Educational Technology

By IBL News

Central New Mexico Community College will soon have the ability to store students’ academic records on the blockchain in a way that is nearly impossible to counterfeit. This way students will have the ability to send their transcripts to employers without having to involve the college registrar.  This project is part of IBM’s initiative called the “Learning Credential Network”, intended to streamline hiring processes with verifiable certificates from training programs and skill boot camps, along with conventional degrees. A recent IBM study found that over 120 million workers in large economies may have to retrain within three years due to AI automation. Big Blue, along with an education consortium of US-based institutions, hopes to solve this by supporting a diverse range of learning credentials on a blockchain platform.

https://iblnews.org/ibm-launches-a-blockchain-credentials-network-a-community-college-at-the-forefront/

By IBL News

Duke University announced Kits, an open-source, next-generation digital learning environment (NGDLE). “Relying on any single solution, including the LMS, is s a short-sighted technology strategy,” Jolie Tingen, Product Manager at Duke, explained in an article at Educause Review. “No monolithic system can provide all learning communities with a completely optimal experience. Learning is maximized when appropriate technologies are used in conjunction with evidence-based pedagogies.”

https://iblnews.org/duke-university-introduces-an-open-source-tool-as-an-alternative-to-a-monolithic-lms/

by Graham Allison, National Interest
Beijing is not just trying to master artificial intelligence—it is succeeding. AI will have as transformative an impact on commerce and national security over the next two decades as semiconductors, computers and the web have had over the past quarter century. First, most Americans believe that U.S. leadership in advanced technologies is so entrenched that it is unassailable. Likewise, many in the American national security community insist that in the AI arena China can never be more than a “near-peer competitor.” Both are wrong. In fact, China stands today as a full-spectrum peer competitor of the United States in commercial and national security applications of AI. Beijing is not just trying to master AI—it is succeeding. Because AI will have as transformative an impact on commerce and national security over the next two decades as semiconductors, computers and the web have had over the past quarter century, this should be recognized as a matter of grave national concern.

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/china-beating-america-ai-supremacy-106861

Jia Jen Low, TechHQ

Entering the fourth industrial revolution and heading towards web 3.0, the new decade is sure to bring new challenges, advancements, and innovation. One of the main ‘predictions’ of the new decade is that up to 35 percent of the skills required for jobs will change across industries by 2020, based on the World Economic Forum. Moreover, 25 percent of jobs in the US are expected to be ‘severely disrupted’ by automation and the impact could hold up to two decades.

https://techhq.com/2019/12/how-digital-upskilling-can-be-powerful-and-transformative/

Tork Media LLC

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the future and is slowly becoming mainstream in almost every industry. Many eLearning companies have also integrated with this exciting technology – making their platforms and courses more efficient and user-friendly. Every learner has different capabilities and backgrounds, making it necessary to provide them with personalized learning. Technologies like AI and ML are working in an exciting way to transform the eLearning sphere.

https://www.rushprnews.com/2019/12/24/8-ways-in-which-ai-will-transform-the-elearning-industry/

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

China’s government has gotten into the MOOC game, setting annual targets for how many high-quality massive open online courses should be produced each year. A recent set of articles on Class Central, which tracks the MOOC segment globally, reported that China currently offers more than 12,500 MOOCs on at least 10 different platforms.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2019/11/21/moocs-on-the-rise-in-china.aspx

By Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel, NY Times

Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The Times Privacy Project obtained one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists. It holds more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans as they moved through several major cities, including Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/location-tracking-cell-phone.html

Hudson Valley Community College

Spurred on by the possibility of making college even more affordable for its students, Hudson Valley Community College is now in its third year of adopting open educational resources. Also known as OER, open educational resources are open source instructional materials, written by experts, that faculty can adopt and adapt based upon their curriculum, often negating the need for students to purchase a textbook. The use of OER not only saves money for students but also allows faculty members to provide customizable content for their classes.

https://cccnews.info/2019/12/20/by-encouraging-homegrown-textbooks-hvcc-saves-its-students-a-quarter-mil/

Ben Thomas, MarketScale

It is no longer debatable that technology is driving the standard of the modern day learning environment. From robots to online learning solutions, education today is officially changing.  Hosts Tyler Kern and Geoffrey Short sat down with Robokind CEO Val Loomer to chat about robotics and AI and how are impacting the industry. The three also discussed how Robokind is revolutionizing education for students suffering with autism and how robotics can improve the learning environment.

https://marketscale.com/industries/education-technology/robot-classroom-instructor/

Hallie Busta, Education Dive

In February, 2U announced it was partnering with an OPM called Keypath Education to support smaller and lower-tuition programs. And in April it made a splash saying it would buy Trilogy Education, a provider of boot camps to colleges and universities. In 2017, 2U brought online short courses into its orbit when it acquired GetSmarter. Speaking to analysts in July, 2U CEO Chip Paucek acknowledged that students’ options for online education “have expanded significantly.” More schools are adding fully online or hybrid programs. And online education platforms are stepping up, too. Coursera recently made its courses available to colleges to use as their own, while edX has added and expanded master’s programs on its platform.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/what-2us-year-of-change-says-about-the-state-of-online-learning/569478/

Richard Price and Alana Dunagan, Christiansen Institute

Whirlwind growth in the technology sector has led to heightened demand for workers with specialized skills in coding and computer science. Projections for continued expansion of the sector feed a persistent fear that traditional educational offerings won’t generate enough graduates with the skills the economy demands. Bootcamps focused on coding and computer science have emerged as an important pipeline for tech talent. These short, intense, workforce-aligned training programs are already graduating over 36,000 students each year.

