Techno-News Blog

MICHAEL IOFFE, Newsweek

As a teaching medium, I came across studies from Stanford and Penn State that showed texts are amongst the most effective ways to learn and retain information. If you’re wondering why, it’s because texts meet users where they’re at (on their phones) and break down concepts into bite-size chunks. To test the idea, I worked with a few friends and professors at Babson to develop the first text message course, which focused on entrepreneurship, and then ran a study with over two hundred students. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with the vast majority of students liking text message learning more than any other form of digital learning. You might be wondering how a “text message course” actually works. Every morning, students were texted about two screen-lengths worth of content (around 1,000 characters) explaining a certain concept or case study in depth, typically ending with an assessment. (You can try out a course here: lrn.st/trial).

https://www.newsweek.com/delivering-education-through-text-messages-more-effective-way-teach-opinion-1447227

By Riia O’Donnell & Katie Clarey; HR Dive
U.S. workers hunger for learning opportunities because employers aren’t providing enough of them, according to a report by City & Guilds Group. Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed said they want a bigger focus on L&D in their workplaces. Only 46% said their employers have provided on-the-job training in the past year, and only 52% said it’s easy to access L&D at their jobs. The majority of employees (82%) said they feel “fairly well equipped” to do their current jobs, but 63% want a heavier focus on training. Many American workers aren’t waiting on their employers to upskill them. A majority of workers, 62%, have invested personal time in training during the past year, with 30% paying for training out of pocket.

https://www.hrdive.com/news/workers-want-ld-focused-work-but-employers-arent-delivering-survey-says/557926/

Lisa Morgan, Information Week
If you really want to understand the capabilities and limitations of machine learning, you have to get hands-on. Here’s a short list of options for beginners. The starting point differs for individuals based on their education and experience. However, the titles of resources may not necessarily reflect that fact. Following is a short list of resources with a bit of insight into their requirements and value. Deep learning, a subcategory of machine learning, has been omitted intentionally to keep the focus of this article on machine learning in general. Open ML (beta 2) describes itself as “an inclusive movement to build an open, organized, online ecosystem for machine learning”. It builds open source tools for discovering and sharing data. Participants can pull the open data into their favorite machine learning environments and build models themselves or with the help of community data scientists.

https://www.informationweek.com/big-data/ai-machine-learning/how-to-get-hands-on-with-machine-learning/a/d-id/1335112

By Sherman Morrison, eLearning Inside
You arrive to your workplace for another day on the job, but things aren’t right. You feel exhausted even though you slept reasonably well. You’ve got lots of work to plow through but you lack motivation. The mere thought of work makes you feel frustrated. You try to get into your work but you feel like you just can’t focus properly. And you’ve been feeling this way for weeks. You could be suffering from workplace burnout. It’s not just in your head, either. The World Health Organization (WHO) recently brought new attention to this problem. Is there a role for eLearning to play in addressing workplace burnout?

https://news.elearninginside.com/can-elearning-help-reduce-workplace-burnout/

by Charlie Bloom, Stylenest

If you’re looking to enter back into education, but are struggling to juggle a work, family, and social life, online learning may be the right option for you. Not only can you gain reputable qualifications, studying online can give you the flexibility you need to slot in your learning around your busy day to day life. Here are 10 benefits of online learning.

https://www.stylenest.co.uk/lifestyle/health-and-fitness/10-benefits-of-online-learning/

Devon Haynie, Josh Moody; U.S.News & World Report
For prospective online students, searching for a degree program can sometimes feel like being lost in the wilderness.   The ubiquity of online education programs comes with promises of quick, effortless degrees that seem too good to be true. Sometimes that’s exactly the case, and students who are duped by the schemes are left with a sizable hole in their wallet and no legitimate credential. The growth of online education in recent years has led to more opportunities for legitimacy and transparency, says Judith Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, which works to provide quality assurance in higher education. Despite the growth of online education, scams and diploma mills still persist on the web. Linked below are seven signs that an online program may not be legitimate:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/7-warning-signs-online-degree-143816338.html

