Techno-News Blog

Gwen Moran, Fast Company

With stay-at-home orders lingering for months, some of the leaders in online courses and programs have seen dramatic spikes in people learning from home. LinkedIn recently announced that, in the first week of April alone, people watched 1.7 million hours of learning content on LinkedIn Learning. Udemy enrollments had a 425% spike overall and an 80% increase in business consumption. During the 30-day period ending May 20, Coursera saw nearly 300% more course enrollment than for the same period in 2019.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90512719/people-cant-get-enough-of-these-online-classes-right-now

Erin Crisp, EDUCAUSE Review

Feedback is a powerful construct in the design of quality online learning, and quantified dimensions of learners’ feedback experiences can be leveraged to improve effectiveness, increase efficiency, and maintain appeal in online courses. What if real-time data could provide proactive insight into a student’s experiences? What if mentors and leaders could monitor experiences and intervene to remedy negative learning situations? Are there online-learner behaviors (rather than algorithms, which can be biased) that mentors and leaders could observe as early-warning signs of problems with the effectiveness of the instruction, the efficiency of the design, or the overall appeal of the courses? What are the key ingredients of learning, and could they be measured and monitored on a large scale?

https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/6/leveraging-feedback-experiences-in-online-learning

Kerri Lemoie and Louis Soares, ACE

As we make our way through the crisis and into recovery, that imperative should encourage experimentation with approaches to credentialing (and hiring) that leverage the potential of new technologies to provide more granular descriptions of skills and improved communication among education and training organizations, individuals, and employers.  Blockchain, in particular, holds promise to create more efficient, durable connections between education and work. It can provide the technological fabric to help displaced workers translate their skills for new education opportunities and employers, and may hold particular value for those currently underserved by the existing education-to-employment paradigm.

https://www.acenet.edu/Documents/ACE-Education-Blockchain-Initiative-Connected-Impact-June2020.pdf

Steve Lohr, NY Times

Coursera… added 10 million new users from mid-March to mid-May, seven times the pace of new sign-ups in the previous year. Enrollments at edX and Udacity, two smaller education sites, have jumped by similar multiples.  “Crises lead to accelerations, and this is best chance ever for online learning,” said Sebastian Thrun, a co-founder and chairman of Udacity.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/technology/moocs-online-learning.html

Brian Beatty, EDUCAUSE

When campuses closed due to the spread of the coronavirus and the threat posed by the COVID-19 illness, faculty who were teaching HyFlex classes were already prepared to teach high-quality, fully online courses. The term HyFlex originates from faculty work to support both online and traditional students—without developing a completely separate online master’s degree program—in the Instructional Technologies master of arts program at San Francisco State University.2

https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2020/5/can-hyflex-options-support-students-in-the-midst-of-uncertainty

Robert Farrington, Forbes

To be clear, it’s not that online learning is low-quality; it’s that many courses were never created for an online learning environment, yet schools had no choice but to fashion one out of nothing in a matter of weeks. With the spring semester of college practically over and a new school year well on its way this fall, there are more questions than answers in the world of higher education right now. Will colleges be able to open for on-campus learning, or will some be forced to renew the year with more weeks or months of distance learning?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertfarrington/2020/06/08/as-harvard-goes-online-will-students-pay-top-dollar-for-higher-education/#f0e8f1465e75

Jaimie Hoffman , Megan Eberhardt-Alstot and Jill Leafstedt; EDUCAUSE

Orientation experiences support students’ transition to the first year of college, which is essential for student success.1 This support is particularly important for those students from historically marginalized populations.2 Orientation for online learners should be holistic and would ideally mirror content delivered in the onsite orientation experience, since students enrolling in online courses may come to campus infrequently or possibly not at all. Student orientation helps to foster student success; research suggests that those who participate in orientation programs generally perform better than those who do not and persist to graduation at a higher rate.3

https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/5/orienting-students-to-online-learning-a-must-for-student-success

Kevin Dickinson, Big Think

Data from LinkedIn suggests soft skills will be the most in-demand as the economy begins to rebuild and 2020 grads look for work. Today’s graduates are entering the worst job market since the Great Depression. LinkedIn’s annual “Grad’s Guide to Getting Hired” report states that soft skills like leadership and communication will be the most in-demand. Even before the coronavirus economy, experts extolled soft skills as critical for tomorrow’s work force.

https://bigthink.com/coronavirus/skills-needed-for-a-job

Jennryn Wetzler, Creative Commons
Currently, we face both a swell of support for open educational resources (OER) and devastating upheaval of our traditional education systems. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, over 1.5 billion youth are out of school, countless teachers and parents are pivoting to online teaching and education systems face immense financial strain. While OER is not a magic cure for the current education crisis, there are opportunities to work with open education efforts to build greater resiliency within our learning ecosystems and also support cross-national partnerships.

https://creativecommons.org/2020/06/01/leveraging-oer-for-covid-19-response-efforts-and-long-term-international-partnerships/

Michael Hunter Schwartz, Tomorrow’s Professor

Ask your friends to tell you about their best teachers. They likely will describe people who were passionate about their fields and student learning, knew their subjects cold, communicated great faith in students’ capabilities and insisted they live up to those expectations, were excellent explainers, and were caring, authentic, respectful, and well prepared for class. For the past 20 years, I have been publishing books and articles about effective teaching approaches; the qualities your friends would name are typical of the best teachers. Poor in-person teaching happens every day at every university…. Poor online teaching also happens every day. But great teaching and deep learning also happen online.

