Techno-News Blog

By Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed
Temple reveals that scandal over false information submitted for rankings of its online M.B.A. was much broader than earlier known. Dean, found to have dismantled system for checking accuracy of data, is ousted. Temple University on Monday announced that its business school had submitted false data for years for rankings purposes. The university said that it had asked Moshe Porat, dean of the business school, to resign, saying that he had dismantled the business school’s system for verifying the accuracy of data being submitted for rankings. An outside review found that the employee responsible for preparing the data said he did so at the dean’s direction, although Porat denied this to the outside investigator.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/07/10/temple-ousts-business-dean-after-report-finds-online-mba-program-years-submitted

by CBS News
Women owe about $890 billion of the country’s $1.48 trillion student loan debt, nearly double the $490 billion owed by men, placing them at a financial disadvantage as they begin their careers, according to a recently released report from the American Association of University Women (AAUW). The study, which analyzed data from the U.S. Department Education from the 2015-2016 school year, also found that women graduating with bachelor’s degree owe on average $2,700 more in student loans than men do. Women, who account for 56 percent of enrolled college students, are far more likely than men to graduate owing money — 71 percent for female grads vs. 66 percent for male grads, according to the AAUW.

https://www.universitybusiness.com/news/who-shoulders-most-nations-14-trillion-student-debt-women

By Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed
Canvas has unseated Blackboard Learn as the leading LMS at U.S. colleges and universities, according to new data from MindWires Consulting. In a blog post on Monday, Michael Feldstein, partner at MindWires Consulting and co-publisher of the e-Literate blog, wrote that Canvas now has 1,218 installations at U.S. institutions, compared with Blackboard’s 1,216. Although the two-figure difference may seem insignificant — and Blackboard and some of its allies say the data don’t accurately reflect the two companies’ relative reach — most analysts agree that Canvas’s ascent, largely at Blackboard’s expense, is noteworthy.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018/07/10/canvas-catches-and-maybe-passes-blackboard-top-learning

by James Paterson, Education Dive
College that “never ends” may be the future, according to a Washington Post story describing a new University of Michigan program that offers scholarships for students to come back and take courses throughout their lives. It also describes a trend toward other online learning initiatives designed to re-educate or update workers. The program at Michigan’s Ross School of Business offers 42 courses in leadership, marketing, human resources and finance that would normally cost about $10,000 a week. Ross charges the students an up-front subscription fee to access the courses, which officials say are intended to be flexible and change with needs in the workforce and economy. In 2015-16, 40 students signed up for the program, and last year 200 of the university’s 580,000 alumni did.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/a-college-program-that-never-ends/526969/

By Deirdre Fernandes, Boston Globe
The Kakuma Refugee Camp, 80 miles from anywhere in northwest Kenya, is a world apart, a holding center for thousands dispossessed by war and conflict. Opportunity knocks rarely here, but a once-obscure New Hampshire university has made it the idealistic focus of its global plans. Under a thatched-roof shed at the edge of northwest Kenya, Achayo Loum logs on to her laptop to tackle the day’s assignment: writing a college essay on counterfeiting in the fashion industry. She is one of the first participants in a program at Kakuma that will, when she completes it, make her a graduate of a school she really only knows from website photos: Southern New Hampshire University. Loum’s world has an unlikely visitor.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/07/07/education-hope/o7JpxrSdkyxzhQH4YpTYdI/story.html

by Herald Republican

One of the features that originally drew Mike Thompson to Trine University’s Lou Holtz Master of Science in Leadership program was the flexibility of online classes. That flexibility became very important to Thompson when, halfway through the program, he was called to active duty by the U.S. Army and deployed to Kuwait. A member of the Army and Indiana National Guard for 26 years altogether, Thompson, who holds the rank of staff sergeant, has been able to continue working on his MSL while deployed, completing two classes from Camp Arifjan in Kuwait.

