Online Learning Update

by MIT Office of Digital Learning

MIT is collaborating with Boeing and NASA to develop a four-part online, certificate-based program: “Architecture and Systems Engineering: Models and Methods to Manage Complex Systems.” The program aims to ensure that the engineering workforce has continual training and access to the latest knowledge and methods to design and develop products in a rapidly changing environment. The four courses, which will be delivered by MIT Professional Education via the edX platform, will marry the research and knowledge of MIT’s world-renowned faculty with lessons and case studies in industry and government from Boeing and NASA professionals.

http://news.mit.edu/2016/mit-boeing-nasa-edx-launch-online-architecture-systems-engineering-program-0216

By Meris Stansbury, eCampus News

It’s the same concept that applies to food deserts: because travel to another source is not possible, and local access is limited, mostly rural area populations cannot obtain affordable, quality food. Now switch food to education and the concept is fairly clear. This concept is discussed in a recent American Council on Education (ACE) report, which posits that the national dialogue on equity and college access doesn’t often take into account geography—and it should.Online learning could be a helpful option; yet, not all students are self-motivated learners, and may prefer attending class in-person. Also, students living in homes without computers or with limited access to high-speed Internet may not see distance learning as a viable option, notes the report.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/geography-education-deserts-909/

by David Raths, Campus Technology

Blogger and self-proclaimed “troublemaker” Audrey Watters discusses venture capital in education, learning analytics, artificial intelligence and more. If you want to catch an interesting glimpse of the views that certain people have about the future of education, look at venture capitalists. Those narratives are probably unrecognizable to those working within education, according to Audrey Watters, author of the popular Hack Education blog. “They are not disruptive or innovative. They are not particularly radical,” she said, pointing out that money is flowing into things like test preparation and tutoring and helping schools move services online as well as the student loan sector.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/02/12/how-venture-capital-misses-the-boat-with-higher-education-technology.aspx

by Heath Harrison, Ironton Tribune

The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow program allows students to learn from home, via lessons delivered through teachers online. It advertises itself as one of the most flexible learning environments available to parents and students, and for Megan Borowski, that flexibility was what drew her to the program as a teacher. ECOT gave her the ability to teach to students statewide from her Chesapeake home or anywhere the couple may be required to move to.“I teach sixth grade science,” she said. It’s the Ohio standard. The topics include rock and minerals to cell structures.”

http://www.irontontribune.com/2016/02/15/web-based-learning-alternative-for-teachers-students/

by the PIE News

More than one in four students in the US was enrolled on at least one distance learning course in 2014, new research by the Babson Survey Research Group has shown. This marks a 13th consecutive year of enrolment growth, but the research also shows that bucking the trend, the for-profit sector has seen enrolments fall. The for-profit private sector saw a 10% drop in student enrolments to 961,173. The not-for-profit private sector experienced “tremendous growth” in the number of students enrolled on distance learning courses – those that do not require students to come onto campus to learn – between 2012 and 2014, up 26% to 960,751 students, contrasting starkly with a 10% drop to 961,173 students on these courses run by for-profit companies over the same period.

http://thepienews.com/news/us-distance-learning-enrolments-up-despite-for-profit-drop/

by Editorial Board, Brown Daily Herald

Brown’s decision this year to open up eight for-credit, online summer courses comes as general interest in online education — including the Massive Open Online Courses that Brown had previously heralded as the future of education — has begun to wane. While the public discourse surrounding Coursera and edX — sites that allow anyone to watch lectures, participate in chat room sections and access course readings — has given way to broader discussions of tuition, affordability and debt, the expansion of Brown’s online summer courses offers a new entry point to examine the technological developments taking place in higher education.

http://www.browndailyherald.com/2016/02/16/editorial-online-learning-makes-brown-accessible-to-all/

By: Rohin Kapoor, Financial Express

Given the uniqueness of the retail sector and its inherent challenges, the ‘retailing’ of online education courses will be a tough nut to crack for companies. According to various estimates, the size of the e-learning industry in India is currently pegged at $2-3 billion. To meet the sudden spurt in demand, a number of education technology companies and start-ups have come up in recent times, offering online courses. As the industry is still at a nascent stage, there are certain companies which are currently operating across the three service categories identified in the accompanying chart. Over time, we expect specialised companies bucketed in each of these categories.

