Online Learning Update

By Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed

Fully online programs widen achievement gaps and often are unaffordable, says report seeking to discourage politicians from pulling back on federal policy protections.   Spiros Protopsaltis, an associate professor and director of the Center for Education Policy and Evaluation at George Mason University, co-wrote the report with Sandy Baum, a fellow at the Urban Institute and professor emerita of economics at Skidmore College.  Ray Schroeder, associate vice chancellor for online learning at the University of Illinois at Springfield [also, Founding Dir of the UPCEA National Council for Online Education], said the report by Protopsaltis and Baum painted online education with too broad a brush.    For example, its comparisons between online programs and on-campus ones failed to acknowledge the low graduation rates and default rates of many traditional programs…. Likewise, Schroeder said the report ignored the value of subdegree credentials such as online certificates and industry certifications. And he said it did not account for the growing potential of technology like adaptive learning to boost student results online.  “The tools we have in higher education are being refined by AI, machine learning and the ways we can engage students,” said Schroeder.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/01/16/online-learning-fails-deliver-finds-report-aimed-discouraging

Andrew Ross Sorkin, NY Times

What if there were a way to eliminate student debt? No, really. Student debt reached a new height last year — a whopping $1.5 trillion. A typical student borrower will have $22,000 in debt by graduation, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Now, Silicon Valley is backing a novel idea that proposes to rewrite the economics of getting an education. The concept is deceptively simple: Instead of charging students tuition — which often requires them to take out thousands of dollars in loans — students go to school for free and are required to pay back a percentage of their income after graduation, but only if they get a job with a good salary. The idea, known as an Income Share Agreement, or I.S.A., has been experimented with and talked about for years. But what’s happening at Lambda School, an online learning start-up founded in 2017 with the backing of Y Combinator, has captivated venture capitalists.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/business/dealbook/education-student-loans-lambda-schools.html

By Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed

The school’s online learning platform will change its name to Harvard Business School Online, having proven itself worthy of the prestigious brand.  For an Ivy League business school once wary of entering the online education space, the rebranding is significant. Nitin Nohria, dean of Harvard Business School, once famously proclaimed that the school would not enter the online education arena in his lifetime.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/01/08/harvard-business-school-finally-puts-its-stamp-online-learning

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic & Becky Frankiewicz, Harvard Business Review

In short, we believe that market demands clearly call for a paradigm change. More and more students are spending more and more money on higher education, and their main goal is largely pragmatic: to boost their employability and be a valuable contributor to the economy. Even if the value attached to a university degree is beneficial to those who obtain it, companies can help change the narrative by putting less weight on “higher education” as a measure of intellectual competence and job potential, and instead, approach hiring with more open-mindedness.

https://hbr.org/2019/01/does-higher-education-still-prepare-people-for-jobs

James Paterson, Education Dive
Temple University has agreed to pay nearly $5.5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit with students in its Fox School of Business who said the university provided inflated data to U.S. News & World Report’s popular college ranking. The lawsuit alleged Temple claimed its entire incoming class for its online MBA program submitted a Graduate Management Admission Test score when only one-fifth of students actually did, leading to inflated average test scores and a higher spot in the ranking. U.S. News removed Temple’s program from the ranking as a result. The plaintiffs said the scandal “will have a long reaching negative impact on [the] school’s reputation, prestige and peer ratings.” Temple will pay $4 million to students enrolled in its online MBA program between 2015 and 2018 and an additional $1,475,000 to students who attended six other programs within its business school over the same period. It also will establish a $5,000 scholarship in business ethics. ​

https://www.educationdive.com/news/temple-pays-55m-to-settle-lawsuit-over-us-news-ranking-inflation/545474/

Elizabeth Mann Levesque, Brookings

In the past two years, with Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ leadership, the department has taken a number of steps to roll back federal regulations, in lockstep with the Trump administration’s broader playbook. As a result, during the midterm elections, Ms. DeVos was an easy and often-invoked target for Democrats. Although Democrats took control of the House, with the Senate and White House still under Republican control, it seems unlikely that there will be much in the way of legislation that undermines or changes policies implemented by DeVos. Nonetheless, with control of committee chairs in the House, Democrats could make life difficult for DeVos starting in 2019. Indeed, several incoming chairs have signaled plans to use their oversight authority to examine DeVos’ policies. What might we see in the way of congressional oversight of education during the 116^th Congress?

