Techno-News Blog

the Frisky

If you’re someone that is looking to spread knowledge and earn from it, there are countless of benefits for you as well. The internet offers us an insane amount of choices for just about anything. Be it products, dates, technology and what not. Well, the same goes for online tutoring.  Simply choose a student that applied for the courses and who you think will be a great match as an apprentice. That way you both can have a much more enjoyable experience. As for earning rates, it once again depends on the subject and how difficult it is. For simple English lessons the rate might not be that high, however, for quantum physics, it’s a whole different story. Usually, the standard rate for tutoring is about $25 to $35 per hour.

https://thefrisky.com/how-much-can-you-earn-as-an-online-tutor/

By Sydney Johnson, EdSurge

Last year, the number of learners who had taken at least one MOOC crossed 100 million, but the number of learners added was just 20 million, which was less than 23 million for the last two years. So the rate at which new users are coming into the MOOC space is decreasing. The number of courses has been growing steadily at the same rate now. We have more than 11,000 courses from 900 universities. As for the MOOC providers, Coursera is the biggest one—with the most revenue and the most number of users, and also the most number of employees. Udacity ended 2017 with 500 employees, but they had layoffs, and ended 2018 with 330 employees.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-02-26-much-ado-about-moocs-where-are-we-in-the-evolution-of-online-courses

By Wade Tyler Millward, EdSurge

Almost 30 percent of industry-recognized credentials American students recently earned relate to careers in architecture and construction. Yet just 8 percent of them are in demand by employers. And only .1 percent of students earned a particular credential that could lead to a nearly $82,000 information technology job. These are just some of the findings teased Monday at a SXSW EDU panel on industry-recognized credentials developed or adopted by businesses to verify students have the technical skills needed for certain jobs.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-03-08-report-the-credentials-people-get-are-not-always-the-ones-companies-want

By Scott Rappaport
UC Santa Cruz has launched a new online course open to the public through the Coursera platform. Titled “Feminism and Social Justice” it is an adaptation of a popular course taught on campus for nearly a decade by Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies Bettina Aptheker. The condensed, four-lecture course critically examines three significant post World War II movements for social justice in the United States from feminist perspectives–considering how participants in these movements thought about race, gender, and class; how they organized; and what progressive changes may have resulted from their efforts.

https://news.ucsc.edu/2019/03/aptheker-online-course.html

by Zoe Mackay, IBL News

“MOOCs haven’t died. They are alive,” said Zvi Galil, Dean of the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the pioneer of the Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS), during an interview at the IBL Studios in New York. In today’s job market, continuing education is a lifelong effort. As technology is constantly changing and employment sectors necessitate continuous learning from their employees, online education is an ideal and flexible model. “We are moving into a period where we must have adult education. We must have lifelong learning. And online will be a major tool to do it. Some very capable people can take the time off to move, to go to a place where they can have classes, and some do, but a majority, I believe, will be using online courses or degrees or certificates.”

https://iblnews.org/2019/03/08/massive-online-courses-are-alive-said-pioneer-of-omscs-affordable-degree/

By Henry Kronk, eLearning Inside

There’s an issue with online higher education that has yet to be resolved. For learners to apply for federal student loans, and for institutions to receive these Title IV funds, online or distance programs must demonstrate “regular and substantive interaction” (RSI) between students and instructors. There’s just one issue in following this guideline. No policymaker has ever clearly defined RSI. Three groups—The University Professional and Continuing Education Association, the Online Learning Consortium, and the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies—have teamed up to offer a series of policy recommendations, including guidelines for RSI.

https://news.elearninginside.com/what-is-regular-and-substantive-interaction-the-term-that-has-defined-online-learning-still-lacks-clear-definition/

By Angela Chen, the Verge
Google’s Arts & Culture division, the team behind the viral art-matching selfie trend from last year, has partnered with museums from around the world to create a collection of videos and images dedicated to honoring science and human discovery. The Once Upon a Try project is available both online and within the Google Arts & Culture app on Android and iOS. Built in collaboration with groups such as NASA, CERN, and the Smithsonian, it features over 200,000 artifacts from around the world.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/6/18253133/google-arts-culture-once-upon-a-try-science-discovery-museum-nasa-cern-exhibit

