Online Learning Update

by Veronica Outlaw and Margaret Rice, OJDLA

The rise of online and hybrid courses at the higher education level increases the need for distance learning infrastructures to nourish online faculty preparedness and student online learning success. One part of the distance learning infrastructure is incorporating the use of educated and trained instructional designers to assist faculty in developing robust and quality online courses. Developing online courses with an instructional designer is a very laborious process, but the results can outweigh the struggles that faculty encounter when doing it on their own. The authors explain what is involved in an established six-step course development model for developing, reviewing, and delivering a quality online course.

http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/fall183/outlaw_rice183.html

by Elke M. Leeds and Jim Cope, OJDLA

KSU redefined the MOOC value proposition through collaboration of university leadership and faculty. The new proposition shifts measures of success beyond just course completion to include measures that benefit students, faculty, and the institution. Students benefitted through access to open educational resources, the acquisition of professional learning units at no cost, and the potential of college credit at a greatly reduced cost. Academic units benefited through a mechanism to attract students and future revenue while the university benefited through digital impressions, branding, institutionally leveraged scalable learning environments, streamlined credit evaluation processes and expanded digital education.

http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/fall183/leeds_cope183.html

by Richard N. Van Eck, EDUCAUSE Review

What will DGBL look like in another ten years? Who knows? Maybe the digital game natives won’t have arrived after all. Or perhaps they will be very different from what we are expecting—just as today’s digital natives are not what we expected in 2006. Or maybe DGBL will help usher in a new era of effective (though not entirely game-based) teaching. What we do know today is that we have the evidence and the design tools to demonstrate that digital games are powerful learning tools. Whether we choose to take advantage of the opportunity before us is a completely different question.

http://er.educause.edu/articles/2015/10/digital-game-based-learning-still-restless-after-all-these-years

by Molly Hensley-Clancy, BuzzFeed

With online for-profit schools leading a boom in black college enrollment, historically black colleges are learning, cautiously, from the model. Now, amidst a push by one of the largest benefactors of historically black colleges, the country’s HBCUs are beginning to figure out how they fit into an online space once dominated by for-profit colleges. They are struggling, too, with the question of what an online education at a black college looks like. “Generally speaking, HBCUs, especially public HBCUs, are behind the curve on this one,” said Johnny Taylor, the president of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, which supports most of the country’s public HBCUs. Taylor believes that building online programs is a matter of dire urgency, and even survival, for historically black schools. They need online programs to compete with majority-white institutions for the older, nontraditional students that tend to be attracted to online programs.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mollyhensleyclancy/black-colleges-are-going-online

By Laura Devaney, eCampusNews

Students’ desire for instant feedback, such as the kind they receive through social media, could be a significant asset when it comes to studying with the help of learning analytics technology, new research suggests. Eighty-seven percent of surveyed college students said having access to learning analytics on their academic performance can have positively impact their learning experience, according to “The Impact of Technology on College Student Study Habits,” the third report in an annual series conducted by McGraw-Hill Education and fielded by Hanover Research.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/students-learning-analytics-547/

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is making sure that big data gets attention in every pocket of the country. This week the NSF unveiled the establishment of four regional hubs for data science innovation, each led by a team of university experts and extending out to almost 300 other organizations, including non-profits, cities and businesses. Each big data or BD hub will specialize in particular areas of study and will provide guidance for building out “spokes” to undertake specific projects. The “big data brain trust” assembled within each hub is expected to develop and support regional partnerships and activities to address regional challenges.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/11/05/nsf-funds-big-data-brain-trust.aspx

By: Maryellen Weimer, Faculty Focus

“Based on the results in this study, students in online courses, with unmonitored testing, are no more likely to cheat on an examination than students in hybrid and F2F courses using monitored testing, nor are students with low GPAs more likely to enroll in online courses.” (p. 72) Some had suggested that because students who had not taken an online course reported that they thought it would be easier to cheat in online courses, students with lower GPAs might be motivated to take online courses. There were only 19 students in the online course in this study, but across these three sections, GPA did not differ significantly. Using this interesting model to predict cheating, there was no evidence that it occurred to a greater degree in the unmonitored tests given in the online course. That’s the good news. The bad news: “There is ample opportunity for cheating across all types of course delivery modes, which has been demonstrated through decades of research.” (p. 73) In other words, we still have a problem, it just isn’t more serious in online courses, based on these results.

http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/do-online-students-cheat-more-on-tests/

