Techno-News Blog

May 18, 2019

Three Innovators Changing The Education Landscape Today

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Jeanne Allen, Forbes

America is the land of innovation, leading the world in technology, art and industry — yet we still have a 20th-century educational system. Our schools are stifled by regulatory overload, making it difficult to bring needed change to outdated ways of doing things. Fortunately for our nation’s children, enterprising individuals at all levels of education are working to change that. Here are a few of the most innovative figures in education today,

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanneallen/2019/05/08/three-innovators-changing-the-education-landscape-today/#6556d75aed5a

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What I Learned From Designing and Developing E-Learning

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By Nikki O’Keeffe, TD Insights

Sometimes my designs worked and sometimes they did not. I learned what participants liked and what they did not like through course evaluations and from talk around the office. The true results, however, showed on the job. It didn’t take long for me to realize that a decent e-learning program requires more than a set of clickable PowerPoint slides. The learner needs to experience real-life scenarios, try out tasks, and get feedback along the way. An extrinsic smiley face and a thumbs up icon at the end aren’t enough. Here are the top five lessons I learned from designing and developing e-learning programs.

https://www.td.org/insights/what-i-learned-from-designing-and-developing-e-learning

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May 17, 2019

Online Education, Beyond ‘Deans Gone Wild’

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By Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed

Leaders of companies colleges hire to take academic programs online discuss their role, the scrutiny they’re facing and why we should call them something other than OPMs. These are increasingly fraught times for the OPMs, with growing scrutiny from think tank analysts concerned about the corporate role in educational delivery and legislation in California that could limit the ability of such companies to operate in the state. The OPMs are also under attack from within their own ranks, as 2U’s co-founder, John Katzman, who now runs Noodle, another online enabler, said of the ed-tech industry at another panel here last week: “At a lot of schools, online programs are 20 percent more expensive than their on-campus counterpart. We’ve effectively raised the cost of education. So, I have to ask, are we properly using taxpayers’ dollars?”

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/05/08/their-industry-under-scrutiny-opm-leaders-ponder-their-role

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Why Every University Needs an Africa Strategy

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By Grant T. Harris, Inside Higher Ed
Just as many academic institutions now regret their slow start in China, so will they come to regret missing out on early opportunities in this increasingly important and fast-growing region Grant T. Harris warns. American universities are largely unprepared for a key global phenomenon: Africa’s growing importance. The continent’s prominent demographic, economic and political trends are impossible to overlook, and any institution aspiring to sustain a global brand and position its students to thrive in international settings will need a deliberate Africa strategy. There is no denying Africa’s growing presence in global markets and international affairs. The region’s current population of 1.2 billion is expected to double by 2050, at which point one in every four people will be African.

https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2019/05/09/benefits-universities-intensifying-and-broadening-their-involvement-africa-opinion

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To Scale Online and Save Small Schools, Higher Ed Takes a Page From K-12 – Michael B. Horn (Columnist) and Scott Lomas, Ed Surge

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As online learning has grown in both higher education and K-12 schools, it has traditionally taken different pathways. But hundreds of small colleges and one company have an incentive to try and change that.Thanks to a new and growing effort by the College Consortium, a company that supports online course sharing between institutions, higher education is taking a page from K-12 education to help schools expand their course options for students. The company is allowing colleges to control already-shaky budgets in two ways: by holding the line on costs as participating schools can rely on faculty from other colleges and don’t have to hire additional ones, and by supporting the top line through revenue sharing among schools.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-05-07-to-scale-online-and-save-small-schools-higher-ed-takes-a-page-from-k-12

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May 16, 2019

Why AI Will Never Replace Teachers

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edX

AI will never replace our amazing teachers – and I’m saying that as the CEO of the online learning platform edX and in the business of developing education technology. It’s no wonder, then, that when we say “education technology,” “ed tech,” or “online learning” you might automatically think teachers are being replaced. Online learning has the power to augment and improve what’s going on in the classroom. While MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are generally designed to help students learn autonomously, and in fact millions do, as part of a classroom experience, they function much like new-age textbooks. And let’s not forget that behind every online course there can be upwards of a dozen great teachers, professors, or teaching assistants who have perfected that course in front of students before adapting it for online use. It all comes back to teachers.

https://blog.edx.org/ai-will-never-replace-teachers

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It Is Time for the Edtech Industry to Stop Denying Its Equity and Race Problem

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Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