https://tomprof.stanford.edu/posting/1803

A. Joseph Dorairaj, the Hindu

An effective transition to an online mode of teaching-learning requires the debunking of several false views.  COVID-19 has turned the world upside down. All sectors, including the education sector, have been drastically affected all sectors including education. The world is searching for new strategies to cope with this pandemic and its aftermath. Higher educational institutions are now looking at online teaching-learning as a window of hope. Many institutions and teachers have taken efforts to incorporate online education and are trying to use tech tools to such as Learning Management Systems (LMS) and web conferencing platforms.

https://www.thehindu.com/education/seven-myths-about-online-education/article31766396.ece

Steve Lohr, NY Times

Mr. Chertavian and the leaders of other programs, which operate in dozens of American cities, from Seattle to Miami, said they saw opportunity beyond their immediate challenges. The forced march online, they said, has triggered a drastic rethinking across the education-to-employment field and will most likely bring lasting change — and perhaps open the door to significant expansion. Program directors spoke of a post-pandemic model, in a year or so, in which half or even three-quarters of instruction and coaching would be done virtually, and the remainder face-to-face.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/technology/virtual-skills-inequality-gap-virus.html

Sophie Quinton, Pew Trusts

The pandemic has thrown every college revenue source into question, from student tuition payments to endowment earnings, football ticket sales and university hospital revenue. It’s also landed colleges and universities with unexpected extra costs, such as paying to launch online versions of in-person classes.  If state higher education funding and enrollments take a dive in the months to come, layoffs likely will accelerate, higher education experts say. A collapse in enrollment and employment could, in turn, hurt college towns that rely on students, faculty and other workers to shop and eat local.

https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2020/06/04/covid-19-could-be-end-of-line-for-some-regional-colleges

Rebekah Saylors, Appalacian State

Social robotics is a field that deals with robots that work together with people in industries such as education, health care, retail and therapy. Wallace is exploring how online users interact with avatars that differ from their own ethnic or cultural backgrounds as well as the role avatars and virtual reality play in understanding a concept from an alternative point of view.

https://today.appstate.edu/2020/06/02/wallace

Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

For an online learning course to succeed, students must be held accountable for engaging in all essential and required course requirements. Whether that participation is time-stamped by the eLearning application itself or the honor system is employed, students must be held to a standard of complete engagement and nothing less. In addition, a set of ground rules must be laid out for how students conduct themselves in an online learning environment. These rules should run the gamut from engagement to the quality of discourse. These rules should be laid out in plain language and posted on the site for easy access at any time.

https://www.thetechedvocate.org/revisiting-accountability-in-online-learning/

Melanie Torre, CBS Austin

Wednesday interim UT-Austin president Jay Hartzell shared an update on planning for the Fall 2020 semester. In a letter to Longhorns he said about 20 percent of classes would be designed for online learning and classrooms would only be filled to 40 percent capacity. He also explained plans to ramp-up COVID-19 testing.

https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/ut-reveals-fall-plans-for-some-online-learning-limited-classroom-capacity

BY ROB WILEY, Campus Technology
As higher education processes have shifted, how can schools enhance their virtual capabilities and create a positive learning environment while maintaining enrollment? Many higher education institutions have been forced to create contingency plans for the incoming fall and spring semesters to run a campus without students, faculty and employees, and ultimately no face-to-face learning or interactions.The unexpected and sudden change in the standard learning environment can make students wary of whether they will still be able to receive the high quality education they are seeking, which may significantly impact enrollment.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2020/06/02/how-data-and-technology-will-drive-the-future-of-higher-education/

Dana C. Gierdowski and Joseph Galanek, EDUCAUSE Review

Technology in higher education can be both an aid and a challenge for students with disabilities. Institutions and instructors can take steps to ensure that these students have equitable access, and those same measures can help all students, particularly during the era of emergency remote teaching.

https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2020/6/ecar-study-of-the-technology-needs-of-students-with-disabilities-2020

University of Southern Indiana
Teaching online and looking for tips to increase student engagement?

1.) Consider offering multiple channels of communication to your online students.

2.) Leverage the instructional design services

3.) Take your online course to the next level with relevant and engaging content.

https://www.usi.edu/online-learning/news-media/increasing-engagement-of-online-students-three-tips-for-professors/

Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Education

The time of truth telling, backed by video, has arrived to ensure our standards of justice and equity. And it is not just video technology. Big data have a role in telling the story. Through the gathering and analysis of big data, the truth is being exposed every day. Though privacy is being lost day by day by the proliferation of video, the nearly ubiquitous presence of video shines a virtual light on the mundane day-to-day activities, but also on the bigotry and crimes that are committed. If we are very careful to validate sources and methods of both videos and big data, we will arrive at the truth. The truth is there to see if we are prepared to search vigilantly and to verify. And the truth delivered by technology can set us free. These skills are key to the success of our students in their careers as well as their personal lives. That is our hope for tomorrow: that increasingly truth will be collected, verified and disseminated through technology. That truth will lead to greater justice, more freedom and better lives for all.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online-trending-now/technology-truth-and-tomorrow

Knowledge at Wharton

In order to help leaders and organizations manage uncertainty driven by COVID-19, we have developed four scenarios for the future of human capital in the year 2023, with implications for companies operating in different industries as well as regions of the world. Each scenario presents unique opportunities and challenges. And with those opportunities and challenges, winning operating models, organizational structures, leadership profiles, skills, talent and organizational cultures can be identified for each scenario.

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/planning-post-covid-19-workforce-four-scenarios/