Educational Technology

Abigail Hess, CNBC
In 2018, workers quit at the highest rates since 2001, and experts predict that the trend will continue into 2019. According to the most recent Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), over 3.5 million Americans quit their jobs every month, about 2.3 percent of the labor force. Analysts pointed to sluggish wage growth and a tight labor market that’s encouraged workers looking for higher salaries to find new opportunities as the driving force behind this trend. But according to LinkedIn’s 2019 Workforce Learning Report, 94 percent of employees say that they would stay at a company longer if it simply invested in helping them learn.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/27/94percent-of-employees-would-stay-at-a-company-for-this-one-reason.html

BY LAURA ASCIONE, eCampus News
Internet, or education? If you ask Gen Z, the internet wins: an astonishing 64 percent of Gen Z would rather have unlimited internet access and no college degree than a college degree and no internet access, according to a new study. According to Reality Bytes: The Digital Experience is the Human Experience, it seems the internet and being connected are absolutely necessary for Gen Z-ers. The study, conducted by The Center for Generational Kinetics and commissioned by WP Engine, is a follow-up to a 2017 study.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2019/02/19/does-gen-z-value-degree-over-digital-connection/

By Dian Schaffhauser, THE Journal
Teacher confidence in the use of technology is rising incrementally. Some 99 percent of teachers and school leaders in a recent survey reported that they’re using digital technology in their classrooms. And nearly as many (96 percent) said they’ve seen benefits from its use. The survey was conducted among 1,281 teachers on behalf of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt by public opinion survey company YouGov. The goal of the survey was fourfold: to understand where educators are feeling both optimistic and concerned about the state of their profession, how they use technology and what they perceive as its impact, what kind of professional development they get to prepare them for the use of digital learning resources and how equity is playing out across districts with and without sizable achievement gaps.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2019/01/22/teacher-confidence-in-ed-tech-on-the-rise-but-not-feelings-about-the-profession.aspx

Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

Artificial intelligence recognizes faces, delivers better online search results, and steers autonomous cars. The AI trend has been hailed as the next industrial revolution. While AI transforms the world beyond recognition, six countries are taking the lead in the AI race.

https://www.thetechedvocate.org/six-countries-leading-the-ai-race/

BY ELLEN ULLMAN, eSchool News
This large Louisiana district used data to fix the way mobility negatively impacted performance.  Several schools in the district had been identified by the state as failing and the state needed to see progress. With high poverty and high mobility, finding solutions to address the needs of this community required out-of-the-box thinking, good data, and community support. Rapides Parish identified 12 buildings and roughly 10,000 students that were in a high-mobility, high economically disadvantaged area. Each move was causing school disruption. Three community zones were created in a part of the overall district that had low performance and high mobility. They used GuideK12 geovisual analytic software to create scenarios and maps and share the zones with the community so they could visualize the proposals and understand the dynamic changes.

How we reduced mobility and improved outcomes in low-performing schools

Vint Cerf, Forbes

Steve Case calls it the Third Wave. Others call it the fourth industrial revolution. Whatever we call it, the new jobs it creates will require new skills and new learning. Someone will have to program the billions of devices of the Internet of Things. Someone will have to re-program them when bugs are found. Someone else will have to install and configure them. Others will make them. And still more will invent new ways to use programmed devices, to outfit them with new AI capabilities. We are entering the endless world of software, where anything that you can program is possible. It is very important to recognize that the people whose jobs evaporate, because of AI or automation or invention in general, may not be prepared to do the newly created jobs unless they get retraining… again and again.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/02/25/with-ai-at-hand-dont-stop-learning/#6d6b9d481898

By Dian Schaffhauser, THE Journal
Innovating in education, especially with technology, doesn’t come without its hurdles. These may be organizational; they may involve people not knowing what to do or having a lack of resources, but the result is a slow-down in the adoption of innovation. The top one, however, is growing the innovation once it has been proven, according to a new report. The report was produced by the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), which has taken over the work from the New Media Consortium’s Horizon K-12 reports, a decade-long series that ended in 2017 when that organization ceased operations.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2019/01/28/5-hurdles-to-technological-innovation-in-k12-education.aspx

