Techno-News Blog

by Tom Ward, Futurism

At its I/O ’17 conference this week, Google shared details of its AutoML project, an artificial intelligence that can assist in the creation of other AIs. By automating some of the complicated process, AutoML could make machine learning more accessible to non-experts. The AutoML project focuses on deep learning, a technique that involves passing data through layers of neural networks. Creating these layers is complicated, so Google’s idea was to create AI that could do it for them.

https://futurism.com/googles-new-ai-is-better-at-creating-ai-than-the-companys-engineers/

by Tim Dodd, Financial Review

As teachers and school principals are faced with increased challenges in leading people and managing organisations Southern Cross University (SCU) has added elements of an MBA degree to a postgraduate course for teachers. The university’s new online master of education, which commences in July is meant to give senior teachers the skills to be a school principal or department head. “Most masters of education do not offer MBA components,” said Jo-Anne Ferreira, who heads SCU’s school of education.

http://www.afr.com/leadership/management/business-education/southern-cross-university-education-masters-borrows-from-mba-to-teach-leadership-20170519-gw8rbj

by Matthew Lynch, tech Edvocate

Technology makes accessing student data rather easy. However, all student data needs to be maintained in a confidential manner to protect students’ rights, security, and dignity. At the same time, federal and state laws and guidelines may have certain rules regarding the type of safety precautions that must be taken regarding this data, but they might not specify specific tasks. Unfortunately, not all schools may provide a higher level of interpretation of those guidelines and laws. Therefore, there some steps need to be considered when protecting student data.

http://www.thetechedvocate.org/9-steps-keep-student-data-safe/

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

The productive use of predictive analytics in higher education is almost a foregone conclusion. Being able to predict whether a student will enroll in your institution, stay on track in his or her studies or need extra support to succeed seems like just the kind of data that can help colleges and universities meet their enrollment goals, better target recruiting efforts and more strategically apply their institutional help. However, the application of data in this way also cries out for a set of ethical practices to prevent its abuse. For example, the same data that can help students succeed could also be used to pinpoint which low-income students not to bother recruiting because their chances of enrollment are smaller than more affluent candidates.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2017/05/17/report-proposes-ethical-practices-for-use-of-predictive-analytics-in-higher-ed.aspx

By Sri Ravipati, Campus Technology

Virtual reality is taking off in higher education. VR devices are expected to increase 85 percent by 2020, with gaming and educational applications driving most of that growth. But what areas of VR should educators specifically focus on and what tech can they look out for? “We can expect to see certain trends in VR to move forward, while others will disappear. As devices continue to shrink we will see the development of augmented and mixed reality experiences that will power compelling visualizations, immersive storytelling, gamified simulations and learning experiences,” said Maya Georgieva, an ed tech strategist, author and speaker with more than 15 years of experience in higher education and global education.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2017/05/16/6-vr-trends-to-watch-in-education.aspx

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

Whether you’re flipping your courses, creating videos to help your students understand specific concepts or recording lectures for exam review, these tips can help you optimize your production setup on a tight budget. Burriel oversees what he calls the “media ecosystem” at his university, a topic on which he speaks nationally. While Oregon State maintains media production units for creating high-quality video, these days, he noted, “everyone’s got a video creation device in their pocket.” In fact, he estimates that 90 percent of the video creation done on campus is user-generated content, whether it’s faculty making videos to help students learn, students creating videos for assignments, webinar production or extension service tutorials made for people out in the field.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2017/05/17/8-tips-for-lecture-capture-on-a-shoestring.aspx

By Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed

Big time online learning gets all the press. Read the Digital Learning Compass report on online education enrollment and you will see lots of big numbers. In 2015 over 6 million students took at least one online course – 5 million undergrad, a million grad – with bout half of these distance learners are taking courses exclusively online. The real online learning story, however, is not about size. It’s about change. The big online learning story of 2017 is not about the few schools that offer distance education to ten of thousands of students. Rather, it is about the impact that online education can have on teaching and learning at every institution. And this impact may be greatest at our most traditional residential colleges and universities.

