Educational Technology

Aaron Hale, University of Georgia
The number of University of Georgia undergraduate students in STEM disciplines has risen about 20 percent in the past five years. In fall 2018 along, 11,832 (40 percent of the student body) declared a major in science, technology, engineering or mathematics. Combine this surge with the recent launch of UGA’s Innovation District and construction beginning on the I-STEM Research Building, one can see the STEM momentum growing on campus. The increase in STEM-related majors matches national trends.

https://www.onlineathens.com/news/20190329/uga-prepares-stem-students-for-rapidly-changing-future

Macy Bayern, Tech Republic
Technology is now integral to the learning process for students and professionals. Here are the 10 technologies predicted have the biggest impact on higher ed in 2019. Between online learning and interactive digital classrooms, technology is completely shifting how students are being taught and gaining knowledge. Not only does this technology affect students, but also professionals undergoing corporate trainings or looking for ways to upskill, according to a recent Gartner report.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/10-technologies-that-will-impact-higher-education-the-most-this-year/

By Dave Gershgorn, Quartz

Tech giants are starting to create mechanisms for outside experts to help them with AI ethics—but not always in the ways ethicists want. Google, for instance, announced the members of its new AI ethics council this week—such boards promise to be a rare opportunity for underrepresented groups to be heard. It faced criticism, however, for selecting Kay Coles James, the president of the conservative Heritage Foundation. James has made statements against the Equality Act, which would protect sexual orientation and gender identity as federally protected classes in the US. Those and other comments would seem to put her at odds with Google’s pitch as being a progressive and inclusive company. (Google declined Quartz’s request for comment.)

https://qz.com/1583989/as-tech-giants-seek-help-on-ai-ethics-where-they-seek-it-matters/

AUDREY HOVANNESIAN, eSchool News

By the time today’s digital natives enter high school, most of them have already been using devices, computers, the internet, and social media for years. They use these tools on their own terms and for their own reasons, many of which aren’t readily apparent to older adults who didn’t grow up with tablets and mobile phones in hand. This usage presents unique challenges for educators who must not only teach a standard curriculum and help shepherd students into adulthood, but who must also help promote good digital citizenship both in and out of the classroom. Whether this means posting on social media only content that they’d be okay with everyone seeing; not using profanity; using their devices responsibly and safely at all times; or following the rules and guidelines when using classroom forums, Instagram, or other sites; raising good digital citizens is as challenging as it is rewarding.

https://www.eschoolnews.com/2019/03/29/6-steps-good-digital-citizenship-students/

Anna Maria Romero, Free Malaysia Today

Being an entrepreneur isn’t just about the fundamentals of business. In today’s world, learning about learning itself, the science of happiness and non-verbal communication all have a part to play in being an entrepreneur.

https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/leisure/2019/03/31/5-of-the-best-online-courses-for-women-entrepreneurs/

Forbes

Unfortunately, there’s no industry-standard, best-practices handbook on AI ethics for companies to follow—at least not yet. Some large companies, including Microsoft and Google, are developing their own internal ethical frameworks. A number of think tanks, research organizations, and advocacy groups, meanwhile, have been developing a wide variety of ethical frameworks and guidelines for AI. Below is a brief roundup of some of the more influential models to emerge—from the Asilomar Principles to best-practice recommendations from the AI Now Institute.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/insights-intelai/2019/03/27/the-growing-marketplace-for-ai-ethics/#429648c44c4b

Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed

Information wants to be free — even more so in 2019 than 35 years ago when the phrase was first publicized. Students are on board. Recent studies have begun uncovering the link between OER and engagement, learning outcomes and student success.

In sum, reasons to consider moving to open educational resources:

• Success in student recruitment and marketing because of lower costs
• Improved student retention due to more students accessing the required materials
• Improved student learning outcomes as indicated in recent studies
• Implicitly finer faculty control and familiarity with resources they produce

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online-trending-now/information-learning-material-wants-be-free

BY DENNIS PIERCE, eCampus News

At Central New Mexico Community College (CNM), empowering students is an important goal, says Tobe Phelps, senior director of online college. Giving students a permanent, secure digital record of their accomplishments that they can take with them when they graduate aligns perfectly with this objective. “When we issue a diploma to a student, that diploma still belongs to the college, and the student must get a certified copy from us,” Phelps says. “If they try to get a job or move on to another college, all of those (entities) have to come back to us for validation of the student’s credentials.” By using a technology called blockchain, “we’re able to take that certification and give it to the student as an official record they own themselves,” he says. “We can be completely out of the circle.”