The EdTech industry is dominated by white employees, white leaders, and white entrepreneurs. If you doubt this statement, just attend an Edtech conference. Admittedly, educators and others don’t attend Edtech conferences to discuss equity. They go to get inspired, learn from each other and discover the latest technology that can benefit their teaching and their students. That’s all very well, but if we expect technology to transform how we teach and how students learn, it’s imperative that we integrate equity into our efforts. We need to have those awkward discussions.

https://www.thetechedvocate.org/it-is-time-for-the-edtech-industry-to-stop-denying-its-equity-and-race-problem/

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How Microsoft is using AI to improve accessibility

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KYLE WIGGERS, Venture Beat

“We’ve come to know that AI-powered experiences can get a lot of information to a person with a disability, which ultimately empowers their independence,” Mary Bellard, senior accessibility architect at Microsoft, told VentureBeat in an interview ahead of the company’s annual Build developer conference in Seattle. “[We’re working] to make sure we’re not just developing tech for tech’s sake, [but] working on technology that a particular disability community wants and is interested in driving with us.”

https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/06/how-microsoft-is-using-ai-to-improve-accessibility/

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May 15, 2019

Melinda Gates: With so few women in AI, we are baking bias into the system

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By Kathryn Vasel, CNN Business

While Silicon Valley has made some strides in creating opportunities and more inclusive workplaces for women, Melinda Gates believes there’s still work to be done. “If you talk with women and men in Silicon Valley, some companies have changed, but quite a few still haven’t,” the co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation tells CNN’s Poppy Harlow during a Boss Files interview. “And, what I know to be true is that we need more pathways for women into technology.” Having a bad reputation for supporting women in the workplace can be costly for a company.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/06/success/melinda-gates-ai-gender-equality/index.html

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What’s Microsoft’s vision for conversational AI? Computers that understand you

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John Roach, Microsoft

For example, he explained, systems today can add a new appointment to your calendar but not engage in a back-and-forth dialogue with you about how to juggle a high-priority meeting request. They are also unable to use contextual information from one skill to assist you in making decisions from another, such as checking the weather before scheduling an afternoon meeting on the patio of a nearby coffee shop. The next generation of intelligent assistant technologies from Microsoft will be able to do this by leveraging breakthroughs in conversational artificial intelligence and machine learning pioneered by Semantic Machines.

https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/microsoft-build-future-of-natural-language/

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Word’s new AI editor will improve your writing

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Frederic Lardinois, Tech Crunch
If you write in Microsoft Word Online, you’ll soon have an AI-powered editor at your side. As the company announced today, Word will soon get a new feature called “Ideas” that will offer writers all kinds of help with their documents. If writing is a struggle for you, the most important feature of Ideas is surely its ability to help you write more concise and readable text. You can think of this as a grammar checker on steroids, as it goes beyond fixing obvious mistakes and focuses on making your writing better. It uses machine learning, for example, to suggest a rewrite when you mangled a complex phrase. Ideas will also help you write more inclusive texts.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/06/words-new-ai-features-will-help-you-write-better/

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May 14, 2019

How do global virtual internships benefit your study skills?

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Study International
Long gone are the days of traditional office settings and tiring work commutes to work, largely due to the brilliance of widespread digital advancements. Through virtual work environments and speedy internet connections, interns can now gain vital work experience without having to move an inch from their home or university. This may sound strange at first, and you may question the validity of the skills you earn from an online internship, but that’s the way our future could be heading…

https://www.studyinternational.com/news/how-do-global-virtual-internships-benefit-your-study-skills/

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3 Cool Tech Tools to Consider for the Digital Classroom

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Quentin Bellard, Kimberly S. McCoy, and Richard Varner, Faculty Focus
It is imperative that educators find new ways to incorporate technology to stay current. This can be done by considering tools and applications that will not only enhance a students’ educational experience but also support teaching and learning. We offer three tools/applications that supports this notion here

https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-with-technology-articles/3-cool-tech-tools-to-consider-for-the-digital-classroom/

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Leveling the Playing Field With Internet Connectivity Plus…

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Cryptopolitan

Not so long ago all learning was delivered offline. Nowadays it is a given that students will have an internet connection and will be able to access their content at all times. Learning Management Systems were designed as SaaS to always be online or at least linked to a central database. They were designed to track learning activities that occur in the LMS, and lack the capability to record informal or social learning actions. An offline player, in the context of elearning, is a program which allows learners to download elearning content when they are connected to the internet, then complete the training later when disconnected. The benefits of this, for students as well as for a multilingual distributed workforce that may have poor access to the internet, can be great.

https://www.cryptopolitan.com/leveling-the-playing-field-with-internet-connectivity-plus/

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May 13, 2019

Give This Funky Google AI One Word And It Will Give You A Whole New Poem

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Pang-Chieh Ho, Digg
In the latest demonstration of how far artificial intelligence has come, designer Es Devlin and Google have developed Poem Portraits, an algorithm that can be used to generate poetry from one suggested word. The way it works is you “donate” a word to Poem Portraits and it will create a unique poem for you based on that word. The algorithm itself works a bit like predictive text, as Devlin has explained to Engadget, and was trained on millions of words from 19th-century poetry.

http://digg.com/2019/google-ai-poem-portraits

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AI Is Everywhere. Now It Wants to Teach You Chinese.

