Online Learning Update

by Jon Marcus, Hechinger Report

Administrators at universities and colleges across the country have been spending the summer in the same level of suspense as they invest scarce resources in large numbers of new programs they hope will bolster sagging enrollment. Largely unnoticed federal figures show that, even as their finances have become more and more strained and their student populations have declined, public and private higher education institutions have added 41,446 degree or certificate programs since 2012. That’s a 21 percent increase in the number that existed when the dramatic slide in enrollment began.

Panicked universities in search of students are adding thousands of new majors

by Halona Black, Education Dive
The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s Transfer and Mobility study for 2018 reports that only 5.6% of the fall 2011 cohort of students attending two-year institutions in the U.S. transferred to four-year institutions after receiving either a certificate or an associate degree from their starting institutions. The vast majority of students transferred without a degree. Of those students who transferred, slightly more than half (50.5%) started at a two-year institution and transitioned to a four-year institution. Asian and white students at two-year institutions were more likely to transfer to a four-year institution (49.8% and 50.4%, respectively) than black and Hispanic students (33.2% and 39.5%, respectively).

https://www.educationdive.com/news/report-only-56-of-two-year-college-students-transferred-to-four-year-ins/529845/

by ALEX SALKEVER, the Big Think

The general consensus on whether robots will take jobs wholesale remains mixed but is trending towards resignation. The optimists believe that, as with the Industrial Revolution and the Agricultural Revolution, the technological improvements that will come from the dawning era of artificial intelligence and its offshoot in modern robotics will create more new jobs than they destroy.  But until now, those conversations have held that the robots and AI will replace human jobs at some point in the future.  What if, in fact, the robots and AI have already started coming for jobs and this is happening not due to simple automation but because these systems are rapidly attaining capabilities and skills once presumed to be defensible by humans?  In fact, the pool of things that “AI Can’t Do” appears to be steadily shrinking.

https://bigthink.com/alex-salkever/what-if-ai-is-coming-for-jobs-faster-than-we-thought

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology
When Oral Roberts University hosted the one-day event, “Blockchain Essentials in Education,” all attendees received a blockchain-based certificate from the Tulsa university verifying their participation. As CIO Michael Mathews, the event’s organizer, explained, blockchain will be as important to transforming education as the internet was. He said he believes those colleges and universities that jump on the secure public ledger concept early enough and begin testing it out will be the ones who could see the biggest benefits. Mathews believes blockchain will have the “biggest payback” within an organization’s processes where trust is essential as part of a “value chain”: student application processing, transcript evaluations, articulation agreements. Blockchain “templates” that run in the cloud could replace “entire cumbersome processes” — akin, he added, to when Microsoft Word templates were first introduced and people figured out how they could optimize word processing and mail merge.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2018/08/09/why-higher-ed-should-do-more-with-blockchain-tech.aspx

By Institute Communications at Georgia Tech
The Georgia Institute of Technology has announced a new online cybersecurity master’s degree that will be offered for less than $10,000 and delivered in collaboration with edX. The Online Master of Science in Cybersecurity (OMS Cybersecurity) is designed to address a severe global workforce shortage in the field. According to the 2017 Global Information Security Workforce Study, the shortage is expected to reach 1.8 million people by 2022.

https://www.news.gatech.edu/2018/08/08/georgia-tech-creates-cybersecurity-masters-degree-online-less-10000

By Amelia Harper, Education Dive

The workplace is “on the cusp of a major evolution, eSchool News reports, and educators need to prepare students for a future in which 85% of the jobs have not been invented yet and many jobs will require increased digital skills and the ability to work with machines as an integrated team. The changing workplace will also allow lesser-skilled workers to accomplish tasks with the aid of machines and AI and could allow workers to focus on more creative and critical thinking efforts when freed from mundane tasks. In order to prepare students for this future, teachers will need to become “collaborative mentors” who encourage the development of creativity and critical thinking skills through the use of project-based learning and the increased use of performance-based assessments that focus on individual mastery of skills.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/new-approaches-needed-to-prepare-students-for-unknown-careers/529604/

by Class Central

A frequent commenter on Class Central’s MOOC Report alerted us to a new page that edX added to their websiBeyond this list of names, not much information is available. The pages for these individual degrees consists of no details and a signup form to learn more. The ‘Masters’ page on edX lists thirteen upcoming master’s degree programs and one Online Master of Science in Analytics Degree from Georgia Tech.