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2018/12/29/congress-in-2019-democrat-led-house-oversight-is-likely-in-store-for-devos/

By Michael Schneider, Inc

Especially in today’s world, where robots are doing the majority of the résumé screening, you have to pass predictive analytics assessments, and (owing to ease of accessibility) there’s an average of 250 applications per corporate job opening. In a LinkedIn Emerging Jobs Report released in early December, new data revealed the 10 jobs with the highest demand and most significant growth in hiring rates, making them conceivably more stable career choices and more attainable.  Although the job market is vast and continuously evolving, aligning your education and experiences with these 10 jobs is a good strategy if you’re looking to snag a new job quickly.

https://www.inc.com/michael-schneider/new-linkedin-data-reveals-10-us-jobs-with-largest-growth-rate.html

By Megan Burks, KPBS

“We have this increasing population of older adults and seniors as part of the Baby Boomer population and they’re redefining what it means to age,” he said. “So they’re looking for creative pursuits, they’re looking for continuing education, they’re looking to get involved in things.”

https://www.kpbs.org/news/2019/jan/04/looking-through-lens-life-after-55/

Andrew Kreighbaum and Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed

The Education Department’s proposals for upcoming negotiated rule-making process would narrow the responsibilities of accreditors and modify federal definitions for credit hour and distance education. In a package of highly detailed proposals set to be released today, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos delivers on a promise to limit the authority and scope of higher education accreditors, the organizations that serve as gatekeepers for federal student aid. The Trump administration wants to clarify that the Education Department — and not accreditors — is responsible for enforcing federal student aid rules, and would give the agencies more latitude to approve and encourage innovative programs, particularly ones featuring online or competency-based education.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/01/07/trump-administration-wants-flexibility-accreditors-and-encourage-alternative

William Arruda, Forbes

Every January, I share my predictions for personal branding and career success for the coming year. This year’s list has a large dose of technology and self-reliance woven throughout. All aspects of career development and growth are moving from the real world to the virtual one. Translating your brand for the digital world now will help you in 2019 and beyond. Here are six trends to maximize for 2019.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamarruda/2019/01/06/career-success-predictions-for-2019/#307cad274172

BY STEPHANE KASRIEL, FastCompany

YOU’LL BE IN SCHOOL THE REST OF YOUR LIVES
Why? Because skills are changing faster than traditional education is keeping up. There are a few reasons for this. After all, per Moore’s law, technological progress grows exponentially, creating smarter and smarter machines, which require newer and newer skills. Plus, in an era of fast-paced technological and scientific breakthroughs, the more we discover, the more we have to learn new skills. And while some leading universities now offer courses on the gig economy or new technologies like the blockchain, it’s far from being the norm. The vast majority of high schools and colleges aren’t adapting quickly enough to the change, leaving their students increasingly unprepared for the jobs market.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90247298/5-things-im-telling-my-kids-to-prepare-them-for-the-future

By Taskeen Adam, EdSurge

MOOCs, if designed inclusively, have the potential and ability to create reciprocal channels between truly diverse global participants, where a plurality of voices can be heard and true diversity of global knowledge can be achieved. This would require taking into account the context of the marginalized virtual participant such as financial difficulties, geographic limitations, educational and emotional support, resources and infrastructure constraints, data costs and connectivity access, time and opportunity costs, levels of education, and aspirations, amongst many other factors.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-01-03-the-future-of-moocs-must-be-decolonized

By Devin Murphy and Grace Gardner, EdSurge

The last wave of instructional initiatives in higher education saw colleges build centers of teaching and learning, sites where faculty could grow their skills and try out new teaching approaches. These centers offered access to tools and training on proven pedagogies and new technologies, but faculty often viewed using them as optional or an addition to their already busy schedules. In contrast, Indiana University (IU) and the University of Central Florida (UCF) are exploring how pedagogy evolves when the actual environments in which students learn are transformed. Form follows function, as the adage says, but these universities are flipping that script and betting that a more flexible and adaptive form will unlock needed changes in the teaching and learning function.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-01-05-function-follows-form-how-two-colleges-redesigned-the-classroom-for-active-learning

Futurism
Is your New Year’s resolution in full swing yet? Despite the sincere desire to improve, most people’s resolutions often fail within a few months. And the reason so many of us can’t keep these annual self-improvement promises is because we fail to recognize the larger issue. In order to break the bad habits that prevent us from achieving our goals, we must first be willing to change the underlying cause: our minds. The human brain is as remarkable as it is mysterious. But thanks to years of neuroscience research, if you’re willing to learn, it’s possible to recognize the mental patterns that impact your life and “hack” your brain to change unwanted behaviors. And by enrolling in one of the following online courses, you’ll gain lifetime access to hours of online content dealing with scientifically proven methodologies for reprogramming your mind.