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By John Waters, Edsurge

Language learning is something of a sweet spot for AI, thanks to the capabilities of two core types of AI tech: machine learning and natural language processing. Machine learning algorithms support adaptive, personalized and spaced learning, while natural language processing technologies help with the extremely complex challenges associated with understanding and translating human language. A growing number of vendors are offering AI-powered language-learning apps to companies and the general public (Speexx, Busuu, Duolingo) for hundreds of languages, but Ponddy’s products were developed specifically for secondary and university teachers of Mandarin.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-05-03-ai-is-everywhere-now-it-wants-to-teach-you-chinese

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Chegg CEO: ‘We need to make learning more available and adaptive’

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Marabia Smith, Yahoo Finance

America’s education system as a whole is far too complex and intersected with other socio-economic factors for there to be easy fixes to this problem, Dan Rosensweig, CEO and president of Chegg, an educational resource company that started out offering online textbook rentals, said in an interview on Yahoo Finance’s On the Move. “We need to make learning more available and that means it has to be downloadable, on-demand, affordable and adaptive,” he said, adding that a host of parties including academic institutions, corporations, families and students need to take part in solving the problem.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cheggs-ceo-we-need-to-make-learning-more-available-and-adaptive-121831496.html

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May 12, 2019

The most important weapon we can use to change the world

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Charles Rick, Aitkin Age

According to a survey in 2016, the Pew Research Center noted 74% of American adults consider themselves lifelong learners. People are interested in enriching their lives in both their personal and professional lives. A characteristic of lifelong learners is the desire to keep learning, with a desire for more knowledge and self-improvement. Besides a personal interest in learning, people want to maintain and even enhance their skills to have a successful career. In the same Pew Research survey, 87% believe their jobs depend on continued learning of new skills.

https://www.messagemedia.co/aitkin/opinion/other_opinions/the-most-important-weapon-we-can-use-to-change-the/article_1eb5271c-6c7d-11e9-b9f7-3fb612a85409.html

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How To Reskill Your Workforce For AI (Artificial Intelligence)

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Tom Taulli, Forbes

AI is considered the most disruptive technology, according to Gartner’s 2019 CIO Survey (it includes over 3,000 CIOs from 89 countries). So yes, this is big reason why there has been a major increase in adoption and implementation. Yet there is a bottleneck that could easily slow the progress – that is, finding the right talent. The fact is that there are few data scientists and AI experts available. In our recent State of Software Engineer report, we found that demand for data engineers has increased by 38% and demand growth for machine learning engineers has increased by 27% in the last year,” said Mehul Patel, who is the CEO of Hired.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomtaulli/2019/05/04/how-to-reskill-your-workforce-for-ai-artificial-intelligence/#4fabfe03eb9b

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How do we teach students to recognise when news is fake?

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Beckie Supiano, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Traditional-age students are digital natives. Professors are trained researchers. Neither of those qualities, though, prevents people from falling for misinformation online. That’s one finding from a memorable study, released as a working paper in 2017, that documented how three groups of ‘experts’ – among them historians and Stanford University undergraduates – evaluated online sources. Members of both groups tended to dig into a site, according to the study, by Sam Wineburg, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, and Sarah McGrew, his doctoral student. The students and historians followed many of the tips that students are usually given for conducting online research, like examining a site’s domain name. But the tactics didn’t work.

https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20190503064623969

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May 11, 2019

Quantum Leap Into the Future of Education

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By Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed
Quantum computing will burst onto the educational technology scene. Are you preparing now? The quantum era will soon be upon us. The changes we will see will far outpace even those we saw in the development of personal computers, smartphones and broadband networking — combined. IBM has already created a commercial quantum computer prototype, the IBM Q System One.  We should begin to visualize adaptive learning models in which the power and speed of quantum computing may best serve the individualized needs of our students. An awesome quantum future awaits us!

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online-trending-now/quantum-leap-future-education

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