Educational Technology

Michaela Martin and Uliana Furiv, University World News

Can we really plan for a COVID-style crisis? Resilience is a notion that lies at the centre of how universities address COVID-19, as it involves the ability of higher education systems, institutions and the community to prepare for, adapt and respond to a crisis. But how resilient were higher education institutions at the onset of the pandemic? And has the crisis actually strengthened their resilience? The panellists’ views confirmed that COVID-19 caught most higher education systems off-guard, resulting in a serious disruption of teaching, learning and research globally.

https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20201211130427131

Education Trust

For millions of college-going students, one of the most urgent concerns is the rising cost of college and how to pay for it — and not just for tuition but other necessities like textbooks, housing, food, and transportation. The idea that one can work one’s way through college with a minimum-wage job is, in most cases, a myth. In the vast majority of states, students at public four-year institutions would have to work an excessive number of hours per week to cover such costs. The same goes for students at many public community and technical colleges. In one of the costliest scenarios, students would have to work 45 hours a week to be exact, leaving nearly no time to focus on academics.

https://s3-us-east-2.amazonaws.com/edtrustmain/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/16202752/How-Affordable-Are-Public-Colleges-in-Your-State-December-2019.pdf

Sophia Matveeva, Forbes

Technology is changing business and enabling us to do more than we have ever done. Coding bootcamps and online programming courses are creating new developers and governments are launching programs to get more students to learn STEM subjects. Yet, without good leadership, technologies are nothing but blunt hammers. In the quest for coding skills, many businesses are becoming dismissive of the essential human skill it takes to grow an organization.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sophiamatveeva/2019/12/15/leadership-lessons-in-the-age-of-technology/#2bbd2606a8c0

CHRISTINE LEE, eCampus News

So if feedback is core to student learning, what then is the most effective kind of feedback? How can feedback be most valuable for students? University of Auckland professors Helen Timperly and John Hattie (2007) describe how student feedback should be insightful, giving students actionable information about what they’re doing right or wrong and next steps towards improvement. A comment like “Great job!” or “This paragraph needs work” lacks enough specificity to help students do better the next time.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2019/12/16/three-ways-technology-can-enhance-student-feedback/

Abigail Hess, CNBC

During the 1978 – 1979 school year, it cost the modern equivalent of $17,680 per year to attend a private college and $8,250 per year to attend a public college. By the 2008 – 2009 school year those costs had grown to $38,720 at private colleges and $16,460 at public colleges. Today, those costs are closer to $48,510 and $21,370, respectively. That means costs increased by roughly 25.3% at private colleges and about 29.8% at public colleges.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/13/cost-of-college-increased-by-more-than-25percent-in-the-last-10-years.html

Hallie Busta, Education Dive

The number of students enrolled in college has dipped slightly below 18 million for the first time in a decade, according to new data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Overall higher ed enrollment fell 1.3%, or more than 231,000 students, year-over-year in the fall of 2019. While four-year, for-profit schools experienced the biggest percentage drop, public two- and four-year schools and private nonprofits also saw enrollment decreases during the period. There are some bright spots in the data: enrollment at private nonprofit institutions that enroll at least 10,000 students increased by 2.7% during the period. Public two-year colleges, meanwhile, saw their dual enrollment population increase for the second-straight year.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/higher-ed-enrollment-reaches-10-year-low-federal-data-shows/569091/

Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

One reads quite a lot about the importance of piloting an online course before launching it, but exactly what does that entail. What is meant by “pilot”? To pilot something means to test it to find out whether it will be successful. In other words, you pilot your online course to test whether learners will like it and would be likely to enroll for it. It’s a kind of initial evaluation by potential customers. Here are a few things to keep in mind when conducting your online course pilot.

https://www.thetechedvocate.org/yes-you-should-pilot-your-online-course-a-few-things-to-consider-as-you-do/

BY STEPHANIE MARKEN, Gallup

About half of U.S. adults (51%) now consider a college education to be “very important,” down from 70% in 2013. Over the same period, the percentages rating college as “fairly important” and “not too important” have both increased, to 36% and 13%, respectively.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/270008/half-consider-college-education-important.aspx

James McBride, THE Journal

A 50-year veteran of psychometrics — the science of measuring mental abilities and processes — offers a brief history and insights into the future of testing. Adaptive testing has been around since at least the early part of the 20th century. The goal has always been to measure something — such as IQ, academic progress or personality traits — with the same precision as more traditional assessments but with fewer questions and less time, or with greater precision. Early efforts had their drawbacks, of course, but we’ve come a long way in the intervening century or so. There is still much progress to be made, but some promising research today will likely  change the way we assess students in the coming decade and beyond.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2019/12/11/what-will-the-2020s-hold-assessment-trends-past-and-future.aspx

CHRIS ARNOLD, NPR

“Once again, it’s the mismatch between the debt and the borrower’s income, their ability to repay,” Calhoun says. This time around it’s the government making the vast majority of the loans. That’s effectively turned the Department of Education into the country’s largest consumer lender. And, Calhoun says, more and more people can’t pay. “Already in the student loan world, we are seeing default levels that approach what there was in the subprime mortgage world,” he says.

https://www.npr.org/2019/12/09/785527874/student-loans-a-lot-like-the-subprime-mortgage-debacle-watchdog-says

Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed

Online conversation shines a spotlight on graduate programs that teach students how to teach — and those programs that don’t.   And of course many Ph.D.s do still want, and snag, part- or full-time professorships across a variety of institution types. Yet graduate education has historically treated this fact a kind of inconvenient truth, overlooking or flat out ignoring students’ need for pedagogical training. That’s explicit pedagogical training, not the sink-or-swim method adopted by so many programs that throw their graduate student instructors into teaching undergraduates with no real preparation.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/12/13/online-conversation-shines-spotlight-graduate-programs-teach-students-how-teach

Jeff Arthur, Campus Technology

It’s been just over a year since the East Coast Polytechnic Institute began issuing digital diplomas as an early adopter of blockchain technology and the Blockcerts open standard. During that time, our institution has issued nearly 1,600 digital diplomas and become a leading advocate for the use of blockchain for secure digital credentials. I realized that the blockchain work being done at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had the potential to dramatically change the way graduates interacted with the school and future employers. Instead of relying on paper diplomas or alterable PDF files and lengthy requests for verification, students could present employers with digital credentials that would be immediately and securely verified.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2019/12/12/why-we-are-using-blockchain-for-digital-credentialing.aspx

edX team
We are pleased to announce that TU Delft Professors Andy van den Dobbelsteen, Eric van den Ham, and Researcher Tess Blom have been named the winners of the 2020 edX Prize for Exceptional Contributions in Online Teaching and Learning! The winners created and teach the course Zero-Energy Design: an approach to make your building sustainable, which has been running on edX since 2019 and has over 18,000 enrollments to date. The edX Prize is an annual award that celebrates the contributions and innovations of educators in the edX community, and amplifies the powerful role that online learning plays in the transformation of education today. It is especially important in this year, when the entire world pivoted to online education due to COVID-19, to celebrate excellence in online teaching.

https://blog.edx.org/congratulations-to-the-edx-prize-2020-winners/