Techno-News Blog

By Natalie Schwartz, Education Dive
Black and Hispanic faculty members are underrepresented at bachelor’s-, master’s- and doctorate-level institutions, according to a new study published in the Hispanic Journal of Law and Policy. At bachelor’s institutions, 5.2% of tenured faculty members are black and 6.6% are Hispanic or Latino. At the doctoral level, those shares shrink to 4% and 4.6%, respectively.  White faculty members make up 78.9% of those with tenure at bachelor’s institutions and 74.2% at doctoral institutions. However, the report notes, an overall decrease in the share of white faculty members hasn’t been “accounted for by increases in other races and ethnicities.”

https://www.educationdive.com/news/racial-diversity-continues-to-lag-among-college-faculty-study-finds/558394/

MIT Technology Review
An AI program developed by Alibaba has notched up a record-high score on a reading comprehension test. The result shows how machines are steadily improving at handling text and speech. The new record was set using the Microsoft Machine Reading Comprehension (MS MARCO) data set, which uses real questions that Bing users have asked in the past. The AI program had to read many web pages of information to be able to answer questions such as “What is a corporation?

https://www.technologyreview.com/f/613931/alibaba-has-claimed-a-new-record-in-ai-language-understanding/

Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed

So, what we hear from industry is that they want workers with the soft skills that do not go out of date, as well as a basic understanding of the current hard facts and skills that will be useful for just a few years before they must be upskilled for a new generation of technology. This combination of knowledge and skills may not require a degree.  While this shift in employment requisites develops, we are now in the eighth straight year of declines in college enrollment. Hundreds of colleges have closed their doors in the past few years, and hundreds more are teetering on the brink.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online-trending-now/what-matters-more-skills-or-degrees

By Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed

We may be on the cusp of a postsecondary revolution in master’s level credentialing for professional programs. It is a revolution, however, that few seem to be taking note. Both edX and Coursera are partnering with top institutions to offer high-quality/low-cost graduate programs. These online programs, as they evolve in quality and reach and employer acceptance, have the potential to shift the marketplace for master’s degrees. To get a handle on the development of low-cost online master’s degrees, I spent some time on the edX and Coursera websites.

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/21-low-cost-online-masters-degrees-coursera-and-edx

Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed

Arizona State is rethinking how this student data might be exchanged. In partnership with Salesforce, the university’s central enterprise unit, EdPlus, is creating a student data network that will enable participating institutions to share and verify students’ academic records using a distributed ledger technology such as blockchain. Donna Kidwell, chief technology officer at EdPlus, said that reverse transfer is just one area where the institution hopes to make its network of verifiable and secure credentials useful. The technology could, for example, be used to help global institutions and employers verify the academic qualifications of refugees.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/07/09/arizona-state-tackling-college-completion-blockchain

Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed

For three days in June 2017, Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, Mich., experienced a complete network shutdown. Wishing to prevent any future outages, Rose B. Bellanca, Washtenaw’s president, commissioned a comprehensive review of the college’s entire IT infrastructure and staffing.  The college’s proposal, presented to the Board of Trustees on May 21, is to contract with higher education software and IT service provider Ellucian to provide technology management services, including on-site support staff at the college. Under the proposal, which was passed in a 5-to-2 vote by the board June 25, Ellucian will be responsible for all current and future technology needs of the college. ​

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/07/08/washtenaw-community-college-outsources-its-it-staff

Marcel Schwantes, CNBC

Gates also noted how different his assessment looks today, at age 63, than it did in his 20s. “Back then, an end-of-year assessment would amount to just one question: Is Microsoft software making the personal-computing dream come true?” he wrote. Of course, Gates still assesses the quality of his work, but he also asks himself a whole set of other questions about his life. “These would have been laughable to me when I was 25, but as I get older, they are much more meaningful.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/06/bill-gates-measures-his-quality-of-life-by-asking-himself-3-questions.html

By Jillian Berman, Market Watch

“Money matters,” said Sarah Turner, an economics and education professor at the University of Virginia and one of the authors of the paper. “The declines in state appropriations have had real effects in terms of degree output, enrollment and there’s at least suggestive evidence that there’s some impact on research outputs.” A decline in state funding to public colleges is also associated with a drop in the number of people earning the types of credentials at public research universities necessary for the types of scientific innovation that boosts the economy, the research found. A 10% drop in state funding is correlated with a 5% drop in master’s degrees in science, engineering, technology and math (or STEM) and a 10.2% drop in Ph.Ds in those fields.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/cuts-in-state-funding-to-public-colleges-may-be-to-blame-for-a-decline-in-bachelors-degrees-2019-06-18

Jon Fingas, Engadget

It’s difficult to simulate quantum physics, as the computing demand grows exponentially the more complex the quantum system gets — even a supercomputer might not be enough. AI might come to the rescue, though. Researchers have developed a computational method that uses neural networks to simulate quantum systems of “considerable” size, no matter what the geometry. To put it relatively simply, the team combines familiar methods of studying quantum systems (such as Monte Carlo random sampling) with a neural network that can simultaneously represent many quantum states.

https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/05/ai-simulates-quantum-systems/

Penny Bishop, the Conversation

The term “personalized learning” is becoming more common. Indeed, 39 states mention personalized learning in their school improvement plans, as required by the Every Student Succeeds Act. Not only are states legislating personalized learning, but philanthropists are funding it and, in some cases, families are pushing back against it. Penny Bishop, a researcher who focuses on learning environments, answers five questions about personalized learning.

https://theconversation.com/what-is-personalized-learning-and-why-is-it-so-controversial-5-questions-answered-118030

