Techno-News Blog

LAURA ASCIONE, eCampus News
Contact tracing and location tech are just two examples of how universities are leveraging innovative tools to keep campuses safe during COVID. Across the nation, higher-ed leaders are grappling with the question of how they will ensure a continued safe on-campus environment for students, faculty, and staff in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Contact tracing and location technologies play a large part in universities’ ability to monitor adherence to safety protocols such as social distancing and track potential COVID cases.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2020/11/30/how-universities-are-using-technology-in-their-covid-precautions/

Keah Sharma, the Varsity

As the fall semester of online learning comes to a close, many first-years’ college experiences have been defined by impending weekly deadlines, eating dining hall food at desks, and ironically savouring walks to the library — the brief time outdoors we get. Although this may seem a bit disheartening, first-years have no past involvement with the university lifestyle to compare their experience to. Academically, there is an unrealistic standard being set for what will suffice in the future for first-year students.

https://thevarsity.ca/2020/11/29/opinion-online-classes-focus-too-little-on-meaningful-learning-too-much-on-accountability/

Alan Ruby and Wendy Fish, University World News

John Orlando, Faculty Focus

The good news is that students can be taught self-regulated learning strategies as part of an online course without distracting from the course content. Teaching these strategies as part of the course will not only help student achievement in that particular course but give them skills that will serve them will in future courses.

https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/helping-online-students-succeed/

Natalie Schwartz, Education Dive

AWS has been laying the groundwork for years to influence how cloud computing education is conducted worldwide. In the U.S. alone, 84 two-year institutions, districts or systems — including the Maricopa Community Colleges, in Arizona — and 67 four-year colleges have taught at least one of its courses, according to an Education Dive analysis of its publicly available list. These schools are AWS Academy members. Community colleges are used to working hand-in-hand with employers, including AWS, to develop curriculum. But these kinds of partnerships aren’t as typical for four-year schools, which tend to value academic freedom over corporate influence.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/why-4-year-colleges-are-tapping-amazon-to-help-deliver-cloud-computing-degr/589750/

JOE FEDEWA, How to Geek

Chrome OS has a reputation for being virus-proof. Google likes to boast about how secure its operating system is compared to others. Are Chromebooks really immune to viruses, though? And, if so, how do they achieve this? Allow us to explain.

https://www.howtogeek.com/700115/why-arent-viruses-a-problem

Marian Stoltz-Loike, University Business

Money is pouring into educational technology. And it’s not just about building digital classroom platforms in response to Covid. In the first half of 2020, $4.5 billion was invested in ed tech and experts predict that $87 billion will be invested over the next 10 years. This investment will drive development in higher education and will be directed to a greater intersection of higher education with industry needs, filling critical skills gaps. It will also likely provide resources to address inequality, access and cost issues.

https://universitybusiness.com/ed-tech-upgrades-will-outlast-the-pandemic/

SIAN BEILOCK, Hechinger Report

According to a recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 75 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 report poor mental or behavioral health associated with the pandemic. Other surveys confirm the prevalence of stress during this time. Some 79 percent of Generation Z adults (ages 18 to 23) in the U.S. say the future of our nation is a significant source of stress in their lives, while climate change alone makes 57 percent of American teens feel afraid.

https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-students-need-tools-to-safeguard-their-mental-health-in-uncertain-times/

JARED MUKAI, eCampus News
This summer posed some unique challenges for colleges and universities across the country, as many needed to act quickly to implement the right AV technology solutions to help faculty create collaborative and engaging learning experiences, regardless of whether or not students would be physically present in the classroom. Overall, in order to provide an optimal learning environment for students and faculty, we need to make virtual learning feel as connected as being physically present in the classroom. That’s where the right technology becomes key for helping faculty seamlessly engage students and create a collaborative learning atmosphere.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2020/11/26/using-av-to-create-engaging-learning-experiences-even-remotely/

Taomi Kenny, ATD

When we first migrated online, L&D teams scrambled to replicate training over Zoom only to find that videoconferencing resulted in limited learner engagement. While these initial results were disappointing, there’s still hope. We can adjust our strategies to develop new, more effective learning experiences as we continue to navigate this digital reality. Designing high-impact online training sounds daunting, but it’s a challenge we’re equipped to face. Using the three strategies detailed below, you can create facilitated, collaborative learning experiences that engage learners and drive business impact.

https://www.td.org/insights/3-strategies-for-scaling-facilitated-online-learning

J. Mark McFadden, Inside Higher Ed

Many have written about the experience, offering suggestions for how to teach online more effectively, and we all continue to share ideas for improvement. While not perfect, here are three tips that, over the past months, I’ve found to have made this shift slightly less burdensome, with hopes they’ll be helpful to you, too.

https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2020/11/25/three-ideas-more-effective-online-teaching-opinion

