Educational Technology

IBL News

This week, Coursera started piloting a new annual subscription program for individual learners at $399 per year. This offering, called Coursera Plus, resembles the existing subscription plans of Coursera for Business and Coursera for Campus – although these ones include analytics and other integration services. Coursera’s plan follows the trend towards the subscription pricing model, increasingly executed among MOOC platforms and initiatives at scale such as Pluralsight or A Cloud Guru.

https://iblnews.org/coursera-introduces-an-annual-subscription-plan-for-learners-similar-to-its-business-and-campus-offering/

Heather Hao and Zhang Huimin, CGTN

Taking advantage of the moment, online educational companies have started taking their operations online. EF Education First, an English language training provider has canceled or postponed all offline lessons and then, took them online.  Many private educational and training institutions besides the Lucerne-based education giant, such as New Oriental, TAL Education, and Offcn Education have successively shifted their focus to online lessons.

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-02-14/School-lessons-move-online-amid-the-coronavirus-outbreak-O58WBz7oZ2/index.html

Hallie Busta, Education Dive

Colleges with campuses in China have been affected more directly. New York University has turned to remote communication and instructional technology at its Shanghai campus, which so far has been delayed from opening until Feb. 17. About half of the 1,500 students there are are Chinese nationals. Uncertain about when travel to the region will reopen, the university expects to rely on a mix of digital and classroom-based instruction this semester. While NYU has had to respond to situations in which students are unable to get to or from a campus, the scale of the current outbreak is “unprecedented,” said Clay Shirky, the university’s vice provost for educational technologies.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/how-one-university-is-teaching-through-the-coronavirus-outbreak/572385/

Diana Lambert, EdSource

Despite a bumpy start and an abrupt change in its leadership, California’s new online college is on track and moving in the right direction, the chancellor of California’s community college system told state senators Thursday.  “While at times the road has been rocky, I believe Calbright is well on its way to achieving the objectives the Legislature established and that my office expects of them,” Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley told senators at a joint oversight hearing at the State Capitol Thursday.

https://edsource.org/2020/californias-community-colleges-chancellor-defends-new-online-college/623754

BY LAURA ASCIONE, eCampus News
Students should pay attention to emerging and prominent tech trends if they’re looking for strong future career prospects. As technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence evolve, students can look to tech trends–some emerging, some well-established–to explore paths of study leading to high-paying STEM careers. A new report from GlobalData, a data and analytics company, details how virtual reality companies are increasingly using artificial intelligence and cloud technologies to develop stronger ecosystems. These developments have implications for higher education, from students up to campus leadership.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2020/02/13/leading-tech-trends-have-big-implications-for-grads/

COCO LIU, Nikkei
Alibaba Group Holding’s attempt to promote online education as the coronavirus forces schools across China to remain closed has hit an unexpected barrier: disgruntled, tech-savvy students. Young people vote down DingTalk in protest at having to study during school shutdowns. DingTalk, the tech conglomerates’s messaging app, recently launched e-classes for schools. Now the app is taking a beating in online stores as tens of thousands of students who are angry at having to study despite schools being closed vent their frustrations by giving DingTalk a bad rating. Apps with lower ratings appear lower in searches, potentially hurting download rates.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Alibaba-s-virus-beating-education-app-draws-Chinese-students-ire

https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/education/coronavirus-universities-cancel-in-class-mid-term-exams-make-shift-to-online

Madeline St. Amour, Inside Higher Ed
Community colleges need to create holistic student supports to serve their increasingly diverse student populations, according to a series of briefs released by Achieving the Dream. The holistic student supports approach requires colleges to tie support services into a “seamless, timely and personal experience for every student,” according to the nonprofit group. It includes comprehensive advising, scalable case management models, a change leadership framework and assessment using technology to improve these strategies as time goes on.

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2020/02/14/holistic-approach-nontraditional-students

Natalie Schwartz, Education Dive

The Arizona Supreme Court agreed this week to review a dismissed lawsuit that takes aim at rising tuition rates at the state’s public universities.   The Arizona attorney general alleges in the lawsuit that tuition increases at the state’s public universities violate the state constitution’s mandate to keep higher education “as nearly free as possible.” The legal battle comes as universities nationwide are struggling to curb tuition increases after years of wavering state support.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/arizonas-top-court-agrees-to-review-lawsuit-over-rising-tuition-at-public/572313/

Congressional Budget Office

Introduced as a way to make student loan repayment more manageable, income-driven plans limit payments to a percentage of borrowers’ income and allow for loan forgiveness after 20 or 25 years. The Congressional Budget Office examined how income-driven plans differ from plans that require fixed monthly payments, how enrollment in income-driven plans has changed over
time, and how those plans are projected to affect the federal budget.

https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2020-02/55968-CBO-IDRP.pdf

David Veldran, Princetonian

In the press release, AAU President Mary Sue Coleman wrote that the proposal “reduce[s] investments in student aid and vital scientific research at the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and other agencies” and “drastically cut[s] or end[s] several Education Department student aid programs including Federal Work-Study, the Federal Supplemental Education Opportunity Grants, and Public Service Loan Forgiveness.” In an email to The Daily Princetonian, University Spokesperson Ben Chang confirmed that the University shared the AAU’s concerns, adding that the University will be working with the New Jersey congressional delegation and other congressional members “to ensure that the final budget provides robust investments in education and research funding.”

https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2020/02/white-house-proposes-cuts-to-education-and-research-funding

by Michelle Diament, Disability Scoop
President Donald Trump is proposing cuts to countless programs benefiting people with disabilities, advocates say, touching everything from Medicaid to employment and autism treatment.  Trump unveiled his $4.8 trillion budget proposal this week for the 2021 fiscal year that starts in October. The president’s budget is unlikely to be rubber-stamped by Congress, but essentially serves as a wish list outlining his priorities. Trump is seeking reductions to Medicaid, food assistance, state councils on developmental disabilities, university centers on developmental disabilities and protection and advocacy programs, said David Card at the National Disability Rights Network.

