Educational Technology

Vernon Miles, ARL Now

While elementary and secondary school students across the country adjust to full-time distance learning, adults have been learning online for years. Online courses offer adults the flexibility to continue their education while working and taking care of families. Some enroll in these courses to learn new job skills and expand their employment opportunities. Others are lifelong learners who enjoy studying the arts, literature, language, history and a myriad of other subjects offered online.

https://www.arlnow.com/2020/09/04/ed-talk-online-education-for-adults/

YASMIN ZACARIA MIKHAIEL, Teen Vogue

Hannah Baity, 18, and her ensemble were nearly performance ready for their next play in a year-long theater program when things took a turn at the end of March. “[It] was really nice [when the director] called to say we were moving to virtual rehearsals and a virtual show,” recalls the youth ensemble member with Free Street Theater (FST) in Chicago. During this time, Hannah, like artists nationwide, were met with emails announcing cancelations or digital transition plans. To get the opposite reaction from her program director was a relief, but also a challenge. “We had actually devised the whole play when COVID-19 happened with [the following city] shelter-in-place [order]. We had to rewrite it for the digital space and I almost quit,” Hannah tells Teen Vogue.

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/theater-programs-adjusting-to-online-learning

Jeroen Kraaijenbrink, Forbes

Lifelong learning is important at three levels: For the individuals who learn, it increases their knowledge and skills and thereby increases their employability for future jobs and satisfies their desire to learn and develop. For organizations it is an important source of innovation and helps making sure that they can keep up with the changes in their environment and be an attractive employer. And for society, lifelong learning increases the likelihood that key challenges such as poverty, inequality and climate change can be resolved.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeroenkraaijenbrink/2020/09/04/using-covid-19-as-catalyst-for-lifelong-e-learning/#33b9f9c37e42

World Ecomonic Forum
LinkedIn has created a list of the most in-demand hard and soft skills in the 2020 job market. The company used data from 660+ million professionals in its network and 20+ million job listings to determine the skills in high demand relative to their supply. You’ll find the 15 hard and soft skills linked below, as well as online courses you can take to build them.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/linkedin-online-elearning-skills-jobs-hiring/

Rhea Kelly, eCampus News
According to a new survey from Visual Objects, 51 percent of high school and college students do not have consistent access to high-speed internet and WiFi. The company, which helps businesses find and hire creative firms, surveyed 400 students across the United States about how they are adapting to remote learning. Sixty-three percent of students surveyed intend to take online classes this fall. But among those remote learners, about 35 percent will be staying home rather than living on campus, meaning “they may be without computers, software, and other resources available at school,” the survey report noted.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2020/08/31/more-than-half-of-students-may-lack-reliable-access-to-high-speed-internet.aspx

Rhea Kelly, eCampus News

Specific goals of the initiative include building partnerships with other university leaders to drive innovations at their institutions; developing a stackable credential system to make it easier for students to select courses that reflect their individual skills and interests as well as document their competencies in their preferred career paths; developing technological components for a Trusted Learner Network to support a verifiable, learner-owned record system and potentially replace traditional transcripts with a competency-based credential system.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2020/09/02/asu-initiative-aims-to-redesign-higher-education.aspx

Hadass Sheffer, Iris Palmer, Annette B. Mattei; New America

The new majority of college students have adult responsibilities, such as parenting, earning a living, and paying for college. Unfortunately, adult students are often treated as an afterthought by colleges and policymakers. Over the last 20 years, more than 37 million students have left without receiving a degree that would greatly improve their economic prospects. This joint report from the Graduate! Network and New America examines the journeys of determined individuals who get back on track, persevere, and earn their degree—known as comebackers—to show how policy makers and postsecondary institutions can design systems that support success for this new majority and better serve all students.

