Techno-News Blog

State of Pennsylvania

Continuing to help students with remote learning during the pandemic, the state Department of Education (PDE), through the Office of Commonwealth Libraries (OCL), today announced $500,000 in funding to support affordability and equity in higher education. These funds will be offered through a new Open Educational Resources Grant Program (OER) funded by the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund (GEER) established by the CARES Act of 2020.

https://www.media.pa.gov/pages/Education-details.aspx?newsid=1013

Amy Collier, EDUCAUSE Review

Design matters in higher education. Inclusive design and design justice provide frameworks and strategies that are attentive to learners for whom education has not typically been designed. In her book Mismatch, Kat Holmes writes, “Design shapes our ability to access, participate in, and contribute to the world.”1 When we think about what that means in education—that design shapes students’ ability to access, participate in, and contribute to meaningful, transformative learning—we are reminded how seriously we should be taking the concept of design in education

https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/10/inclusive-design-and-design-justice-strategies-to-shape-our-classes-and-communities

Mara Leighton, Business Insider

edX and Coursera both offer cheap or free online graduate courses, many from top universities like MIT, Duke, and the University of Michigan. edX MicroMasters and Coursera MasterTracks are bite-sized portions of master’s degree programs.  They can be used to build stand-alone skills to advance your career or as a stepping stone to a full master’s program.  We compared MicroMasters and MasterTracks for you here. Overall, the deciding factor will be the program itself. But generally, edX’s offerings are cheaper, have more options, and are more lenient than Coursera’s.

https://www.businessinsider.com/edx-micromaster-vs-coursera-mastertrack-online-masters-programs

Dennis Pierce, eCampus News

Each year, colleges lose up to a third of the students they accept to “summer melt,” and the global pandemic has only made the problem worse in 2020. However, using data analytics and business intelligence programs to make smarter student enrollment choices helped colleges reduce their summer melt by about 1 percent this fall, a new analysis suggests. The report, from AI and business analytics firm Othot, also argues that colleges using these technologies performed three times better than the national average in terms of their fall 2020 enrollment figures.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2020/12/17/how-predictive-analytics-helps-improve-student-enrollment-and-retention/

KHTS

The sudden rise in the number of Internet users caused developers and marketers to create enhancements on their platforms to give people something new to explore. This keeps people entertained at home and less bothered with the current pandemic. Services are also being offered such as online courier services, online shopping, and even online advertising. Moreover, online learning has become the only safe option as a learning method. Schools have adopted this kind of arrangement ever since the pandemic immobilized onsite learning institutions.

https://www.hometownstation.com/news-articles/how-you-can-benefit-from-online-learning-during-lockdown-359083

STEPHANIE FRANCIS WARD – ABA Journal

The survey, titled “Law Schools and the Global Pandemic,” was conducted in August and has a pool of 2,897 people, including law students, faculty and administrators. A total of 89% of the students surveyed were taking classes entirely online. Respondents were asked to rank how challenging various issues are with a range of “not challenging” to “very challenging.” Overall, student respondents indicated that they saw things as being more difficult than faculty or administrators did. For students and administrators, the most challenging area was students staying engaged in online classes. A total of 39% of student respondents and 24% of administrators marked this area as very challenging. For the same question, 14% of faculty respondents saw the issue as very challenging.

https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/do-law-students-professors-and-administrators-agree-on-challenges-of-online-learning

Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology

4) COVID-19’s Ultimate Impact on Online Learning: The Good and the Bad
According to Michael Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, higher education’s rapid move to online learning this past spring may have left a sour taste in the mouths of students and faculty across the country, but there is a silver lining.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2020/12/15/top-10-campus-technology-stories-of-2020.aspx

Dan Mangan, CNBC

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos resigned Thursday night, blaming President Donald Trump for rhetoric that fueled the invasion of the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump suppporters. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos resigned Thursday night, blaming President Donald Trump for rhetoric that fueled the “unconscionable” violent invasion of the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters. DeVos is the second member of Trump’s cabinet to quit because of the riot Wednesday, which flooded the halls of Congress, postponing the confirmation of Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/07/education-secretary-betsy-devos-resigns-over-capitol-riot-blames-trump-rhetoric.html

Kristen E. Broady, Moriah Macklin, and Jimmy O’Donnell, Brookings Institution

We propose three avenues to make progress along these lines. First, doing more to support the higher education sector in skills training. Second, focusing federal worker training programs on particular occupations and skills. And third, doing much more to support private-sector unions. On all three fronts, enormous challenges were evident even prior to the pandemic. For example, for decades the higher education sector has faced significant declines in enrollment in the face of demographic changes and cuts in funding that could help to support necessary innovations. In addition, employer-paid and government-funded worker training have been on the decline for years. Finally, private-sector union membership has been declining for decades, meaning decreased support for on-the-job training and worker protections.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/preparing-u-s-workers-for-the-post-covid-economy-higher-education-workforce-training-and-labor-unions/