Emily Glassberg Sands & Vinod Bakthavachalam, European Sting

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is transforming the world of work. Technology is advancing faster than humans, disrupting both jobs and the skills needed to compete. Research by McKinsey suggests that globally about half of the jobs performed by humans today will be disrupted by automation, and a survey of business leaders by the World Economic Forum suggests that 42% of the core job skills required today are set to change substantially by 2022. Drawing on a rich database of over 40 million learners, the Coursera Global Skills Index benchmarked 60 countries and 10 major industries across the essential skills of business, technology and data science.

https://europeansting.com/2019/07/03/who-is-first-and-last-in-the-race-to-build-a-workforce-fit-for-the-future/

Matthew Lynch. Tech Edvocate

Libraries have always been the instructional heartbeat of the campus. Once surrounded with rows of bookcases, racks of glossy magazines, and hushing librarians, libraries look quite different today.  The modern library houses some of the latest technology on campus, with teachers and students able to check an array of devices. Digital tablets, 3D printers, and even drones make up some of the devices available for classroom use. The library is a usable space where students and teachers collaborate on learning projects. Today’s librarians encourage this collaboration and lead instructional conversations as students work together in teams to solve problems.

https://www.thetechedvocate.org/3-ways-to-prepare-for-a-future-ready-library-now/

by Ryan Bitzegaio, EDUCAUSE Review

With campus temporarily shuttered, many students didn’t have access to the technology and resources they needed to complete coursework. So, while faculty were encouraged to maintain communication with their students, a moratorium was placed on due dates and other required coursework while the institution was closed. Once everyone returned to campus, we were then left with the challenge of cramming three weeks of lost time into the fairly rigid confines of what was left of the semester. The university was able to creatively carve out a few make-up days from holidays and weekends, but this alternate schedule didn’t necessarily jibe with the already-disrupted lives of faculty and students. As a result, many faculty—including myself—opted for moving contingent instruction online.

https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2019/6/teaching-through-a-hurricane#_zsX02Le1_zlbniw5

By Hallie Busta, Education Dive

In search of a financing option that could keep students enrolled full time through graduation, officials landed on the income-share agreement (ISA). The financing tool allows a college to front a portion of students’ costs in exchange for a share of their post-graduation income for a set number of years once they reach a predetermined earnings level. That means higher-earning students pay more while lower-earning students pay less, though most contracts cap the repayment amount at around double the amount borrowed.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/5-questions-for-colleges-considering-income-share-agreements/558054/

BY NICK WILLIAMS, eSchool News
When we kicked off a new initiative focused on student-centered learning, our district started looking for an all-in-one learning management system (LMS) that would serve as a staging area for our UDL and project-based teaching models. Not only would it give teachers and students the freedom to select their preferred tools, but it would also integrate with Google, keep everything in a centralized place, and enable high-quality professional development for teachers.

https://www.eschoolnews.com/2019/07/03/centralized-lms-supports-udl/

BY LAURA ASCIONE,  Campus Technology
Higher-ed management challenges can be daunting–here’s how leaders are juggling the demands of today’s institutions.  Academic leaders face higher-ed management challenges every day. Some have relatively clear-cut solutions, while others are more complicated and require critical thinking and innovation. From meeting the demands of a new group of traditional students to juggling recruitment and retention at the community college level, there’s always something testing higher-ed leaders’ mettle. Here are five higher-ed management challenges facing leaders each day:

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2019/07/03/5-higher-ed-management-challenges-leaders-face-each-day/

Knowledge at Wharton

New digital technologies are expected to take away many jobs. They will also create several new ones. However, to grasp these new opportunities, everyone must continuously learn new skills. “We will now have to move to a continuum of lifelong learning, which essentially means we have to be lifelong learners,” says Ravi Kumar, president at Infosys, the digital services firm.