https://www.newamerica.org/education-policy/reports/comeback-story/

Daphne Leprince-Ringuet, ZDNet

From video-conference etiquette to triple-checking your emails, here are some do’s and dont’s to help you navigate the new digital workplace.  And while most organizations switched their staff to remote working almost overnight, the new codes that are emerging are here to stay. Three quarters of CFOs, according to Gartner, intend to shift some of their employees to remote work permanently. While there might be hundreds of best-selling business etiquette handbooks out there, not many have anticipated such a radical turn of events. But experts are already thinking about the digital etiquette of the future – and here are some of the do’s and don’ts of the remote business space that they have already identified.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/working-from-home-the-12-new-rules-for-getting-it-right/

eCampus News

Business school hopefuls who are wondering whether MBA courses will address the coronavirus pandemic should know that this topic will be routinely discussed in classes at many B-schools, according to U.S. News & World Report. Even when the world isn’t in a state of crisis, MBA courses frequently incorporate current events, and that will be even more true now that the world is facing unprecedented challenges, MBA deans and faculty say. They note that it is essential for business school students to grapple with the financial and economic problems posed by the pandemic.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2020/09/02/heres-why-an-mba-is-important-during-covid-19/

David Staley, EDUCAUSE Review

As artificial intelligence moves us to a world without work, what does that mean for higher education institutions and their mission in the new economy? But if predictions of a world without work come to pass, the link between higher education and job preparation will be torn apart.  As a result, higher education will become unnecessary for many. A small number of institutions of higher learning might remain, as places where students go to engage their minds, but many colleges and universities will be shuttered if a central core of their mission has been eliminated. Higher education would return to its pre–Morrill Act status as a leisure activity for the few.

https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/8/interface-university-and-other-scenarios-for-the-ai-economy

Pat Reid, EDUCAUSE Review

Having a systematic review process in place can help instructional designers and educational technologists as they consider proposals for the adoption of new teaching and learning tools. At various times, instructional designers and educational technologists (IDs/ETs) are put in the position of recommending teaching and learning technologies. While large systems (e.g., an LMS) are assigned a project manager and a team, smaller applications (e.g., assessment development systems, wikis, and most apps) are left to be managed by the IDs/ETs.

https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/8/identifying-evaluating-and-adopting-new-teaching-and-learning-technologies

Sean Stein Smith, Forbes

Blockchain seems almost tailor made to help secure and protect this new model of education with a combination of information security, as well as the ability to share this data among a wide network of counterparties, and to do so in a completely virtual manner. Specifically, there are a few considerations and opportunities for online educators, institutions offering education online, and private sector blockchain organizations to improve the educational process and product.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/seansteinsmith/2020/08/31/blockchain-and-online-learning-are-a-powerful-combination/#688f6d95718d

EDUCAUSE ELI

Virtual labs are interactive, digital simulations of activities that typically take place in physical laboratory settings. Virtual labs simulate the tools, equipment, tests, and procedures used in chemistry, biochemistry, physics, biology, and other disciplines that include a laboratory component in the  curriculum. A key characteristic of virtual labs is their interactivity—video recordings or renderings of lab activities that cannot be manipulated by users fall outside this discussion. Similarly, physical equipment such as radio telescopes orelectron microscopes that can be controlled by distant users is considered remote instrumentation rather than a virtual lab.

https://library.educause.edu/-/media/files/library/2020/8/eli7174.pdf

Melissa Fanshawe, et al; EDUCAUSE Review

With the increasing use of online course delivery in higher education, it is important to identify aspects of the online course that students consider essential to engage in learning. Typically, a student’s engagement within a course is measured by their performance, their access to the course content, or the time and effort they invest in the course.1 While these things are important, a framework for online student engagement developed in 2018 by Petrea Redmond and colleagues suggests that students engage in learning via five dimensions: cognitive, behavioral, social, collaborative, and emotional.3 This means that rather than focusing only on student access to the content and the course design, educators also need to facilitate social and collaborative interaction to ensure students are emotionally connected within the course.

https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2020/8/creating-emotional-engagement-in-online-learning

Richard Vedder, Forbes

Both Google and Microsoft, along with many other high tech private powerhouses, are moving headlong into teaching employable skills, and certifying vocational competence. Why? For many Americans, traditional higher education is vastly too expensive and too hung up on weird and even threatening left-wing ideology and indoctrination, rather than scholarly dissemination and discovery. Many mostly semi-affluent Americans still want four or five gap years between adolescence and life, provided by residential “colleges” serving the strange triple functions of country clubs, hedonistic party sites, and halls of learning. However, an increasing proportion of the population of our slow growth, aging and debt ridden society are just saying “no” to traditional college.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardvedder/2020/08/31/2025-google-u-vs-microsoft-u/#42513e79396a

