Educational Technology

By Leila Meyer, Campus Technology

Seventy-seven percent of college students think schools should do a better job of using their personal data to improve the college experience, according to a new survey from Ellucian. The company released the results of a survey on the same day as its new data analytics platform, Ellucian Analytics. The online survey was conducted by Wakefield Research from October 13 to 18 and included 1,000 United States college students. The key takeaway from the survey is that students already share vast amounts of personal data with their schools, and they expect those schools to use that data in ways that benefit them.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/10/31/survey-students-think-schools-should-use-personal-data-to-improve-college-experience.aspx

by Roger Riddell, Education Dive

From solutions for boosting cybersecurity to new accessibility components on familiar platforms, these solutions are worth a closer look. Between keynotes, panels and interviews, Education Dive took time to check out what Educause 2016’s close to 300 exhibitors had on display. From solutions for boosting cybersecurity to new accessibility components on familiar platforms, here are six products we saw worth noting.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/6-ed-tech-products-to-note-from-educause-2016/429723/

By Derrick Mason, Journal Standard

Online classes are becoming more popular with college students, and Highland Community College is making sure to keep up with the trend. Highland was recently named the top two-year school in Illinois to offer online classes by OnlineColleges.com. The site generated its rankings based on data from the National Center of Education Statistics. Pete Willging, director of community relations and marketing at Highland, said it was important for the school to learn about the criteria that went into the ranking. “Whenever we do receive a ranking from an institution, such as this one, we ask for the methodology that they use so we can see what we’re doing well,” he said. Willging said the most heavily weighted category for the ranking was the number of programs offered via distance education. Highland offers 18 percent of its courses as online or hybrid classes, he said.

http://www.journalstandard.com/news/20161103/highland-community-college-in-freeport-at-top-of-its-class-in-online-education

by Mario Koran, Voice of San Diego

Last school year, 1,381 seniors – more than 20 percent of San Diego Unified’s class of 2016 – took an online version of a course required for graduation. Roughly 92 percent of them passed. It’s an impressive pass rate. And it was crucial for the class of 2016. That group ended up setting the highest graduation rate on record. They achieved that even as the first class to be subject to far more rigorous graduation requirements. Researchers had predicted it would be impossible, in fact, for the class of 2016 to graduate at the rate they did. But the academics hadn’t factored in the new online courses that would quickly allow students to catch up.

http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/education/san-diego-unifieds-grad-rate-miracle-relied-online-courses/

By Richard Chang, THE Journal

The United States Education Department’s Office of Educational Technology is unveiling a new online tool that’s designed to rapidly evaluate ed tech products and help educators decide whether a product or tool is worth their money. The Ed Tech Rapid Cycle Evaluation (RCE) Coach is a free, openly licensed, web-based platform created in partnership with Mathematica, a policy research organization. The RCE Coach guides educators step-by-step through an ed tech purchasing or renewal process.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2016/10/28/us-ed-department-launches-free-online-tool-to-rapidly-evaluate-ed-tech-products.aspx

BY DAWN NELSON AND ASHLEIGH SCHULZ, eSchool News

Today’s students have too many tests to take—but today’s teachers still need insight into their classes’ knowledge and skills. Adding new tests every time students need to prove mastery rarely seems like the right answer. For some classrooms, the solution lies in formative assessments, which gauge their students’ understanding and personalize their lessons in real time. Here, two educators share how formative assessments are transforming their students’ learning across the board.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2016/10/31/teachers-share-formative-assessment-strategies-that-work/

by eSchool News

More often than not, students pick up a mobile device or use a computer to access videos and digital media online. With a dearth of resources online, educators can find content that meets students where they’re comfortable learning, with interactive and engaging presentation. TED Talks have grown in popularity in part for their inspiring and frank perspectives on any number of world issues, and educators can leverage these resources for learning. Educators can build lessons around any TED-Ed Original, TED Talk or YouTube video through Ted-Ed. Once they locate the video they wish to use, they next use the TED-Ed Lesson editor to add questions, discussion prompts and additional resources. When the lesson is published, educators can monitor their progress and submitted work.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2016/11/01/10-ted-ed-videos-students-can-use-today/