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2019/03/29/how-will-blockchain-transform-higher-ed-start-with-credentials/

Emily Alford, ClickZ

Gartner predicts that by 2020, voice search will account for 30% of all web-browsing. Preparing your brand for this unprecedented rise in voice search.  So why are so many consumers clamoring to adopt voice search?  For starters, it’s much simpler to talk to a device than to tap keys or screens. Voice search also makes it much easier for consumers to to find the goods and services they need when they’re driving or otherwise occupied. Easy-to-use voice search is also incredibly appealing to the elderly, people with impaired mobility or sight, and even just younger audiences, who are often quicker to adopt new technologies than their parents.

https://www.clickz.com/creating-voice-search-experience-brand/228146/

Forbes Technology Council

In a growing company, the hiring process alone can be pretty daunting, with a seeming revolving door of new candidates coming in one after the other. There is nothing more relieving than the moment you find an excellent match for an open position. Yet, with each new hire comes a learning curve—no new employee knows all the inner workings of your company. What is the best way to support new tech team members, and why does that specific method work so well? To help you accelerate the new employee learning curve, we asked 13 members of Forbes Technology Council to share their thoughts.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2019/03/29/13-methods-for-accelerating-the-learning-curve-for-new-tech-team-members/#30e3f7e71886

Elad Walach, the Next Web

We are drowning in data that’s supposed to help us. The big data revolution has come from inexpensive data storage and automated data collection, giving organizations exponentially more data than they had in the past. From business logic data like computer log files to detailed weather patterns, purchasing data to TV viewing, we have access to so much data on how the world works and about the lives and habits of individuals. A lot of this data is just sitting in warehouses, either real or virtual, being ignored or occasionally examined for trends. It’s just too much for people to handle. When it comes to healthcare, advanced new diagnostic techniques mean that more information is collected about patients than ever before.  That’s where AI comes in.

https://thenextweb.com/podium/2019/03/31/how-ai-will-save-us-from-the-mess-of-big-data/

LumenLearning
The OER Adoption Impact Calculator helps you understand many of the potential impacts of adopting OER instead of traditionally copyrighted learning materials. The values in the Settings on the left are set to defaults based on the published research referenced below. Change the Settings on the left so that they match the situation at your institution in order to see how replacing traditionally copyrighted materials with OER might benefit your students and institution. The information below will update in real time as you make changes.

https://analytics.lumenlearning.com/impact/

By Dave Gershgorn, Quartz

AI’s “sea of dudes” or”white guy problem” has been well-documented, and awareness of the topic is becoming more and more mainstream. Diversity and inclusion has become boilerplate language for any major industry event, including Stanford’s own literature on the launch of HAI, and the institute was quick to acknowledge the problems with its faculty makeup. “We know we still have a long way to go to reach everyone who can contribute to HAI’s mission and it is our top priority,” a Stanford HAI spokesperson said in a statement to Quartz, noting that the institute will be hiring 20 more faculty members soon. ”

https://qz.com/1578617/stanfords-new-diverse-ai-institute-is-overwhelmingly-white-and-male/

by TechAdvisor UK

Microsoft and INSEAD, an international business school, have launched a package of free online courses to encourage professionals to embrace artificial intelligence (AI).  While the courses are aimed at those in industry, anyone with an interest in the topic can participate in the AI Business School. The course materials feature a host of 10 minute on-demand lectures divided into four subject areas: strategy, culture, responsible AI and technology. Experts at Microsoft will share their own insights and experiences with AI in the lectures.

https://www.techadvisor.co.uk/feature/internet/microsoft-offers-free-online-artificial-intelligence-classes-3694104/