By Darwin Green, US News

Nontraditional students with outside responsibilities can benefit from the flexibility online courses offer. ​After a long and difficult decision, I decided to return to college after a 12-year gap between my sophomore and junior years. Things had changed since I had been to college, both for me and in education. I now had a pregnant wife and bills to pay – something I never had to consider as a young man in my early 20s. And an undergraduate degree somehow became the new high school diploma. I needed a way to find financial security while maintaining my responsibilities as a father, a husband and as an adult. I decided to apply to an online program. As an adult, I found there are three advantages of online degrees:

http://www.usnews.com/education/online-learning-lessons/2015/11/06/3-challenges-online-education-helps-adult-learners-overcome

by Stanford

The medical school is debuting new online continuing medical education courses that show how information freed from words-only presentation can be an effective medical education tool. The Stanford Center for Continuing Medical Education has debuted new online courses that show how information freed from words-only presentation can be an effective medical education tool.  It has debuted new online continuing medical education courses that show how information freed from words-only presentation can be an effective medical education tool. It’s show, not tell, with animation and video, and a minimum of talking heads.

http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2015/11/stanford-medicine-debuts-new-formats-for-continuing-medical-education.html

by Smart Data Collective

The world of education has forever been changed by the development of big data e-learning. This technology provides a variety of effective online learning systems.In the e-learning industry, big data refers to the data obtained about individuals as they are involved in the learning process. Some companies provide their employees with training models designed to teach company policies. The learning progress of an employee, test results as well as assessments are able to be used to improve the training model. If a number of learners require too much time to complete a specific module, it could mean the module needs to be changed to make it more effective for those using it. The act of data mining for education is considered any amount of data obtained during the learning process.

http://www.smartdatacollective.com/sarah-smith/356047/big-data-e-learning-improving-education

by Olivia Vanni – BostInno

Taking courses online can be the true test of self-discipline. At any moment, you could feel weak and direct your focus to a world of websites rather than your work. So when you’re learning a skill that needs your full attention, like coding, opting to do an online program is risky business. Launch Academy, which has offered on-campus coding coursework for the past couple of years, is trying to mitigate any issues virtual learning has posed in the past with its upcoming online program. In December, Launch Academy will be starting its first online coding program. When I spoke with the company’s co-founders Dan Pickett and Evan Charles, they said they’re taking a new approach to virtual learning by making it more like the real deal. Looking at what’s helped on-campus students and translating that to the online realm, Launch Academy is hoping to enable a broader range of professionals be successful.

http://bostinno.streetwise.co/2015/11/06/launch-academy-online-code-course-and-professional-program/

By Mike Cummings, Yale News

Yale’s latest round of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) will provide learners across the globe instruction on legal concepts, negotiation strategies, and the details of 2008 financial crisis. These courses are the first Yale has offered on Coursera’s new “on-demand,” cohort-based platform. The platform responds to two requests Coursera received from global learners. Learners wanted course material to be much more accessible, but they also wanted their learning process to retain some structure. The cohort-based platform creates a new course session every three weeks, complete with automatically generated (soft) deadlines and fresh discussion forums. The hope is that this will allow cohort-based courses to maintain the robust student-to-student interaction of a session-based course, while drastically reducing the time a learner has to wait before accessing course material.

http://news.yale.edu/2015/11/06/free-online-learning-yale-experts-now-offered-demand

By Meris Stansbury, eCampus News

EDUCAUSE panelists say a dynamic university website is becoming critical for recruitment and sustainable alumni support. University-website-designAdd together social media strategy and digital marketing tactics, sprinkle with interactive design flare, then let rise in the hotbed of a campus community and you’ve got a .edu site that not only improves students and staff recruitment, but keeps alumni engaged. Just ask the website wizards at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) that helped the University win the prestigious interactive media award.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/university-website-2016-765/

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

An online digital repository for academic researchers is being updated. The newest version of Figshare from Digital Science puts an emphasis on controls for more granular management of data. This repository allows users to make their research available in a citable, shareable and discoverable manner. People can upload any file format — figures, datasets, media, papers, posters, presentations and filesets — to be made viewable in a browser. According to the company, increasingly, researchers must develop a data management plan as a requirement of their funding or must address data sharing in interdisciplinary or cross-institutional projects. To address these changes and other areas of usage, the new release focuses on three areas: control, discoverability and usability.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/11/05/online-research-repository-adds-finer-access-control.aspx