EdX Lists 13 Upcoming Online Masters Degree Program

by Greg Toppo, Inside Higher Ed

Diane Auer Jones, the administration’s top higher education official, said in an interview last month with Inside Higher Ed that the U.S. Department of Education is considering eliminating not just the standard credit-hour definition of academic course work — it may also overhaul “regular and substantive” requirements. Online education proponents and a few others call it an anachronistic impediment to innovation in an era where one-third of students study at least partially online, but others aren’t so sure. “It is an ancient rule by Title IV standards, but also it is a rule that reflects its time — and that time has passed,” said Dan Madzelan, associate vice president at the American Council on Education who previously served for years as a career official at the Education Department.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018/08/08/new-debate-regular-and-substantive-interaction-between

BY DIANA G. OBLINGER, eCampus News

AI and robotics, as areas of study, are catalyzing the creation of new majors, minors, and certificate programs in our colleges and universities. Beyond the study of AI or robotics are the complexities of how our work as professionals changes alongside increasingly capable machines. As our roles change, educational needs will change. The real challenge for higher education is to look beyond the delivery of higher education to how AI, big data, analytics, robotics, and wide-scale collaboration might impact the substance of education. What students learn, what college credentials signify, and how we keep abreast of changes may all shift.

What will AI and robotics mean for higher education?

by Bloomberg
Business and academia in the U.S. have traditionally been able to equip new workforce recruits with the hard skills they need to perform at a high level in the workplace. But with the regular flow of new technologies and business models into the market, today’s employees must navigate all this change with a varied skill set. This means soft skills such as adaptability and complex problem-solving are more important than ever for recent college grads, mid-career professionals, and seasoned executives. Employer needs are continually shifting in response to changes in industry and the marketplace, so workers also need to keep refreshing both their hard and soft skills.

https://www.bna.com/uploadedFiles/BNA_V2/Micro_Sites/2018/Future_of_Work/Workday%20Bloomberg%20Build-Tomorrow-Talent_FINAL.pdf

BY Briana Vannozzi, NJTV

Rutgers University undergraduate student Boris Franklin reflects on the long road it took to get where he is today.     “People in our community always rooted for each other to do better because we all knew we were in a similar struggle,” said Franklin. Student isn’t a title Franklin envisioned for himself. He’s working toward a psychology degree after serving an 11-year stint in prison for a deadly drug deal. “I never imagined going to college before NJ-STEP, so I didn’t think, ‘OK, I’m going to get out of prison and go to school.’ This was completely new to me,” said Franklin.

Program gives prisoners a second chance through college

by Nico Savidge, EdSource

Gov. Jerry Brown envisions the college as a training option for so-called “stranded workers” – the estimated 2.5 million 25- to 34-year-old Californians who don’t have a college education. Once it opens in 2019 it will become a key piece of Brown’s education legacy for California. Brown and the college’s proponents say it will also help fuel the state’s economy — the fifth-largest in the world — and its insatiable need for skilled labor.

California’s online community college will break new ground in higher ed

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology
To help community colleges make technology upgrades that will help them deliver cybersecurity education, the U.S. Department of Education has been allotted $1 million in an omnibus spending law, H.R. 1625, approved by Congress earlier this year. According to an explanatory document that accompanied the spending bill, the money is to be spent on a pilot grant program to help the schools make their programs “state of the art.”

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2018/08/02/cybersecurity-education-in-ccs-gets-ed-boost.aspx

by James Paterson, Education Dive
Two of the leading learning management system companies are cutting ties after a six-year partnership — a split that Inside Higher Education reported was likely “messy.” U.S.-based Blackboard and Australia’s Moodle separately announced the end to the partnership, which will mean that Blackboard won’t use the Moodle name in the future, but its Moodlerooms product will be maintained. Inside Higher Education reported it was a “bold move” for Moodle to strike out on its own, although Blackboard reported it had taken the action. It said it refused to renew Moodle’s contract, in part because Moodle was prioritizing separate partnerships that allowed clients to self-host rather than work with Blackboard’s Moodlerooms. Moodle CEO Martin Dougiamas said the partnership had been “awkward” and “uncomfortable” from the start.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/lms-market-after-blackboard-moodle-breakup/529147/

By James Paterson, Education Dive
Two much-talked about concepts in higher education are coming together in an agreement that joins a organization offering assessments for “21st century skills” with an ed-tech firm that specializes in credentials. Education Design Lab, a nonprofit that uses design-thinking concepts to assess the soft skills that some employers say college graduates are missing, reported it is partnering with the Credly, which provides a platform for workforce skills credentials. Credly says its working with 12,000 institutions. George Mason University in Virginia is one of the institutions that worked with Education Design Lab to develop a blended program to teach students soft skills. The nonprofit piloted the program with a number of institutions to test their methods of assessing, recognizing and badging these abilities.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/new-partnership-offers-colleges-soft-skills-credentials-for-their-students/529188/

