Online Learning Update

By Roger Riddell, Education Dive

An early adopter in the space among its peers, Wharton was among the first to embrace MOOCs upon Coursera’s launch in 2012. A Wharton Business Foundations course track is among the “Specializations” offered on the platform, with a paid certificate and capstone project — which applies knowledge gained to a problem presented by Snapdeal or Shazam — available to students. “The future’s coming, and we want to help shape it,” said Anne Trumbore, director of Wharton’s online learning initiatives. “That’s really one of the reason why we have jumped online and jumped online very early. Certainly, we want to bring what we’ve learned in online ed back to enhance the experience of the students in our degree programs. We don’t know what that looks like yet, but this is not separate from our core mission.”

http://www.educationdive.com/news/wharton-online-director-we-want-to-help-shape-the-future-of-learning/387279/

by Kurt Wagner, Re/Code

LinkedIn is keen on getting college students onto its platform, especially college seniors about to enter the job market. Roslansky said the Lynda.com acquisition further promotes this focus, and could help get LinkedIn’s foot in the door of some of these classrooms. Lynda already works with 40 percent of the nation’s colleges and universities, including all of the Ivy League schools. “Colleges are [using] this platform to help students learn skills they need before they take a class or during a class or to augment some of the materials these institutions are using in their day-to-day,” Roslansky explained. “This platform reaches students.”

http://recode.net/2015/04/09/three-reasons-linkedin-broke-the-bank-for-lynda-com/

by Susan Adams, Forbes

The hiring picture keeps getting better for college graduates. According to a new survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), employers are planning to hire 9.6% more graduates for their U.S. operations than they did from the class of 2014. That’s a one percent hike from the 8.6% gain a year ago and a significant jump from 2013, when employers said they would boost hiring by just 2.1% over the previous year. A non-profit group in Bethlehem, PA, NACE links college placement offices with employers. NACE’s questionnaire asked employers to rate the academic disciplines they target for their college hires. At the top of the list: engineering degrees. Some 72% of companies said they want to hire students set to graduate in that discipline. Sixty eight percent are looking for business majors and 58% want computer science majors. At the bottom of the list: health sciences, education and agriculture. Here is a chart showing employers’ hiring expectations by major:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2015/04/15/the-college-degrees-and-skills-employers-most-want-in-2015/

by eCampus News

Acton School of Business’ “Acton On Demand” goes public with completion data that reveals student success depends on relationships. Acton On Demand (AOD)–a platform for immersive online learning–launched publicly today with powerful student completion data, which the school says is due to peer and mentor relationship building tools. AOD was launched, says the school, to bring practical and transformative entrepreneurial training beyond the walls of Acton School of Business. Through the On Demand platform, users can enroll in graduate-level online courses covering the strategies, skills, and step-by-step frameworks that explore what it means to be a successful entrepreneur. However, what makes the online platform so successful, says the school, with completion rates that dwarf those of MOOCs, is the ability for students to interact with guides and mentors.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/acton-relationship-business-364/

By John K. Waters, Campus Technology

Technology driven disruptive innovation in higher education “Disruption” is one of the most overused buzzwords in education today, according to education industry watcher Michelle R. Weise, and yet most people don’t really know what it means. “There is this tendency for pundits, policy makers and institutional leaders to take any kind of technological advancement, call it a ‘disruptive innovation,’ cram it into the classroom experience and then hope that somehow efficiencies are going to magically appear,” Weise said during her keynote presentation at the recent CT Forum conference in Long Beach, CA. “Obviously, it’s not that simple.”

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/04/16/disrupting-higher-education.aspx

by Rebecca Klein-Collins and Kathleen Glancey, EDUCAUSE Review

A targeted collaboration among higher education entities in Texas addressed a key problem for would-be students and their families: affordability. In January 2014 the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB), South Texas College (STC), and Texas A&M University–Commerce (A&M–Commerce) launched the Texas Affordable Baccalaureate (TAB) Program, the state’s first competency-based bachelor degree. The program’s inaugural degree, an applied baccalaureate in organizational leadership, offers a low-cost alternative to a traditional postsecondary degree. The degree is also designed to provide students with employer-identified 21st-century competencies. While gaining or demonstrating these competencies, students have the opportunity to accelerate their time to completion, reducing costs further. The program features a blended model that combines competency-based courses and more traditionally formatted courses. Students earn the first 90 credit hours required for the degree through self-paced, online, competency-based modules, and the last 30 credit hours in either a hybrid or online format.

