Educational Technology

ZOE MANZANETTI, Governing
A report finds that the coronavirus-caused shift to remote work has altered the idea of a workspace. Some are uncomfortable with returning to an office and many hope to continue working from home even after offices reopen. The study, conducted by Morning Consult, a global data intelligence company, had four key findings, all of which suggest that working remotely may continue well after the pandemic is under control. The survey found that, for most Americans, the benefits of working remotely outweigh the disadvantages, citing mainly increased time and comfort when working from home. These benefits caused three-quarters of adults to say that they would like to work from home at least once or twice weekly, even after the pandemic has subsided.

https://www.governing.com/work/The-Pandemic-Has-Permanently-Changed-the-Way-We-Work.html

Kevin Carey, New York Times

Online higher education has abruptly gone from down-market and sometimes disreputable to a privilege reserved for the elite few. In 2020, only the best and the brightest will be allowed to not go to college.  At least among traditional residential students, that is. The Chronicle database shows the most intense plans for online learning are at both ends of the selectivity spectrum. Many community colleges are also going online only, along with commuter campuses like the California State University System, which announced its online plans back in May. All of a sudden, Stanford has a lot in common with your local two-year vocational college.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/upshot/virus-colleges-harvard-reopening.html

LAURA ASCIONE, eCampus News

A public data analysis shows many higher-ed leaders are considering a range of scenarios, while many faculty are planning for online learning.  The COVID pandemic continues to wreak havoc on higher education: 86 percent of institutions have yet to announce their plans for the fall semester and, when factoring in enrollment, this leaves more than half (62 percent) of college students uncertain about how to plan their lives come fall.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2020/07/10/uncertain-back-to-campus/

Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed
In the months of COVID-19 isolation, the gulf between college science labs and professional labs has narrowed; they both are converging in online practice.  Academic virtual science labs have improved year by year as more and more learners seek to advance their education and careers through online learning. At the same time, professional laboratories have increasingly utilized robotics, distant sensors and associated technologies to make the labs more versatile, efficient, accurate and operable at a distance. The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) is overhauling laboratories to provide remote (distant) control and monitoring.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online-trending-now/virtual-laboratories-convergence-learning-and-career

Raghav Gupta, Times Higher Education

Gupta argues that online learning is here to stay, reiterating the point he made during the THE Live Asia 2020 session, “The importance of competency-based learning for students during changing times…. Online education has been around for a while, but Covid-19 has accelerated it,” he says, adding that this is part of a larger trend, where companies want to upskill and reskill their staff with short courses, as technology revolutionises the workplace. Online learning can offer the agility to meet this demand, which traditional in-person courses may lack.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/hub/coursera/p/video-importance-competency-based-learning-students-during-changing-times

David Bobb, Education Dive

Whatever a school’s learning environment is at the start of the new school year, a curriculum that is expensive, inflexible, or hard to navigate won’t get used. Just ask a teacher about how they use their instructional tools in the time of COVID-19. You’ll learn a lot about entrepreneurship.  Teachers’ entrepreneurial ways long precede the coronavirus. As Newsela reported in October 2019, administrators in social studies said that teachers used their prescribed textbook half the time. In that same national survey, however, teachers revealed that they use the assigned textbook only one-fifth of the time.

https://www.educationdive.com/spons/free-open-digital-resource-in-us-history-improves-access-promotes-viewp/581072/

Steven Mintz, Inside Higher Ed

We must engage, motivate and challenge our students, tap in to their innate curiosity and challenge them with activities that they find authentically meaningful. Active learning in virtual environments is not a mission impossible. It’s eminently doable. The keys are to ask our students to interpret conventional and unconventional primary sources; invite them to experiment with new ways of organizing, visualizing, analyzing and presenting data; encourage them to undertake investigations, solve problems and engage in role playing, brainstorming and debates; and create their own multimedia projects and presentations.