Valerie Irvine, EDUCAUSE Review

On today’s higher education campus, there are likely a dozen new terms being used to describe different configurations around the modality of courses. Modality typically refers to the location and timing of interactions. What used to be a simple binary of face-to-face or online has now become so extremely complex that our ability to understand each other is impaired.

https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/10/the-landscape-of-merging-modalities

Anant Agarwal, Founder and CEO of edX, Professor at MIT

Here at edX, we’re experiencing an exciting and pivotal moment in the history of online education. Never has online learning been more accessible than it is today, and never has it seen such widespread adoption. On-campus degree programs cannot match the global reach, diversity of student perspectives, or variety of career experiences that learners encounter among their peers in top-tier online educational programs. Because online courses aren’t limited by geography or students’ schedule constraints, these programs can bring together far more heterogeneous groups than their traditional, campus-based counterparts could hope to attract.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mythbusting-who-says-online-learners-cant-network-build-anant-agarwal/

Marika Gerken, CNN

California State University, East Bay published a public database of remote job vacancies across the country to help people struggling to find employment due to the pandemic. In a press release last week, the university said it wants to help “pull the rising unemployment level in the country back to its normal level.”  The database, which the university says is regularly updated, has more than 3,000 active job openings across different fields and industries.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/22/us/cal-state-job-database-trnd/index.html

Livia Gimenes, Brown Herald

The COVID-19 crisis forced the University to dive headfirst into waters it had first explored more than 10 years earlier, when it offered its first online class. For the past eight months, the entire Brown community has been trying to navigate online learning, and wondering how these unusual semesters will shape the University’s long-term reality. University staff members started to think about offering online courses around 2005 and 2006, according to Vice President of Strategic Initiatives Karen Sibley MAT’81 P’07 P’12 P’17. Sibley said that back then there was a lot of stigma surrounding online education, with many believing that it was inferior to in-person instruction.

https://www.browndailyherald.com/2020/11/23/online-education-brown-past-future/

Cali Morrison, EdSurge
Higher education is heading into the eye of the tornado. Many of us are planning for academic continuity while the debris of the COVID-19 pandemic is swirling around us. There are regulatory matters to consider. The health and safety of our colleagues and our students to put at the forefront. A long-overdue spotlight on equity, diversity and inclusion shining on all of our operations. It can all feel overwhelming, like we’re all going to get swept away in the storm. Now, more than ever, as educators and institutions, we need to recenter ourselves on our why—not on how we get through this or when this storm will be over.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2020-11-23-to-weather-the-storms-of-higher-education-remember-why-you-re-there

Dennis Pierce, eCampus News

When the pandemic emerged, IT and academic leaders at Bucknell University worked closely together to make sure faculty had everything they needed to succeed. IT and faculty leaders formed a remote learning team that offered training in how to teach effectively online. Tech support staff extended their availability to answer student and faculty questions. The university expanded its WiFi coverage to outdoor locations over the summer to support faculty who wanted to teach outside when students returned to campus. “I think the pandemic in some ways transformed our relationship,” says Vice President for Libraries and Information Technology Param Bedi. Although IT and academic leaders have always collaborated well at Bucknell during Bedi’s 12-plus years in this position, “it became a true partnership,” he observes.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2020/11/24/three-ways-campus-cios-can-support-high-quality-instruction/

Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed
As we prepare to launch another semester mostly online, we are facing what may be the most severe mental health crisis in the history of American education. The next three months promise to bring the most dangerous and stressful period in American medicine. It will unfold in the cold, dark months of winter — December, January, February and into March — when the death toll mounts higher and higher before a hoped-for spring of vaccinated immunity begins to bring hope and some measure of mobility and in-person engagement. I am sounding the alarm now to alert readers that the next three months may bring struggle and harm to our faculty, staff and students.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online-trending-now/mental-health-epidemic-dark-shadow-covid-pandemic

BETH KOWITT, Fortune

In April, the U.S. unemployment rate surpassed 14%. And while the numbers have since improved, what’s become clear is that many of the jobs that were lost aren’t coming back. In this week’s episode of Fortune’s Reinvent podcast, we explore how the company Coursera—one of the biggest platforms offering massive open online courses (MOOCs)—is helping the American workforce reimagine itself for a post-COVID world.

https://fortune.com/2020/11/16/coursera-reinvent-podcast-coronavirus-reskilling/

Jon Marcus, Hechinger Report

A lot of other people also have invested time and money getting four-year degrees only to return for career and technical education in fields ranging from firefighting to automation to nursing, in which jobs are relatively plentiful and salaries and benefits comparatively good, but which require faster and far less costly certificates and associate degrees. One in 12 students now at community colleges — or more than 940,000 — previously earned a bachelor’s degree, according to the American Association of Community Colleges. And even as college and university enrollment overall declines, some career and technical education programs are reporting growth, and anticipating more of it.

https://hechingerreport.org/more-people-with-bachelors-degrees-go-back-to-school-to-learn-skilled-trades/