Online Learning Update

By Matthew Lynch, tech Edvocate

Edtech continues to change and improve the face of education, from K-12 schools all the way through to community colleges and even postgraduate institutions. We’re more connected than ever, and edtech offers a multitude of ways to improve performance and enhance the student experience. The higher education edtech market is far from solved, however: there are still things college administrators wish edtech companies would do, each of them an opportunity for aspiring edtech companies.

http://www.thetechedvocate.org/5-things-college-administrators-wish-edtech-companies/

By David Raths, Campus Technology
Forward-thinking CIOs are exploring the potential of IoT technologies in higher education and heading off challenges along the way. At Sun Devil Stadium on the campus of Arizona State University in Tempe, sensors connected to the WiFi and cellular network collect temperature, humidity and noise data for use by facilities staff. As part of a longstanding cheering contest, the noise data analysis identifies the section of the stadium that is making the most noise and puts the results on a big screen. Sensors can identify if a faucet anywhere in the stadium is left running after a football game is over, to help cut water usage. ASU also is exploring providing information through a mobile app on the availability of parking and wait time estimations for concession lines and restrooms.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2017/08/24/smart-campuses-invest-in-the-internet-of-things.aspx

by Matthew Lynch, tech Edvocate

The truth is, some coding boot camps are basically scams. They charge students hundreds or thousands of dollars and don’t offer real training or job opportunities. However, other coding boot camps can help students learn useful skills in a short amount of time. In choosing a coding boot camp, students must be careful and do their research. The most important thing to look for is job placement statistics. Do students who graduate from this coding boot camp end up with jobs in the tech field? Programs with low job placement numbers are most likely not worth it. After all, the purpose of attending a coding boot camp is to land a job.

http://www.thetechedvocate.org/coding-bootcamps-worth/

by Matthew Lynch, tech Edvocate

While we’re far from seeing robots in the classroom, artificial intelligence is making its way into education. Certain tasks can be made easier through the use of artificial intelligence. Grading, for example, can be done quickly and easily using artificial intelligence. In the future, we can expect to see even more artificial intelligence in the classroom. Artificial intelligence could be used to personalize the education experience for students. Programs that use artificial intelligence can act as tutors for students by determining what each student is struggling with and delivering personalized interventions, just as a teacher would. Robots could someday provide one-on-one tutoring or coaching sessions to bring struggling students up to speed.

http://www.thetechedvocate.org/artificial-intelligence-future-education/

BY ZAC JOHNSON, Business.com

Want to improve your expertise and professional skills? Of course you do. It’s one of the best ways to not only get ahead in your professional career, but it’s a great way to improve your self-confidence. The good news is that it’s now easier than ever to accomplish this through the power of the internet. There is no longer a need to attend expensive classes or certification programs in your area. Thanks to the internet, anyone can pretty much learn how to do anything. Linked below are three of the best ways to continue your education or hone your skills and expertise through online courses while documenting your success and connecting with others online.

https://www.business.com/articles/three-ways-to-improve-your-expertise-in-any-profession/

by Elise Chen, MIT News

Justin Reich was ready to observe a teacher integrating technology into her lesson plan at a school in rural New Hampshire. Her school had bought the laptops, Reich says. She had reserved them. They were charged. All of the kids were logged in. The power was on in the building. The wireless network was working. The projector bulb was working. The screen was working. But when the teacher went to plug the projector into the wall, the electrical socket fell behind the drywall, foiling her attempted lesson plan. “New technologies have tremendous potential to improve student learning,” Reich says, “but many pieces in a complex system need to be working seamlessly to make this happen.”
Reich, an assistant professor in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing Program (CMS/W), has remained excited about the possibilities that constantly evolving technologies have brought to the learning process over the last few decades.

http://news.mit.edu/2017/increasing-equity-through-educational-technology-justin-reich-0830

by Elizabeth Logan, Teen Vogue

Just after 10:30 a.m. on Monday, the teacher wrote his new students an email with the subject line “Disappointed.” that read, “Today was the first day of class and nobody showed up. If this is how you will all act the entire semester, feel free to drop my course.”  Instead of dropping out, it looks like students decided to, um, alert the professor to the class being online, because 15 minutes later, everyone got another email, this time with the subject line “I’m sorry.” saying, “It has just come to my attention that this is an online course. No in person class time is required. I am very sorry for the rude email. I’m not a jerk, I promise. Please forgive me, class.” [ed note – almost certainly fake, but still a good story!]

