Online Learning Update

by Roger Riddell, Education Dive

Micro-credentials, which offer learners the ability to master a single topic based on their needs or interests, offer administrators a way to personalize teachers’ professional development, Education Week reports. Delaware, Florida and Tennessee are among states, along with individual districts elsewhere, that have experimented with the model through providers such as the nonprofit Digital Promise, some of which allow educators to provide evidence including student work or videos and award digital badges for LinkedIn. Amid the growth in popularity, there is also increasing attention to the need for standards around rigor, value for stakeholders, oversight and teacher incentives for earning them.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/micro-credentials-key-personalized-learning-professional-development/441782/

by Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed

Accrediting agencies are facing intense scrutiny from academics, policy makers and the general public, with the latest salvo being the decision by Northwestern University’s school of journalism and communications to ditch its accreditor. Much of the broader conversation about accreditation revolves around institutional accreditors, both national and regional, that serve as the gatekeepers for federal financial aid. Criticism tends to focus on whether the agencies are doing enough to prevent fraud and to push colleges to improve graduation and job-placement rates. Yet specialized accreditors have felt heat as well. And the tension over innovation at Medill is familiar to most accreditors, as their role of by-the-books regulators of quality often conflicts with encouraging innovation. “This is part of a re-evaluation that’s happening in the education space and in accreditation,” said Judith Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, which recognizes ACEJMC. “The focus on innovation is there across the board.”

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/05/03/northwestern-and-berkeleys-journalism-schools-drop-accreditor-echoing-broader

BY SOPHIA STUART, PC Magazine

Online tools can engender a greater understanding of other cultures; who doesn’t love the ability to peek into the quotidian existence of people around the globe via Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook? But what about more serious issues such as peace in the Middle East; does the internet have a place to play there? The organizers of YaLa Academy, founded in 2011 by the Peres Center for Peace and YaLa Palestine, believe it does. The online education platform provides distance learning and encourages collaboration between those from nations that have traditionally been in conflict. Students take online courses to develop skills as future peace leaders, including negotiation and conflict management, taught by various experts from organizations like the US Institute of Peace and Harvard Program on Negotiation.

http://www.pcmag.com/news/353408/solving-the-worlds-problems-one-online-class-at-a-time

by Mike Krings, Phys.org

Across the country, classrooms are making the transition to blended learning models. Typically, students work together, with devices, with a teacher and seek information from a number of educational resources. Recently, researchers at the University of Kansas developed an online course to help teachers create blended learning environments by moving from teacher-centered to student-centered learning, which increases opportunities for personalized learning. Early evaluation of the online course indicated that teachers find the course helpful in providing planning guidance and support necessary to shift to a blended learning model of instruction. With support from the OAK Foundation, KU’s Center for Research on Learning developed the online course. It helps teachers understand blended learning, identify what they want to include in their courses and to design and implement instructional plans.

https://phys.org/news/2017-05-online-blended.html

by Pat Donachie, Education Dive

A new paper presented this weekend at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association finds that there doesn’t seem to be strong evidence of divergences in gender on the tenure track at universities, in contrast with other recent studies, according to Inside Higher Ed. The paper examined graduates 10 years after earning their Ph.D., and its authors found that scholarly publications, research and quickly acquiring a postdoctoral appointment were strong indicators of getting tenure-track professorships and receiving tenure. However, the author’s research found that women earn less in salary and take longer to finish doctoral degrees, and said that more gender inequity may become apparent in the second decade after receiving a Ph.D., which the authors did not analyze.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/new-study-suggests-gender-gap-may-have-closed-in-tenure-track/441752/

By ANN CARRNS, NY Times

Borrowers can expect to pay more for federal student loans, beginning on July 1. The federal government sets interest rates on student loans annually, based on a formula adopted in 2013. The rate on new undergraduate Stafford loans, one of the most popular student loans, will rise to 4.45 percent, up from 3.76 percent this year. Rates for graduate student Stafford loans will increase to 6 percent, up from 5.31 percent.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/your-money/stafford-student-loan-rates.html

By Christopher Beach, Real Clear Education

In the fall of 2016, online educator Udacity announced the launch of a “nanodegree” program for self-driving car engineering. For $2,400, a student proficient in coding could enroll and learn the skills. The one-of-a-kind program and curriculum were designed in collaboration with Mercedes-Benz, Nvidia and Uber ATG. The first class has yet to conclude but already some impressive results are coming in. Chrysler has indicated that it wants to hire 40 graduates, according to Sebastian Thrun, founder and president of Udacity. “There are more than 1 million people dying every year in traffic accidents — largely due to human error and distracted or impaired driving. Employers are looking for thousands of engineers with the skills needed to solve this urgent, global problem. This is why making self-driving car engineering education accessible and efficient is so important.”