http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/texas-affordable-baccalaureate-program

by MIT

Through its newly created Online Education Policy Initiative (OEPI), made possible by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, MIT aims to catalyze the national conversation on the future of education and online learning. Led jointly by Professor Karen Willcox and Dean of Digital Learning Sanjay Sarma, the initiative’s broad objectives are: to explore teaching pedagogy and efficacy, institutional business models, and global educational engagement strategies — and to present a cohesive report on these issues that can be used by policymakers and leaders in education; to engage in the public discourse surrounding online learning and to encourage productive discussion; and to aid policymakers in creating a welcoming environment for educational innovation. “There’s been much written about online education recently,” Sarma says. “OEPI is an opportunity to pause and have a thoughtful, scholarly discussion about everything from the cognitive psychology of learning to the policy implications of online courses.”

https://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/mit-creates-new-online-education-policy-initiative-0414

by Bharat N. AnandJanice H. HammondV.G. Narayanan, Harvard Business Review

In June 2014, Harvard Business School launched HBX, to focus on solving real-world business problems. Videos capturing real managers discussing real problems would anchor the course offerings, to help students understand the applicability of even the most abstract and esoteric concepts. Encourage active learning. Students would engage with the material in “lean forward” mode, rather than passively watching video lectures. Students would not spend more than 3-5 minutes on the platform before being required to interact with the material. Foster social and collaborative learning. Students would engage meaningfully and regularly with others on the platform. We believed that such collaborative learning would not only make it more engaging, but would draw participants more deeply into a process of discovery. Here are some of the most important things we’ve learned since launching HBX, as it relates to creating a social, collaborative experience online.

https://hbr.org/2015/04/what-harvard-business-school-has-learned-about-online-collaboration-from-hbx

By MICHAEL BRINDLEY, New Hampshire Public Radio

A free online course this fall focused on the New Hampshire Primary is likely to attract political junkies from the Granite State and beyond. “FIRST! Understanding New Hampshire Presidential Primary” is the University of New Hampshire’s first Massive Open Online Course. It’s open to anyone, anywhere. It will explore the history of the First-in-the-Nation primary, and follow the 2016 primary as it unfolds. The course will be taught by UNH political science professors Andrew Smith and Dante Scala.

http://nhpr.org/post/online-course-offers-nh-primary-experience-political-junkies-across-globe

http://www.educause.edu/library/resources/7-things-you-should-know-about-visual-literacy

By Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed

Yale University has learned that a thorough review over a period of several years may be the fastest way for its hybrid master’s degree program in medical science to become accredited. The development — while in no way killing the program — is being seen as a victory for alumni and students who have expressed skepticism about online education. The university’s School of Medicine had planned to treat the hybrid program, which combines online learning and in-person classes, as merely an increase in class size, which meant it would piggyback on the face-to-face program’s accreditation. But at the same March 2014 meeting of the Accreditation Review Commission on Education for the Physician Assistant (ARC-PA) where Yale received approval for its most recent change in class size, the accreditor also made it more difficult for programs to rapidly grow or shrink.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/04/14/accreditation-snag-delays-yale-us-hybrid-physician-assistant-program

By Michael Hart, Campus Technology

Michigan Virtual University (MVU) has teamed with a private partner to update 60 courses for its LearnPort program. The school has selected Knowledge Delivery Systems (KDS) to ready the courses, which are designed primarily to help Michigan K-12 educators improve their teaching skills and earn required state continuing education certification. Among course subjects to be covered will be those that address the needs of diverse learners, blended learning and data-driven decision-making. New courses being offered include “The Flipped Classroom: Personalizing Learning for Students Every Day,” “Shifting Instruction With the Five Core Practices” and “Courageous Conversations about Race.” MVU President and CEO Jamey Fitzpatrick said, “As standards continue to evolve, it is crucial that we also equip educators with the tools and resources they need so that they can make a real difference in the classroom.”

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/04/13/michigan-virtual-university-adds-professional-development-courses.aspx

By David Raths, Campus Technology

The Open Cloud Consortium is working to meet the collaboration and data-management needs of multi-institution big data projects. In 2008, a group of researchers came together to form the nonprofit Open Cloud Consortium (OCC), a shared cloud-computing infrastructure for medium-size, multi-institution big-data projects. The OCC has grown to include 10 universities, 15 companies and five government agencies and national laboratories. In a recent interview with Campus Technology, OCC Director Robert Grossman discussed the organization’s relationship to research universities’ IT departments, as well as its business model and sustainability challenges.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/04/09/a-data-commons-for-scientific-discovery.aspx

by eCampus News

U.S. reaches settlement with edX to increase MOOC accessibility for those with disabilities. Under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice, edX will make its website fully accessible to users with disabilities within 18 months and will appoint a web accessibility coordinator, in addition to a number of other actions to ensure accessibility. The agreement with edX addresses complaints that edX’s website is not fully accessible to individuals with disabilities, including individuals who are blind or have low vision, those who are deaf or hard of hearing, and those who have physical disabilities affecting manual dexterity. Under the settlement, edX will provide accurate captioning for the deaf, oral navigation signals for the blind, and programming changes so those with dexterity disabilities can navigate content without struggling with a hand-operated mouse.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/mooc-accessibility-steps-742/