Robbin Page, Evolllution

Higher education institutions can gain a lot by supporting the corporate learning market while also helping to grow their local and regional economies, but only if a few critical changes are made first. But postsecondary institutions do not stand alone as the preferred providers of formal education. In this interview, Robbin Page discusses some of the factors that helped the University of Memphis stand out as a learning partner for FedEx (a partnership also discussed in this piece by Richard Irwin and Barrett Schwarz from the UofM). She also reflects more broadly on the importance of investing in employee education, and shares some insights into how postsecondary institutions can stand out as corporate learning partners.

https://evolllution.com/revenue-streams/corporate_partnerships/positioning-the-academy-to-serve-the-corporate-education-market/

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

“Open” has become a definite thing. According to the latest public accounting, there were nearly 1.5 billion Creative Commons-licensed works in the world available for use in teaching and learning, including whole courses, textbooks, images, videos, quizzes, syllabi, lectures, homework assignments, labs, games and simulations. Given that abundance of materials, it would be no surprise if you were to feel overwhelmed and unsure about where to start your search for free curriculum to use in the courses under your care. To help out, Campus Technology has developed this list of the best sites for obtaining free (and low-cost) digital textbooks.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2019/03/25/best-sources-for-free-digital-textbooks-and-more.aspx

BY REBECCA GRAETZ, eCampus News

In some online learning programs, there is the concept of a “Master Course Shell.” Faculty in a program or who teach the same course get together and design a Master Course Shell that everyone agrees on. Then, at the beginning of a semester, each faculty member copies the content from the Master Course Shell to their live course shell, tweaking it a bit to personalize the course for their students. They may take out an assignment or two or add a discussion or rubric, but the textbook is the same and students across programs get a similar experience.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2019/03/25/online-faculty-use-master-course-shell/

Jon Younger, Forbes

The Coursera Global Skills Index benchmarks 60 countries and 10 industries for Business, Technology, and Data Science skills. As Coursera explained, “Functionally, our competencies and skills come from Coursera’s Skills Graph, which is a set of skills assembled through both open-source taxonomies like Wikipedia as well as crowdsourcing from Coursera educators and learners on what they are teaching/learning on the Coursera platform.” Coursera found the U.S. and Canada to be middle of the pack of the global rankings and not cutting-edge in any of the three domains. Canada ranked ahead of the U.S. in most areas.  As Coursera notes, “Although the current technological boom started in North America, it prompted a wave of innovation around the world to the point where the United States and Canada no longer lead in Technology.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonyounger/2019/03/23/courseras-global-skills-index-how-does-your-nation-and-industry-compare/#44ada72e62b6

Christopher Drew, eLearning Inside

During the process, one question stimulated extensive conversation. This was the question of how and when to use the LMS discussion forums. From that conversation, the team developed a sketch of the ways LMS forums can be used, and to what end. We found the group analysis of the affordances of forum discussion to be incredibly useful. It helped us to clarify our expectations of our students, and indeed our intentions of how they will go about learning. Below are the 5 means of using LMS forums for learning and teaching that the team identified:

https://elearningindustry.com/lms-forums-used-educators-ways

Beth Hawkins, the 74

Read deeper, though, and it turns out that the studies did not in fact find the program ineffective. And that disconnect, say experts, illustrates a frustrating reality: Research on personalized learning is too scant, too new and too nuanced to provide the kind of thumbs-up, thumbs-down statements longed for by education watchers. Neither study used a methodology designed to isolate the math program’s impact on student learning, according to outside researchers with expertise in personalized learning. Still, both represent important contributions to the small but growing body of information about which strategies might work, and under what circumstances.

https://www.the74million.org/article/does-personalized-learning-work-the-research-is-too-scant-too-new-and-too-nuanced-to-give-a-clear-yes-or-no-at-least-for-now/

by Mattew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

When children die in mass shootings at their schools, which are supposed to be safe havens of learning, the need to find solutions to these atrocities is urgent. Schools, universities, parents, and students everywhere are trying to understand why this kind of thing happens and how it could be prevented from happening in the first place. And they are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence-backed solutions to help find answers and solutions.  Artificial intelligence (AI) is an obvious way to bring scientific analysis to the puzzle of students turning on their friends and teachers in the most destructive way. Various approaches have emerged.

https://www.thetechedvocate.org/how-ai-can-help-prevent-school-shootings/