https://www.christenseninstitute.org/publications/bootcamps/

James Vincent, the Verge

GPT-2 is part of a new breed of text-generation systems that have impressed experts with their ability to generate coherent text from minimal prompts. The system was trained on eight million text documents scraped from the web and responds to text snippets supplied by users. Feed it a fake headline, for example, and it will write a news story; give it the first line of a poem and it’ll supply a whole verse. It’s tricky to convey exactly how good GPT-2’s output is, but the model frequently produces eerily cogent writing that can often give the appearance of intelligence (though that’s not to say what GPT-2 is doing involves anything we’d recognize as cognition).

https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/7/20953040/openai-text-generation-ai-gpt-2-full-model-release-1-5b-parameters

Dhawal Shah, EdSurge

Other than these funding rounds, MOOCs had a mostly uneventful year. EdX got a new co-CEO while Udacity got a new CEO. As in previous years, Udacity chopped and changed a lot. Another late-trend that we noticed is annual catalog subscriptions. Early this year, FutureLearn announced FutureLearn Unlimited ($249/year), and Coursera is also currently testing out Coursera Plus ($399-$499/year). For a single price, learners can now get access to the majority of the providers’ catalogs, instead of paying for courses and microcredentials individually.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-12-18-online-degrees-slowdown-a-review-of-mooc-stats-and-trends-in-2019

Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

A great LMS use policy clearly and explicitly details the rules and regulations for using the system’s different features, what roles each user and administrator plays in the overall health of the system, who has authority over key overarching policies and decisions, etc. With that in mind, here are the 10 key points which should be covered in drafting an LMS use policy.

https://www.thetechedvocate.org/10-areas-to-consider-in-an-lms-use-policy/

Sam Blyth, FE News

Remote learning is not a new concept for educators. Today, there are nearly 400,000 distance learners in Higher Education (HE), and three-quarters of university leaders say that online tuition is just as effective as lessons undertaken in a physical classroom.  However, while the power of distance learning is broadly accepted by the HE sector, the Further Education (FE) market has always been different. A focus on in-person tuition has understandably been prioritised, as vocational subjects call for hands-on training and workplace experience, and the vast majority of learning has always been done in the classroom.

https://www.fenews.co.uk/featured-article/39292-how-distance-learning-can-plug-the-uk-s-skills-shortage

Craig S. Smith, NY Times
Artificial intelligence is starting to take over repetitive tasks in classrooms, like grading, and is optimizing coursework and revolutionizing the preparation for college entrance exams. For years, people have tried to re-engineer learning with artificial intelligence, but it was not until the machine-learning revolution of the past seven years that real progress has been made. Slowly, algorithms are making their way into classrooms, taking over repetitive tasks like grading, optimizing coursework to fit individual student needs and revolutionizing the preparation for College Board exams like the SAT. A plethora of online courses and tutorials also have freed teachers from lecturing and allowed them to spend class time working on problem solving with students instead.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/18/education/artificial-intelligence-tutors-teachers.html

Niya Bond, Faculty Focus

Because I am an online adjunct, these texts inspired me to wonder about the ways that welcome can (and should) warm virtual classrooms more broadly, and my own online teaching practices, more specifically. I believe that it is through continued reflection and sharing that we can (and should) cultivate a compassion-driven Scholarship of Online Teaching and Learning (CSoOTL rolls off the tongue, right?). It is my hope that sharing my own reflection will inspire continued conversations about the importance of promoting welcome in our virtual pedagogies and practices.

https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/pedagogies-of-welcome/

Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

Microlearning is a unique aspect of eLearning. It focuses on teaching new information in bite-sized chunks. Microlearning is more than simply bite-sized training assets, though. It is focused and offers just the right amount of information necessary to help a learner achieve a specific, actionable objective. Videos are a great medium for teaching new information in short bursts. In this article, we look at what to keep in mind when creating training videos to maximize learning in the context of microlearning.

https://www.thetechedvocate.org/how-to-create-engaging-microlearning-videos-for-your-online-course/

Jeremy Bauer-Wolf, Education Dive

The number of students who are older than 24 and enrolled in college declined by 2.7% to 6.2 million in the fall of 2019, according to new data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.  The adult student population has been declining since the fall of 2011, and it contributed to the continued downturn in college enrollment this year.  The decrease in adult students occurred across all institution types: public and nonprofit private four-year colleges, public two-year colleges and private for-profit four-year institutions. Students in the traditional college-age range of 18 to 24 are expected to enroll at higher rates than their older peers in the coming years.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/adult-learner-enrollment-continues-to-contract/569285/

Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

Adaptive learning is transforming education, changing the way learning content is delivered and contributing to better learning outcomes. Adaptive learning uses artificial intelligence to tailor content to each individual’s needs actively. The technique doesn’t only create customized learning experiences for learners, but also provides personalized feedback, which further enhances learning. There are various benefits adaptive learning can provide corporate learners. Let’s go through them to apply adaptive learning in corporate training programs better.

https://www.thetechedvocate.org/how-adaptive-learning-revolutionizes-corporate-training/

REX CRUM, Boston Herald

Leading the LinkedIn list is artificial intelligence specialist, or someone who focuses on machine learning and ways to incorporate artificial intelligence technology into business environments. LinkedIn said that AI specialist jobs have grown annually by 74% over the last five years as demand in computer software, internet, information technology and consumer electronics industries has increased. AI specialist salaries also have a lot to be excited about, as LinkedIn said its data shows such jobs average $136,000 a year.  LinkedIn said the San Francisco Bay Area is among the top regions in the country for such positions. Hiring is also strong in New York, Boston, Seattle and Los Angeles.

https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/12/16/the-emerging-jobs-for-2020-according-to-linkedin/