Online Learning Update

By Marian Stoltz-Loike, US News

Through online graduate education programs, future educators might learn how to incorporate digital tools into their classes.Teaching is often seen as a great field for career changers and other nontraditional students. Some pursue teaching because they want to contribute to society in a meaningful way. Others may desire to share the knowledge and expertise they gained in another setting, or they may no longer want to compete in the corporate world. Online education is an ideal way for future teachers to build the expertise they need while balancing school with work, family or other commitments. Here are five ways online graduate education programs offer value for future teachers.

https://www.usnews.com/education/online-learning-lessons/articles/2017-03-31/5-reasons-online-graduate-education-programs-build-good-teachers

By WILLIAM L. WANG, Harvard Crimson

Harvard Medical School will launch its first online certificate program this summer for people considering health careers, offering four paid courses on topics in medicine. The program, titled “HMX Fundamentals,” will be open to the public through a brief application and includes courses in physiology, immunology, biochemistry and genetics. Upon completion of a course, students will receive a PDF certificate which will not count for academic credit at Harvard. Unlike Harvard’s edX and HarvardX platforms, which offer their online classes for free, access to HMX Fundamentals will come at a cost. Tuition will cost $800 for a single HMX Fundamentals course, $1,000 for two courses, and $1,800 for all four.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/3/31/hms-launches-first-online-certificate-program/

by eCampus News

Major online learning provider Alison releases data on the skills most sought-after by students and professionals looking to upskill. Americans looking to upskill online are focusing on hard skills they can use in the workplace, according to new data released by Alison. The list of the top 10 most popular courses on Alison, a free e-learning site, was dominated by Customer Service, IT, and workplace skills like time management. Health and education related courses also claimed many of the top spots, including courses focusing on mental health, working with students with special needs and teaching English as a foreign language.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/demand-skills-united-states/

By Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology

A new Connected Learning Lab (CLL) at the University of California, Irvine will focus on equity-oriented, learner-centered innovation in education technology. Sponsored by UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, School of Education and School of Social Sciences, as well as the UC Humanities Research Institute, the lab will serve as an interdisciplinary hub for research and innovation, providing an “experimental site for pushing the boundaries of connected learning.” “Connected learning happens when someone is pursuing a personal interest with the support of peers, mentors and caring adults, and in ways that open up opportunities for them,” a CLL statement explained.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2017/03/30/uc-irvine-launches-research-hub-for-connected-learning.aspx

BY LAURA ASCIONE,eCampus News

Virginia tops a new ranking that analyzes the best states for higher education. The state took the No. 1 spot based on its ability to educate its residents and high graduation rates. The annual list, from financial technology company SmartAsset, compares four-year public colleges and universities using various metrics such as undergraduate graduation rates, average net price, 20-year return on investment (ROI), and the student-faculty ratio. For 2017, both the University of Virginia and the College of William & Mary rank among the top 10 public universities in the nation, according to U.S. News & World Report.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/news/state-among-best-higher-education/

by Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed

Today’s reality is that the line between administrative and academic technology has blurred to such a degree that applying organizational distinctions is no longer useful – and is perhaps actively harmful. The reason for this is that we no longer have a clear line where an academic IT service ends and an administrative IT service begins. Are efforts to leverage learning data to drive student success a task of administrative or academic IT? The answer is that neither the skills of the traditional administrative technology professional or the seasoned academic technology expert are, on their own, adequate to the opportunity. Rather, administrative and academic IT people must work collaboratively – really as a single unit.

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/myth-higher-ed-tech-academic-administrative-divide

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

The availability of analytics products for higher education is on the rise, and the applications tend to fall into two broad camps: learning analytics, designed to be used by instructional staff to examine data tied to student engagement and academic outcomes; and operational analytics, for use by administrators to explore operational and financial areas, such as admission, enrollment and retention. That’s how a new report from Eduventures classifies the more than two dozen offerings it has identified in the current analytics marketplace.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2017/03/30/higher-ed-analytics-market-is-growing-in-complexity.aspx

by Marco De Novellis, Business Because

At Birmingham, the Online MBA is positioned as a direct alternative to the classroom-based course. Fortnightly live sessions bring distance-learning to life, connecting groups of approximately 25 students together with tutors and lecturers in an immersive online learning environment. The sessions are two and a quarter hours long. Munyaradzi wants a world-renowned, accredited MBA to help him build his IT training business and take his corporate career to new heights. When he graduates from Birmingham’s Online MBA, he’ll receive the same certificate as students on the full-time course.

http://www.businessbecause.com/news/mba-distance-learning/4505/how-my-online-mba-is-helping-me-juggle-study-work-family-and-my-own-business

by Julie Wurth, News-Gazette

A third online-only master’s program, this one from the top-ranked accounting department, will soon be available at the University of Illinois. Offered in partnership with the online learning platform Coursera, the program is geared toward professionals who want to beef up their accounting credentials, refresh their skills or change careers. The UI is the first top five accounting program to offer a master of science in accounting completely online, dubbed the “iMSA.” The UI helped pioneer this model with the Silicon Valley-based Coursera last year with an “iMBA,” an online master’s degree in business administration for $20,000, a fraction of the cost of the on-campus MBA program. It currently has 500 students from around the globe.

http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2017-03-29/ui-offer-online-masters-program-accounting.html

by Penn State

In recognition of the increasing scope of digital learning, the College of Arts and Architecture’s e-Learning Institute will be renamed the Office of Digital Learning, effective April 1. Gary Chinn, director of the e-Learning Institute, will become assistant dean for digital learning. “A broader conceptualization of digital learning acknowledges that today’s courses can move across a continuum of completely in-person and completely online,” explained Chinn. “Blended learning courses, which utilize a combination of online materials and in-person lectures, continue to grow in popularity. Courses that take place in a lecture hall but feature class assignments that have a strong digital aspect are another example. As students flow in and out of physical classroom spaces and virtual environments, a broader term like ‘digital learning’ better captures this fluidity of learning context.”

