Techno-News Blog

by Future Learn
The first two in a series of twelve new free online courses to assist refugees affected by conflict in the Middle East start on June 18th. The courses are designed for tens of thousands of young people whose education has been interrupted by wars such as that in Syria, helping to prevent a ‘lost generation’ in the region. King’s College London has produced two new free online courses, Basic English 1: Elementary and Basic English 2: Pre-Intermediate so refugees and displaced people in Jordan and Lebanon can learn basic English for everyday situations in order to gain transferable skills and/or help proceed into higher education.

https://www.fenews.co.uk/press-releases/17525-new-free-online-courses-launched-to-help-syrian-refugees-continue-their-education

by Harvard Gazette

“There are many millions of students who, as a result of economic or geographic limitations, simply do not have access to one of the most central aspects of being a scientist, which is working in a laboratory,” said Robert Lue, principal investigator of LabXchange and professor of the practice of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard. “LabXchange addresses this issue with a platform that integrates dynamic experimental simulations with background curriculum and social networking — all created to more effectively expose students of varying backgrounds to the authentic and engaging experience of scientific discovery.”

As founding sponsor, Amgen has awarded $6.5 million in grant funding to Harvard to develop, launch, and grow LabXchange. Amgen will be engaged throughout the development, and its scientists with industry experience will play key advisory roles.

Virtual lab to extend reach of science education

By Jean Dimeo, Education Dive
Facebook is partnering with community colleges to share curriculum for digital advertising and media training, skills that a growing number of small business owners and staff say they lack, according to Inside Higher Ed.  Facebook recently announced partnerships with two-year institutions Des Moines Area Community College, Greenville Technical College and Central New Mexico Community College, and more partnerships are expected to be announced this week, Inside Higher Ed reported. Meanwhile, Google announced this week that it partnered with Udacity to offer free career and tech courses to recent graduates and mid-career professionals, according to Tech Crunch. Udacity and Google tested an online course in March; they now will together launch 12 free courses.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/facebook-google-offering-tech-career-courses/525069/

By Jeffrey R. Young, EdSurge

In fact, three of the 10 most popular courses on Coursera aren’t produced by a college or university at all, but by a company. That company—called Deeplearning.ai—is a unique provider of higher education. It is essentially built on the reputation of its founder, Andrew Ng, who teaches all five of the courses it offers so far. Ng is seen as one of the leading figures in artificial intelligence, having founded and directed the Google Brain project and served as the chief scientist at the Chinese search giant Baidu, as well as having directed the artificial intelligence laboratory at Stanford University. He also happens to be the co-founder of Coursera itself, and it was his Stanford course on machine learning that helped launch the MOOC craze in the first place.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-06-07-andrew-ng-is-probably-teaching-more-students-than-anyone-else-on-the-planet-without-a-university-involved

Digital Shadows, Bank Info Security
As customers spend more and more money online each year, the opportunities for fraud increase in parallel; experts project a loss of $24 billion to payment card fraud by the end of 2018. Payment card fraudsters rely on a sophisticated ecosystem and support network that provides a wide range of credit card details, fraud tools and online tutorials. This whitepaper lifts the lid on e-learning credit card fraud courses. These programs coach aspiring criminals to make $12,000 in monthly earnings and point to the increased sophistication of the professional cybercriminal ecosystem as fraudsters seek to up-skill themselves. Think: High-paying job with a degree in cybercrime and membership to Bad Actor Fraternity from Fraudster University.

https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/whitepapers/inside-look-at-online-carding-courses-for-cybercriminals-w-4397

By Dian Schaffhauser, Camapus Technology
A startup based in Israel has raised $11 million to expand the growth of its solution for doing artificial-intelligence-powered transcription. Verbit technology, according to the company, will be helpful to schools in addressing the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) regulation. The transcription process for videos and audio recordings typically relies on a combination of approaches: fully automated transcription, which tends to produce partially accurate results, and/or manual transcriptions, which require a much longer turnaround. Verbit has developed Verbatizer, a transcription system that uses a combination of AI technologies for automatic speech recognition algorithms and human-augmented refinement. The corrections made by human transcribers are fed into the Verbit algorithms through machine learning technologies to continuously improve the formulas.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2018/06/04/startup-uses-ai-and-human-augmentation-for-video-audio-transcription.aspx

By Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology
Research suggests that blended learning is more effective than both face-to-face and online education, according to a new e-book released by the Online Learning Consortium and academic publisher Routledge. Online & Blended Learning: Selections from the Field brings together advice and best practices from a number of scholarly publications related to online and blended learning; topics covered include the basics of the blended model, differences between online and on-campus learning, strategies for teaching with technology, data analysis techniques, policy issues and more.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2018/05/23/6-reasons-blended-learning-works.aspx

By Cait Etherington, eLearning Inside

In a 2017 interview with the University Professional and Continuing Education Association, Dean Hunt Lambert, who leads Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education, emphasized that the 60-year curriculum recognizes that people begin their learning careers in earnest in their teens, continue learning throughout their work years, and even continue their educations during their retirements. Continuing education programs evidently play an integral part in the learning lives of most adults, but this will expand as the need to reskill increases over the coming decades. As several recent studies have found, in today’s disrupted economy, life-long learning is no longer just for ambitious upskillers. To survive in today’s economy, everyone needs to commit to reskilling on a constant basis. The idea of 60-year curriculum captures this shift, and this weekend’s symposium is a chance for thought leaders to begin exploring its far-reaching implications on higher education.

Harvard Hosts 60-Year Curriculum Symposium

By: Danielle Geary, Faculty Focus

Online students need to feel an instructor presence in their classes. Thorough explanations and effective communication help fulfill this need and can transform a mediocre online course into a great one—and it all starts with the syllabus. Structure and communication. That’s what I’ve found to be the keys to an effective online course syllabus. Well, that, and something I call a chapter checklist, to go along with the syllabus. I’ve discovered both to be essential to my asynchronous online foreign language course.

https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/ideas-for-creating-an-effective-syllabus-for-online-learning/

by Scroll India

On May 24, the University Grants Commission, India’s higher education regulator, approved new regulations for online education. The regulations are yet to be formally notified but the commission said they “will be made applicable from the academic session 2018-19”. The regulations clear the way for universities that rank high in the government’s ranking and rating systems to offer even degree programmes online. In theory at least, a student will be able to earn a bachelor’s degree without attending college. Lectures will be recorded or delivered through video-conferencing and discussed in an online discussion forum; e-content will replace textbooks and there will be a provision for self-assessment.

https://scroll.in/article/880977/indias-top-universities-can-now-offer-full-degree-programmes-online-but-there-are-reservations

by Shweta Ganjoo, India Today

We all know that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is an avid reader. Over the years the business manganate has shared numerous book recommendations on his blog. The list of his recommended books include Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo Da Vinci, Kate Bowler’s Everything Happens For A Reason and Neal Stephenson’s Sebeneves among others. And now Gates in his blog has listed another recommendation. But this time it’s not a book but an online course. Gates, in a recent post on his blog, recommended an course online titled “Big History” by an Australian historian Christian David. Interestingly, unlike most online courses this one is absolutely free. “As the creator of Big History- my favorite course of all time- David is well-suited to write about how we came to be,” he wrote in his blog praising the author.

https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/bill-gates-wants-everyone-to-take-this-free-online-course-because-it-explains-origin-and-future-of-humans-1247768-2018-06-01

By Ann Marie Barron, SILive
Trying to choose a college major that’ll pay off down the road? Computer science, communications and political science top the list, according to the most recent study by the Princeton Review. Research conducted by the college admission services company resulted in a list of the top 10 college majors based on a few different things, including job prospects, alumni salaries and popularity. And while those three topped the list, other majors on it also offer myriad benefits and opportunities, researchers said.

https://www.silive.com/news/2018/06/college_majors_here_are_the_to.html

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology
The California State University and California Community Colleges systems have teamed up to launch a new online course finder that will provide students enrolled at either set of institutions access to more than 10,000 online, transferable classes. The program is live in time for students to take summer 2018 classes. “Finish Faster,” as it’s called, is part of the Online Education Initiative, a collaborative effort among several community colleges in the state to push students to finish their educational goals faster. Besides the online courses, the project incorporates resources to help online students succeed, including counseling, tutoring and access to library services.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2018/05/31/california-universities-and-ccs-launch-online-course-finder-with-10000-classes.aspx