KYLE WIGGERS, Venture Beat

Professional-level lecture clips require not only a veritable studio’s worth of equipment, but significant resources to transfer, edit, and upload footage of each lesson. That’s why research scientists at Udacity, an online learning platform with over 100,000 courses, are investigating a machine learning framework that automatically generates lecture videos from audio narration alone. They claim in a preprint paper (“LumièreNet: Lecture Video Synthesis from Audio“) on Arxiv.org that their AI system — LumièreNet — can synthesize footage of any length by directly mapping between audio and corresponding visuals.

https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/05/udacitys-ai-generates-lecture-videos-from-audio-narrations/

IBL News

MITx has become, along with Harvard University and Microsoft, the most prolific course creator on edX.org, with 111 MOOCs shared in the past year, and 26 of them being run for the first time. “We have about 30 more in the pipeline.  Another remarkable initiative where MIT collaborates with eight other top research universities is related to the design of a digital, distributed infrastructure for issuing, storing and displaying verifiable credentials and certificates of academic achievement.

https://iblnews.org/mitx-prepares-30-new-moocs-and-build-with-other-universities-a-blockchain-system-for-credentials/

Henry Kronk, IBL News

Professor Robert Lue, the Richard L. Menschel Faculty Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University, was involved in the creation of edX. He now believes that, for the full potential of MOOCs and open educational resources (OER) to be realized, the reign of the ‘course’ in open education needs to come to an end. The next step, he believes, will be the Blockstore.

https://iblnews.org/it-takes-a-network-to-teach-a-learner-robert-lue-believes-blockstore-will-bring-about-the-next-step-for-open-edx/

Northeastern University and Gallup

We asked 10,000 people in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada what they thought about the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs. We wanted to know what they believe it takes to be prepared, what type of education is needed, who should provide it and who should pay for it. And do they believe higher education,
business and government are up to the task to solve the skills crisis?

https://www.northeastern.edu/gallup/

By Justin Bariso, Inc

In 1995, psychologist and science journalist Daniel Goleman published a book introducing most of the world to the nascent concept of emotional intelligence. The idea–that an ability to understand and manage emotions greatly increases our chances of success–quickly took off, and it went on to greatly influence the way people think about emotions and human behavior.

https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/13-things-emotionally-intelligent-people-do.html

BY DEREK B. JOHNSONJUL, GNC

While organizations are ultimately legally responsible for the ways their products, including algorithms, behave, many encounter what is known as the “black box” problem: situations where the decisions made by a machine learning algorithm become more opaque to human managers over time as it takes in more data and makes increasingly complex inferences. The challenge has led experts to champion “explainability” as a key factor for regulators to assess the ethical and legal use of algorithms, essentially being able to demonstrate that an organization has insight into what information its algorithm is using to arrive at the conclusions it spits out. The Algorithmic Accountability Act would give the Federal Trade Commission two years to develop regulations requiring large companies to conduct automated decision system impact assessments of their algorithms and treat discrimination resulting from those decisions as “unfair or deceptive acts and practices,” opening those firms up to civil lawsuits.

https://gcn.com/articles/2019/07/03/explainable-ai.aspx

KHARI JOHNSON, Venture Beat

Democratic societies the world over have come under attack in this digital era — and in ways many probably never thought possible in their lifetime. In an interview with VentureBeat earlier this year, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said that any informed citizen in the 21st century must have some understanding of artificial intelligence in order to participate in debates, because “You don’t want to be someone to whom AI is sort of this thing that happens to you.” If you believe any part of assertion, or recent call for education initiatives by EU AI experts then public education initiatives to teach more people about AI may in fact be an act that strengthens democracy. The Finnish government for example committed to educating 1% of its population on the basics of AI.

https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/04/how-ai-can-strengthen-and-defend-democracy/

By Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology
About three-quarters of higher education institutions in a recent survey currently offer wireless coverage for 81 percent to 100 percent of the entire campus. And 84 percent offer a strong wireless connection in on-campus student areas. That’s according to the latest State of ResNet Report from the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International. For its eight annual survey, ACUHO-I polled 351 higher education administrators at 200 institutions about residential network trends, practices and policies to understand the challenges schools face providing high-performance networks in residence halls and campuswide.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2019/07/03/3-in-4-schools-approaching-100-wifi-coverage-on-campus.aspx?admgarea=news

Eli Zimmerman, EdTech

To appeal to Gen Z students and employers, universities will adopt new ways to deliver academic materials, focusing on customizable courses and experiences outside of the classroom. A recent report from Education Design Lab outlines four models for universities and colleges to stay relevant in an education world that continues to move online. Five years in the making, the report details each of the models of innovation: the platform facilitator, experiential curator, learning certifier and workforce. University officials can take a quiz to see which model best fits their campuses to create an innovative culture that fits the changing demands of higher education.

https://edtechmagazine.com/higher/article/2019/07/4-models-reinvent-higher-education-21st-century

by SHERI MCKEEVER, Hechinger Report

In my first class, I had a homeless student from St. Paul and another who was training for the Olympics in the Duluth area. Both were concerned about their education and wanted to succeed. They had unique circumstances, yet they shared many common challenges — internet access, enough time to complete assignments, anxiety about failure. The entire class shared their stories, and their worries, with one another and reinforced each student’s strengths and perseverance. We worked hard as a class to find common ground and cultivate our strengths. Technology has enabled me to connect with my students in ways I never had when I taught in a traditional classroom.

https://hechingerreport.org/teacher-voice-diversity-and-online-learning/

By Liz Dominguez, RIS Media

Neubauer says the podcast is also a great accessory to online courses, which are typically missing the interaction and the anecdotes of the concrete classroom. “Having an hour conversation allows us to go into detail and offer great tools that agents can apply immediately,” says Neubauer. “And with the conversational style with different guests, it makes it entertaining as well as informative.”

https://rismedia.com/2019/07/02/continuing-education-courses/