DANNY MCAULIFFE, Florida Politics

The curriculum — which covers topics like fundraising, management, messaging and field work — is widely sought after. At the end of June, course registrations exceeded 28,000, according to NDTC. In Florida, 320 Democratic candidates have made use of NDTC’s campaign resources. So far, according to self-reported data, 268 of 369 Democratic candidates who have used the training and have had primaries have won. But according to the NTDC founder Kelly Dietrich, winning local races may not be the best indicator of success. He told media his organization’s goals include electing Democrats to office at every level, creating a deeper bench of candidates for each election, and facilitating an up-ticket effect, which occurs when local candidates help turn out votes for Democrats running for higher offices.

Free online courses teach Democrats how to run campaigns

By Andy Fell, UC Davis

“Introduction to Research,” BIM 088V, is an exclusively online class taught by Louie, professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UC Davis, for the University of California’s Cross Campus Enrollment program. The class was first offered in spring quarter 2018 and enrolled about 125 students, one-fifth of them from outside UC Davis. The course is intended to introduce undergraduates, especially “first generation” students with no family experience in higher education to draw on, to the ways they could conduct research with a faculty mentor. They explore their interests, practice composing letters to professors applying for a position on a research project, and learn about ethics, integrity and social impact. The accompanying game, “Re: Search, A Campus Story” is intended to engage students and draw them in while reinforcing key points from each week’s work, Louie said. There are nine game levels, with a new level unlocking after each week’s class.

https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/student-built-online-game-accompanies-online-class

by Paul LeBlanc, EDUCAUSE Review

As EDUCAUSE contemplates its next twenty years, what signals from our future exist today?2 Current trends are fairly well established, even if still in their relative infancy in some cases. Online learning is a mainstay of higher education. Data analytics, common in so many industries, is starting to take hold in higher education. Supplied with that data, machine learning is being applied to a variety of areas such as persistence,3 assessment, personalized learning, and improved workforce pipelines.4 But these are not signals from the future—they are technologies that are already reshaping our work. What are our present-day signals from the future? Although we may flounder and perhaps fail in our current attempts to use them (à la the Newton), I suggest paying attention to four: game play and immersive learning; virtual and augmented reality; connected learners; and artificial intelligence.

https://er.educause.edu/articles/2018/7/reading-signals-from-the-future-educause-in-2038

BY MARTIN PRITIKIN, eCampus News

Law schools have been far behind most other academic disciplines in embracing online education. That is why a recent proposal by the American Bar Association (ABA) to increase the number of credits that law schools may offer online has garnered attention. In reality, this proposal doesn’t go nearly far enough. Current ABA Standard 306 limits law schools to offering no more than 15 credits (out of a typical 86 to 90 total) to be taught online. It also prevents law students from taking any online credits until they have completed their first year. The proposed revised Standard 306 would allow law schools to offer up to one-third of their credits—about 28 to 30—to be offered online, effectively doubling the current limit. It would also allow up to 10 credits of online courses within the first year.

It’s time to expand online legal education

Laura Jacobi, Journal of Educators Online

The purpose of this study was to examine instructional strategies used to motivate students to engage in online communication courses. Eighteen undergraduate students, seven graduate students, and ten faculty members were interviewed individually or in small focus groups. Results indicate the significance of instructional strategies that promote autonomy, perceived competence, and relatedness in motivating students. Two instructional strategies that promote autonomy (i.e., conveying choice in instructional language and validating negative feelings associated with arduous or tedious tasks) were not discussed by participants in this study, which poses interesting challenges for instructors. The results reveal the utility of Self-Determination Theory in aiding contemporary scholars in understanding the particular needs of online learners and the distinct challenges for today’s teachers.

https://www.thejeo.com/archive/2018_15_2/jacobi

Sherrie Negrea, University Business
Imagine coaching a student intern who is teaching in a school that’s so remote, there are no roads leading into town. Or trying to observe a social work major who has a field placement hundreds of miles from campus. For colleges and universities that serve rural areas, interacting with students who do not have access to campus—either by car or the internet—can be a challenge. But higher ed institutions are finding ways to expand their reach into rural communities through video-based distance learning.

https://www.universitybusiness.com/article/how-colleges-reach-remote-students