Techno-News Blog

Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed

My advice to everyone working on a Ph.D. or other terminal degree: look beyond the department walls. Ask after people who studied in your field and landed successfully in other areas of higher education. Find out what they did to get prepared not to be a faculty member—things like taking courses in the business school as electives or interning with an academic press. Spending even twenty minutes at a time talking with colleagues and exploring options can pay big dividends after the excitement of getting your doctoral hood turns into “what comes next?” For those of you who have established careers and are looking to make a wise move to something bigger, more stable, or more engaging: you’re in luck. Consider trying out various alt-ac roles, such as speaking, consulting, writing, and publishing.

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/qa-alt-ac-thomas-j-tobin

Natasha Noy, Google Blog

In today’s world, scientists in many disciplines and a growing number of journalists live and breathe data. There are many thousands of data repositories on the web, providing access to millions of datasets; and local and national governments around the world publish their data as well. To enable easy access to this data, we launched Dataset Search, so that scientists, data journalists, data geeks, or anyone else can find the data required for their work and their stories, or simply to satisfy their intellectual curiosity.

https://www.blog.google/products/search/making-it-easier-discover-datasets/

Science Daily
The phenomenon of multitasking across three or four internet-connected devices simultaneously is increasingly common. Researchers were curious to know how often this happens during online education, a method of delivering college and even high school courses entirely via an internet-connected computer as opposed to a traditional face-to-face course with a teacher physically present.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190214153135.htm

Robert Vamosi, Forbes
Stuart McClure is on a personal mission. After more than two decades in the anti-malware industry, he firmly believes that ninety percent of malware attacks today can be prevented by not clicking on this, not clicking on that, and not opening that attachment either. While he’s not the first nor alone in suggesting the user bears at least some responsibility, the anti-malware industry up until now hasn’t yet produced an effective alternative to signature-based solutions based on known attacks. McClure’s company, Cylance, thinks it has the answer with its first-generation AI-driven anti-malware products for both enterprises and consumers.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612975/ai-natural-language-processing-explained/

by Karen Hao, MIT Technology Review

The language model can write like a human, but it doesn’t have a clue what it’s saying. The passages of text that the model produces are good enough to masquerade as something human-written. But this ability should not be confused with a genuine understanding of language—the ultimate goal of the subfield of AI known as natural-language processing (NLP). (There’s an analogue in computer vision: an algorithm can synthesize highly realistic images without any true visual comprehension.) In fact, getting machines to that level of understanding is a task that has largely eluded NLP researchers. That goal could take years, even decades, to achieve, surmises Liang, and is likely to involve techniques that don’t yet exist.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612975/ai-natural-language-processing-explained/

Robyn D. Shulman, Forbes

To accommodate the rapid changes we’re seeing within in the workforce, it is imperative that every person who is either entering the workforce, runs a business, or has been working for decades takes time to become a life-long learner.  Learn with Facebook is for anyone looking for an introductory set of skills to help them find a new job, make a career change, return to the workforce or improve in their current role. The courses teach skills that are applicable to a range of jobs in the digital economy including digital marketing, customer service, and data analyst roles, among others.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/robynshulman/2019/02/16/learn-with-facebook-aims-to-train-1-million-people-and-small-business-owners-by-2020/#3c1590dbce50

by Sean Gallagher, University World News

At Northeastern University’s Center for the Future of Higher Education and Talent Strategy in the United States, we recently conducted a survey of 750 hiring leaders in the United States – across all sectors and organisational sizes. One of the foundational findings was that a majority – 64% – of executives felt that the need for continuous lifelong learning will demand more credential attainment from job seekers and higher levels of education in the future.

https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20190213103113978

Michael Kan, PCMag

The AI system from OpenAI can pump out fiction. It can also write fake news or divisive social media posts. All you have to do is serve up the topic or the beginning first sentence, and the AI will do the rest by trying to write human-like text. Researchers have developed an AI that is so good at writing text they’ve decided to keep the technology behind it secret over fears it’ll be exploited to write high-quality fake news. “Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are not releasing the trained model,” the research company OpenAI wrote in a blog post on Thursday. The AI, called GPT-2, can produce text of “unprecedented quality” when compared with other computing systems by simply giving it a short writing prompt. For instance, the AI can pump out fiction. It can also finish a homework assignment. All you have to do is serve up the topic or the beginning first sentence, and the AI will do the rest.  [Ray notes: Image students using this to complete creative writing assignments and more]

https://www.pcmag.com/news/366572/this-ai-is-too-powerful-to-release-to-the-public?

