Online Learning Update

by Shalina Chatlani, Education Dive

Higher ed institutions ought to be prioritizing digital literacy skills revolving around digital savvy, creativity, and complex thinking, as employers increasingly value these qualities in college graduates. The World Economic Forum predicts 35% of the top ten skills employers say they want will change by 2020, and will increasing include to include these competencies, according to a new report from the New Media Consortium.  The report shares digital literacy frameworks from other nations and U.S. schools they consider worth emulating, such as The University of Pennsylvania, which offers students workshops on how to produce and share digital content legally, writes Campus Technology. Most of these frameworks revolve around how to use technology to develop communication, critical thinking, technical, citizenship, and cultural and political awareness.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/digital-literacy-a-key-factor-for-employers-report-finds/504321/

by Joe DePaolo, Mediaite

Thursday night on Hannity, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich stopped by to plug an online course he’s teaching called “Defending America.” “It’s really on how to defeat the left intellectually,” Gingrich said. “And remind people why America is unique and why American history matters and why being patriotic is important.”  It’s a standalone course — not being taught in association with any institution of higher learning — for which the former House Speaker is charging $49.99 (with 20 percent off for early registrants). The comparisons to Trump U, of course, are inevitable. And Twitter didn’t disappoint.

https://www.mediaite.com/online/newt-gingrich-went-on-hannity-to-plug-an-online-course-hes-teaching-the-twitter-reactions-are-gold/

By Joe Chapman, US News

Even as thousands of students head back to college campuses nationwide, enrollment in online courses continues to grow. For students starting online courses, it’s important to set yourself up for success – particularly if you work full or part time and juggle other family and personal responsibilities. Get a head start by thinking through your personal and online course schedules, organizing your materials and identifying a solid support structure. Here are a few tips to help online students get organized before beginning classes.

https://www.usnews.com/education/online-learning-lessons/articles/2017-09-08/4-steps-to-get-organized-for-online-courses

By Ashley A. Smith, Inside Higher Ed
Accreditor’s [HLC] rejection of Scottsdale Community College’s online expansion suggests that consistency and mandated faculty training could become a focus for quality control in online education.  A regional accreditor recently denied an Arizona community college’s bid to increase its online degree offerings, with a decision that highlights challenges colleges may face when seeking to expand their online presence. In a peer review report, which Inside Higher Ed obtained, HLC’s reviewers described “strong foundational components critical to online delivery and a clear passion for such delivery.  In particular, the reviewers found a lack of required training for online instruction. “SCC’s contract with the faculty was cited as the reason training could not be mandated. Further authority for reviewing and overseeing online delivery was pushed down to the department level.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/09/15/accreditor-denies-arizona-community-colleges-bid-expand-online

By Henry Kronk, e-learning inside
When most people start a new job at a fast food restaurant, they might expect to watch a requisite – and boring – training video. But for new cooks at KFC, the initiation process is definitely weirder. As new employees enter on their first day, they are now given an Oculus Rift VR headset to wear. The game they must play is best described as an insane VR escape room where they must correctly progress through the five steps of the KFC cooking process before they can get out. Colonel Sanders himself heckles each employee throughout the process. The new system might sound like a quirky publicity stunt, but KFC claims that it takes players an average of 10 minutes to beat the game, while the previous teaching method took 25 minutes.

Gamification: What E-Learning Modules Can Learn from Video Games

by Pat Donachie, Education Dive

Higher education institutions are failing to adequately service part-time students, with only about a quarter of such students attaining a degree within the eight years they begin college, according to a new report from the Center for American Progress, with four out of every ten students who enrolled exclusively part-time in their first year not returning for their second. Part of the issue is due to a lack of comprehensive data at the national level, according to Marcella Bombardieri, the author of the report and a senior policy analyst on the postsecondary education team for CAP. She noted that often community college administrators, when asked about what they were doing to assist part-time or transfer students, would respond that “everything” they do is for those student groups, because they often make up the most significant proportion of community college enrollees.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/new-report-illustrates-challenges-part-time-students-face/504501/

by PBS

As technology evolves and more online graduate programs become available at a much lower cost, should we reconsider traditional higher education in a classroom setting? Hari Sreenivasan reports on how some students earning master’s degrees at Georgia Tech are paying little or nothing for online courses from a top program.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/online-graduate-programs-offer-degrees-significant-savings/