http://www.kpcnews.com/heraldrepublican/article_e695d617-724d-53a3-8edb-cd7a337332a3.html

by Carmen Reinicke, CNBC

“New-collar jobs,” positions that require skills but not a bachelor’s degree, are in demand right now, according to ZipRecruiter. When Josh Hannaford saw that IBM used the phrase “no degree, no problem,” advertising for its apprenticeship program, he cried. Then, he applied. “It just blew me away that a company like IBM was recognizing that there was a whole untapped workforce out there and they were going to give us a chance,” said the 21-year-old Hannaford. So-called new-collar jobs, positions that require specific skills but not a bachelor’s degree, are in high demand, according to ZipRecruiter, an online employment marketplace. The skills gap, in which jobs stay vacant for lack of qualified applicants, has given opportunities to people like Hannaford who take the initiative to train for hotly desired skills.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/28/want-to-increase-your-salary-learn-these-key-skills.html

by Luke Dormehl, Digital Trends

The reason for this is the unimaginable pace at which we currently produce data. Each day, around 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is created, courtesy of the 3.7 billion humans who now use the internet. In the last two years alone, a mind-boggling 90 percent of the world’s data has been created. That’s where Park and fellow MIT scientist and co-founder Nathaniel Roquet enter the picture. Their startup Catalog has developed technology they believe could transform data storage as we know it; allowing, or so they claim, the entirety of the world’s data to be comfortably fit into a space the size of a coat closet. Catalog’s solution? By encoding data into DNA. That might sound like the plot of a Michael Crichton novel, but their scalable and affordable solution is serious, and has so far received $9 million in venture funding — along with the support of leading professors from Stanford and Harvard Universities.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/dna-data-catalog-startup/

by JAZZY QUICK, Big Think

With the average student loan borrower owing in the $27,900—$50,000 range, it’s no wonder that national student loan debt in America is at a record high of $1.52 trillion. And to make that statistic worse, STEM-based degree programs are pumping out a considerable portion of the borrowers with debt, due to students taking out massive amounts of loans in order to compete in a saturated job market. A survey shared by CommonBond gave data that depicts how the technology industry might be the most affected the most by student loan debt. Currently, approximately 53% of workers have student loan debts, according to CommonBond, and of those borrows, 65% of them are paying off $50,000 or more in student loans.

https://bigthink.com/jazzy-quick/the-tech-industry-leads-the-way-in-revolutionizing-student-loan-debt

By James Paterson, Education Dive
Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, believes it has skillfully moved some instruction online without sacrificing the small institution’s best qualities that its 2,500 students expect, according to Inside Higher Education. A 25-person task force with representatives from various departments, the faculty and the student body began investigating online learning options about four years ago and made several recommendations tailored to the college to move it into the realm. The group discouraged the development of massive open online courses (MOOCs). As a result, this summer the college is offering 19 courses online with a maximum of 23 students in each, most with a liberal arts focus.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/one-small-college-moves-online-carefully/527152/

by Leigh Guidry, Lafayette Daily Advertiser

About two-thirds of prisoners go back to jail within three years of being released, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But an online learning platform at 15 correctional facilities are helping Louisiana inmates create a new future for themselves.  The state tested Lantern, an educational program for the incarcerated created through a partnership with Ashland University in Ohio, first in the Louisiana Transition Center for Women in Madison Parish.  Kim Barnette, retired state director of correction education in Louisiana, said it was a success in that not only were the women educated, but it also reduced their discipline issues inside the institution. Not only are inmates 43 percent less likely to go back behind bars but they also are more likely to get a job, according to the research.

https://www.theadvertiser.com/story/news/local/education/2018/07/06/online-learning-helping-louisiana-inmates-stay-out-prison/742154002/

by IBL News

edX is building a transferrable student records tool, which will be ready in the next “Ironwood” version of the Open edX platform, scheduled for the first quarter of 2019. Bill De Rusha, an edX engineer, shared some insights about this development on a talk from the 2018 Open edX conference in Montreal. The first implementation of transferrable student records will be available on edx.org in the coming weeks. This software is a need today for learners who want to apply their MicroMasters credentials as transfer credits and share their edX records with partner institutions.

EdX Engineers Are Building a Transferrable Student Records Tool

by Jon Marcus, Hechinger Report

While the number of students has been rising, however, so has the proportion who begin as full-time freshmen but fail to come back for a second year. Fifty-five percent who started in 2015 were gone by the following year, the most recent period for which the figures are available, according to U.S. Department of Education data analyzed by The Hechinger Report. That’s up from 44 percent two years before.

https://www.texastribune.org/2018/07/05/more-high-school-grads-ever-are-going-college-1-5-will-quit/

by deToledo High School

by Wharton
The blockchain is one of the most significant, fundamental advances in digital platforms since the internet and also probably the most overhyped technology in current times, according to Kevin Werbach, Wharton professor of legal studies and business ethics, at the inaugural annual Penn Wharton Budget Model Spring Policy Forum, held recently in Washington. The basic idea behind blockchain is that one can trust the system as a whole without necessarily trusting any of the participants, Werbach said. The blockchain is a ledger — record of transactions in a database — distributed to people in a network. Everyone on that network has their own copy of the ledger and be “actually confident, based on mathematical structures of cryptography, that every copy is the same.” So even though there is no central intermediary — like Equifax, a bank or the Federal Reserve — all the players in the blockchain network can trust the information.