http://www.financialexpress.com/article/industry/jobs/the-retailing-of-online-education-courses-in-india/211512/

by David Schatsky, Huffington Post

I recently finished teaching a free, eight-week online course on artificial intelligence and cognitive technologies. Over 7,000 students registered for the course. Many of them were active participants in rich discussions throughout the eight weeks. I’d like to tell you what I learned from my students during the course, and invite you to register for the next run of the course, which starts on March 14. Students were fascinated with the ways in which perceptual technologies like speech recognition and computer vision make possible natural interfaces between humans and computers. And they actively debated the implications of cognitive technologies for businesses, workers, and society.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-schatsky/what-i-learned-teaching-a_b_9212496.html

by IT News Africa

Where is our Coursera, our Udacity, our Khan Academy? These virtual universities teach millions of people science, engineering, accounting, finance and more. Online universities give people a chance to get advanced qualifications – people that in the past would have never have had the opportunity to study further. All you need is access to a computer and the Internet In South Africa, this is a huge barrier to entry. We have a very high Internet penetration rate… but only 20% of South Africans own a computer with an Internet connection (SA Network Society/ Research ICT Africa 2012). You can’t study advanced topics using just a mobile phone. But still. One in five South Africans is ten million people, and government’s ambitious SA Connect policy should see this number jump quickly. Why are we still stuck in the past when it comes to higher learning, with parents needing to scrape the money together to send their kids far away to sit in a lecture theatre?

http://www.itnewsafrica.com/2016/02/south-africa-must-move-on-from-physical-universities/

by Biz Carson, Business Insider

Faced with competition from not just from Verizon and Sprint, but also Google and Amazon, the telecommunications giant is working aggressively to make sure its employees catch up and get ahead of the changing technology of the times. Its CEO and Chairman, Randall Stephenson, isn’t afraid to mince words about will happen if his employees don’t. In an interview with the New York Times, Stephenson said those who don’t spend five to 10 hours a week learning online “will obsolete themselves with technology.” “There is a need to retool yourself, and you should not expect to stop,” Stephenson told the Times.

http://www.businessinsider.com/people-who-dont-spend-5-hours-a-week-online-learning-will-make-themselves-obsolete-says-att-ceo-2016-2

By Meris Stansbury, eCampus News

Final Online Report Card highlights switch in enrollments for specific institutions; shows that if online learning hasn’t happened yet, it probably won’t.Private non-profit institutions grew by 11.3 percent, while private for-profit institutions saw their distance enrollments decline by 2.8 percent. “Clearly, many private, non-profit institutions are aggressively investing in distance education,” noted Russell Poulin, WCET’s Director of Policy & Analysis. “Between 2012 and 2014, students taking all of their courses at a distance grew by 33 percent for non-profits. They were only a few hundred students away from passing the for-profit sector for having the second most number of enrollments. Public colleges still lead the way, by far.”

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/online-learning-data-345/

By Meris Stansbury, eCampus News

Research delves into issues when trying to gauge instructional and design quality in MOOCs for credit. As more institutions consider offering MOOCs for credit, often the MOOCs provided by third-party platforms, researchers say it’s imperative to gauge instructional and design effectiveness…but how, and with what quality standards? These are the main questions posited by Patrick Lowenthal, assistant professor at the Educational Technology College of Education at Boise State University; and Dr. Charles Hodges, associate professor of Leadership, Technology & Human Development at Georgia Southern University, in their research study on trying to measure the quality of MOOCs.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/mooc-quality-standards-716/

By Josh Tolan, Business.com

Workforce training has never been exciting. Employees are given a handbook they need to read, a course to complete or a workshop to sit through. It’s not an effective method, but time and budget constraints restrict employers from improving their educational processes. Technology is removing these barriers. New tools are changing the way employees learn on the job and are improving the process for both employees and employers. Here are some of the ways technology is causing employee training to evolve.

http://www.business.com/technology/4-ways-technology-is-changing-on-the-job-training/

By Brett Milano, Harvard

Harvard Divinity School senior lecturer Diane Moore has modest goals for her upcoming online course, “World Religions Through Their Scripture.” The course, which launches this spring, will bring together Harvard’s leading scholars in the world’s major religions: Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. As a HarvardX MOOC (massive open online course), it was designed to attract an international, multicultural audience. Moore, a senior lecturer on religious studies and education, a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions, and director of the Religious Literacy Project, has long been an advocate of “religious literacy,” meaning an understanding of how religion works in its cultural and political contexts.