Michal Borkowski, Entrepreneur
Homework, tests and exams are all synonymous with education. The aim is usually to get the work done, but to get it done with quality content has often been a task. Here’s where ed-tech has stepped in, as an interesting and efficient way to get solutions and promote discussions via peer-to-peer learning. This is steering students toward being more motivated to learn, and parents toward better resources to help their kids out. While answers to most of the questions are readily available online, the chaotic nature of the inter-web makes the process hard. The advent of crowd learning platforms has emerged as a solution to this by facilitating the process through an aggregation of all such information under a single domain, making the sources more reliable.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/328134

by SEO Manager

There are many benefits of online teaching; if you have the right set of skill sets and are looking for an opportunity which does not require frequent travels. The Key reasons why a person can choose to teach online are the following:

1. Good mix of students
Through online classes, students of various culture can enrol themselves and can represent various religion, age, culture, ethnicity and even geography. You get an opportunity to address a group of students who can bring in numerous kind of experiences and that’s how you can get exposed to cultural diversity from one single platform. See the other benefits below:

https://securityboulevard.com/2019/02/key-reasons-to-teach-an-online-course-benefits-of-online-teaching/

By Ben Unglesbee , Education Dive
The Education Department has revised its proposed rules around distance education to clarify the role of subject-matter experts and their interaction with students, Inside Higher Ed reported. The changes are part of the department’s ongoing negotiated rulemaking on accreditation.  The latest proposal nixes language letting accreditors define distance education. The revision also calls for a subject matter expert to lead, rather than simply be included in, an instructional team. It also ensures subject-matter experts are responsible for assessing student learning, and it includes academic credentials in addition to work experience as criteria for a subject-matter expert. The revisions also add specificity to the definition of “regular and substantive” interaction between students and instructors. Regular is now defined as once-per-week interaction for courses worth three or more credit hours and every two weeks for courses less than three credit hours. Some subcommittee members proposed an alternative definition that accounted more for academic progress than duration, which favor emerging models of online learning.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/ed-dept-backpedals-its-proposed-distance-learning-stance-with-latest-revis/548435/

Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology

In our latest Teaching with Technology Survey, most faculty said they are comfortable using tech in the classroom, but many reported low-to-average tech skills among their students. Nearly all faculty in a recent survey believe they have adequate skills (or better) to get the job done when it comes to teaching with technology. And a full 77 percent said they are “absolutely confident” or “very confident” with tech use. These findings come out of Campus Technology’s 2018 Teaching with Technology Survey, which asked higher education faculty at colleges and universities across the country about their use of tech in the classroom, students’ tech skills, the availability of tech support and more.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2019/02/13/survey-faculty-confident-in-their-own-tech-skills-but-say-student-skills-lag.aspx

Michael Horn, Forbes

If colleges and universities cannot redesign their processes and priorities—or introduce new models with new and different processes and priorities—then bolting online tutoring on top of their existing model could be a critical sustaining innovation that allows them to capture some of the benefits of personalizing learning to become student-ready institutions. The reason why is that tutoring is inherently adaptive. Even if a college course can’t slow its pace of learning or accommodate learners with different levels of background knowledge about a subject, tutors can adjust and fill in what’s missing—even if it’s knowledge entirely outside the scope of the class that dates back to earlier concepts a student should have mastered in high school.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelhorn/2019/02/14/could-on-demand-online-tutoring-be-the-gateway-to-personalizing-learning-for-colleges/#574d2a1b560b

Mark Lieberman, Inside Higher Ed

Two weeks ago, “Inside Digital Learning” published an article exploring the decision-making process for institutions tweaking the length of their online courses. If you missed that piece, catch up before reading this one. A significant volley of Twitter mentions of the article — and a few email messages in our in-box — left us thinking about additional angles to explore on this topic. Teaching a short online course can be a learning experience for instructors. Penelope Moon is the former director of online programs in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University and is currently responsible for elearning planning and design with the Office of Digital Learning and Innovation at the University of Washington’s Bothell campus. For eight years at Arizona State, she taught 7.5-week-long online courses, and she continues to do so as an associate clinical professor. At another institution, she previously taught the same course online in a semester-length format. In a shorter course, she’s more focused on outcomes — how to ensure that students leave the class having learned a set of knowledge and skills. “It really forces faculty to identify what’s essential in a course, and to trim the fat,” Moon said.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/02/13/shorter-online-courses-offer-flexible-alternatives-students-pose

