Online Learning Update

By Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed
Oregon State University Ecampus has created a database compiling research on the efficacy of online learning. The Online Learning Efficacy Research Database, which launched this week, is a searchable resource of academic studies that was created in response to skepticism about online education. In a press release, Katie Linder, director of the Oregon State University Ecampus Research Unit, said that faculty want to see research on online learning before they invest their time in designing or teaching an online class. “We’re not here to convince faculty that online teaching and learning is always effective,” said Linder. “This database is meant to give them an opportunity to dig in and read the studies themselves and make their own assessments of the outcomes of those studies.”

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/11/10/online-learning-research-database-launched

by David Raths, Campus Technology

Business intelligence (BI) projects are only worthwhile if users derive tangible value from them. And campus decision-makers don’t have the time to wade through complex reports, no matter how relevant the data. With that in mind, the BI team at George Washington University (DC) tapped into data visualization tools to create a dashboard tailored to the needs of busy college deans. The Dean’s Dashboard is a collection of several high-level metrics from different business areas across the university. It is one result of a five-year process of creating an enterprise data warehouse and a culture of data stewardship across the university, as well as the deployment of an agile project management process that fosters incremental improvement.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2017/11/09/streamlining-access-to-complex-data.aspx

BY LAURA ASCIONE, eCampus News

Eighty-two percent of institutions say open educational resources (OER) will be an important source of course content in 5 years, according to a survey of CIOs detailed in an annual report that takes a look at campus IT. [Read last year’s Campus Computing results here “CIOS: 5 campus IT priorities for 2016 and beyond.“] The results of the report were released during the recent EDUCAUSE 2017 conference held in Philadelphia, Pa. This year saw small gains in formal institutions support for using OER in course materials, but faculty concerns remain about the quality of OER and updates surrounding the materials, according to the annual Campus Computing Project.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/it-newsletter/report-oer-video-take-lead-campus/

by Jeremy Epstein, ClickZ

In the mid ‘90s, marketers heard about email and the web. Ten years later, it happened again, with Facebook and Twitter. Finally, they began to understand and adapt to the implications that customers are connected and empowered in a way previously unimaginable. Marketers who recognize that blockchains represent another seismic shift have a large opportunity in front of them. History may be repeating itself.

https://www.clickz.com/blockchain-marketing-how-the-technology-behind-bitcoin-could-change-marketing-forever/114114/

By Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology

A video game about 15th and 16th century art is the center of a new course this fall at Texas A&M University. Offered in the College of Architecture’s Department of Visualization, ARTS 489: World of Medici combines faculty-led lectures with ARTé: Mecenas, an art history game developed by Triseum in collaboration with the department’s LIVE Lab to immerse students in the course subject matter. Students are given many attempts to complete the game, which requires them to learn and retain the course material as they build and maintain a financial empire in Medici-era Florence. Those who achieve 100 percent mastery in the game earn one credit hour.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2017/11/08/texas-a-m-offers-art-history-video-game-as-credit-bearing-course.aspx

By CSU Fullerton

Beginning in January, students at Cal State Fullerton have another choice when they select their college courses: to pick classes that offer free digital materials or low-cost print versions. With the passage of state Senate Bill 1359, all college campuses are required to highlight on their online course schedules those classes that exclusively use free digital materials or low-cost print versions. The effort is but one way the University is developing ways to help students get the courses and the materials they need to succeed in their educational goal of a college degree. Cal State Fullerton is one of 11 universities and schools across the nation taking part in the OpenStax Institutional Partnership Program to encourage the use of free, peer-reviewed textbooks and other Open Educational Resources — free digital teaching, learning and research materials — on campus.

http://news.fullerton.edu/2017fa/Affordable-Course-Materials.aspx

by MEENA KRISHNAMSETTY, Insider Monkey

If you can overlook the lack of clout of an MOOC, then you’d actually be a prime learner. Gaining new skills for a lower price and shorter time than by going to University, look here: 10 best websites like Coursera, Udacity and other MOOCs. In addition to the self-satisfaction that accompanies newly acquired skills, you’re also more likely to land a job with a bigger salary and opportunities for further development. With the increase of technology and internet development, you can access that spectrum of information and knowledge anyplace and anytime.

https://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/10-best-websites-like-coursera-udacity-and-other-moocs-521897/

By Danny Bradbury, Distributed

Hyperledger , the blockchain reference framework launched by the Linux Foundation , is nearly two years old. It is starting to gain commercial traction, underpinning projects such as Everledger , the blockchain to track the provenance of high-value items like diamonds.  Now, participants can enroll in ” Blockchain for Business – An Introduction to Hyperledger Technologies .” It is an introduction to the Hyperledger ecosystem, which consists of various frameworks. They should expect to walk away with an understanding of common Hyperledger use cases, how to install its various frameworks and how to build simple applications on them. One useful takeaway will be information on how to contribute to the open-source project.  Why was Hyperledger launched anyway and why should you care? The problem with the blockchain is that there are no standards for it. There may be heavily adopted and supported projects, such as the Bitcoin blockchain and Ethereum, but the Linux Foundation, which specializes in reference implementations, wanted code that would effectively be the Linux of the blockchain world.