BY JOHN ZIRKLE, eSchool News

New software and a big collaboration changed how one rural school’s students think about music; the Achievement Program seeks to establish the first national standard in the United States for measuring musical aptitude in students of all ages. There are moments in my life when the world slows down long enough for me to have incredibly emotional experiences linked to music. Those moments are pure joy. My goal as a music educator is to facilitate opportunities for my students to connect in that very same way. One of the purest ways to imbue students with these amazing experiences is through music composition. Spending seven years as music teacher in Big Sky’s rural community, I encounter daily the educational benefits that a small school district offers students, particularly in its abilities to offer more intimate backdrops for learning.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2016/11/03/small-school-turned-every-district-music-composer/

By Darth Vaughn and Casey Flaherty, Legal Rebels

Anyone can take classes at Harvard. Few people get into Harvard. But HarvardX, the school’s iteration of Massive Open Online Courses, is open to everyone. There are similar offerings from MIT, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Cornell, et al. The internet has taken the democratization of knowledge to unprecedented heights. And our selective institutions of higher education should be commended for their contribution to the global learning community. Most people still don’t learn. Like libraries, MOOCs are open to all but only used by some.

http://www.abajournal.com/legalrebels/article/lawyers_too_busy_to_learn

BY ANDY REID, Rapid Growth

Online learning, while firmly established in colleges, isn’t always an option considered by parents of high school students. But with more and more options available through schools and other brick-and-mortar institutions, online courses have found their place in traditional settings.  Here are five facts that explore what online learning offers young students and teachers throughout Michigan.

http://www.rapidgrowthmedia.com/features/fivefactsonline110216.aspx

by Sydney Neely, The Commercial Appeal

U.S. colleges recorded a 3.9-percent rise in students who take online courses from 2013-2014. The University of Memphis increased its online courses by 30 percent since the 2011-2012 year. 1,960 students at Southwest are enrolled in 205 online courses, compared with 2,067 students and 193 courses in 2015. The online faculty has grown at the University of Memphis by 11 percent since the 2011-2012 year.

http://www.commercialappeal.com/story/news/education/educate-memphis/2016/11/02/online-courses-continue-grow-memphis/91541306/

By Andrew Kreighbaum, Inside Higher Ed

Students are more likely to drop out of college if they lose even small amounts of financial aid — regardless of their grade point average — according to a study from the Education Advisory Board, a research and consulting firm based in Washington. The study also found that the more financial aid a student loses, the more likely they are to drop out. On the other hand, students who receive more financial aid are more likely to persist in completing a degree, according to the study.

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/11/03/even-top-students-may-drop-out-after-losing-aid

by eCampus News

Trilogy Education Services, the education platform that powers skills-based technology programs for colleges and universities, announces today that it has partnered with University of California, Berkeley Extension to launch a 24 week web-development program geared towards adult learners and part-time students. This brings the total number of university partnerships to twelve, as Trilogy continues to expand its nationwide reach in preparing students for high-growth careers in the digital economy. Throughout the digital economy, coding skills are increasingly in demand across a broad range of careers, including data analytics, marketing, engineering, scientific research and design. As noted by job market analytics firm, Burning Glass, 7 million job openings in 2015 required coding skills with programming jobs growing 12 percent faster than the market average.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/curriculum/coding-boot-camp-trilogy/

By Dian Schaffhauser, Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology

In our 2016 Teaching with Technology survey, faculty members offered their predictions on what the future holds for technology in teaching — including what hardware and systems will bite the dust over the next 10 years. The technologies that exist in classrooms today won’t necessarily be the same ones that are around in 10 years. In particular, the days of desktop computers and laptops are numbered, according to educators in Campus Technology’s 2016 Teaching with Technology survey. The survey polled faculty members across the country about their use of technology for teaching and learning, their wish lists and gripes, their view of what the future holds and more. Respondents were asked to predict what education tech would die over the next decade. Desktop computers were mentioned by 29 percent of the 408 people responded. That type of tech won hands-down by a margin of nearly 2-to-1 compared to the next most popular choice: clickers, referenced in 16 percent of the votes.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/11/02/top-10-education-technologies-that-will-be-dead-and-gone-in-the-next-decade.aspx