By Jeanne Batalova and Michael Fix, Migration Policy
As the U.S. workforce ages, baby boomers retire, and birth rates decline, the United States is facing an estimated shortfall of 8 million workers between now and 2027. At the same time, the U.S. economy is becoming ever more knowledge-based. Having a marketable postsecondary credential, whether an academic degree or a professional certification or license, has become more of a necessity to secure a job that pays a family-sustaining wage. Amid these economic changes, immigrant-origin adults—that is, immigrants and their U.S.-born children—are projected to be the primary source of future labor-force growth. Yet about 30 million of the 58 million immigrant-origin adults in the country as of 2017 did not have a postsecondary credential, representing 30 percent of all U.S. adults without one. These immigrants and their children are thus an important target group for efforts by governments, educational institutions, civil society, and employers to boost the credential attainment of U.S. workers.

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/credentials-immigrant-origin-adults-united-states

Sean Gallagher, Evolllution

The world of credentialing is changing fast. Employer needs have evolved in concert with improving hiring support technologies. Higher education institutions are now in a difficult position, responding to changing employer and student demands for credentials that signal job readiness. In Educational Credentials Come of Age, Sean Gallagher shares the results of a comprehensive study on the progress and growth of non-degree credentials when it comes to supporting employability. In this interview, he expands on some of those findings.

https://evolllution.com/programming/credentials/the-growing-profile-of-non-degree-credentials-diving-deeper-into-education-credentials-come-of-age/

Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed

In our field, we have a wide array of risks — technological infrastructure within and outside the university, including bandwidth, physical interruptions due to hurricane, tornado, earthquake or related natural disasters; policy and regulatory at the state and federal levels; accessibility shortcomings; global malware challenges; online, in-class verbal sexist, gender-preference, racist and analogous abuse; academic integrity issues; competitive risks in meeting game-changing new models of degree and certificate offerings; and maintaining our reputation as leaders in the field. These are the things we think about when we wake up in the middle of the night. These are the what-if challenges that are always in the back of our minds.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online-trending-now/identifying-and-mitigating-most-important-risks-online

Jackie Snow, Fast Company

A new machine learning paper shows how AI can take footage of someone and duplicate the video with the subject looking an age the researchers specify. The team behind the paper, from the University of Arkansas, Clemson University, Carnegie Mellon University, and Concordia University in Canada, claim that this is one of the first methods to use AI to tackle aging in videos. The system was trained on an expanded dataset of photos of showing individuals at different ages. Reinforcement learning, a technique that rewards an AI model for getting a task correct, comes into play by rewarding the system when the synthesized features, like wrinkles, appear similarly across consecutive video frames. Similar approaches power the “deepfake” technology that has raised alarms about the prospect of AI-powered video propaganda.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90314606/this-new-ai-tool-makes-creepily-realistic-videos-of-faces-in-the-future

Brian Benchoff, Hackaday
Google has promised us new hardware products for machine learning at the edge, and now it’s finally out. The thing you’re going to take away from this is that Google built a Raspberry Pi with machine learning. This is Google’s Coral, with an Edge TPU platform, a custom-made ASIC that is designed to run machine learning algorithms ‘at the edge’.

https://hackaday.com/2019/03/05/google-launches-ai-platform-that-looks-remarkably-like-a-raspberry-pi/

Gaby Del Valle, Vox

Textbook publishers, for their part, have begun acknowledging that textbooks and other course materials have become so expensive that some students simply can’t afford them, even if it means their grades will suffer as a result. Publishers claim that new technologies, like digital textbooks and Netflix-style subscription services, make textbooks more affordable for all. But affordability advocates say that if anyone is to blame for the fact that textbook costs have risen more than 1,000 percent since the 1970s, it’s the publishers — and, advocates claim, these new technologies are publishers’ attempt to maintain their stranglehold on the industry while disguising it as reform.
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/3/6/18252322/college-textbooks-cost-expensive-pearson-cengage-mcgraw-hill

BY DARIA KIRPACH, BizEd AACSB
Because so many of their students struggle with the cost of course materials, more professors are opting to use free open educational resources (OER) in their courses, rather than expensive traditional textbooks. But other faculty worry that the quality of OER might not equal that of traditional textbooks, according to a report conducted by the Babson Survey Research Group at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

https://bized.aacsb.edu/articles/2019/march/what-do-faculty-think-of-open-educational-resources

