraduate students who were allowed to keep their phones with them actually scored better on tasks that measured their cognitive functioning. Even when they weren’t allowed to use their phones, students who were allowed to keep their phones in their pockets performed better than students whose phones were confiscated.

http://www.theedadvocate.org/professors-shouldnt-ban-smartphones/

by Kristin Houser, Futurism

Elon Musk co-founded artificial intelligence non-profit OpenAI just announced it has created an AI system that can learn to complete a task in reality after watching just one demonstration of that task in a simulated environment. The research company co-founded and chaired by Elon Musk used two separate neural networks to develop its one-shot imitation learning system. The first, a vision network, analyzes an image from the robot’s camera to determine the location of objects in reality. The second, an imitation network, determines the intent of a task it observes a human demonstrating via a virtual simulation. It then imitates the task in the real-world setting. Again, this network was trained on thousands of virtual demonstrations, but none that took place in reality.

https://futurism.com/elon-musk-just-unveiled-breakthrough-ai-research-heres-what-your-need-to-know/