Online Learning Update

By: Ashley Godwin, Four States

Crowder College administration is seeing a pattern of students balancing course work with other priorities, but they have found a way to help.  Through a Title 3 grant, Crowder is implementing a new style of higher educational learning called uConnect where students can still be considered a full-time student, but not take so many classes at once. “So for example when I take 15 credit hours a semester that’s usually 5 classes. The first 8 weeks I’ll do two of those classes and then the next 8 weeks I’ll do the other three classes, so I’m still getting my 15 hours a semester, but I’m only studying two or three subjects at a time,” says Cindy Brown. “You have time to breathe. You have a lot of time to breathe, and just take a step back, because you need that for your mental health,” says Amy Leyva. Crowder will start uConnect this fall. And with technology becoming more prevalent in education, as the program progresses, Crowder is looking to add online or partial online classes.

http://www.fourstateshomepage.com/news/crowder-starts-new-program-to-lighten-the-load-on-students/1237539490

BY MURIEL VEGA, Hypepotemus

In today’s world, you’re a few clicks away from a how-to video or an online course covering anything you might want to learn. But for Haley Bohon, the in-person networking and community building aspect of learning is missing from those tools. “On the community side, I felt like a lot of my peers who had just moved to the city went to pop-up fitness classes and networking groups, looking for things to do outside of work, with new people,” says Bohon. “You should be able to take a photography class and that learning should be happening in your community.”

Haley Bohon Founded Pop-Up Class Startup SkillPop to Bring Back In-Person Learning

By J Vignesh, Economic Times

Udacity, an online education platform, is doubling down on working with enterprises to both upskill employees and also add more hiring partners in India. The enterprise clients include IT giants like Infosys and Wipro to new age companies like Flipkart and Myntra. The firm has also partnered with around 100 firms including Flipkart, HCL, Myntra, Tata Elxsi, Ola, Swiggy and Zomato to be its hiring partners. In the first half of 2018, Udacity has already done more than twice the enterprise business revenue of 2017.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/newsbuzz/udacity-looks-to-double-down-on-enterprise-game/articleshow/64581098.cms

By Shalina Chatlani, Education Dive
The workplace of the future will be marked by unprecedentedly advanced technologies, as well as a focus on incorporating artificial intelligence to drive higher levels of production with fewer resources. Employers and education stakeholders, noting the reality of this trend, are turning a reflective eye toward current students and questioning whether they will be workforce ready in the years to come. This has become a significant concern for higher education executives, who find their business models could be disrupted as they fail to meet workforce demands. A 2018 Gallup-Northeastern University survey shows that of 3,297 U.S. citizens interviewed, only 22% with a bachelor’s degree said their education left them “well” or “very well prepared” to use AI in their jobs.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/preparing-students-for-workplace-of-the-future/525536/

The Purdue University Board of Trustees on Friday (June 15) reaffirmed Purdue Moves as the university’s current strategic plan and added five initiatives to the plan to reflect several strategic updates. Building on the original Purdue Moves plan, trustees voted to add online learning, data science, life sciences and three-year degrees as priority initiatives.

https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2018/Q2/trustees-add-five-initiatives-to-purdue-strategic-plan.html

By Cait Etherington, eLearning Inside

Dr. Guralnick, a faculty member at Columbia University and the founder and CEO of Kaleidoscope Learning, reflected, “I have always viewed ICELW as a fairly unique conference, in that we bring together researchers and practitioners from such a wide variety of countries and backgrounds.”  In early June, Guralnick told eLearning Inside News that among other highlights, he anticipated that this year’s conference would feature far more discussions on the integration of virtual reality and augmented reality. This certainly proved to be true over the course of the three-day meeting. While the conference did still attract a certain number of presenters engaged in asynchronous online learning projects, discussions of virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality definitely dominated this year’s meeting.

Final Day of the ICELW Conference at Columbia University

by Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed

The one area where higher ed malaise seems largely absent is in the world of online learning. At least that is what I found after hanging out for a few days in DC at the UPCEA powered SOLA+R. I can’t remember when I’ve been with a group of 400+ positive higher ed people. Why were the online learning leaders who gathered at SOLA+R so upbeat? My theory is that, like most everything else in higher ed, the answer comes down to money. Online education has a business model.