By David Nagel, Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

The numbers are in: Our survey of higher education IT professionals gathered salary data for hundreds of tech leaders and staffers in colleges and universities across the country. As readers we’ve always approached salary surveys with conflicting sensations — trepidation that we might be wildly underpaid; and hope that, if we’re not, there’s still room for growth in salary so that if we chose to leave the jobs we had, we wouldn’t be priced out of the market. If you’re the same way, let’s get the jolt over with quickly: The average salary of respondents to Campus Technology’s IT salary survey was $75,621 (plenty of additional details to follow). People are generally positive in their outlook and don’t plan to switch jobs anytime soon. Most do not expect promotions in the near future, and just a few foresee any kind of raise over the next year.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/11/03/campus-technology-2015-salary-survey-it-pay.aspx

by Maria E. Cruz Lopez, MIT Tech

The increasing popularity of massive open online courses (MOOCs) has created new pathways to education, connecting diverse groups of learners not bound by geography. But what happens when these online students engage and interact? Do they build bridges of healthy discourse or do they form siloes of insular thinking — and is it possible for instructors to forge communities founded on conversation rather than conflict? Education researcher Justin Reich, executive director of the Teaching Systems Lab within MIT’s Office of Digital Learning, intends to find out. Reich, along with associates from Princeton University and Harvard University, was recently awarded a $400,000 research grant from the Spencer Foundation. The grant is part of the foundation’s “Measuring the Quality of Civic and Political Engagement” initiative.

http://news.mit.edu/2015/grant-enables-research-into-online-course-mooc-forums-1105

by the University of Arkansas

Self-paced courses offer the most flexibility of any university credit course, while meeting the same academic standards as face-to-face or traditional online courses. Self-paced courses allow students to set their own learning tempos, rather than following structured learning environments led by faculty or instructors. Students are not required to be formally admitted to the university to take self-paced courses, but students should consult with an academic adviser regarding course selection to ensure courses will count toward their degree requirements. Students should be aware that self-paced courses require a high degree of self-discipline and most require proctored exams.

http://news.uark.edu/articles/32775/deadline-approaches-for-final-fall-session-of-self-paced-online-courses

By Meris Stansbury, eCampusNews

If online learning is to succeed as not only as a legitimate option for learning but as a respected platform within an institution, leadership has to build that respect through calculated risks and building multi-departmental relationships. That was the main takeaway from an EDUCAUSE conference panel on the “Hallmarks of Excellence in Online Learning,” based on a newly released report from UPCEA (University Professional and Continuing Education Association). “We wrote this report to serve as an aspirational model for the approach to online learning,” said Vickie Cook, director of Online Learning, Research and Service at the University of Illinois at Springfield and one of the authors of the report.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/online-learning-leader-265/

by Kirk Wickersham, Alaska Dispatch News

During the Great Recession, no state was hit harder than Arizona. Arizona State University took successive double-digit budget cuts. They used that crisis as an opportunity to transform into a university of the 21st Century. Today, ASU advertises “70 bachelor’s and master’s degrees available entirely online” on the Anchorage NPR station. Why? Because they can, and because it works for them. They are apparently getting good Alaskan students. Similarly, the University of Alaska system needs to use our state budget crisis to transform itself into a 21st century university. With the smallest and most geographically dispersed student body in the nation, it needs to commit to standard course offerings, academic calendars, programs and degrees, and centralized, uniform, online delivery. Not in two years, but now.

http://www.adn.com/article/20151104/university-alaska-needs-focus-nontraditional-students-and-online-learning

by Jennifer Reingold, Fortune

The massive disruption of the education industry is well underway, but the biggest tremors are yet to come—disruptions so dramatic that many universities will cease to exist in the next few years. That was the conclusion of the panelists at the Fortune Global Forum’s session on Ed Tech. Said Alan Arkatov, a professor in USC’s Rossier School of Education: “Think Jurassic Park,” he said. “I would say 500 to 1000 colleges across the country will not be around, or will have morphed into something else, because they do not have a sustainable business model. The market will annihilate those folks.” Two of the would-be annihilators—Dennis Yang, founder of Udemy, and Daphne Koller, founder of Coursera, weren’t disagreeing. Yang’s company, which allows anyone to offer a course and relies on the market to sort out the good from the bad, now offers 30,000 different classes in 80 languages. And Koller says Coursera has reached 4 million “learners,” with much of the company’s growth coming from outside the U.S.

http://fortune.com/2015/11/04/ed-tech-at-fortune-global-forum-2015/

by Anya Kamenetz, NPR

As one of the biggest, most successful tech companies, Google can hire pretty much anyone it wants. Accordingly, the company tends to favor Ph.D.s from Stanford and MIT. But, it has just partnered with a for-profit company called General Assembly to offer a series of short, noncredit courses for people who want to learn how to build applications for Android, Google’s mobile platform. Short, as in just 12 weeks from novice to employable. This is just one of a slew of big announcements this fall coming out of a peculiar, fast-growing corner of the higher education world: the coder bootcamp. This is really an entire new industry within higher ed that’s grown up in about five years.

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/11/03/451999158/the-un-college-thats-training-100-000-app-developers