Thomas Klassen, Toronto Star

University and college students will soon be back in their classrooms. However, more and more students now study online, rather than in a classroom. This is both positive and worrisome. I know, as earlier this summer I taught my first online university course. Online education is a transformative disruption in teaching and learning. Freed from physical constraints, learning becomes more accessible and teaching techniques more innovative. More than one-quarter of post-secondary students in Canada have registered in at least one online course.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2017/09/05/online-classes-take-teaching-from-stage-to-screen.html

Adam Lashinsky, Fortune

Coursera and its ilk—Udacity and Minera Project are two examples—are an appropriate topic of conversation on the day after Americans honor those who work. Coursera’s take is that higher education is too expensive and too airy-fairy to meet the needs of today’s students. What’s needed are specific classes that serve the needs of today’s students, like courses on how to code specific software languages and brand-new fields like machine learning and data science. Coursera also is working with individual employers like Google to design classes that employees and developers need to succeed on their platforms.  Coursera sells access to groupings of courses it calls “specializations,” sold as a subscription for $49 a month. It also has created online degrees with prestigious universities, including a $20,000 MBA from the University of Illinois (my alma mater) that Maggioncalda says would cost $118,000 in person.

http://fortune.com/2017/09/05/courseras-online-mbas-could-be-big-business/

by SOPHIE NICOLAS, Junkee

Studying online can actually be pretty fun. You don’t have to endure any awkward first day ice breakers, or sit through boring lectures. In fact, you can literally just skip the boring bits and cut to the chase. You pretty much run your own schedule.  But sometimes without uni friends to motivate you, or without an attendance record to force you to go to class, it’s easy to feel a bit blasé about your study. Here are six study hacks you need to ace your online course.

http://junkee.com/6-study-hacks-to-help-you-ace-your-online-course/122035

By Cait Etherington, e-learning Inside

It’s a fact: Sometimes students cheat on exams. This is why exam proctors remain necessary at all levels of the education system. In most cases proctors are anonymous individuals who pass out exams and then pace up and down watching you while you write. The proctor is also the person who typically says time is up and retrieves your exam…whether or not you’ve completed it. In short, they are the eyes and ears of the education system in testing situations, but the days of human proctors may be numbered.

https://news.elearninginside.com/the-rise-of-the-online-exam-proctor/

By Aziza Musa, Arkansas Online

As of late, Michael Moore is measuring progress in what has been his main task for the past four years: building a stand-alone, online-only university for the system. That school, eVersity, first opened to students in September 2015, taking aim at the state’s estimated 213,987 adult learners who started college but never finished and promising them accessibility and affordability. Now — two years in — Moore said he would give everything but enrollment an A grade. Enrollment — on which eVersity will soon rely exclusively for revenue — remains its biggest challenge and would earn a B-minus, he said, adding that the university has about 650 students, just short of the university’s anticipated mark of 1,000. “We’re a few months behind that,” he said. “One of the lessons we learned early on that I think caught all of us off guard was that so many of our students are bringing to us so many credit hours that what we needed early on in the first few months were more upper-division courses, and we played a little catch-up trying to get those upper-division courses.”

http://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2017/sep/04/online-university-seeks-students-201709/?f=news

By Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed

We might be in for a similar 50 year transition as we in higher ed figure out how to take advantage of all the affordances of digital technologies. An interesting thought experiment to run is to ask if starting from scratch, would we design our colleges and universities the same way as they are now? Giving ourselves the freedom to think about redesigning our institutions from a clean slate may yield some interesting changes. Given our shift in understanding of the critical role of active learning, would we continue to build tiered lectured halls with fixed seats? How might we change the organization of our classrooms, labs, libraries, and residential facilities to encourage project based and experiential learning? If we started from the premise of abundant information available on ubiquitous mobile screens, how might we design our physical environments to encourage collaboration and social learning?

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/why-digital-technology-higher-ed-what-electricity-was-manufacturing

by Punch
Why do some of us learn easily and quickly, while others struggle, left behind plodding along? Part of the answer, at least in the online learning space, is that learning is a real skill in and of itself, and some people are more skilled at it than others. And the good news for the plodders is that it is a skill that can be readily grasped when we break it down. I’ve analysed the data from over 100,000 learners on the University of Melbourne’s various MOOCs or massive open online courses – every click, tap, swipe they make, every document they consult and every word they write in chat forums and exercises. What emerged was a remarkably consistent pattern of which learning behaviours work and which don’t. It means that it should be possible to design online learning systems that not only teach skills and knowledge, but also at the same time teach students how best to learn.