https://futurism.com/brain-hacks-neuroscience-courses

By Dhawal Shah, EdSurge

The first online degrees by Coursera, Udacity and edX have done well, with combined potential revenue of more than $80-million, based on numbers of current students. Over 10,000 students are currently enrolled in a MOOC-based degree program. But the bulk of those of students come from just two universities and three online degrees: the Online Master’s Degree in Computer Science (Georgia Tech with Udacity), the Online Master of Science in Analytics (Georgia Tech with edX), and the iMBA (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with Coursera).

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-01-02-year-of-mooc-based-degrees-a-review-of-mooc-stats-and-trends-in-2018

Synced

It all started with a tweet from Google Japan Data Project Manager Suzana Ilić: “Yesterday someone (ML, CS PhD, Stanford) said he would not hire a person who is online educated in Machine Learning. Who here agrees and who thinks differently?” The question triggered a long and occasionally heated discussion that spread from Ilić’s twitter across the machine learning community.

https://syncedreview.com/2019/01/04/to-hire-or-not-to-hire-online-ai-grads-that-is-the-question/

Cait Etherington, eLearning Inside

A new report by Northeastern University’s Center for the Future of Higher Education and Talent Strategy has concluded that employers—specifically, human resources (HR) leaders—are now increasingly interested in candidates’ credentials, not simply their degrees. The study also found that most HR leaders no longer view online degrees or credentials as inferior to those earned on campus.

https://news.elearninginside.com/have-online-degrees-and-credentials-finally-lost-their-stigma/

By Rafi Letzter, Live Science
Neuroscientists are teaching computers to read words straight out of people’s brains. Kelly Servick, writing for Science, reported this week on three papers posted to the preprint server bioRxiv in which three different teams of researchers demonstrated that they could decode speech from recordings of neurons firing. In each study, electrodes placed directly on the brain recorded neural activity while brain-surgery patients listened to speech or read words out loud. Then, researchers tried to figure out what the patients were hearing or saying. In each case, researchers were able to convert the brain’s electrical activity into at least somewhat-intelligible sound files.

https://www.livescience.com/64424-speech-computer-brain-interface.html

Jonathan Moules, Financial Times
When the Association of MBAs, the accreditation body for postgraduate management education, gives its approval to a business school’s MBA programme, it does so for a maximum of five years. But when that same business school awards one of these degrees, it is for life.  This does not make sense, according to Bodo Schlegelmilch, who is both chair of AMBA and a professor of international management and marketing at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. He is involved in both assessing schools and teaching masters degree students.  Subscription business models, such as car clubs and music streaming services, have made it a smart, easy choice to rent the things we used to own, Prof Schlegelmilch says. It would not, he thinks, take a great leap to apply this logic to degrees.

https://www.ft.com/content/257d9aa8-fd69-11e8-ac00-57a2a826423e

By Annika Hom, Boston Globe
Millions of people around the worldtake advantage of the free Harvard offers online, but what types of subjects are trending these days? Harvard recently released its most popular online courses in 2018, a list that reflects interest in computer science, data science, architecture, and religion.   Introduction to computer science CS50 collection. Students learn how to program using the modern coding languages Python or JavaScript or explore how computer science manifests in game development and apps. Since its creation in 2012, this collection has over one million users.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/01/04/intro-comp-sci-tops-list-most-subscribed-harvardx-class/g2Y8pnOJyw1nkRGMof4YqJ/story.html

Ross Rubin, ZD Net
While the new frontier of intelligent object detection can create amazing eye candy, it is also tackling the decades-old problem of simply being heard in a crowd. The demonstrations — promised to be only a hint of the kinds of wizardry AI can muster — made some of the strongest cases to date about how AI-based computations can enhance the smartphone experience beyond the photo enhancement that has been one of the leading manifestations to date. Indeed, they began with the original cell phone application: Voice calls. By using AI to identify the voice of the speaker, a phone would be able to virtually eliminate any background noise from a call, be it some reserved office chatter or raucous city street noise. This capability extended far beyond that of even today’s best noise cancelling and into the realm of noise elimination.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/ai-could-reduce-the-tech-in-your-smartphone/