http://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2017/05/02/online_educator_udacity_adapts_courses_to_changing_labor_market_110152.html

by Marguerite Ward, CNBC

LinkedIn’s new list of top skills for 2017 confirms what experts have been saying for years. Tech skills are more important than ever, as digital advancements have radically transformed the working world. “While some skills expire every couple of years, our data strongly suggests that tech skills will still be needed for years to come in every industry,” LinkedIn career expert Catherine Fisher said in the report. The world’s largest professional social network analyzed hiring and recruiting activity on its platform between Jan. 1 and Sept. 1. Analysts then identified the skills that belonged to members who were more likely to start new jobs and receive interest from recruiters. Linked below are the 10 most in-demand skills.

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/20/the-top-10-skills-that-will-get-you-hired.html

BY MERIS STANSBURY, eCampus News

As online learning becomes increasingly popular, what are the skills and habits necessary for student success? Recently, eCampus News posted an article about the latest online learning myths, one of which was “earning an online degree is easy.” Typically, only those online students who are self-motivated tend to succeed, but are there other more define-able characteristics that characterize successful online students? In author Joel English’s book, Plugged In: Succeeding as an Online Learner, students about to embark in online learning are given a list of should-have skills or habits in order to succeed. English, as well as Cengage Learning (which produced an infographic based on the key points of English’s book) recommend instructors share these 10 boiled-down characteristics with their online students before starting the course or class.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/featured/featured-on-ecampus-news/attributes-online-students/

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

“To be a 21st-century land-grant school, to meet the obligation, really, the great opportunity, the noble opportunity that we have always embraced here at Purdue, we must be active in online education in a way we are not now,” said Purdue President Mitch Daniels in a prepared statement. Currently, Purdue encompasses a main campus in West Lafayette and two regional campuses, Purdue Fort Wayne and Purdue Northwest. The deal has drawn support from one unique quarter: Arne Duncan, who, as secretary for the U.S. Department of Education, drew the wrath of for-profit schools for his continual efforts to reign them in. “I’m excited by this opportunity for a world-class university to expand its reach and help educate adult learners by acquiring a strong for-profit college,” said Duncan in a prepared statement. “This is a first, and if successful, could help create a new model for what it means to be a land-grant institution.”

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2017/05/01/purdues-kaplan-purchase-shoring-up-the-21st-century-land-grant-mission.aspx

by Mark A. Cohen, Forbes

The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), the regulatory body that oversees the legal profession in England and Wales, has enacted a major overhaul of legal training and solicitor licensure to take effect in 2020. The exam will not spell the end of traditional legal education in the UK—no doubt many aspiring solicitors will opt for some form of traditional legal study. But the exam’s emphasis on competency based learning and its experiential requirements will undoubtedly serve to update outdated legal curricula, reduce law student debt, and better serve the public by ensuring new entrants to the profession have core competency and a modicum of practical experience. It shifts focus from course work at expensive universities to competency based experiential learning that can be obtained more efficiently, cost-effectively, and usefully by apprenticeships, jobs that require critical thinking, online learning, and other ‘real world’ means.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/markcohen1/2017/05/01/a-british-reboot-of-legal-education-law-school-optional/

By Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed

My guess is that reactions from folks who work at smaller schools will fall into 1 of 3 categories:

Category 1: Interesting – but probably not that big a deal for us. Category 2: Interesting – and important for us to understand and discuss. Category 3: Not only not interesting – but another example of the blurring line between the non-profit mission of higher education, and the growing corporate and market-based thinking that ruining this country. The reason that I think that all of us should pay attention is my belief that all of us should be paying attention to online learning. I believe that even small, residentially focused liberal arts institutions can leverage online learning to advance their core mission. This may be through providing opportunities for a more diverse population of students to access the strongest programs and faculty at your school.