Dhawal Shah, Class Central

The ongoing pandemic has increased interest in online education. MOOC providers, in particular, have all seen drastic growth, which reminded me of the Year of the MOOC. On March 15th, Class Central noticed a big rise in learners visiting our website. Since then, 15 million learners (and maybe even a few celebrities) visited Class Central to look for courses, sending 8.5 million clicks to MOOC providers.  This is more than twice the number of people who visited Class Central in 2019. We also found that these users were more engaged than before, possibly due to many people finding themselves with extra time during quarantine. In this article, I will share stats and numbers collected from different providers and Class Central. I will also update the article when new information is available.

https://www.classcentral.com/report/mooc-stats-pandemic/

Matt Reed, Inside Higher Ed

This weekend Kim Weeden tweeted that the most common myth about higher ed that she runs into is that teaching online is cheaper. It isn’t. Most of a college’s budget is labor. When a physical campus moves to online teaching, it doesn’t save much labor at all. Grading an online student’s paper takes the same amount of time as grading an on-site student’s paper.  Yes, technology allows a single presentation to be shared with many more people at once, but viewing a presentation isn’t education. Actual learning occurs in the engagement with the material, and that still requires human interaction.

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/no-running-online-classes-isnt-cheaper

John Richard Schrock, University World News

During the coronavirus pandemic, teachers, professors and parents worldwide have realised that we are falling behind in education, research and intellectual progress. How much will the pandemic slow the academic progress of each country and of the world? We could borrow and modify a parallel measurement from the medical field to measure the slowdown. ‘Years of potential life lost’ or YPLL is an important calculation in medical epidemiology. Save the life of a baby in a developed country today and you have potentially saved 60 or more years of life. Save the life of an elderly person and you have perhaps given them a few more years to live.

https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20200807090836187

Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed

Even if the essential content remained the same, the shift to online provided the opportunity to optimize use of video, audio, animation, simulation and other online technologies to promote engagement and interaction by the students, resulting in deeper understanding and retention. In each of the instances where there seems to be no substitute for actual hands-on, we would do well to begin with a deep dive into current professional practice and emerging trends in that field. Where is current practice and how will it be changing in the near future? We must not only follow those trends, but also anticipate where our associated fields are going. Hands-on is becoming “goggles-on” and face-to-face is becoming “face-to-screen” in many fields.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online-trending-now/hands-classes-distance-and-emerging-virtual-future

Juliana Walter, University of Tampa Minaret

“It is a little worrisome thinking about the concept of modifying a film degree to be online. But with all the resources we’ve been given, I think it’ll be a challenge to our creativity to modify films to fit the circumstances,” said Simpson. “It’s a scary time but also an exciting one.” Plays also believes that another transition to online learning will provide students with more opportunities to test their creativity. “Many of the animation, film and new media lend themselves to creative problem solving and students working and learning through virtual means,” said Plays. “We will continue to use the pandemic as a means to a creative end. Students are very willing to adapt necessary parameters and find solutions.”

https://theminaretonline.com/2020/08/28/how-hands-on-majors-take-on-virtual-learning/

Hansen Lian, the Hoya

Some Georgetown University professors teaching classes about China are taking precautionary measures to protect students and faculty from possible security threats during online learning in the fall. Some faculty worry lecture recordings and other technical vulnerabilities in Zoom may endanger students and instructors who criticize the Chinese government. Faculty who spoke with The Hoya are particularly concerned some sensitive course material may violate the broad and vague stipulations of the latest Chinese national security law. The law, enacted by the Chinese government June 30 in response to ongoing pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, is an open-ended prohibition of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign powers against the Chinese government.

https://thehoya.com/gu-professors-teaching-classes-on-china-take-online-learning-precautions-in-light-of-possible-security-threats/