By Meris Stansbury, eCampus News

How universities are looking past incubators to future functionality. Are college and university investments in innovation worth the time and money? Only if your incubators lead to scalable, sustainable success, says new research. A recent report, conducted in 2014 by the American Council on Education (ACE) and Huron Education aimed to gauge some of the current thinking and practices of select institutions on taking innovation from a commonly passed around buzzword to actionable practice. ACE chose five institutions that had detailed case studies and data on their innovation incubators—each highlighting the goals, challenges, and outcomes of their own unique approaches to scaling innovation campus-wide.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/innovation-buzzword-practice-311/

by the Daily Tarheel (letter to editor)

Recent research suggests that students rate female professors more harshly than male professors. When a female professor of an online course pretends she is male, her evaluations are significantly higher than when students know she is a female, and evaluations of female professors are more likely to focus on aspects of personality or appearance rather than intellect or skill in the classroom. Gender bias in course evaluations can be reduced by focusing comments on feedback that is useful for improving instruction. Ideally, student comments will help us improve our instructional techniques and thus improve the learning experience of future Carolina students. Comments that are vague, belittling, personal or based on gender expectations do not help us make our courses better.

http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2015/04/letter-keep-gender-in-mind-for-course-evaluations

by Tim Dodd, Financial Review

Students in massive open online courses (MOOC) who pay a modest amount for a “verified certificate” are just as likely finish their course as regular university students, according to a new large-scale study of online education. The study, from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) which jointly founded the leading MOOC provider edX, found those students who paid the usually less-than $US100 ($130) fee for a certificate, had a 59 per cent course completion rate, the same as the overall graduation rate for students enrolling in bachelor’s degrees in the United States.

http://www.afr.com/news/policy/education/fee-payments-lift-mooc-completion-rates-20150412-1mhw76

BY DANIEL AHN, Daily Bruin

UCLA, following the lead of many universities, is expanding an initiative to promote free, online course materials for students amid rising textbook costs. The Affordable Course Materials Initiative, a UCLA Library-led project which launched in 2013 as a pilot program, will become an official program fall 2015. The program, which UCLA recently decided to continue, seeks to encourage faculty members to compile online resources in a textbook-like form so they can be freely accessed by professors and students. The library will send out applications for the program this week, and instructors will be able to apply for a grant of up to $2,500 to help find resources and adjust syllabi and assignments. Since 2013, the UCLA Library has awarded $27,500 to 23 instructors. The library estimates that students enrolled in awarded courses saved more than $160,000 collectively since the program began.

http://dailybruin.com/2015/04/13/ucla-library-to-expand-program-promoting-free-online-course-material/

by Andrew Kelly, Forbes

The point is: all of these ideas are part of the future of learning. Because the set of prospective students is large and diverse, that future must be a “big tent” containing a variety of new ideas, not just online learning. Some of the tools (i.e., MOOCs) will be low-touch, low-cost affairs with little interpersonal contact. Others will feature short, intense doses of direct instruction and mentorship and cost significant amounts of money. In short, entrepreneurs will produce different products because learners have different preferences. While The End of College implicitly acknowledges this by talking about more than just MOOCs, other models always seem to take a back seat to the open online courses that Carey expects to dominate in the future.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/akelly/2015/04/08/the-university-of-everywhere-isnt-for-everyone-the-future-of-learning-will-be-a-big-tent/

By Kristen Hicks, Edudemic

Adaptive learning has long been a part of education. The basic concept is simple: Coursework should be adapted to meet the individual needs of each student. Every teacher has experience modifying curriculum in some way to help students access information. Nowadays technology can help make the adaptations easier and more streamlined. Many of the benefits that adaptive technology offers in online courses also apply to traditional classrooms. However, the nature of online learning means that some of the challenges adaptive learning helps to address are especially relevant to online students. When teachers and students don’t interact with each other regularly in person, as often happens with online courses, having a tool that helps pick up the slack becomes that much more important.

http://www.edudemic.com/how-adaptive-learning-technology-is-being-used-in-online-courses/

by Margaret Andrews, University World News

Over the past few years it seems you can’t read about higher education without thinking about how ripe it is for disruption. Rising costs, employer dissatisfaction with graduate skills, technology advances and new entrants are making the case for the need for new ways of thinking about and delivering education. Based on some recent developments, business schools may be the first to feel the heat. Clay Christensen, who popularised the idea of disruption, has written and spoken quite a bit about disruption in higher education in general, and the management education market in particular. So how is this beginning to play out in the management education sphere? There are many new initiatives afoot.

http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20150406140223800