By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology
Does online learning spend more on technology and less on people? That’s the latest question posed by Eduventures Chief Research Officer Richard Garrett, in an essay published on the Encoura website. This was a follow-on to a recent brief he posted that examined whether online learning could help institutions deliver a lower-cost education to more students. In that setup, he concluded that the higher the portion of fully online students a school had, the less the school spent per student. In his latest analysis of IPEDS data, Garrett specifically examined the situation of private, nonprofit four-year schools (while suggesting that the outcome could be applied to public four-year institutions as well).
June 3, 2019
Study: Online Schools Have Not ‘Dethroned’ Faculty
Open Standards and Transparency Groups Team Up to Improve Information on Credentials
IMS Global Learning Consortium and Credential Engine
IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global) and Credential Engine today announced a partnership designed to advance new interoperability and transparency standards for credentials and institutional data systems. Through the new agreement, the organizations will build interoperability between IMS Global’s widely-adopted standards and Credential Engine’s Credential Transparency Description Language (CTDL)—the first and only common language that enables credential issuers to publish data and information on the content and value of credentials to the public Credential Registry and the open web. Already, 12 states and regions, nearly 400 credential providers, and several federal agencies have joined this cloud-based library that makes information such as competencies, cost, quality assurance, earnings, and connections to occupations, and pathway information searchable to the public.
Share on FacebookHow Digital Credentials Can Advance Student Mobility and Success
by Rahul Choudaha, AACSB Blog
The impact of today’s megatrends—long-term, transformational processes with broad reach and influence—is driving a reconstruction of the higher education sector. The changing nature of work and widening skills gap, as a couple of megatrend examples, are instilling a sense of urgency among many business schools to assess their portfolio of academic offerings and curriculum. One such call for adaptation and assessment is emerging in the form of digital credentialing. What are the drivers and implications of digital credentialing? How can business schools prepare for a shifting landscape of credentialing and its relevance to workplace skills?
https://www.aacsb.edu/blog/2019/may/how-digital-credentials-can-advance-student-mobility-and-success
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June 2, 2019
Analysis: Sebastian Thrun, Creates the University of Silicon Valley and the Fourth Degree
Mikel Amigot, IBL
Sebastian Thurn, Founder, and CEO at Udacity, is not shy when he claims, in a recent post, that his company will become the “University of Silicon Valley”. “Only 4% of students ever complete a MOOC. At present, our Nanodegree programs have a 34% graduation rate, thanks to the tireless efforts of the hard-charging Udacity team. When paired with our new personalized mentorship programs in past experiments, cohorts have commonly exceeded 60% graduation rates.” (…) “For our Nanodegree Plus pilot, an independent accounting firm verified that among our career-seeking and job-ready graduates, 84% found a new, better job within six months of graduation. And for that 84 %, the salaries went up, by an average of $24,000 per person. So much that on average, those students recouped their entire Udacity tuition fee in just three weeks.” (…) “No other online learning platform provides this level of end-to-end personalized mentorship.”
Share on FacebookStudents need a boost in wealth more than a boost in SAT scores
Andrew Perry, Hechinger Report
The College Board creates an adversity score to acknowledge that wealth and race matter. Scores on the widely used SAT and ACT predict adequately only for grades earned in a student’s first year in college. And those scores are worse predictors for black and brown students. On the other hand, scores from the SAT and ACT tests are good proxies for the amount of wealth students are born into. Income tracks with test performance. The more money a student’s parents make, the more likely it is he or she will have a higher score, according to College Board data. The less money you make, the more likely you’ll be denied a chance at a selective institution. The divide between the rich and the poor has widened slightly. The score gap between those who make less than $80,000 and those who make more than that amount has increased from 2012 to 2016, according to a 2016 ACT report.
https://hechingerreport.org/students-need-a-boost-in-wealth-more-than-a-boost-in-sat-scores/
Share on FacebookNon-Degree Certificates And Certifications: Fast, Cheap And Effective
Michael T. Nietzel, Forbes
Non-degree certificates convey substantial economic value, including higher employment rates and income, greater marketability and more personal satisfaction. Those are the key results from a just-released survey of about 50,000 working adults between the ages of 25-64. The survey focused on respondents who did not have a college degree and were not attending college. The study was conducted by the Strada Educational Group and Gallup as part of their Education Consumer Survey, and the report, “Certified Value: When Do Adults Without Degrees Benefit From Earning Certificates and Certifications?” was published by Strada and the Lumina Foundation.
Share on FacebookJune 1, 2019
AI Ethics and Data Governance: A Virtuous Cycle
Alex Woodie, Datanami
As companies spend billions researching and developing AI, they’re facing meaningful questions related to ethics. What does responsible AI look like? How do you control bias? It’s all very new and cutting edge, and it has serious implications for society. But before companies can even begin to address the ethics questions, they should focus on more fundamental matters of data governance.
https://www.datanami.com/2019/05/17/ai-ethics-and-data-governance-a-virtuous-cycle/
Share on FacebookHow we might protect ourselves from malicious AI
Karen Hao, MIT Technology Review
We’ve touched previously on the concept of adversarial examples—the class of tiny changes that, when fed into a deep-learning model, cause it to misbehave. In recent years, as deep-learning systems have grown more and more pervasive in our lives, researchers have demonstrated how adversarial examples can affect everything from simple image classifiers to cancer diagnosis systems, leading to consequences that range from the benign to the life-threatening. A new paper from MIT now points toward a possible path to overcoming this challenge. It could allow us to create far more robust deep-learning models that would be much harder to manipulate in malicious ways.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613555/how-we-might-protect-ourselves-from-malicious-ai/
Share on FacebookHow To Separate The AI Hype From Reality
Kimberly A. Whitler, Forbes
For some time, AI has been the “hot” topic among marketers, technologists, and nearly everyone else, receiving an out-sized amount of media attention and buzz. In a discussion with Kipp Bodnar, CMO of HubSpot, a leading growth platform, he indicates that it’s hard for businesses to distinguish between hype and reality. The result is that a lot of companies throw resources at an opportunity that doesn’t materialize. Below are Bodnar’s thoughts on how marketers can distinguish between what’s possible and what’s not.