https://www.disabilityscoop.com/2020/02/13/trump-budget-calls-for-cuts-to-disability-programs/27812/

John Cumbers, Forbes

China is on lockdown, and the whole world is watching developments about the coronavirus in real-time. Yet amidst the fear and panic, there’s a surprising consequence: students and workers who are effectively captive behind closed doors are logging online en masse. The result? New innovation and a burgeoning demand for a new way of learning and working. A catalyst, perhaps, for how we interact in a global economy that demands greater sustainability.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johncumbers/2020/02/12/as-coronavirus-spreads-house-bound-chinese-students-are-causing-an-online-ed-tech-boom/#45421e314183

Jane Cheung, Hong Kong Standard

Teachers are encouraged to film or livestream lessons to facilitate online learning during period when classes are suspended, Secretary for Education Kevin Yeung Yun-hung said. His call came in wake of last month’s announcement that the suspension will last until March 2. Writing in his blog yesterday, he said: “The suspension is not an extra holiday. Everyone should make good use of the time and continue to learn. The class suspension does not mean a suspension in learning.”

https://www.thestandard.com.hk/section-news/section/4/216245/Online-learning-urged-amid-suspension

John Ross, Times Higher Ed

Universities face a daunting task ramping up their online capabilities to maintain course delivery to thousands of Chinese students exiled from campuses by Covid-19 coronavirus-related travel bans, but experts believe the biggest challenges will be pedagogical rather than technical.  Australia has been hardest hit because of its heavy reliance on Chinese students and the fact that the crisis occurred shortly before the start of a new academic year Down Under, with nearly 100,000 learners stranded at home. Online learning is seen as a way to limit disruption and maintain student engagement but, despite questions over Chinese students’ willingness to consume content remotely, researchers told Times Higher Education that the biggest barrier will be the capacity of academics and universities to deliver it.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/race-create-online-courses-virus-stranded-students

Rebecca Kanthor, NY Times

Throughout China, quarantines and lockdowns are the new norm as cities try to contain the virus. Most parents here are afraid to let their kids go outside even for a little while, and no one knows how long it will last. Just a few days ago, we heard that schools, which have been on winter vacation for the past three weeks, won’t start again until March at the earliest. So teachers are sending out e-learning assignments as many parents head back to work remotely.

https://parenting.nytimes.com/health/coronavirus-quarantine

Betsy Foresman, edScoop

Penn State announced last week that its initiative to enable access to higher education by lowering the cost of textbooks and other course materials has made serious progress, saving students a combined $4.8 million over the past three years. “Penn State’s novel, combined approach to lowering textbook costs through the use of both freely open and affordable, or low-cost, resources, is gaining notice in higher education nationwide,” Penn State’s Rebecca Miller Waltz said in a press release.

https://edscoop.com/students-save-5-million-penn-states-open-educational-resources-oer/

Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed

The biggest story in international education over the last decade was, in a word, China. As the number of students from China studying in the U.S. grew rapidly, fueled by a big increase in tuition-paying undergraduates, colleges and universities grew reliant on them to balance their budgets. And as Chinese universities grew in stature, American colleges created innumerable partnerships with their Chinese counterparts in research and other areas.  Now the global public health crisis precipitated by an outbreak of a new coronavirus, COVID-19, in China — and the imposition of travel restrictions barring entry to the U.S. of most foreign nationals who have traveled to China within the last 14 days — threatens student flows and other forms of collaboration. More than 1,100 people have died from the virus, which was first identified in December in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the center of the outbreak.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/02/13/longer-coronavirus-crisis-persists-bigger-likely-impact-chinese-student-enrollments

Douglas Heaven, Technology Review

In a paper in Nature today, Pan Jian-Wei at the University of Science and Technology of China, in Hefei, and his colleagues describe an experiment in which they demonstrate entanglement through more than 30 miles of fiber coiled in a lab, with lower transmission errors than previous attempts. “This is a big improvement,” says Pan, who is sometimes called the “father of quantum.” The trick was to find efficient ways to entangle two particles. The team used an atom, which stayed put, and a photon, which was sent down the fiber. They found that they were able to create an entangled pair of nodes much more reliably than was demonstrated in previous experiments—including the one setting the mile benchmark, which it beat by five orders of magnitude.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615191/quantum-entanglement-over-30-miles-of-fiber-has-brought-super-secure-internet-closer/

Natalie Schwartz, Education Dive

The Florida Legislature is weighing a proposal that would begin the process of merging two of the state’s smaller colleges with two of its larger institutions. Under the plan, the New College of Florida would merge with Florida State University, while Florida Polytechnic University would combine with the University of Florida. The smaller institutions would also transfer their assets to the larger universities. The proposal makes Florida the latest state to consider merging its public institutions as a way to address enrollment declines and to help lower higher ed spending.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/florida-lawmakers-weigh-merger-for-two-small-public-colleges/572224/

RICHARD PRICE, eCampus News

There is a tendency to see the transition between higher education and the workforce, from a skills acquisition perspective, as packing all your belongings from college into one suitcase, getting your first job, and then…that’s it. You unpack, settle down, and never have to pack again. If you need anything else, your employer takes care of it. This leads educational institutions, government agencies, and many companies to imagine a single, modular interface between college and a first job, and to behave as if higher education’s role is done after the graduation ceremony.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2020/02/11/keeping-pace-with-lifelong-learning-demands/