http://www.nasdaq.com/article/hyperledger-goes-to-school-cm872546

By Mark Lieberman, Inside Higher Ed Digital

Administrators knew faculty members felt frustrated and isolated by the online development process, though Bond said they all agreed that instructional designers were valuable. Bond and his team landed on a faculty cohort model in which six to eight instructors joined together and met every other week in a 12-week time frame. During that time period, each professor developed one online course with the help of the group. The instructional design team provided substantive assistance and design input during the process. Unlike at other institutions with faculty cohort models, where instructors gathered to create a single course, each instructor in the cohorts at Central Michigan was manager for their own online course. Another new element under this approach was the designation of one of the instructional design team members as a course production services coordinator, or CoursePro.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2017/11/08/trial-and-error-faculty-cohort-model-speeds-online-course

By Sean Gallagher, Ed Surge

Corporate learning and development, often referred to as L&D, is radically different than just a few years ago. Meanwhile, the education dialogue has shifted to a focus on employment-related themes such as competencies and skills. “Businesses today have to be more agile and have to be able to pivot—access to content needs to be very rapid,” says Lori Bradley, executive vice president for global talent management at PVH Corp, a publicly- traded fashion and apparel company with 35,000 employees. “Priorities and jobs are changing more quickly, so we need an agile learning environment that anticipates what learning needs will be, and where we can quickly access them.” The typical employee has one percent of their time available for learning, according to research by Bersin by Deloitte.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-11-06-as-corporate-world-moves-toward-curated-microlearning-higher-ed-must-adapt

by Merris Stansbury, eCampus News

Soft skills, ease with technologies are some of the most important skills undergrad students should be learning today for the future of tomorrow. “The jobs of the future will be those that focus on intellectual capitalism, not commodity capitalism,” said Futurist, Physicist and Bestselling Author Michio Kaku during the recent 2017 EDUCAUSE conference keynote, held in Philadelphia, Pa. This was the big reveal to the thousands of EDUCAUSE attendees ranging from college and university faculty to CIOs, and from some of the world’s leading tech companies to some of the country’s most prominent higher ed provosts and presidents—all anxiously awaiting what the crystal ball of the postsecondary future had to say through Kaku’s educated guess.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/campus-administration/michio-kaku-higher-ed-skills/

by David Raths, Campus Technology

Learning analytics tools have become increasingly valuable for college and university administrators looking to boost student success. But can data also inform decision-making on the part of students themselves? A project at Purdue University (IN) explores that possibility by taking advantage of the “quantified self” movement (made popular by health-tracking apps such as Fitbit) and putting the data into students’ hands. Pattern, one of several teaching and learning apps developed by Purdue Teaching and Learning Technologies over the past few years, allows students to self-track their academic and extracurricular pursuits and rate how productive they are. The app also lets them compare their behaviors to other students to see which activities may yield the best results. Pattern can suggest when to study, recommend ways students can be more efficient with their time, and suggest how long students should be spending on tasks.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2017/11/01/purdue-app-puts-learning-data-into-students-hands.aspx

by Pat Donachie, Education Dive

Colleges and universities can take advantage of texting students and parents, according to Mongoose Research, which notes that administrators should follow the same FERPA regulations for texting as they do for e-mails and phone conversations. While nonprofit organizations like schools are not legally required to get consent for texting, Mongoose advises schools offer some kind of opt-in. The research also shows students will begin ignoring texts from colleges if they are sent too often or are not helpful — the ones that are include reminders on deadlines and updates for admissions, promotional efforts. Mongoose also advises school leaders and administrators to limit the number of staff and departments that can send texts to students, as students typically only want texts from admissions, financial aid, student success and the Registrar’s office.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/how-can-colleges-best-use-texting-with-students/510218/

by Magnetic Magazine

To help optimize the usage of available bandwidth for streaming video, most streaming platforms use algorithms known as Adaptive Bitrate (ABR). Traditional ABR algorithms are either rate-based that vary the video quality based on connection speed, or buffer-based that attempt to constantly keep a certain percentage of the video pre-loaded as a buffer so that the stream is smooth. Although there are several AI streaming algorithms in development, two of the most notable are MIT’s Pensieve and Netflix’s Dynamic Optimizer. In fact as the usage of AI enables more efficient video streaming, cloud data distribution and other optimizations – the efficiency of the internet in general is likely to improve.