By Dian Schaffhauser, THE Journal
The Nebraska Library Commission is using a $531,000 grant to purchase “mobile” maker labs and spread them into rural communities for five months at a time. Nine libraries have been chosen to host what’s being called “Library Innovation Studios.” These join 18 other libraries that were previously selected for the same program in 2017. The Studios project provides a rotating set of makerspaces that contain creative tools like 3D printers, laser cutters and film and photography equipment. The project uses makerspaces hosted by the public libraries to offer participatory learning experiences to local residents.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2019/02/21/rural-libraries-hosting-movable-makerspaces.aspx

By Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed

In the summer of 2011 we produced eduMOOC — a constructivist massive open online course about online learning with the help of a small group of talented and expert professionals at the University of Illinois Springfield as well as colleagues around the country who were then, and continue to be, among the leaders in our field of online learning. By the time it concluded in August, eduMOOC had reached 2,700 learners in 70 countries — making it among the largest such classes produced up to that time.  MOOCs will continue to evolve. The groundbreaking work of Ashok Goel at Georgia Tech in developing a virtual teaching assistant is a key milestone in enabling these large-scale classes to engage students and to potentially personalize learning. In the meantime, the essential online, at-scale characteristics will make them affordable and attractive to students around the world.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online-trending-now/maturing-mooc

by Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed

Chinese hackers are ramping up their efforts to steal military research secrets from U.S. universities, new cybersecurity intelligence suggests. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Hawaii, Pennsylvania State University, Duke University and the University of Washington are among 27 institutions in the U.S., Canada and Southeast Asia to be targeted by Chinese hackers, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. The Chinese hackers targeted institutions and researchers with expertise in undersea technology as part of a coordinated cybercampaign that began in April 2017. Some of the institutions mentioned above may have been compromised in the attacks, though none have confirmed this publicly.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/03/06/report-top-universities-us-targeted-chinese-hackers

Franklin News Post
As enrollment in Franklin County Public Schools declines, homeschooling has been on the rise. The school district has been examining an alternative solution by adding an online program. This would allow the district to increase its state subsidy because enrollment would increase in grades 6-12, which are the target grade levels for the online program. Students enrolled in the program would be required to take Standards of Learning tests before receiving a high school diploma from Franklin County High School. Bringing homeschool students into the system — even if only virtually — is one way to bring enrollment figures back up.

https://www.thefranklinnewspost.com/editorials/online-program-good-for-schools/article_f9ffacfc-d174-5b86-9dcf-f2127e9d857c.html

BY ELLEN ULLMAN, eCampus News

At Dawson College in Montreal, Canada, there are three active-learning classrooms that the college calls “smart classrooms.” These rooms are designed with group tables and interactive whiteboards around the perimeter of the room. Two of the rooms have SMART Board technology while the third, and newest, has eight Nureva Walls that stretch around the room, providing 56 feet of digital workspace. It is the largest installation of Nureva visual collaboration solutions in a single classroom. eCampus News spoke with Chris Whittaker, physics professor and coordinator of Dawson’s smart classrooms, about active learning and what goes on in a smart classroom.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2019/02/21/colleges-support-active-learning/

Sam Shead, Forbes

The U.K. government is planning to fund thousands of postgraduate students that want to study a Masters or a PhD in artificial intelligence as it looks to keep pace with the U.S. and China. AI is poised to become the most significant technology for a generation but there are only so many people that know how to develop the technology, which could have a huge impact on industries such as healthcare, energy, and automotive. Business Secretary Greg Clark and Digital Secretary Jeremy Wright announced on Thursday that the government will commit up to £115 million towards training the next generation of AI talent.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/samshead/2019/02/20/uk-government-to-fund-ai-university-courses-with-115m/#73a9fcbb430d

By Tanya Seidel, ATD
We’re yet another year closer to the official death of Flash, and while Adobe plans on ending their support of it at the end of 2020, there’s no telling when browsers will pull the plug. Have you started converting your old Flash courses to HTML5? While this technological storm is slow-moving and won’t arrive for another two years, there are plenty of people who haven’t even started their preparation. How do we know, you ask? Because we talk to learning managers who have libraries full of old e-learning courses that were either published to Flash or have Flash elements in them, and they’ve done nothing about them.

