Online Learning Update

By Clement Chen, Keith T. Jones, and Keith Moreland, CPA Journal

The results indicate that a student’s ability to regulate her commitment and effort can be associated with a more positive course experience, which may ultimately translate into a better evaluation of the course. This seems true whether the course is delivered in a traditional or online format. As such, differences among students seemed to have more of an effect than course delivery method; online students do not necessarily appear to be at a performance disadvantage. As noted earlier, some research suggests that online students are more motivated because they know that they cannot rely on class attendance.

https://www.cpajournal.com/2017/10/09/online-learning-compares-traditional-classroom/

By Rajiv Singh, Economic Times

Cofounded by Stanford professor and former Google vice-president Sebastian Thrun, Udacity offers free and paid online certification courses for students who earn nanodegrees and learn skills such as front-end web developing, iOS and Android programming, or machine learning. It recently rolled out ‘Introduction to Selfdriving Cars’ and ‘Flying Car’ nanodegree programmes to give students the skills to create autonomous flight vehicles.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/how-american-edutech-unicorn-udacity-is-re-skilling-indians-through-nanodegrees/articleshow/60987152.cms

by Robert Ubell, ATD
How to overcome common challenges of introducing massive open online courses to your learning portfolio. When e-learning first emerged a couple decades ago, organizations turned their backs on it. But by 2014 resistance had collapsed. With the conquest of swifter and cheaper virtual training over traditional methods, organizations started shutting down lavish ­country-club training parks and canceling employee travel to exotic sites. Yet, just when companies started imagining the learning industry was comfortably settled, dominated by just two principle players—classrooms and e-learning—a new competitor invaded. Out of the blue, MOOCs (massive open online courses) muscled in. About five years ago, computer scientists at Stanford University astonished everyone by streaming video lectures worldwide to anyone—for free. Since then, thousands of high-quality courses have streamed to millions of people.

https://www.td.org/Publications/Magazines/TD/TD-Archive/2017/10/Making-the-Most-of-Moocs

By Jeffrey R. Young, EdSurge

If 2012 was “The Year of the MOOC”—massive open online courses, usually offered for free—2017 could be “The Year of the Microcredential.” A growing number of elite colleges are offering short-form graduate and certificate programs that can be taken online for a fraction of the price of a traditional master’s. Proponents say the new offerings will expand access to graduate education and help workers update their skills in fast-changing fields. But the programs also serve as an example of how colleges, increasingly thinking like businesses, are eager to find new ways to bring in revenue.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-10-05-more-colleges-are-offering-microcredentials-and-developing-them-the-way-businesses-make-new-products

By Sydney Johnsonc EdSurge

For the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley, geography is everything. Split into two satellite campuses in South Texas—one in Edinburgh and another nearly 60 miles away in Brownsville—students and professors may commute more than an hour to get to their next class. And that’s just for those who live who live in the United States.  In Brownsville, a fence dividing the U.S. and Mexico runs visibly through the far-side of campus, and some students live south of the border. Though the Brownsville campus is just one freeway exit away from the national entrypoint, faculty say crossing can take over an hour on a busy day. That, plus the threat of heightened border security, can make attending school challenging, and intimidating, for some students. Increasingly, the university is turning to online classes to alleviate the struggle.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-10-04-a-south-texas-university-turns-to-online-courses-to-help-commuters-students-in-mexico

by Taylor Ostrom, Blue and Gray

Life as a college student is all about creating the perfect schedule to avoid unnecessary stress. In my experience, I have found online classes are a great option when trying to create a flexible schedule. However, after transferring to the University of Mary Washington last year, I was sad to learn that the university has a limited amount of classes offered online. In correspondence with Rita Dunston, university registrar, she said, “No more than 5 percent of online classes are offered during the academic year.” This percentage was alarming to me because not only am I a college student but I am a mother as well. Online classes are extremely beneficial to me when trying to make enough time for both my daughter and class work. They’re not only beneficial to me but other Mary Washington students too.

http://blueandgraypress.com/2017/10/05/umw-should-offer-more-online-classes-to-give-students-flexibility/

by David Chandler, MIT News

Five years ago, at the first annual Online Learning Summit, the question being asked was “can we scale learning” to reach the vast population on the internet, said Sanjay Sarma, MIT’s vice president for open learning, in his introduction to this year’s summit. That’s no longer in question, he continued: “The answer is emphatically yes.”
Now, as the number of people taking online classes around the world has rocketed upward, the questions revolve around issues of how to carry out such online education, how to provide meaningful credentials for online classes, and how to integrate and complement online education with that offered on traditional residential campuses.