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/02/a-religion-course-for-the-internet-age/

by Gabrielle Russon, Orlando Sentinel

Emily Long refuses to stay in her apartment all day, even though she won’t physically go to class until she is halfway through her bachelor’s degree at the University of Florida. “I’m like never home,” says Long, who rents an apartment 15 minutes from campus. “That’s a good thing.” Her friend Ethan Cassidy sometimes can’t shake the notion that he is missing out as he takes his online courses. To combat that, he has found friends whose paths to UF are similar. Cassidy and Long are among the 235 students in the second semester of their freshmen year under a new UF program that was criticized when it was announced a year ago.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/education/os-uf-online-only-student-20160212-story.html

by WCET

Based on data accumulated by the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) surveys from the Fall of 2014, the WCET Distance Education Enrollment Report 2016 highlights differences by sector, graduate vs. undergraduate study, student location, and by the number of institutions educating students at a distance. Our aim is to enlighten readers about the current state of the industry through graphs, data tables, observations, and commentary based on our insights.

http://wcet.wiche.edu/initiatives/research/WCET-Distance-Education-Enrollment-Report-2016

by Alex Fitzpatrick, Time

On Feb. 12, Udemy announced that more than 10 million students have taken one of its courses. In the U.S., there were about 13 million students working toward a four-year degree during fall 2015 semester, according to the Department of Education. It is another example of the rising popularity of online education as college costs have boomed in the United States. Americans hold $1.2 trillion in student loan debt, second only to mortgages in terms of consumer obligations. Entering the workforce deep in the red could be a handicap that follows graduates the rest of their careers, economists say.

http://time.com/4215787/udemy-dennis-yang/

by Linda C. Hodges, Tomorrow’s Professor

Faculty typically spend a lot of time teaching—over 20 hours of a 50-hour workweek in one study (Bentley and Kyvik 2012). Are we spending that time productively? Obviously, whether or not we feel productive depends on what we hope to accomplish as instructors. For example, virtually all the faculty surveyed in the 2013–14 Higher Education Research Institute Faculty Survey felt that two learning outcomes were particularly key: 
developing students’ abilities to think critically (99.1%) and promoting students’ abilities to write effectively (92.7%). If these are our top goals for student learning, how do we direct our time most efficiently to achieve them? As more data become available on how people learn, the answer to this question may lie in our use of the flipped classroom.

https://tomprof.stanford.edu/posting/1463

By Meris Stansbury, eCampus News

Final Online Report Card highlights switch in enrollments for specific institutions; shows that if online learning hasn’t happened yet, it probably won’t. Online learning enrollment may be up across the board, but one type of institution is climbing up the online enrollment ladder at a breakneck pace; and some institutions may be giving up on online learning before they start. These are some of the major findings from the 2015 Survey of Online Learning conducted by Babson Survey Research Group in partnership with the Online Learning Consortium (OLC), Pearson, WCET, StudyPortals, and Tyton Partners. The results are part of the Online Report Card, the thirteenth and final annual report tracking online education in the U.S.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/online-learning-data-345/

by Lauren Rubenstein, Wesleyan

Wesleyan’s creative writing specialization is open to anyone with a love of reading or a drive to invent a story or tell their own. Wesleyan’s creative writing specialization on Coursera provides an opportunity to learn from some of the country’s best contemporary writers. Wesleyan will present the first-ever creative writing specialization on the Coursera platform, beginning Feb. 9. Taught by four award-winning authors, the specialization is open to anyone with a love of reading or a drive to invent a story or tell their own. Titled “Creative Writing: The Craft of Story,” the specialization will include four courses, plus a capstone.

https://newsletter.blogs.wesleyan.edu/2016/02/09/creativewritingcourcera/

By Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed

The best part of my job is the opportunity to work with folks at the beginning of planning an online learning program. Whether these colleagues are from my own institution, or from a peer institution, I always say the same 10 things.

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/10-ways-fail-when-creating-online-program