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/lifelong-learning-future-of-work/

#LeadingLearning

In this episode of Leading Learning, Celisa talks with Ray about the evolving role of learning businesses, continuing education, and online learning— particularly when it comes to workforce development issues and the skills gap. They also discuss how advances related to artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, badges, blockchain and more are impacting the future of learning. To tune in, just click below.

https://www.leadinglearning.com/episode-193-ray-schroeder/

By Shailaja Neelakantan, Education Dive
Decreases or low growth in tuition revenue was a key cause of declining revenue overall at public and private colleges in 2018, Moody’s Investors Service said in a pair of reports on higher ed finances. At public institutions the situation was compounded by lagging state support, while private colleges struggled to curtail expenses. Revenue growth was below 3% at more than half of public colleges, with the median value falling to 2.4% from 2.9% a year ago. Private colleges’ median revenue growth held steady at 2.4% year-over-year, though it trailed a median 2.9% increase in expenses for the third-straight year. Larger institutions outperformed their peers in both sectors as the combination of declining enrollment, slow recovery of public funding and rising tuition stressed revenue.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/moodys-colleges-revenue-growth-lagged-in-2018/558169/

Nicole Flynn, cielo24

Without proper support from colleges and universities, faculty and staff are unable to provide accessible content as required by law. And this lack of support and education can have significant consequences for universities. Multiple universities have faced lawsuits and high-cost resolution agreements due to the inaccessibility of their websites, course materials, videos, learning management systems, etc. These institutions include Penn State, University of Montana, Louisiana Tech University, University of Cincinnati, Youngstown State University, Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkeley.

https://cielo24.com/2019/06/overcoming-accessible-online-learning-challenges/

Jessica Davis, Information Week

Entry-level (level 1) predictive analytics professionals with a four-year degree can expect an entry-level base salary that averages $78,615 (with a median of $80,000). A master’s degree won’t make that much of a difference to salary at level 1 for predictive analytics pros who earn a base level salary that averages $80,737 (with a median of $80,000). At the entry level, predictive analytics pros saw a salary increase of 4% year over year, Ferguson said. Level 2 and level 3 individual contributors each saw a 2% increase year over year. Level 3 predictive analytics pros with a PhD earn an average base salary of $159,956 (with a median of $140,000).

https://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/team-building-and-staffing/data-science-salary-survey-reveals-market-shift/d/d-id/1335077

Jessica Davis, Information Week
Artificial intelligence is actually a term that encompasses a host of technology and tools. Here’s a closer look at some of the more important ones. If you aren’t hands on with the projects yourself, you may have heard a lot of different terminology. You may be wondering what it all means. Is AI the same as machine learning? Is machine learning the same as deep learning? Do you need them all? Sometimes the first steps of understanding whether a technology is a fit for your organization’s challenges and problems is understanding the basic terminology behind that technology.

https://www.informationweek.com/big-data/ai-machine-learning/7-technologies-you-need-to-know-for-artificial-intelligence/d/d-id/1335032

Graham Smith, Bitcoin.com

Why Bitcoiners Are Turning to Unschooling for Decentralized Education
Unschooling is an alternative education movement quickly gaining popularity and currency worldwide. Like Bitcoin, it is an individualist approach to an area of human action long thought to be established beyond question―education. Both cryptoeconomics and unschooling seek to provide autonomy to individuals, providing a return to logical, natural systems that value human life.

https://news.bitcoin.com/why-bitcoiners-are-turning-to-unschooling-for-decentralized-education/

Nazreen Nazir, Entrepreneur

Short video platforms and live streaming platforms have converted everyone into a celebrity. TikTok and BIGO LIVE are examples of such short video platforms that are trending these days. These short video apps are gaining popularity because of their easy features which make it easy to use for not so tech savvy people. These platforms enjoy wide reach with audience and users from all the classes of society. TikTok has recently made foray into content aimed at education, health, safety and motivation with its EduTok campaign. Bigo Live is another live streaming platform which also ventured into educational content. Let’s take a look at how these video content platforms are emerging and influencing the content creation in the country.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/336069

BY LAURA ASCIONE, eCampus News
A new survey shows that most professors say higher-ed tech adoption is a major pressure point, resulting in anxiety and loss of sleep.  A survey of university professors reveals higher-ed tech adoption is one of their biggest sources of stress–a majority say they’ve experienced anxiety and both personal and professional tension. The survey points to the alarming notion that college and university faculty aren’t ready for technologically savvy students who have never known a world without the internet or smartphones.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2019/06/27/higher-ed-tech-adoption-is-surprisingly-stressful-for-faculty/