by Jarrett Carter, Education Dive

The Association of American College and Universities has launched a digital collection of materials and guides for community college officials to research and develop best practices for student success. According to Campus Technology, the repository provides online communities and topical arrangement on success areas such as transfer support, administrative transparency, learning pathways and high-impact teaching. Institutions are also presented as evidence-based examples of best practices in action, with resources developed on campuses and outlines on implementation strategies.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/aacu-launches-new-digital-resource-hub-for-community-colleges/429524/

by Roger Riddell, Campus Technology

The success strategies of these three tech chiefs can serve prospective administrators campuswide. Strong people skills are key to success in any higher ed leadership role, and IT — where workers are often noted for being far more introverted — is no exception. In a Thursday afternoon panel at last week’s Educause conference in Anaheim, CA, CIOs Keith McIntosh (University of Richmond), Barron Koralesky (Williams College) and Sharon Pitt (Binghamton University) offered their advice as people relatively new to the role of campus tech chief. But in addition to sharing experiences and lessons learned, which we’ll get to in a bit, the trio also offered the following list of 10 tips that tied into those stories

http://www.educationdive.com/news/new-cios-offer-advice-10-tips-for-those-aspiring-to-the-role-educause-201/429493/

By GERRIT DE VYNCK, BLOOMBERG

A customer orders a robot online and boots it up at home. At first the bot doesn’t do much of anything; it simply follows its new owner around and observes his daily routine: walking the dog, making lasagna, washing the dishes. But before long the bot has learned to be a surrogate, shouldering routine tasks so its owner can focus on more interesting ones. That’s the world envisioned by Suzanne Gildert and Geordie Rose. They run Kindred, a secretive artificial intelligence company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, and funded in part by Google’s venture capital arm.

http://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2016/oct/31/firm-learning-how-to-teach-human-skills/?f=business

By Erin Duffy, World-Herald

In a tucked-away classroom at an Omaha library, groups of third- through fifth-graders are dreaming up their version of the perfect sundae. On Post-it notes, they draw pictures of bananas, chocolate sauce and sprinkles. But this isn’t snack time or art class — it’s coding, unplugged. The kids, who make up the inaugural class at the Omaha Virtual School, are learning about algorithms, a series of steps that solve a problem. Algorithms are the building blocks of computer programming.

http://www.omaha.com/news/education/in-omaha-virtual-school-home-schoolers-are-forging-a-new/article_2cf35df1-e43f-5554-9ae1-fed8819aa16d.html

By Amy Ahearn, EdSurge

“Self-paced.” “Mobile.” “On-the-go.” Edtech companies use these buzzwords to describe the next generation of learning tools. We assume that granting learners access to education technology outside the classroom to be used on their own time is unequivocally positive. Yet, some of these factors are at odds with the way people develop productive, habit-forming behaviors. Without imposed schedules, proximity to peers, or physical classrooms, even the best-intentioned students never make it through a MOOC or fail to reengage with the educational app they downloaded. How can we use insights from psychology and behavioral science to design products that help students actually stick with learning and build it into their lives?

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-10-30-7-ways-for-learning-designers-to-build-habit-forming-experiences

By Dian Schaffhauser, THE Journal

Last year, when an MDR survey asked curriculum directors to rate the various factors that influenced their buying decisions for digital instruction, the one that surfaced above all others was compatibility with multiple computing devices, chosen by 62 percent of respondents. No wonder. A multiplicity of devices proliferates on the school campus, especially in an era of rising acceptance for bring-your-own-device. As a new report from MDR points out, students may show up with “smartphones, iPads, tablets, laptops, desktops and Chromebooks.” Those devices may be running iOS, Android, Chrome and Windows. Even district-provided devices can run the gamut depending on which grade they’re being used in.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2016/10/26/device-type-proliferation-poses-problems.aspx