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/blockchain-can-transform-government/

BY LAURA ASCIONE, eCampus News

The study estimates the skills gap between future talent supply and demand will occur in 20 major economies at three milestones: 2020, 2025 and 2030, and across three sectors: financial and business services; technology, media and telecommunications; and manufacturing. It found that left to run its course, this shortage will create 85.2 million unfilled jobs and nearly $8.5 trillion in unrealized revenue in the economies analyzed. What’s more, a shortage of what the report calls “Level A” workers–those who have completed postsecondary education or a high-level trade college qualification–could equal 21 percent of the highly-skilled workforce of the 20 countries in the study.

Skills gap could have alarming consequences

By Keith R. Krueger, THE Journal

This year’s report found that school leaders place a high priority on cybersecurity and broadband/network capacity. When asked to rate the importance of privacy and security of student data, 68 percent of IT leaders indicated that it was more important than the prior year. For the fourth straight year, budget constraints are the top challenge facing school technology leaders, followed by the unavailability of relevant training and professional development, as well as the existence of silos in school districts. In addition, integrating technology into the classroom continues to be the most understaffed IT function in schools — it has remained the most understaffed IT function for three straight years by a significant margin. And 43 percent of respondents said that their staffs are “stretched too thin.”

https://thejournal.com/articles/2018/06/28/key-facts-to-advance-ed-tech-in-america.aspx

by LAURA PAPPANO , Hechinger Report

Amid all the bellowing about charters, school choice and vouchers, a potentially more revolutionary reform movement is bubbling up. Philanthropists, state education officials, reform advocates — even charter school leaders — are examining personalized learning. The big idea is to create a customized path so students learn at their own pace, in the manner that resonates best with them, with content tailored to their interests, aided by their computers. It feels natural to a generation groomed to presume that everything is calibrated to their needs and wants — whether it’s online shopping, news or math homework — and raised with smartphones in their hands.  It sounds benign, and wonderful, to many parents. Schools, districts and even entire states are embracing it. Teacher unions cautiously endorse it, while flagging the concern that teachers could be replaced by technology. But personalized learning raises big questions about educational equity.

Is the new education reform hiding in plain sight?

By Renee Patton, Times Higher Education

Technology continually disrupts almost every area of our lives, resulting in constant shifts across all segments of our society. This is something we’ve examined at length in our research “Digital Vortex How Digital Disruption Is Redefining Industries”, developed with IMD, and our book on the same subject, where we studied the ways in which many industries are being impacted by new digital technologies. Today’s students want always-on access to the network and resources, wherever they are on or off campus, for a deeper and more flexible learning experience. Traditional rigid modes of classroom instruction are unlikely to inspire students whose online life outside the classroom is dynamic and evolutionary. Creating an effective digital learning environment is not just about offering convenience and familiarity to students, however. The consequences for their futures if we don’t keep pace are manifold and damaging.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/digital-evolution-new-approach-learning-and-teaching-higher-education

By James Paterson, Education Dive
More Americans believe a four-year degree is not worth the financial cost, according to a CNBC All-American Economic Survey, which found the the number had increased to 44% from about 40% five years ago. The survey also found that fewer felt a four-year college degree was the best type of training, down to about 50% from nearly 60%. About 60% of Democrats favor a bachelor’s degree and 40% of Republicans. The survey additionally found that more people believe two-year schools may be of greater value. The biggest increase was seen for trade schools, which 26% of Americans felt were a good value, compared to 18% in 2013.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/yet-another-report-says-fewer-americans-value-4-year-degree/526820/

By Autumn A. Arnett, Education Dive
The Trump administration is planning to rescind Obama-era 2011 and 2016 guidance documents encouraging the use of race in college admissions to promote diversity on campus, the Wall Street Journal is reporting.  Administration officials will argue that the guidelines reach beyond the Supreme Court precedent and oversimplify what is allowed under the law.  The U.S. Department of Justice is reviewing claims from Asian-American students who believe they were unfairly discriminated against in Harvard University’s admissions practices. A similar complaint was dismissed last year by the Obama administration.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/trump-administration-plans-to-rescind-policies-that-encourage-affirmative-a/527039/