http://news.psu.edu/story/458885/2017/03/29/e-learning-institute-broadens-focus-renamed-office-digital-learning

by Stephen Noonoo, Education Dive

A shortage of trained professionals who can deal with sophisticated cybersecurity threats has put renewed focus on K-12 education efforts in the sector, both at the federal and state level. Preisdent Donald Trump is considering an executive order that would review cybersecurity education efforts. Various federal departments sponsor cybersecurity training initiatives, and several states including Virginia, Michigan and Colorado are taking proactive steps to boost graduates with skills in these areas. Despite the push, less than 25% of high school students have taken a computer science course, with the percentage even lower for students from minority backgrounds.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/government-boosts-funding-for-computer-science-ed-to-combat-threats/438827/

by Matthew Lynch, tech Edvocate

Technology has changed just about every field, including education. Digital learning is reshaping education in unprecedented ways. The ways in which students learn are changing rapidly thanks to technology, and both students and teachers will benefit from it. There are several specific changes that we can expect to see as digital learning takes over education. For one, the way teachers present information and how students work with that information has changed. Students are asked to be more hands-on and collaborative than ever before. There are also new skills that students must learn, such as digital literacy.

http://www.thetechedvocate.org/why-digital-learning-is-reshaping-education/

by Kyle Johnson, EDUCAUSE Review

These two competing visions of AI in higher education need to be discussed now, before the decisions get made for us. The LAT session brought some important perspective and in-depth conversation around the issue, and I think this is one of the valuable assets LAT brings to the broader teaching and learning community within higher education. I hope that more of these facilitated group-expert discussions can be planned for future conferences so we can continue to grapple with these issues together.

http://er.educause.edu/blogs/2017/3/supplement-or-replacement-exploring-the-role-of-ai-in-teaching-and-learning

by Brewster Kahle, EDUCAUSE Review

By 2020, we can build a collaborative digital library collection and circulation system in which thousands of libraries unlock their analog collections for a new generation of learners, enabling free, long-term, public access to knowledge. Much of modern knowledge still exists only on the printed page, stored in libraries. Libraries haven’t met this digital demand, stymied by costs, e-book restrictions, policy risks, and missing infrastructure. We now have the technology and legal frameworks to transform our library system by 2020. The Internet Archive, working with library partners, proposes bringing millions of books online, through purchase or digitization, starting with the books most widely held and used in libraries and classrooms. Our vision includes at-scale circulation of these e-books, enabling libraries owning the physical works to substitute them with lendable digital copies.

http://er.educause.edu/articles/2017/3/transforming-our-libraries-from-analog-to-digital-a-2020-vision

by Ilja Rijnen, Human Resources Online

Since the late 90s, e-learning has been introduced to the world of learning and in the recent times, especially with the arrival of enterprise systems, the digital form of education has become the preferred choice for many organisations due to its perceived benefits: it offers its learners a flexible schedule, cheap and efficient ways of education and convenient ways of offering content on demand. However, the individual learning experiences that are being created seem contradictory though to the social ways in which people learn, which is why many digital forms of learning have failed in the past decade. Nevertheless, by working with the approaches from the social learning theories, it is possible to drive the learner’s intrinsic motivation and involvement. This will drastically improve the effect from virtual classrooms in the enterprise world.

http://www.humanresourcesonline.net/5-ways-to-drastically-improve-the-impact-from-virtual-classrooms/

BY SHARON CONWELL, eSchool News

In the past, dyslexia was rarely recognized, and when it was, very little was put in place for the student. It was assumed that students were being lazy, not paying attention, or being disruptive because they were badly behaved, not because they were infuriated. Nowadays, however, so much has changed, and students with dyslexia are able to thrive in the classroom. The following teaching tools and apps can make learning a lot more enjoyable for dyslexic students.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2017/03/20/tools-apps-dyslexic-students/

By AKHIL S. WAGHMARE, Harvard Crimson

Thanks to the explosion of the internet, it is now possible to share content with billions of people. This has also allowed for increased access to high quality education through online platforms. Services like Khan Academy have reached millions of students worldwide and offered them resources for the classroom and traditionally expensive test prep for exams such as the SAT. And the rise of Massive Online Open Courses has given universities platforms for offering free, online versions of their own classes. Harvard has produced many of these, replicating almost 100 courses through the edX platform which it cofounded with MIT.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/3/27/waghmare-open-online-harvard/

by The China Post

The e-learning courses for journalists are now available in Chinese, English and eight other languages, and are designed to help journalists discover content, create stories and engage audiences using Facebook. Every course features best examples, guides and cases of successful utilization of Facebook by journalists. Facebook is studying new methods to support journalists and help users make accurate judgements on news stories that they read and facilitate meaningful discussions on subjects of common concern, a statement said.

http://www.chinapost.com.tw/business/company-focus/2017/03/28/494432/Facebook-launches.htm

By John Hoang, The Shorthorn

Learning through online classrooms can give students more options to incorporate into a busy schedule. Flexibility is a strong benefit for students taking online courses, said Jodi Tommerdahl, associate professor of curriculum and instruction, in an email. Students have more room to work and take care of college responsibilities. Students struggling with commuting to campus and work schedules that fall outside most class schedules can be alleviated through technology.

http://www.theshorthorn.com/life_and_entertainment/online-classes-provide-students-with-options/article_b9597dae-13ec-11e7-b0e7-db85e64d9b39.html