By Hallie Busta, Education Dive

Mike Silagadze, CEO and co-founder of Top Hat, a digital learning company that offers OER, acknowledges those issues. The solution, he said, is creating a peer-led community around producing OER content. “Until that happens, OER is going to continue not being up to par with what the textbook publishers are providing,” he said. Last spring, the company hired a chief product officer to help it find new revenue opportunities. The company has reached more than 2.8 million students at North American institutions.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/sxsw-edu-taking-oer-to-the-next-level/549850/

by Emily Alford, ClickZ

According to Gartner, 50% of search will shift to voice search by 2020. And in the cases of personal assistants, if your business doesn’t come in first, it comes in last. Marketers scrambling to make sure they’re optimized to take those top spots ranked voice search high on their list of 2019 priorities, with 36.1% naming voice search a top trend. Holmes says that as voice search becomes more common, search queries will most likely get more specific and companies need to start anticipating those queries sooner, rather than later.

https://www.clickz.com/business-ready-search-trends-2019/226655/

Brandon Busteed, Forbes
There are a growing number of examples where students prefer online over traditional classroom education. For a while now, online education has been a good option for students who – for various reasons – can’t access on-the-ground education. And although there are still examples of rudimentary online courses out there (think compliance training), both the technology and the pedagogy powering online learning have gotten considerably better over the last decade. And now, fairly suddenly it seems, there are a growing number of cases where online education is actually outperforming its traditional classroom counterpart. Evidence of student success and, indeed preference, for the online classroom is mounting – and this will serve widespread benefits for all of us.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brandonbusteed/2019/03/05/online-education-from-good-to-better-to-best/#6516a1a06912

By Tanya Seidel, ATD
We’re yet another year closer to the official death of Flash, and while Adobe plans on ending their support of it at the end of 2020, there’s no telling when browsers will pull the plug. Have you started converting your old Flash courses to HTML5? While this technological storm is slow-moving and won’t arrive for another two years, there are plenty of people who haven’t even started their preparation. How do we know, you ask? Because we talk to learning managers who have libraries full of old e-learning courses that were either published to Flash or have Flash elements in them, and they’ve done nothing about them.

https://www.td.org/insights/one-year-closer-to-the-death-of-flasha-case-study

By Michael Sano, EdSurge

The #DLNchat community recently explored this question of work and learning, and while there was some disagreement about how much society can predict about specific jobs in the coming decades, there was agreement about how higher ed institutions can help prepare its students for whatever careers lie ahead. Automation looms large in many predictions about the future of work. In response, #DLNchat-ters posited that universities can strengthen the cultivation of skills like critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration and literacy. “Prensky says to let technology do what it does best and hone our skills, as humans, to do what we do best—responding, reacting, engaging as humans who understand nuance and beauty,” said Erin Crisp. Many argue this focus on so-called “soft skills” has long been what learners gain from a liberal-arts education. Just don’t call them “soft skills” at #DLNchat.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-02-21-how-the-future-of-work-will-influence-the-future-of-learning-dlnchat

BY LAURA ASCIONE, eSchool News

Educators know project-based learning (PBL) isn’t simply another teaching strategy. Project-based learning gives students deeper learning experiences, and as they apply their knowledge, they develop soft skills such as critical thinking and team work–skills they’ll carry through to college and the workforce. But it’s often a great undertaking to locate and vet resources and tools for project-based learning, and educators don’t have an abundance of time. Below, we’ve gathered a handful of “add-on” tools for project-based learning. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but we hope these resources help as you search for PBL examples and strategies.

https://www.eschoolnews.com/2019/03/04/bam-5-tools-for-project-based-learning/

Susan Grajek, Evolllution

Changing student expectations are a key driver of higher education’s digital transformation. In particular, students want a customer experience that is personalized and seamless. They want a home base for their education, but they want their institution to offer access to a larger higher education marketplace. They want to be at a competitive advantage when they graduate, and that means having job-ready skills and competencies and new and innovative learning opportunities.

https://evolllution.com/technology/tech-tools-and-resources/how-student-expectations-are-driving-digital-transformation/