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/upbeat-higher-ed-solar-conference

By Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology

University of Maryland found that people recall information better when it is presented to them in a virtual environment, as opposed to a desktop computer. The researchers asked 40 volunteers to familiarize themselves with printouts of well-known faces, such as Abraham Lincoln, the Dalai Lama, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Marilyn Monroe. Participants were then shown the faces placed in various locations within a “memory palace,” an imaginary physical location designed to promote “spatial mnemonic encoding,” or visual-based recall of an object in a specific place.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2018/06/14/study-people-remember-information-better-through-vr.aspx

By Shalina Chatlani, Education Dive

Scholars have long pointed out the inherent flaws and potential biases of student evaluation systems — and the fact that these scores can possibly unfairly determine whether faculty members receive tenure or a raise. While these long-used assessment metrics were created with the intention of improving instruction, many institutions are starting to recognize that these largely opinion-driven standards do little to inform administrators on how well a faculty member is performing, which can be negative for the integrity of the business model. That’s why the University of Oregon decided to turn the evaluation system on its head, with administrators developing an evaluation system that would rely more heavily on qualitative measurement, rather than having students rate instructors with arbitrary numbers.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/another-community-college-approved-for-bachelors-degrees/525562/

By James Paterson, Education Dive
Despite some setbacks, some massive open online courses are growing, with three of the 10 most popular courses provided on Coursera, a leading provider of MOOCs, produced by Deeplearning.ai, according to a report in EdSurge. Students are drawn to artificial intelligence courses led by Andrew Ng, the firm’s founder and a leading figure in AI who co-founded Coursera while at Stanford University. Ng’s machine learning course, which was Coursera’s first MOOC, has enrolled more than 1.7 million, and his new series of courses introduced last year have enrolled 250,000, which means, according to EdSurge, that he “teaches more people than anyone else on the planet.” Typically, Coursera students pay a $49 a month fee, which allows them access to courses, talks with the professor and a graduation certificate. The presenters get half the course’s revenue. Another online MOOC provider, Udacity, founded by another former Stanford professor, Sebastian Thrun, offers most of its courses without university help, and is valued at more than $1 billion.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/despite-overall-setbacks-one-mooc-on-ai-gains-ground/525812/

by Global Banking and Finance Review
Gone are the blackboards of yesteryear. Instead, many schools and higher education institutions are using a range of connected devices, both at school and at home, as part of a wireless revolution in the education sector.With the growth of automation, cyber-security and AI, the role that technology will play in the education sector is already shaping a future job market. In preparation for these new advancements, schools and students will need to adapt to a constantly changing way of digital learning. Here Performance Networks discuss 5 ways digital connectivity is revolutionising the education sector, as well as offering insight into how digital learning technology will shape schools in the future.

5 WaysDigital Connectivity is Revolutionising Education

by Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

Learning games provide greater benefits than passing the time in class or entertaining students to keep them occupied. Experienced teachers know that using games in the classroom can invigorate interest in learning, so why wouldn’t eLearning incorporate using gaming in digital courseware and learning tools? Learners who participate in instructional games have improved their performance scores by as much as 30% and increased their confidence by 20%, likely because of the motivation and engagement games produce. In short, gaming in the classroom improves overall retention by 17%. Not only are learners more engaged and better motivated to learn, but they also are more likely to remember what they’ve learned. Games have specific purposes in instruction. Incorporating games at specific instructional points in eLearning can augment the instructional program, and here are four ways to do it:

4 Powerful Ways to Use Games in eLearning

by Tom Vander Ark , Forbes
A couple of Oxford faculty imagine a different kind of university, one that is distributed and democratic. Joshua Broggi, Faculty of Philosophy, is the founder of Woolf Development, a platform startup that aims to leverage distributed ledger technology to remove higher education intermediaries, support decentralized governance structures and ensure the security of data. Blockchain, and other distributed ledger technologies (DLT) can address several other problems. First, a distributed ledger eliminates the risk that individuals claim a degree from an institution they did not graduate from. DLT also addresses the risk that an individual earned a credential from an institution that goes out of business. A third benefit of a DLT could be the efficiency of accumulating credits from multiple providers over time. A final benefit is cost savings from automating a number of administrative procedures and reducing overhead.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomvanderark/2018/06/13/woolf-building-the-first-blockchain-university/#615810d15ae5

By Joe Deegan & Nathan Martin, Pearson

Key points include:

1. develop and measure the specific skills that will be most in
demand, especially interpersonal skills and complex thinking;
2. utilize dynamic and work-based pedagogy to grow learners’
competencies, while also preparing educators to embrace
new forms of teaching and learning;
3. respond to the needs of the labor markets to ensure
continuous alignment;
4. create flexible and adaptive pathways to allow learners to
rapidly convert learning to earning; and
5. support changes that make the entire education landscape
function better, enabling traditional and alternative providers to
participate in creating the future of education alongside industry.

https://www.pearson.com/content/dam/one-dot-com/one-dot-com/global/Files/about-pearson/innovation/open-ideas/DDE_Pearson_Report_3.pdf

By Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Ed

What do online students want? According to a new survey, they want to conduct more of their course activities on their mobile phones or tablets, and they’d like better career-planning services. Their biggest regrets? They all relate to not having done enough research about the college and what it would cost before they enrolled. The survey, produced by Learning House and Aslanian Market Research, is based on responses from 1,500 past, current, and prospective online students.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/What-Do-Online-Students-Want-/243653

By Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed

In its quest to find a sustainable business model, online course provider edX will test charging users for access to previously free content. Observers say the move was inevitable. Massive open online courses got a little less open with edX’s recent announcement that it is introducing support fees for some of its MOOCs. Midway through an innocuous-looking blog post, Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX, said the nonprofit would be “moving away from our current model of offering virtually everything for free.” On May 3, edX began testing the introduction of a “modest support fee” that will “enable edX and partners to continue to invest in our global learning platform.” Adam Medrox, edX COO and president, said in an interview that the support fee was just one option being explored to ensure the long-term sustainability of the MOOC provider.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/06/14/edx-introduces-support-fee-free-online-courses

by Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed

This week I’m heading to the Summit for Online Learning and Administration + Roundtable (SOLA+R), hosted by the University Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA). Inside Digital Learning has a good preview of the convening. With the proliferation of events that bill themselves under the umbrella of “learning innovation”, how do folks choose where to go?

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/are-we-peak-learning-innovation-conference

By: Chris Booker, the Ohio State University

The Ohio State University is working to move textbooks off the shelves and online to make learning more affordable and accessible to students. An update on the university’s Affordable Learning Exchange program was presented to the Academic Affairs and Student Life Committee at the June Board of Trustees session on Thursday. The program works with Ohio State faculty to find or develop high-quality, open and affordable alternatives to conventional, high-cost textbooks. “A focus has been placed on the cost of textbooks. We talk about the cost of tuition and fees. We talk about housing and dining. We talk about the other costs of school as well,” Executive Vice President and Provost Bruce A. McPheron said. “Sometimes it’s that last dollar that makes a difference if a student is successful or not.”

https://news.osu.edu/news/2018/06/08/affordable-learning-exchange-works-to-increase-access-by-reducing-costly-course-material/

BY WILLIAM WILKERSON, Star-Telegram

Longhorns sophomore guard Andrew Jones, who is battling leukemia, has been cleared to enroll in online classes this summer and will move into a dorm room on campus, the university announced Thursday. “We’re really happy that Andrew Jones has been approved to enroll in web-based coursework for the first session of summer school today,” Texas head coach Shaka Smart said. “Andrew continues to receive treatment, but this is another positive step in his recovery. He will move into a dorm room, which will allow him to have a home base here during the times he is on campus. It will be great to have him around more, as he continues his fight.”

http://www.star-telegram.com/sports/college/big-12/university-of-texas/article212810319.html

A new study from Arizona State University suggests that online courses may be better equipped to help retain students and to keep them on the path to graduation, according to a report from Campus Technology. The university examined digital learning trends and outcomes from two public universities, two community colleges and a community college system. It found that three out of four institutions that offered in-person and online courses had higher retention and graduation rates for students who at least enrolled in some digital learning classes. At Houston Community College, for example, first-time freshman retention rates were at least nine points higher among students in exclusively online or blended courses. At the University of Central Florida, students who took between 40% and 60% of their courses online finished their degrees earlier than students who took no online classes. They completed their degrees in 3.9 years compared with 4.3 years for learners who only took in-person courses.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/study-online-learning-improves-retention-graduation-rates/521271/

By Ryan Whitwam, Extreme Tech

We are still in the very early days of useful artificial intelligence, so there aren’t a lot of specifics in Google’s new guidelines. Google’s general objectives for AI include being socially beneficial, avoiding creating or reinforcing unfair bias, being built and tested for safety, being accountable to people, incorporating privacy design principles, upholding high standards of scientific excellence, and being made available for uses that accord with these principles.

Google’s AI Manifesto: Accountability, Privacy, and No Killer Robots