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/small-college-conversations-and-big-purdue-kaplan-online-learning-news

by Connie Letch, edscoop

The massive open online course provider launched its Professional Certificate program, a series of courses built around skills for specific careers. The program was designed by a collection of industry leaders and top universities, and is a result of demand in the marketplace, according to edX’s CEO, Anant Agarwal. “We’ve heard from our global community of learners that they are seeking career-focused, professional content programs that deliver meaningful and impactful job-related results,” Agarwal said in a statement to EdScoop. “We developed the Professional Certificate programs on edX to match this demand.” Fields that are represented in the courses include digital marketing, virtual reality, data science and other popular tech-oriented areas. The certificates are endorsed by companies like HSBC, GitHub and The North Face.

http://edscoop.com/edx-adds-new-professional-certificate-program-for-career-advancement

by Hayleigh Colombo, Indianapolis Business Journal

“It’s very surprising,” said Robert Kelchen, an assistant professor of higher education at Seton Hall University. “I think it’s a fairly high-risk, high-reward strategy.” “Purdue gets essentially all of Kaplan’s students,” Kelchen said. “They get a lot of national attention and they get a ready-made online or adult student infrastructure that they didn’t really have. The question then becomes, was it better for them to essentially acquire Kaplan, or start something on their own?” Lumina Foundation CEO Jamie Merisotis said the deal is interesting because it bucks a trend of for-profit universities acquiring not-for-profit, private colleges. Merisotis said Purdue’s big jump into online is a bit of a coming-of-age moment for adults in higher education and a “big signal about the market.”

https://www.ibj.com/articles/63603-purdues-decision-to-acquire-kaplan-a-high-risk-high-reward-move

by Maggie P. Fay, EDUCAUSE Review

The course, called SAILS math, was identical — in both content and delivery model — to the developmental math curriculum in Tennessee community colleges (though Tennessee community colleges have since moved to a corequisite remediation model). Though the courses were the same, high school students finished the course at much higher rates. They were between 14 and 29 percentage points more likely than college students to complete the course with a passing grade in a single semester.

http://er.educause.edu/blogs/2017/4/same-course-different-outcomes-the-mysterious-case-of-computerized-developmental-math-in-tennessee

by George Veletsianos and Rolin Moe, EDUCAUSE Review

The rise of educational technology is part of a larger shift in political thought, from favoring government oversight to asserting free-market principles, as well as a response to the increasing costs of higher education. The technocentric view that technology can solve these challenges combines with a vision of education as a product that can be packaged, automated, and delivered to students. Unless greater collaborative efforts take place between edtech developers and the greater academic community, as well as more informed deep understandings of how learning and teaching actually occur, any efforts to make edtech education’s silver bullet are doomed to fail.

http://er.educause.edu/articles/2017/4/the-rise-of-educational-technology-as-a-sociocultural-and-ideological-phenomenon

by Associated Press

With college costs rising steadily and with more courses available online for free, some observers are beginning to question the need for a traditional college education that may include lectures on Greek philosophy but burden graduates with massive student loans. Education startups are offering alternatives — from boot camps, to one or two-year tracks, to accredited degree programs — and their founders say these options will give students a more relevant education in today’s job market, and at a lower price. But some experts caution against betting on a narrow, practical education geared toward a specific field that is in demand today but could leave them unprepared for the jobs of tomorrow. They also say most applicants still need a college degree from an established institution to get a good job.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/04/30/is-this-future-college-online-classes-but-no-degree.html

by Kalev Leetaru, Forbes

Putting this all together, while no technology is 100% accurate, deep learning image recognition algorithms have reached a level of nuance, accuracy and precision that they can not only recognize firearms and violence in realtime today, but their ability to precisely catalog an image into thousands of objects and activities mean that in 2017 we have the technology to offer complete personalization of violence filtering, allowing each individual user to precisely define the level of violence or conflict that distresses them and have those hidden. In short, deep learning has reached a point where social media platforms simply no longer have any excuse not to take real steps towards curtailing the reach of violent imagery and in the process perhaps eliminate the infamy that drives many of the worst uses of live streaming.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/04/29/can-ai-rescue-us-from-violent-images-online/#5a69c8742570

By Sri Ravipati, Campus Technology

The University System of Maryland (USMD) has selected 21 faculty and staff members to receive funding to increase the use of open educational resources (OER). Through the Maryland Open Source Textbook (MOST) initiative led by USMD’s William E. Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation, more than 8,000 students will save $1.3 million in textbook costs over the upcoming fall semester. Grantees at seven community colleges and five four-year institutions will participate in the MOST initiative’s High-impact OER Mini-Grant Program,

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2017/04/24/university-system-of-maryland-scales-up-oer-at-12-institutions.aspx

BY JEREMY CUNNINGHAM, eCampus News

In a computer-driven world, it seems that writing still plays a critical role in education and beyond. In an age of technological advancement, it’s easy to feel obsolete. I feel confident that education will always be needed; but, occasionally I wonder if writing education has value in a computer-driven world. Students enter my English classrooms and see the course as a requirement for advancement. They look at is as one of many “basics” they need until they can study their actual interest.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/cc-blog/writing-education-technology/