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-gamma/making-online-learning-active

JEFF MAGGIONCALDA, the Hill

Policymakers should use this opportunity to launch a large-scale effort to help Americans develop the skills to do the jobs of the future. Some lawmakers are already laying the foundation for this American reskilling. The Skills Renewal Act is a bipartisan, bicameral proposal to provide a $4,000 tax credit to individuals to cover the cost of training programs that build high-demand skills. To maximize participation during the pandemic, the bill includes provisions for distance learning to help workers with access to job-relevant education. This is where the Skills Renewal Act could have a transformational impact.

https://thehill.com/opinion/education/505983-online-learning-critical-to-the-reskilling-of-america

MIT Technology Review

Demand for the wireless technology’s speed and power has reached astronomic heights—while supply remains conspicuously low. The coronavirus health crisis may have changed that. Once implemented, the long-anticipated 5G experience will be dazzling: smart factories, telemedicine, and augmented reality will be commonplace. Users will have ubiquitous, high-speed connectivity everywhere, whether moving or at rest. “When you have to re-create all of these experiences—from education to health care to transportation to work—you suddenly realize what you’re missing,” said John Roese, president and CTO of products and operations at Dell Technologies.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/30/1004555/pandemic-reveals-opportunities-for-5g-connectivity/

Phil Cox, eCampus News

As the school year comes to an end, educators are looking at how our classrooms have changed over the past few months and the various possibilities of what the future of learning will hold. And while my school, like many, has not made its final decision on how learning will take place in the fall, I’ve taken an opportunity to look back at the successes with online learning to understand how my class will forever be changed, for the better.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2020/07/07/3-ways-remote-learning-changed-my-instruction-forever/

Christina Moore, EDUCAUSE Review

The circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic highlight the opportunities and benefits that mobile technologies can provide to students and instructors as they learn and teach in unusual times. I am not typically glued to my phone screen, but I have come around to intentional mobile learning for two main reasons: it offers incredible untapped learning potential, and it reroutes mindless screen scrolling. Recent Pew Research data shows that we all want to use our phones for beneficial tasks like learning.

https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2020/6/now-is-the-time-to-embrace-mobile-learning

Aarushi Datta, University of Washington Daily

Four months ago, I was living in Lander Hall and walking to and attending classes during the day. Then, all of a sudden, with the onset of this pandemic, I had to return home to Bangalore and attend online classes from the other side of the globe. As a UW student living in India, I had to attend my classes at night. I lived an inverted day, with a routine of sleeping at 5 a.m. and waking at 2 p.m. I spent most of my afternoons completing assignments and studying. Evenings were when I made use of all the extra time I now had – while confined to our apartment under a strict lockdown stretching more than two months. Even now, as the number of Covid-19 cases continues to rise, I continue to live under virtual lockdown.

http://www.dailyuw.com/opinion/article_ee144cd6-bd58-11ea-86e4-0753d58dd8ae.html

Matt Zalaznick, University Business
Only 17% of the 1,500 faculty members surveyed said their view of online learning has become less favorable since the COVID-19 outbreak, according to the report from Tyton Partners, a higher ed consulting firm.  Instructors said student engagement, along with access and equity concerns, were the biggest challenges.  Contrary to public opinion, the sudden shift to wholesale online learning in higher ed did not create a furious backlash from college and university faculty, a new survey finds.

https://universitybusiness.com/faculty-survey-opinions-online-learning-classes-equity-access-student-success/

Natalie Schwartz, Education Dive
At least seven colleges have canceled their fall sports in the last two weeks out of concerns related to the coronavirus. Bowdoin College, in Maine, and the University of Massachusetts Boston, were among the first schools to cancel their fall seasons. Several other institutions followed suit.  Although Division I schools and many other colleges appear to be resuming sports in the fall, the recent spike in coronavirus cases in the U.S. and among student-athletes may jeopardize the season. Sports management experts and health officials are advising colleges to prioritize student safety.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/at-least-7-colleges-cancel-fall-sports-because-of-the-coronavirus/580755/