https://www.magneticmag.com/2017/11/deep-learning-could-be-the-future-of-online-streaming/

by Emily Price, Fortune

In recent years several universities and colleges around the world have started offering some of their courses for free. Over the past six years over 8,000 different courses have been made available for free to anyone who wants to take them. In a story on Quartz, Class Central founder Dhawal Shah notes that he’s been tracking them all since they rose to prominence.  Free courses range from humanities and social sciences classes to business, health & medicine, and computer science courses. Classes are taught by professors from places like Stanford, Johns Hopkins, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Colorado. If you’re interested in giving one a try, Quartz has a good rundown up of some of the best courses available as well as how to sign up for them. You can also view a more detailed list on Class Central’s website.

http://fortune.com/2017/11/06/free-online-college-courses/

by eMarketer Daily

US consumers are spending more time with their digital devices than ever before, and that holds true while they’re already watching something else. eMarketer estimates 177.7 million adults will regularly use a second-screen device while watching TV this year, an increase of 5.1% vs. 2016. As individuals spend more of each day digitally connected, simultaneous media use will rise. As always, consumers want to fit as much into their day as possible, and multitasking during TV is often how that’s accomplished. By 2019, 193.5 million US adults will access the internet during TV viewing at least once a month. Some 162.6 million people will use smartphones as a second-screen device while watching TV in 2017. This is much higher than the 110.5 million simultaneous users expected for desktops/laptops. The number of people using a desktop/laptop and TV set at the same time will be roughly flat during the forecast, due to declines in overall PC use.

https://www.emarketer.com/Article/Few-Viewers-Giving-TV-Set-Their-Undivided-Attention/1016717

by Elizabeth Woyke, MIT Technology Review

A number of workers face the same situation: they’d like to boost their salaries and improve their career prospects by working in technology, but they lack technical skills and don’t know how to acquire them. There are, of course, conventional ways to pick up that knowledge, including reading textbooks, watching educational videos, taking in-person classes, and finding industry mentors. But San Francisco–based Salesforce—one of the world’s largest software companies, with $8.4 billion in annual sales—has found that self-guided, online, interactive training is an effective way to teach skills to its 26,000 employees worldwide. Its main tool is Trailhead, which the company developed in 2014 and began deploying for internal training in 2016. Today, all Salesforce employees are encouraged to use the platform.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609295/making-job-training-software-people-actually-want-to-use/

by Arthur Levine, Inside Higher Ed

That definition of access, while still essential, is now outdated and inadequate — no longer serving the nation’s needs. The United States is making a transition from a national, analog, industrial economy to a global, digital, information economy. The historic view of access is a product of the former, while largely ignoring the realities of the latter. Today we need something very different. The United States is experiencing profound, accelerating and continuous change owing to the transition, and the lives of many Americans are being disrupted. Jobs are being eliminated, both those requiring relatively little education and increasingly those requiring a great deal of education but involving routine work — even in fields such as journalism, medicine and law. Some of those jobs have migrated to other countries, but the overwhelming majority of them — four out of five — have been lost to automation.

https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2017/11/06/need-provide-educational-access-across-peoples-entire-lifespan-essay

by Jill Barshay, Hechinger Report

ITT Technical Institute, a for-profit university, produced more than 64,000 dropouts with student loan debt in fiscal years 2015 and 2016 before it went bankrupt and shut down in September 2016. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File) AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File The saddest stories among those who owe some of the $1.3 trillion in student loan debt are those of college dropouts. They took out loans to go to school, hoping for a better life. But without college degrees, many don’t find good jobs to help pay back these loans. It not only ruins their lives, it’s terrible for the nation’s budget. The loans are financed by the federal government, ultimately leaving taxpayers on the hook.
Which schools are leaving taxpayers and students in the lurch most often? I ran some calculations, using the latest data, released in September.

http://hechingerreport.org/federal-data-shows-3-9-million-students-dropped-college-debt-2015-2016/

BY LAURA ASCIONE, eCampus News

Online education programs are seeing steady growth, though lower tuition and the use of innovative technologies and tools seem to be lagging, according to the Changing Landscape of Online Education (CHLOE). CHLOE is a survey of chief online officers at community colleges and four-year public and private nonprofit institutions and focuses on the management of online education as it becomes more mainstream at U.S. institutions. The emergence of the chief online officer position at many institutions is strong evidence that online education is becoming more mainstream, and the CHLOE survey draws upon feedback from 104 chief online officer responses to inform its report on current online education trends, including resource allocation, emerging tools, instructional innovations, and more.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/ed-tech-leadership/innovation-online-education/

BY JUDY FRELS AND KEVIN CAPITANI, eCampus News

Although we’re clearly not at the point where online learning can be considered a “mature” industry, enough edtech companies have entered the market and enough online programs are being offered that higher education leaders are looking for strategies to effectively launch or grow online programs for this new era. Specifically, deans, faculty members, and other college and university leaders are seeking new approaches to increase enrollment in online programs, help individuals attain degrees and improve their professional lives, and extend their reach. In addition, these institutional leaders are looking for better ways to differentiate, expand, and structure their online offerings.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/campus-administration/launching-growing-online-programs/