Chronicle of Higher Ed

“Making Digital Learning Work: Success Strategies From Six Leading Universities and Community Colleges” wades into those waters with a study of three community colleges and three public research universities, all of which have at least 20,000 students, and enroll significant percentages of Pell-eligible students and students who take online classes. The authors crunched a lot of data to determine how digital technologies affect access, student outcomes, and return on investment. First, the good news. Researchers from Arizona State University and the Boston Consulting Group found that online education can boost retention and graduation rates, while saving students time and money. But — and this is a big one — to be successful, colleges need to develop a variety of delivery models to match students’ needs, and make significant investments in things like instructional design and student support services. In other words, don’t expect a series of videotaped lectures to get the job done.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/What-6-Colleges-Learned-About/243540

by Jarrett Carter, Education Dive

California State University Channel Islands (CSUCI) assistant nursing professor Jaime Hannans, Jill Leafstedt, CSU’s executive director of Teaching and Learning Innovations, and Michelle Pacansky-Brock,​ faculty mentor, Digital Innovation for the California Community Colleges Online Education Initiative write in EdSurge about the value of online learning as an important element of the school’s mission as a Hispanic Serving Institution. With more than 54% of its student body comprised of first-generation students and more than half having transferred from community colleges, they write about online learning as a tool to defray the invisible college costs of transportation and time away from family and work.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/the-importance-of-online-learning-for-hispanic-students/524559/

by Lindsay MacKenzie, Inside Higher Ed

Is a shakeout in the offing? Most analysts and observers say yes, given the number of providers, the lack of differentiation among many of them and growing qualms from some college officials about the industry’s traditional business model of revenue shares and long-term lock-ins. The latter has spawned even more competition, from a new set of companies charging fees for specific services, rather than the bundles that the OPMs have historically used. “I think there is a roll-up coming in the OPM industry,” said Joshua Kim, director of digital learning initiatives at the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (and an Inside Higher Ed blogger). “There are just too many players.”

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018/06/04/shakeout-coming-online-program-management-companies

By Henry Kronk. eLearning Inside

For the most ambitious, Agarwal hopes to attract 100 million learners to edX in five years’ time. The non-profit MOOC provider has, one might argue, remained truest to the original promise of MOOCs (keeping them open and massive) when they exploded in 2011 and 2012. The platform has trained 16 million learners with courses from over 130 different institutions. Using the Open edX platform, a further 18 million + have taken at least one university course, bringing the total number to roughly 35 million.  In addition to a few other goals, Argawal wants to foster a culture in which university credits are more transferable and widely accepted. “Why is it so hard to do?” he asked. He hopes to generate a community in which 25% of edX courses will count anywhere. “Let’s say I want to launch an online masters degree in computer science and I want to teach AI as part of it,” Argawal said.

edX CEO Anant Agarwal Announces Ambitious Goals for 2022

by Karthik Reddy, HR Technologist

eLearning can be described as using electronic technology for any educational activities, and over the past few years, it has steadily grown in popularity, particularly to online course distributors like Udemy. This is especially true for the younger generation who have not only grown up using the internet but also have begun to use technology in schools. There are many different types of eLearning, each coming with various benefits. Everyone has a kind of learning that works best for them, but often it can be the most effective if different methodologies are used in conjunction with each other.

https://www.hrtechnologist.com/articles/learning-development/a-new-type-of-learning/

The Amgen Foundation and Harvard University today announced plans to launch a free online science education platform uniquely designed to level the playing field for aspiring scientists. The LabXchange platform, which will launch with a focus in biology, will offer digital instruction and virtual lab experiences to high school and college students, enabling them to gain meaningful exposure to the scientific process. It will also include online networking focused on collaboration and mentoring.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/amgen-foundation-and-harvard-team-up-to-offer-free-online-science-education-platform-300656825.html

by Darren Catalano, EDUCAUSE Review

The mantra “data-driven decision-making” is one that institutions of higher education are adopting at an increasing clip. More than three-quarters of colleges and universities say institutional analytics is a priority. However, as more projects get off the ground, some initiatives are falling flat. What’s happening? Data are being kept in the periphery. For an analytics program to be useful, leaders must build an institutional data culture that sets analytics as its modus operandi.

https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2018/5/making-analytics-the-campus-modus-operandi

by Mark Rowh, University Business

Tackle issues head-on and promptly. This may be especially important for tech staff who ignore policies, fail to carry their load or can’t seem to get along with co-workers. “Don’t let the bad behavior of a few poison those who want to work,” says CIO Yvette Brown Koottungal at Barry University in Florida. She is also vice president for technology at the university, where she manages a team of 63.

https://www.universitybusiness.com/article/seven-strategies-minimizing-tech-services-staff-issues