https://www.td.org/insights/one-year-closer-to-the-death-of-flasha-case-study

John Liu, EdScoop
University administrators and faculty are increasingly buying in to the idea of open educational resources — encouraging the adoption of free online textbooks on a course-by-course basis, said David Harris, editor in chief of OpenStax, a Rice University-based publisher. “What we’re seeing is a shift in the market from what we would call individual adoption to institutional-supported adoption and adaption of OER,” Harris told EdScoop. “The institutions are now helping faculty drive affordability for students. That’s a significant change.”

https://edscoop.com/university-students-saved-177-million-in-2018-using-openstax-oer/

By Ashley A. Smith, Inside Higher Ed

Community college graduation rates are poor, but they’re even worse for single mothers. Only 8 percent of single mothers enrolled in an associate or bachelor’s degree program graduate within six years, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. A new initiative announced Wednesday by former second lady Jill Biden hopes to improve that rate. Biden, a full-time English professor at Northern Virginia Community College, said the Community College Women Succeed initiative will help colleges learn how to help adult women and single mothers graduate from two-year institutions across the country. The initiative was announced during the Achieving the Dream national conference.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/02/22/new-initiative-help-single-moms-succeed-community-colleges

Emily Alford, ClickZ

Survey results reveal the top search trends 2019 looks to have in store for marketers. Here are the top five, along with tips for how to handle them. Recently, ClickZ teamed up with Chatmeter, the all-in-one local brand management platform, to collect data from 700 US-based marketers. We asked them what they believed were the top five search trends this year…. According to our survey, 36.1% of respondents said they’d focus on voice search in 2019.  See details on all five below:

https://www.clickz.com/survey-top-five-search-trends-2019/226086/

By Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology
In a recent survey, community college students cited online learning as one of their top five challenges to success. Conducted by researchers from North Carolina State University, the Revealing Institutional Strengths and Challenges (RISC) Survey polled 50,097 students at 10 community colleges across the United States on the challenges they face in five areas: academic support services; campus environment; finances and financial aid; succeeding in their courses; and work and personal issues. Work was the No. 1 challenge reported by students, cited by 34 percent of survey respondents. That was followed by paying expenses (also 34 percent), family and friends (30 percent), online classes (21 percent) and parking on campus (21 percent).

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2019/02/21/online-learning-a-top-challenge-for-community-college-students.aspx?admgarea=news

EAB

As projections for undergraduate enrollment wane, many colleges and universities are looking to adult learner programs for growth and revenue. However, the adult learner market is complex, and adult learners’ mindsets are shifting. In order to gain market share and effectively recruit students, institutions need to understand how today’s adult learners think. To help our partners better understand this mindset, EAB recently conducted a
survey of current and prospective students of graduate, undergraduate degree completion, online, and certificate programs. As we will elaborate in the following pages, the responses indicate that today’s adult learners are savvy, digital consumers who approach their education with a consumer-like mindset.

http://pages.eab.com/rs/732-GKV-655/images/Understanding%20the%20Shifting%20Adult%20Learner%20Mindset.pdf

By Jeffrey R. Young, EdSurge

Two universities—Duke University and Carnegie Mellon University—are releasing templates and best practices for getting IRB approval for classroom research and are encouraging other colleges to use them.  Leaders of the effort admit that templates alone are unlikely to lead to a revolution in self-study by faculty. But the tools are the first output of a nationwide effort to spread teaching innovation in higher education. That broader project, called the Empirical Educator Project, was started a year ago by e-Literate, a blog run by two longtime edtech consultants, Michael Feldstein and Phil Hill. The group held an invitation-only summit where they encouraged participants to identify projects that they can share with colleagues elsewhere.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-02-15-does-innovative-teaching-work-a-new-effort-aims-to-help-faculty-find-out

By Dave Bergmeier, HPJ.com

The Southwest Plains Regional Service Center, based in Sublette, Kansas, was recently recognized as a Transformation Award recipient by Fuel Education, its online computer partner, for giving dropouts and at-risk students an opportunity to earn a high school diploma and expanding access to online courses to hundreds of students across the state. “We were selected for outside of the box thinking on how we use our software in helping adult learners,” said Community Learning Center Director Bill Losey.

https://www.hpj.com/ag_news/online-program-helps-non-traditional-students-regional-education-center-receives/article_a6dc93ee-7d6a-5d68-adc3-96819115631c.html