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/building-support-online-learning-small-residential-institutions

By Richard Chang, THE Journal

I always start off with this question: “Have you ever felt inept, because you tried to open a door the wrong way?” There are these types of doors called Norman doors. You get confused about whether to pull instead of push, or vice versa. Don Norman was the author of The Design of Everyday Things. In the case of Norman doors, it’s poor design. If you’re opening a door the wrong way, that’s a fleeting moment. But if you start off a course on the wrong foot, because it’s poorly designed, that sets the tone for the whole rest of a student’s experience with the course. We look at a teacher-developed course. We look at that first walking through the door — when the student begins, is there stumbling around? That’s one of the first things we’ll do in that workshop.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2017/05/19/designing-your-online-course-learning-from-an-expert.aspx

by Matthew Lynch, tech Edvocate

Mobile devices as teaching tools are becoming a more and more common part of the American education experience in classrooms, from preschool through graduate school. As far back as 2010, reports were surfacing that mobile apps are not only engaging, but educational, for children as young as preschool. PBS Kids, in partnership with the US Department of Education, found that the vocabulary of kids ages three to seven who played its Martha Speaks mobile app improved up to 31%. Abilene Christian University conducted research around the same time that found math students who used the iOS app “Statistics 1” saw improvement in their final grades. They were also more motivated to finish lessons on mobile devices than through traditional textbooks and workbooks.

http://www.thetechedvocate.org/mobile-devices-classroom-really-improve-learning-outcomes-2/

BY Rich Baxter, EdNews Daily

Authentic personalized learning requires that 21st century schools are filled with students and families who are provided the opportunity to take on more responsibility for their learning, in response to the exponential increase in resources provided by the Internet. Excellent teaching and AI will guide this upward innovation movement, but ‘a shared leadership’ will facilitate more and more partnerships within communities and between them. Education is merging with neuroscience, quantum computing, and AI, redefining what it means to be human and thus what it means to learn and to teach. Where does that put education as a human endeavor and what other factors do we need to consider in order to take full advantage of the present knowledge revolution?

http://www.ednewsdaily.com/10-notables-changing-the-future-of-learning-and-teaching/

http://www.talenteconomy.io/2017/05/17/universal-skills-measurement-system/

by Pat Donachie, Education Dive

Female faculty members at colleges and universities who hope to achieve greater professional success and leadership are consistently stymied in male-dominated environments where they must work far harder than men to receive similar awards, according to a new study conducted by a professor at Florida Atlantic University’s College of Business. The study examined appointments to named professorships by gender using a sample of 511 faculty from research universities throughout the country, finding women were less likely to be awarded such positions and are inadequately appointed to endowed chairs in return for their significant scholarly work. The biases will be difficult to excise because they are so embedded in the college culture, according to the researchers, but they are hopeful that the study will lend more insight into the issue.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/report-female-professors-seeking-leadership-roles-face-inherent-biases/443140/

by Maris Stansbury, edCircuit

A major generational clash is underway, says a foremost expert, and it’s affecting all industries, including education. The clash is coming from so-called Gen Z, the first generation to be considered fully “phigital” — unwilling or unable to draw a distinction between the physical world and its digital equivalent. So what does that mean for educators? Well, buckle up and hold on.

http://www.edcircuit.com/rising-phigital-student/

By Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed

New data from Blackboard show that the most common types of course content that students use on a daily basis — images, PDFs, presentations and other documents — continue to be riddled with accessibility issues. And while colleges have made some slight improvements over the last five years, the issues are widespread. The findings come from Ally, an accessibility tool that Blackboard launched today (the company in October acquired Fronteer, the ed-tech company behind the tool). Ally scans the course materials in a college’s learning management system, comparing the materials to a checklist based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 AA, developed by the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative. If any issues arise, the tool flags them and suggests accessible alternatives.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/05/18/data-show-small-improvements-accessibility-course-materials