Jamal Eddine Benhayoun, University World News
Universities have long stood as privileged and well-protected sites serving the creation, structuring and dissemination of knowledge, both theoretical and practical. The complex but relatively short history of the modern university allows us, however, to track a course of intellectual endeavour characterised by recurrent resilience, ingenuity and innovation.  The new global university has to make a statement of its own through the actual diversity of its community of staff and students and by its power to network and influence academe irrespective of the time difference, geographical location and cultural background.

https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20200704092348232

Anant Goyal, Entrepeneur

It is nothing short of a prospective moment under the sun for the online learning lobby, provided it wholly capitalizes on such a chance offering. With students facing a severe discontinuity of their learning process, it is up to the e-learning platforms to supplement the educational loss of students as well as the professional void of teachers. As the essential procurers of knowledge, the students as guided by their teachers will naturally turn to online learning modes for continuing their learning trajectory. It is then up to the edutech players to preserve the momentum, even more so after the initial popular and massive adoption of e-learning platforms and new-age knowledge portals amongst the primary stakeholders as the go- to-mode for acquiring education.
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/352727

Doug Bonderud, EdTech
Zoom classes. Netflix shows. Livestreamed work webinars. With the majority of Americans continuing to work and learn from home, annoying network congestion is plaguing families who struggle with the limited bandwidth of Wi-Fi 5. This can be particularly frustrating for college students and their professors, especially with a significant portion of higher education schools planning to adopt the blended learning model in the coming academic year. But there is a solution for that: Wi-Fi 6 can support up to four times the number of devices that Wi-Fi 5 can. Also known as the 802.11ax, this relatively new wireless connection standard promises big benefits for postsecondary schools — especially when paired with other emerging technologies, such as 5G mobile networks.

https://edtechmagazine.com/higher/article/2020/07/improving-connections-advantages-wi-fi-6-online-learning

Josephine Larbi-Apau, University World News

Authoring this article was spurred by a progressive dialogue among a community of scientists at Cornell University, where I studied. Amid the COVID-19 plague, these adroit academics are sharing knowledge on how to handle science laboratories virtually and effectively to benefit the learning needs of students. The need to perform as an innovative, resourceful and effective classroom teacher and administrator cannot be overstated.

https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20200630093204248

Network World

At the beginning of March, when California was in the early stages of realizing the full impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, we had already begun plans to transition to virtual learning at Sacramento State. However, given the diversity of our students, and their varied living situations, we knew that delivering classes online would work only if all of our students could access them.  Fortunately, our new six-floor parking structure provided us with a solution. We determined that we could deploy Wi-Fi on floors 2-6 by leveraging the existing telecom closets on those floors. Then students could drive up to a designated parking spot and access online courses securely using their Sacramento State eduroam credentials.

https://www.networkworld.com/article/3563764/pandemic-spurs-drive-up-access-for-online-learning.html

By ANDREW ATTERBURY, Politico.com

The move, barring action before midnight Tuesday, will kill the Complete Florida Plus Program, an array of technology systems that faculty, staff and students throughout Florida rely on, never more so than now, in the midst of a pandemic that has amplified reliance on distance learning. The cuts include a database of online courses and an online library service that provides 17 million books to 1.3 million students, faculty and staff. At least 2,000 adult learners could be cut off from their scholarships and school accreditation could even be at risk without the resources housed under Complete Florida, which are used by students at high schools, state colleges and universities. https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2020/06/30/desantis-kills-online-learning-program-amid-virus-resurgence-1296178

Christof Rindlisbacher, Class Central

In total, the top 100 courses represent approximately 11.7 million new enrollments during the pandemic. Surprisingly, a substantial portion (nearly 20%) of those 11.7 million enrollments came from one course: Yale University’s The Science of Well-Being. A few courses related to COVID-19 that were launched during the pandemic also made it to the list. Overall, 30+ such courses have been launched by institutions such as Harvard, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and the World Health Organization (WHO).

https://www.classcentral.com/report/coronavirus-most-popular-courses/