http://www.teenvogue.com/story/viral-college-professor-scolds-online-class

by Devin Coldewey, Frederic Lardinois, TechCrunch

Tech giants Google, Microsoft and Facebook are all applying the lessons of machine learning to translation, but a small company called DeepL has outdone them all and raised the bar for the field. Its translation tool is just as quick as the outsized competition, but more accurate and nuanced than any we’ve tried. I only speak a smattering of French in addition to my passable English, but luckily my colleague Frederic is a man of many tongues. We both agreed that DeepL’s translations were generally superior to those from Google Translate and Bing. Take, for example, the following passage from a German news article linked below.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/29/deepl-schools-other-online-translators-with-clever-machine-learning/

BY: PATRICK BEAN AND ANDREW HORSFALL, Biz Community
The current education system is ripe for disruption. Historically, institutions have positioned themselves as knowledge leaders and the primary place to receive expertise to prepare students for the workplace. However, in the age of free online courses from the world’s top universities and part-time study sites, such as edX and Coursera, that information is becoming widely available outside the system.Universities are facing a future where students will be able to study online with reputable and internationally recognised institutions for a relatively cheap fee, potentially even free. In the online space, education is becoming more commoditised and there will be a few global winners, dominated by well-known education brands that collaborate with technology companies.

http://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/371/166798.html

by Technavio

Technavio’s latest report on the global machine learning courses market provides an analysis of the most important trends expected to impact the market outlook from 2017-2021. Technavio defines an emerging trend as a factor that has the potential to significantly impact the market and contribute to its growth or decline. Increasing popularity of adaptive training is a key trend in the global machine learning courses market. The market is growing at a fast pace because of the growing awareness of machine learning among students and professionals. The inclusion of analytics and robotics in many industries is prompting organizations to upscale the knowledge of their employees in the AI domain. The most popular AI courses available in the market are machine learning and deep learning.  Online teaching is another factor that has bolstered the growth of the global machine learning courses market as it provides individuals with better learning flexibility.”

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170831005098/en/Machine-Learning-Courses-Market—Trends-Forecasts

by Roger Moore, Virtual College

As pressures within the UK healthcare sector increase, it is becoming increasingly vital that hospitals, clinical teams and other providers of essential care services are operating efficiently, compassionately and with constant attention to detail. Upholding these standards can be a challenging ask, which is why good communication is one of the most important qualities for any healthcare team to uphold. Unfortunately, this can sometimes fall by the wayside when language barriers and inconsistent methodologies get in the way – with the result being that patient safety and care quality sometimes end up taking a hit. Fortunately, e-learning can offer an ideal solution to many of these problems, helping healthcare professionals to communicate clearly at all times – a key step in safeguarding patients, staff and the sustainability of the health service as a whole.

https://www.virtual-college.co.uk/news/virtual-college/2017/08/how-e-learning-can-address-communication-issues

by Dennis Romera, LA Weekly

The University of California system has 10 campuses, 150 academic disciplines and 600 graduate degree programs. An Orange County real estate broker wants to add tens of thousands of online courses to that list. And he wants to make them available to the public. For free. The Bernie Sanders–style proposal, officially submitted this week to the California attorney general as a potential ballot initiative, is clearly a long shot. But its author, Boyd Roberts of Laguna Beach, thinks people will be so enthused by the prospect of getting a world-class education on their laptops for no cost that they’ll come out in droves to help him get the measure on the November 2018 ballot. “The first thing it does is establish the right of the public to access publicly owned higher education,” he says. “More specifically, it gives them the right to audit all publicly owned higher education online.”

http://www.laweekly.com/news/proposal-seeks-to-open-university-of-california-to-all-for-free-8594210

By Jessica Stillman, Inc

Class Central aims to clear up some of the confusion by curating the 8,000 or so MOOCs (massive open online courses) currently available to students. They also put together an annual list of the 50 most highly rated classes in areas from technology to the humanities.  Students rate the classes on a five-star scale similar to how they would a restaurant on Yelp. We sort the classes based on the Bayesian average of their rating, which factors in the number of ratings for the class,” Class Central founder and CEO Dhawal Shah explained to Inc.com in an email.  If you are specifically hoping to hone your business skills online, here are the top five business-related MOOCs recommended by the 30,000 students who have reviewed classes on Class Central. To get a certificate of completion and have your work graded, you may need to shell out a small fee of about $50. Otherwise the courses can be taken for free.