http://news.mit.edu/2017/exploring-new-world-online-credentials-1003

By David Raths, Campus Technology

Algorithms can help faculty discover and select open educational resources for a course, map the concepts covered in a particular text, generate assessment questions and more. The basic definition of machine learning is that it allows a computer to learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed. One obvious example: the way a Netflix algorithm learns our TV-watching habits to make suggestions of other movies we might like. We come into contact with dozens of such machine-learning algorithms every day. And in support of faculty members, several efforts are underway to use machine learning to analyze the contents of open educational resources (OER) for their fit in a particular course.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2017/10/04/how-machine-learning-is-easing-oer-pain-points.aspx

by Pat King, Metro

Who would have thought that one of the most prestigious performing arts schools in the world would now be offering part of its curriculum for free online? That is exactly what the Juilliard School is offering with their new JuilliardX program. In a collaboration with the popular online education service edX, Juilliard will now offer six different classes that are open to the public without having to be accepted through their notoriously competitive audition process. What would Miles Davis think if he were alive today?

https://www.metro.us/lifestyle/career-education/juilliard-will-now-offer-free-online-courses

By Penelope Adams Moon, Inside Higher Ed

But while I see a lot of logic and value in telecommuting, I want to make a case for having online educators, in particular, physically present on campuses. My motivation and reasoning stem not from a sense that physical presence is crucial to student learning (it isn’t), but from my understanding of the political landscape of academic environments.  There are a host of reasons why online educators — particularly full-time contingent faculty members — should resist the lure of full-time telecommuting. If we hope to build an educational environment that truly values online spaces and online learners — not to mention non-tenure-track faculty members — we need to make ourselves impossible to ignore. The best way we can do that is to maintain both an intellectual and physical presence in our academic communities.

https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2017/10/03/why-online-professors-should-be-campus-essay

By Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed

Ohio State University and Apple on Wednesday announced a collaboration that will start a digital learning effort at the university that Apple and university officials said may represent the company’s most ambitious program in higher education. The university plans to start a series of efforts to promote student success, using tools from Apple. Starting in autumn 2018, new first-year students (at Columbus and regional campuses) will receive an iPad Pro with tools including Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard as well as apps to support learning and life at Ohio State.

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/05/ohio-state-apple-start-push-digital-learning

by Jim Carlson, Penn State
An effort to transform burgeoning online learning from being essentially individualistic to considerably more collaborative is gaining ground, according to a researcher who is breaking ground about the usefulness of online communities. Marcela Borge, assistant professor in learning, design and technology in Penn State’s College of Education, earned a National Science Foundation grant for her work on “Fostering Ecologies of Online Learning Through Technology Augmented Human Facilitation.” Borge said “Research in the learning sciences has shown that collaborative processes like discourse and collective sense-making are essential for learning. For this reason, we wanted to make sure that students who are learning in online contexts have equal access to meaningful learning experiences: collaborative learning, deep sense-making, building relationships with other students.”

http://news.psu.edu/story/485949/2017/10/03/research/new-computer-program-examine-collaborative-online-learning

by Calvin Harper, Go Certify

Learning House queried 1,500 past, present, and prospective online college students about their demographics and reasons for pursuing an online education. Their responses show some interesting trends. For example, cost can lead to a reluctance to enroll in school, but it can be overcome with minor scholarship incentives, as little as $500 in most instances. What came as no surprise was the finding that the percentage of students pursuing online computer science and IT degrees has more than doubled since 2014, from 9 percent to more than 20 percent. Additionally, the average age of online students is really declining. In 2016 the average age was 29, down from 36 just two years ago. The main reason for the age drop is directly related to an increase in the number of younger students signing up for online courses. Since 2012, the number of online students in the 18-to-24-year-old demographic has more than doubled.

http://www.gocertify.com/articles/we-are-living-in-the-age-of-online-learning

By Joel Hans, RT Insights

By creating some standards by which to structure blockchain-based IoT deployment, consortiums like this one seek to lower the barrier of entry to those who want a secure, easily-deployable blockchain experience. The Trusted IoT Alliance aims to publish open source code under some coordinated standards and reference architecture that even non-members could take advantage of. And they already have a common API that allows them to register transactions on both Hyperledger and Ethereum blockchains.