http://punchng.com/learning-to-learn-could-be-built-into-online-courses/

by Beth Corsentino, CNBC
A recent study found that more than half of Americans are afraid they will lose their job to a robot. While plenty of jobs could be in jeopardy, there are certain fields that could be considered “robot proof.” Lee Rainie, director of Internet and technology research at the Pew Research Center, calls these positions “high touch jobs” that are not in danger of being outsourced, he explained to CNBC’s “On The Money” recently. Fox example, positions like hair stylists, doctors, nurses or even physical therapists could turn into high growth industries. “Anything that involves dealing directly with the public and taking care of them, either their needs in health or other places” are likely to survive the robot onslaught, Rainie said.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/01/these-are-the-robot-proof-jobs-of-the-future-pew-research.html

By Joshua Bolkan, Campus Technology
Student loan debt in the United States has grown 149 percent over the last decade to reach $1.4 trillion, according to a new report from Experian. Over the same period, the average student loan debt per person went up 62 percent. Held by 13.4 percent of Americans, student loan debt is the fastest growing debt segment and the largest non-household debt. But, counter-intuitively, fewer people make late payments on this type of debt than on other loans. In fact, the percentage of late payments on student debt has decreased 10.1 percent since 2009.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2017/08/29/report-student-loan-debt-reaches-1.4-trillion-late-payments-decline.aspx

By Michael S. Roth, Washington Post

At its core, the new education Cathy Davidson envisions creates a platform for student-centered, active learning. Technology will be a part of that, but only if it enhances student agency. She cites approvingly the conclusion of Tressie McMillan Cottom, a sociologist of technology: “If you believe technology is the answer to everything that plagues higher education, you probably don’t understand technology or higher education.” “The New Education” provides strong examples of successful academic innovations.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/revolutionizing-the-university-for-the-digital-era/2017/09/01/c82386a2-6740-11e7-8eb5-cbccc2e7bfbf_story.html

by MIT Technology Review

Tomorrow’s jobs will demand collaborative workers steeped in hands-on problem solving. To that end, digital learning is leveling the playing field for far-flung disadvantaged students who previously would have had no chance to be part of this new workforce, as well as boosting the skills of students and workers closer to home. Cloud, virtualization, and software-defined networking—along with consumer electronic devices—are among the many advanced technologies enabling this development.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608774/technology-moves-to-the-head-of-the-21st-century-classroom/

by Wichita State
Wichita State is offering free online professional development badge courses.
Badges are designed for working professionals who want to learn new skills and technologies to keep up with the needs of employers. Any non-degree seeking person can take a course. Wichita State University is offering full scholarships for anyone wanting to enroll in one of 35 undergraduate online professional development badges. Badges are designed for working professionals who want to continue learning new skills and technologies to keep up with the needs of employers. The self-directed online courses allow students to go at their own pace each semester. Anyone who enrolls for one undergraduate-level badge now through Friday, Sept. 15, will have the full cost of the badge covered.

http://www.wichita.edu/thisis/stories/story.asp?si=3764

by Brad Fuster, US News

One challenge for me as a professor when teaching introductory classes is assessing what students already know and what they don’t, and then presenting course material in a way that is simultaneously helpful and rigorous. An online course that uses adaptive learning technology may be a great fit, especially for older students with previous work experience. But these classes also have limitations.  Adaptive courses, which are gaining popularity and offered mainly at larger online universities, individually adjust each learner’s experience in real time based on the student’s progress. For example, a three- to five-minute lecture might explain how to solve a mathematical equation. This lecture is followed by a quiz that presents the student with one problem at a time. A computer program assesses how the student answers each question, and then, based on whether they answered correctly, determines the next question.

https://www.usnews.com/education/online-learning-lessons/articles/2017-09-01/weigh-an-online-course-that-uses-adaptive-learning

BY GARY KAYYE, eCampus News

Higher education institutions often make the mistake of investing in exorbitantly expensive products they don’t need. If the higher ed market really considered the generation it serves, it would make a better cost-benefit analysis. For example, I use the completely-free Facebook LIVE in all of my classes, while my university has spent thousands of dollars on alternative solutions that are impossible for the average person to use and require an AV tech to launch. My students are familiar with Facebook. They are already on it in their daily lives. It’s free. And, let’s face it, sometimes college students don’t want to get out of bed and get dressed for class. So, Facebook LIVE allows them to never miss a class. As a professor, I am using the technology to adapt to them, instead of having them adapt to me. Remember, I’m the old person in the room, not them.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/campus-administration/higher-ed-invest-reach-millennials/