By Chuck Staben, Inside Higher Ed
To drive professors’ embrace of open educational resources, college leaders should offer incentives — a share of the financial savings — to academic departments, teaching centers and libraries, Chuck Staben suggests. We propose a different motivation structure for OER adoption. Our plan is to give some of the estimated yearly savings from OER use to the department, our teaching and learning center, and our library (5 percent/2.5 percent/2.5 percent, respectively). As an example, if a biology course enrolls 1,000 students per year, and the typical text savings would be $100 per student, adoption might save students $100,000 per year. Providing even 5 percent of the projected savings from OER adoption directly to the department as flexible money would be highly motivating to many departments; the teaching center and library are incentivized to support adoption and access. Although the savings from such a plan would accrue to the students, the retention of even one or two additional students due to better textbook usage by the students would, from an institutional perspective, pay for such an initiative. And, particularly for public universities, controlling cost, increasing access and enhancing success align with our mission.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/views/2019/02/13/encourage-faculty-adoption-oer-share-savings-departments-and

Xinhua

Online learning with software has made textbooks obsolete, and digital tools are a better choice for today’s students, said Bill and Melinda Gates, co-chairs of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In their 2019 annual letter released Tuesday, Bill Gates said even the best textbook can’t figure out which concepts you understand and which ones you need more help with. It certainly can’t tell your teacher how well you grasped last night’s assigned reading. But now, thanks to software, the stand-alone textbook is becoming a thing of the past. He gives algebra as an example. Instead of just reading a chapter on solving equations, you can look at the text online, watch a super engaging video that shows you how it’s done, and play a game that reinforces the concepts. Then you solve a few problems online, and the software creates new quiz questions to zero in on the ideas you’re not quite getting.

http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-02/12/c_137816237.htm

SUNY Oswego

SUNY Oswego professors Arvind Diddi and Murat Yasar have new standing to offer tips for successful online teaching: They recently began a year as Open SUNY Online Teaching Ambassadors. An innovative collaboration that opens the digital door to online-enabled teaching and learning opportunities across all 64 SUNY institutions, Open SUNY requires its teaching ambassadors to be “exemplary online educators, who are enthusiastic and effective in online teaching, and who can be positive and strong advocates for online teaching in our SUNY community.”

https://www.oswego.edu/news/story/open-suny-teaching-ambassadors-promote-value-online-courses

James Sanders, ZDNet

As mobile network operators sprint to deploy 5G in more localities around the world, interest in and hype around the benefits of 5G is accelerating to Autobahn speeds. With the advent of a mobile network capable of effectively supplanting a wireline internet connection, this can serve to benefit people who rely exclusively on a smartphone for internet connectivity. According to a report from the Brookings Institution, 35 percent of Hispanics and 24 percent of African-Americans “have no other online connection except through their smartphones or other mobile devices,” while the same is true of only 14 percent of whites. The economic effects of this disparity can be observed in education, as the report notes that internet use for homework is lowest among Hispanic and African-American students. For families without the means to pay for wired and wireless internet access, 5G levels the field in terms of connection quality. In addition to supplemental educational resources for homework, students in distance and online education courses that rely on streaming video instruction will not require a dedicated wired connection to participate.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/five-ways-professionals-will-experience-5g-and-when/

Carolyn Preston, Hechinger Report

It turns out the data on older students is imperfect, but here are some numbers we do know: Of the 12.1 million students enrolled in community colleges in 2015-16, about 903,000 were 40 or older, according to Martha Parham, senior vice president of public relations for the American Association of Community Colleges. Most of those older students, about 663,000, are participating in vocational programs…. According to the latest data from the National Center for Education Statistics, meanwhile, some 22 percent of students enrolled in credential-seeking subbaccalaureate occupational education (like computer and information science, manufacturing and marketing) were age 35 and older.

https://hechingerreport.org/going-back-to-school-after-50/

BY LAURA ASCIONE, eCampus News

Although no state has comprehensive data about all types of non-degree credentials, including certificates, licenses, and industry certifications, states are improving their data-collection practices around non-degree credential attainment, according to Measuring Non-Degree Credential Attainment from the Workforce Data Quality Campaign. States are most likely to have data about public for-credit certificate programs, registered apprenticeship certificates, and licenses. Thirty-six states report having most or all individual-level data on for-credit certificates from public two-year institutions in their state. Twenty-seven states report having most or all data about registered apprenticeship certificates, and 22 states report having most or all licensing data.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2019/02/12/more-states-are-recognizing-the-importance-of-non-degree-credentials/

Tom Simonite, Wired

“AI has really become a transformative technology that’s changing industries, markets, and society,” says Lynne Parker, who leads work on AI in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “There are a number of actions that are needed to help us harness AI for the good of the American people.” Parker previously contributed to work by the Obama administration that, a month prior to Trump’s election, led to reports on AI’s potential and societal implications, and a plan for future research. She is also working on a new national AI research strategy, slated for release soon.

https://www.wired.com/story/trumps-plan-keep-america-first-ai/