https://www.rtinsights.com/how-blockchains-could-set-iot-free/

by Aruna Sankaranarayanan, Live Mint

For generations, formal learning was associated and often limited to the confines of academic institutions. Pictures of young graduates throwing their caps into the air was symbolic of their new-found freedom as they didn’t have to study for dreaded exams anymore. Even though we still commemorate graduating from college with fanfare, this milestone doesn’t necessarily foreshadow the end of one’s education nowadays. In fact, the pace at which the world of work is changing, only those who are willing to be lifelong learners are the ones who will be able to take on the unpredictable workplace of tomorrow.

http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/yM9VUsXHPvy307eB9DJByM/A-beginners-guide-to-lifelong-learning.html

by Anant Agarwal, OZY

The ways in which the nature of work is changing beyond our control necessitate a more flexible education system, with “students” no longer being defined just as 18-to-22-year-olds on college campuses. In this era of Netflix subscriptions and Blue Apron dinner deliveries, it’s high time we embrace an education system that’s flexible, accessible and affordable, whether it’s by streaming classes onto our laptops at home or by hitting the pavement to get to class.

http://www.ozy.com/pov/higher-education-needs-a-rethink-to-train-tomorrows-workforce/81004

By Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed

At many medical schools, new or renovated libraries have few books. Librarians are divided on the trend. Earlier this year the Association of American Medical Colleges predicted that by 2030, the United States would have a shortage of up to 104,900 physicians. To try to curb this impending crisis, a wave of new medical schools have opened in the last decade. Eleven schools have been accredited by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education in the last five years, and eight more are currently under consideration.
As a condition of accreditation, these new schools must provide access to “well-maintained library resources sufficient in breadth of holdings and technology” to support the school’s educational mission, but it seems many medical schools are deciding that large print collections are no longer a vital component of those resources.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/10/03/do-medical-schools-still-need-books

By Henry Kronk, eLearning Inside

Udacity marks just one-way disrupters are profiting from online education using business models previously absent from the field. The company with the most registered users, Coursera, operates on a kind of graduated and diversified freemium model. You can try before you buy with Coursera, but to progress in their classes, students can pay a flat fee, get a bundled deal, or sign up for a subscription package. With enough credits, students can obtain accredited degrees. Though it has millions more users than Udacity, Coursera was just valued at $800 million in June. While MOOCs began as an initiative that would bring education to those who struggled to access it, the practice was soon swallowed up by-, or transformed into for-profit education. This is not an innovation of democracy, it’s capitalism.

https://news.elearninginside.com/for-profit-mooc-providers-are-pushing-margins-first-and-changing-the-world-second/

by Scott Pulsipher, Hechinger Report
An argument in favor of competency education:  The Education Department’s inspector general on Sept. 22 recommended that the department seek the return of more than $700 million in federal financial aid from the Western Governors University, citing concerns of the role of faculty at the large online university. The inspector general also said the school should be ineligible to receive any more federal aid payments. A response from Western Governors’ president follows:
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has wisely noted that to innovate, you have to be willing to be misunderstood, often for long periods of time. The release of the Office of Inspector General’s audit report is a strong reminder of just how true that is.

http://hechingerreport.org/opinion-innovation-wins-antiquated-ideas-higher-education-work-college-students-learn/

by Jim A. Jorstad, Center for Digital Ed
Universities are a wealth of sensitive data and prime targets for cyberattacks. Making sure everyone on campus is on board with your defense strategy is key to ensuring your institution’s cybersecurity.  While corporate cyberattacks have been in the headlines, academic institutions possess a treasure trove of important data, identities, sensitive financial information, Social Security numbers and private research. Today, there are many defensive software and hardware tools available to thwart cyberattacks, but equally important are having strategies to create effective communications, information and awareness. These strategies can cost little — or are free — but can yield impressive dividends and create a proactive first line of defense. End users can become confident in protecting themselves and their data from aggressive phishing, spamming, and ransomware attacks.

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/higher-ed/5-Strategies-to-Thwart-Cyberattacks-in-Higher-Education.html

By Bradley Fuster, US News

Some programs allow online students to earn several smaller certificates as they progress toward a full degree. Many working adults are overwhelmed by the time and financial commitments required to get an online degree. The fear of starting and not finishing a program, only to be saddled with debt, can deter potentially excellent students from taking online classes. Enter the online stackable credential. Students may complete as few as three online university classes at either the undergraduate or graduate level and earn a certificate, badge or other type of microcredential. Students can earn a second, more advanced certificate on top of the first one by completing a few more online courses. These stacked credentials allow students to quickly advance in their careers, adding a new line to their resumes.

https://www.usnews.com/education/online-learning-lessons/articles/2017-09-29/explore-pros-cons-of-online-stackable-credentials