https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/the-5-best-online-business-courses-of-the-year.html

by Ray Pelosi, EdTech

So, what can universities do — on their own and in league with solutions vendors — to protect against botnet assaults on their IoT devices? Design and Build with Security Top of Mind: For starters, security must be a design consideration instead of an afterthought. “Developers must start thinking about security and building it in,” says Bob Turner, CISO at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It should be a bake-it-in, don’t-bolt-it-on approach.” That includes developing security controls that focus on encryption, device authentication, key management, virtual local area network (VLAN) segregation and code signing — and doing so in a timely, cost-effective fashion.

https://edtechmagazine.com/higher/article/2017/08/how-protect-your-university-malware-you-ve-never-heard

by Steve Lohr, NYTimes

In the last five years, dozens of schools have popped up offering an unusual promise: Even humanities graduates can learn how to code in a few months and join the high-paying digital economy. Students and their hopeful parents shelled out as much as $26,000 seeking to jump-start a career. But the coding boot-camp field now faces a sobering moment, as two large schools have announced plans to shut down this year — despite backing by major for-profit education companies, Kaplan and the Apollo Education Group, the parent of the University of Phoenix. The closings are a sign that years of heady growth led to a boot-camp glut, and that the field could be in the early stages of a shakeout.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/technology/coding-boot-camps-close.html

By JEREMY ASHKENAS, HAEYOUN PARK and ADAM PEARCE, NY Times

Even after decades of affirmative action, black and Hispanic students are more underrepresented at the nation’s top colleges and universities than they were 35 years ago, according to a New York Times analysis. The share of black freshmen at elite schools is virtually unchanged since 1980. Black students are just 6 percent of freshmen but 15 percent of college-age Americans. More Hispanics are attending elite schools, but the increase has not kept up with the huge growth of young Hispanics in the United States, so the gap between students and the college-age population has widened.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/24/us/affirmative-action.html

by Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

The civil rights movement has always been about ensuring that all people, regardless of race, sex, income, religion, or other factors, have equal access to opportunity. In today’s world, technology is increasingly needed to access many opportunities. But not everyone has equal access to technology. The idea of digital equity as a civil rights issue has been raised, and many are calling digital equity the civil rights issue of our day. What exactly is digital equity? Digital equity is the idea that all people should have equal access to digital technology. Currently, in the United States, there are 5 million households with school-aged children who do not have access to the internet. Children whose parents make less than $50,000 per year make up most of this group. Black and Hispanic children are also far more likely than their white peers to live in a home without internet access.

http://www.thetechedvocate.org/digital-equity-civil-rights-issue-day/

By Cait Etherington, Elearning Inside

Microdegrees, such as Udacity’s nanodegrees, appear to be here to stay. The reason is simple. Increasingly, what people learn during college holds little or no relevance to what they end up doing on the job. This isn’t because what they are learning is necessarily irrelevant at the time but rather because job roles and workplaces continue to change at a rapid pace and retraining is now a lifelong process regardless of one’s profession. But microdegrees may also solve another major educational problem. Across generations, some people have been unable to attend college due to cost. After all, for some people, taking four years out of the workforce to pursue a degree that may or may not offer a strong return on investment over time is simply too expensive and risky. Microdegrees offer a way for people, even those who can’t afford to attend college on a full-time basis, with the means to train for high-paying positions in in-demand industries.

https://news.elearninginside.com/future-education-microdegree/

http://www.fredericksburg.com/discover/the-future-of-higher-ed-in-the-region/article_616fcd27-5eb0-5435-9d83-d87bdbf17999.html

by Vinod Mahanta, EdTech

In an experiment recently, Facebook chatbots created their own language and had to be shut down. Isn’t that a dangerous sign that we are dealing with something we don’t fully understand yet? Andrew Ng responds:  “In the early days, electricity was seen as dangerous. People did PR stunts to show electricity could electrocute an elephant.This kind of fear mongering is completely unnecessary. Ultimately, like electricity, AI will be beneficial to the human society. And electrocution of an elephant hardly ever happens today. One thing that AI can do is that a small team of AI engineers can do such work today which earlier even thousand engineers could not have done.The thing I worry about is that AI software will be in direct competition with a lot of people for jobs.”

http://tech.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/people/ai-can-make-an-impact-like-electricity-courseras-co-founder-andrew-ng/60229635

by Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

In the 21st century, it is important for colleges not only to have computers and the Internet that students can access; colleges should implement up-to-date and popular technology for students to use in their everyday lives. The place to begin this goal is in the Instructional Technology Department. IT Departments should help colleges create their IT strategies. But, it is of utmost importance to include students in a college’s IT strategy to make it the most effective.

How to involve students in your college’s IT strategy