Natalie Schwartz, HigherEd Dive

Coursera debuted a service last year giving colleges access to its course catalog, which they can use to supplement their online offerings. The company made the service free from March through September to help universities find their online footing during the health crisis. This fall it introduced a tiered pricing model, including two free plans that give students access to one course annually. Participation in the service has grown from about 30 campuses in February to 3,700 worldwide. In all, about 2.6 million students have enrolled in 24 million courses. Completion rates for campus programs is above 50%, according to the company.

https://www.highereddive.com/news/are-moocs-getting-a-second-wind-as-colleges-look-online-for-gen-ed-classes/592309/

Christopher Harrington and Elizabeth S. LeBlanc, EdSurge
When we say “stuck at substitution,” some readers may recognize the SAMR model of education technology integration. The SAMR framework describes four different levels of technology use, from Substitution to Augmentation, Modification and Redefinition (SAMR). At its most basic level, education technology can be used to simply substitute: to replace traditional methods of teaching and learning with ones that are digitally mediated, but are still based on the same basic structure and pedagogy. For example, a digital worksheet is still a worksheet in the same way a traditional six-period bell schedule done via Zoom or Google Meets is still a basic substitution of the physical classroom setting for the virtual one.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2020-12-16-now-is-the-time-to-redefine-learning-not-recreate-traditional-school-online

LAURA ASCIONE, eCampus News

Campus IT leaders have their hands full navigating online learning and increased threats to network security. Higher education has always been a target for cybercriminals, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only highlighted vulnerabilities in campus IT networks and infrastructure. Higher education institutions often host sensitive research data, patent information, and a vast amount of student personal data while supporting a sprawling campus of information resources used by students, faculty and others. The current pandemic has added to these problems and has sent university network administrators scrambling to accommodate the rapid shift to remote, on-line learning, coping with unprecedented traffic volumes on university network infrastructure and a vastly increased risk of security breaches.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2020/12/14/4-ways-covid-has-impacted-campus-it-and-whats-next/

John Kroger, Inside Higher Ed

College policies on COVID-19 — whether students should study on campus or in distance modes, when they should go home for vacation, and how they are regulated while present on campus — have a potentially immense impact on host communities. As a New York Times study recently revealed, “since the end of August, deaths from the coronavirus have doubled in counties with a large college population, compared with a 58 percent increase in the rest of the nation. Few of the victims were college students, but rather older people and others living and working in the community.”

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/leadership-higher-education/10-observations-covid-19-and-higher-ed

Rick Seltzer, Inside Higher Ed

New projections released today showing more students graduating from high school than had been previously expected are good news for higher education, where traditional-aged 18- to 24-year-old students make or break budgets for many colleges and universities. “That good news really can’t escape demography,” said Patrick Lane, vice president of policy, analysis and research at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. “There are simply fewer students available that were born in and after the Great Recession to fill college seats going forward.”

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/12/15/what-do-new-projections-high-school-graduates-mean-colleges-and-universities

Maeghen MacDonald Kuhn & Brittani Wyskocil Garcia, OJDLA

This breakout study reviews the findings of a 2017 study of Penn State University’s World Campus undergraduate online students. The study surveyed students to report demographic, academic, preferences, and satisfaction information and sought to develop relationships between these variables by their levels of academic success. This breakout study focuses on the findings related to three of the study’s variables: academic advising frequency, interaction preference, and satisfaction of undergraduate online students.

https://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/fall233/kuhn_garcia233.html

Ingrid Fadelli , Tech Xplore

Researchers at Tecnologico de Monterrey in Mexico have recently created a low-cost robotic arm that could enhance online robotics education, allowing teachers to remotely demonstrate theoretical concepts explained during their lessons. This robotic arm, presented in a paper published in Hardware X, is fully open source and can be easily assembled by all teachers and educators worldwide.

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-12-open-source-low-cost-robotic-arm-online.html

Jack Deem, et al; OJDLA

Virtual teams have become a major component in the delivery of online courses at Purdue University Global (PUG) and in higher education in general (Olson, et. al, 2015). To help provide employers with qualified candidates for their talent needs, teamwork has been established as one of the six professional competencies that Purdue University Global (PUG) students are assessed for in all programs.  Cross functional working teams were established to review the team project processes. The objective of these teams was to develop recommendations for improving team projects in the curriculum. Initial results showed the main factors impacting student satisfaction with team assignments in the virtual classroom included; poor communication within the team, time schedule issues; and, lack of training for both students and faculty.

https://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/fall233/deem_beyer_dana_chicone_ringler_ferebee_strouble233.html

Higher ed needs modern protections from modern ransomware attacks
MIKE WISEMAN, eCampus News

Higher education institutions suffering from ransomware attacks is nothing new. However, as institutions shift to distance learning, the attack surface is much greater, giving malicious actors greater opportunity. Institutions have a plethora of data – student assignments, academic research, administration and admission files, and alumni relations materials. The amount of data institutions have is incredible and increasing – making them prime targets for ransomware attacks. Ransomware not only creates an issue for institutions by restricting access to critical systems and data, but it also can expose students’ personal information, such as Social Security numbers, passports, and banking details.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2020/12/11/higher-ed-needs-modern-protections-from-modern-ransomware-attacks/