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/call-action-marketing-and-communications-higher-education/coming-phigital-generation-%E2%80%94-and

by Rice University

My colleague, Dr. Vickie Cook, shared this site with me. I think that you may find it useful! Somewhat surprisingly, there is very little research about the amount of time it takes the average college student to complete common academic tasks. We know quite a bit about how students tackle common academic tasks, but those studies rarely ask students to report on how long it takes them to complete the task (whether reading a book, writing a paper, or studying for an exam). The testing literature provides some clues (because valid instrument design depends on data about the average speed of test takers), but it’s tough to generalize from the experience of taking high-stakes, timed tests to the experience of working on an assignment in the comfort of your dorm. And while there is a sizable literature on reading, the nature and purpose of the reading tasks in these experiments are also quite different from what students typically encounter in college. All of which is to say the estimates linked below are just that: estimates.

http://cte.rice.edu/workload/

by Michael Parker, EDUCAUSE Review

In rethinking medical education, an interdisciplinary team at Harvard Medical School designed a new fundamentals curriculum for online health care learning. HMX Fundamentals takes advantage of how people learn and an array of online tools to provide an immersive online program for students just beginning their studies in health care. Courses integrate clinical applications, opportunities for active learning, and biomedical visualizations that help make concepts more intuitive and memorable. Students from the pilot at one HMX partner institution increased scores by an average of 55 percent from pre-course to post-course quizzes, with similar trends for groups at other schools.

http://er.educause.edu/articles/2017/5/teaching-medicine-as-an-immersive-experience

By Jean Dimeo, Inside Higher Ed

Although tuition certainly matters to students, what matters more is “total cost of attendance.” That includes fees, books, transportation, and the opportunity cost of taking classes, among other things. (Reduced work hours to make time for classes leads to reduced income in the short term, which is a cost. Over time, if they graduate, they more than make it back, but in the here and now, it’s a cost.) Opportunity cost is lowest in recessions and highest during expansions, which is why our enrollments are counter-cyclical. So here’s the plan. If we get critical mass of sections using OER, and we can quantify the typical savings to students in some sort of credible way, I’d like to go to the Board with the following argument: If we raise tuition $5 a credit, a student taking 30 credits pays an extra $150 a year. But if we’re using OER in enough places that the student is saving $500 a year on books, she’s still coming out ahead.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/insights/2017/05/17/oer-could-boost-revenues

BY MERIS STANSBURY, eSchool News

Google’s Chromebooks are now the most used devices in K-12 classrooms across the U.S.  The use of Google in the classroom is true Googlification, or modeling learning off of Google’s own employee skillset, in that the use of Google and Chromebooks in the classroom aims to turn today’s students into creative and collaborative problem-solvers that know how to intuitively harness online and in-hand technologies. “Google is helping to drive a philosophical change in public education—prioritizing training children in skills like teamwork and problem-solving while de-emphasizing the teaching of traditional academic knowledge, like math formulas,” writes the New York Times.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2017/05/17/google-shift-education/

by Chris Weller, Business Insider

Take notice, incoming college freshmen — the richest person in the world has some advice for what you should study. In a Twitter thread on Monday, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates said if he were to enter college now, he’d major in artificial intelligence, energy, or biosciences. He called them all “promising fields where you can make a huge impact.” Experts in technology and economics generally agree that there will be profound changes in the next 20 years in the way companies use AI to automate their factories, construction sites, and retail locations.

http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-what-college-freshman-should-study-2017-5

by Matthew Lynch, tech Edvocate

This month, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) announced a disappointing decision. Sixteen years after they published their formal recommendations discouraging any form of screen time before age two – and 14 years after making recommendations to limit screen time for older children to no more than two hours per day – they are now recanting those recommendations, calling them “outdated.” According to AAP-affiliated doctors who participated in the Academy’s Growing Up Digital: Media Research Symposium (a symposium organized to discuss research data and suggest practical advice to parents), the two-hour daily limit does not reflect how much media children actually consume. Therefore, they argue, the recommendation needs to be changed.

http://www.thetechedvocate.org/screen-time-recommendations/