By IBL News
Big news for Open edX’s developers: Ironwood, the 2019 version of this learning platform, will be released on February. The first release candidate, Ironwood.1rc1, was just made available this week. “Our goal is to release Ironwood in two weeks. In order to do that, I need to hear back from you about how testing is going,” Ned Batchelder, Software Architect at edX announced on Google Groups.
Share on FacebookBY LAURA ASCIONE, eCampus News
A three-year bachelor’s degree may help students dodge some of the increasingly burdensome debt associated with higher education–that is, if the programs can get off the ground. At least 32 institutions offer programs that help students graduate in three years, and more colleges and universities are expected to follow suit. Many of these three-year degree programs have existed for more than 10 years, notes Paul Weinstein Jr., a senior fellow of the Progressive Policy Institute and director of the Graduate Program in Public Management at Johns Hopkins University, in a report detailing the trend toward three-year bachelor’s degrees. “American college students are facing a triple whammy–out-of-control college costs, record levels of student debt, and declining real earnings for college graduates,” Weinstein contends in the report, yet lawmakers haven’t taken any real action to remedy the issue.
https://www.ecampusnews.com/2019/02/05/are-three-year-degree-programs-the-answer/
Share on FacebookJeffrey S. Russell, Evolllution
In this new world, described in The 100-Year Lifeby Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott, most of us won’t have the luxury of sticking with what we learned in college during our teens and 20s. Most of us won’t be able to stop working in our 50s, either, as my father and grandfather did. With careers lasting longer, people will have to continually update their knowledge and learn new skills. After reading The 100-Year Life—recommended to me by Vice Provost Rovy Branon of University of Washington Educational Outreach—I realized that the implications for higher education are profound. To accommodate longer lives, we’ll need to develop academic programs that stretch from childhood into old age. This will require creativity in how we deliver courses, with an emphasis on flexibility and personalization. It will also require creativity in how we provide credentials, from degrees to certificates to digital badges.
Share on FacebookMatt Krupnick, Hechinger Report
Educators and policymakers started raising alarms about low levels of college-going among people in places like this after frustration from rural Americans over limited opportunities and incomes spilled over into national politics in 2016. Now growing demand for college-trained workers has brought a powerful new voice to the chorus: businesses desperate to fill increasingly complex jobs at a time of almost nonexistent unemployment. With worker shortages hitting industries nationwide, their companies — and many states’ economies — depend on it. The high school grads least likely in America to go to college? Rural ones
Share on FacebookWill Knight, MIT Technology Review
A new report on global AI patents and publications has offered an interesting snapshot of the current boom—including the uneven way it is being commercialized. The report (pdf) from the World Intellectual Property Organization shows that since the field of AI was established in the 1950s, 340,000 AI-related inventions have been patented and over 1.6 million scientific papers published. Around 49% of all AI patents relate to computer vision, and that number is growing 24% year on year. What it means: Together, deep learning and computer vision stand to have a huge impact in many commercial areas: medical imaging, autonomous driving, and surveillance, for instance. But the figures show that AI isn’t transforming every industry.
BY LAURA ASCIONE, eCampus News
It’s no wonder institutions are focused on innovation–as students demand more from their schools, institutions must be ready to meet those expectations with new mentalities and a willingness to think and act outside the box. Some schools are rethinking the way they use technologies and are turning to students for inspiration, while others are turning the idea of the traditional campus on its head and are aiming for a complete conceptual redesign. Whatever the action, most higher-ed leaders know they have to be willing to embrace change in order to remain relevant and retain students. Here’s a look at 6 different examples of institutional innovation.
https://www.ecampusnews.com/2019/02/01/5-ways-innovation-is-inspiring-higher-ed/
Share on FacebookNatalie Schwartz, Education Dive
When a polar vortex swept through the Midwest last week and triggered wind chills as low as 66 degrees below zero, University of Michigan professor Perry Samson thought it was too good of a teaching opportunity to pass up. Samson, an atmospheric sciences professor, teaches a course called “extreme weather.” In it, he covers topics such as hurricanes, tornadoes and lightning, as well as how a changing climate can alter the frequency and intensity of such events. The week the polar vortex hit, he was scheduled to lecture about heat waves. Inaccurate student data can have major consequences for credit reporting for not only your organization, but also your students. Get up to speed on new standards and how to meet them with this playbook. Even if students were willing to chance frostbite in the record-breaking cold to get to his class, the university had made the rare call to close the campus. So instead, Samson took the class online. Other instructors at closed campuses across the Midwest kept their students on track through the deep freeze by bringing their classes online.
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Sandra Ponce de Leon, Forbes
Besides being a hot topic these days, emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain have received a reputation for being especially male-dominated in an already bro-saturated tech world. However, the buzz around artificial intelligence and cryptography isn’t without merit, as these technologies are much more than just one more thing to be mansplained. With such diverse and far-reaching applications, it is clear that a diversity of perspectives will be necessary to create effective and sustainable solutions. I interviewed some of the most innovative female voices in AI and blockchain to better understand their struggle to ensure that this technology benefits everyone.
Share on Facebookby the Deccan Chronicle
Addressing everyone’s individual requirements is simply not viable in the traditional classroom. Also, looking at the broader picture, metropolitan cities enjoy a higher quality of teachers, whereas, their low-tier counterparts do not. This naturally creates a disparity in the quality of education amongst such regions. These are some of the most fundamental problems experienced in our education system. Thankfully, the advent of e-learning is helping to address some of these challenges that have been inherent to our education system. At present, the sector is growing with a CAGR of 20 per cent (roughly about three-times our GDP growth rate) and is expected to reach a market size of USD 1.96 billion by 2021. The industry’s subscribers, which were 1.6 million in 2016, are further projected to grow six-fold to become 9.6 million by the same period.
Share on FacebookBy Cait Etherington, eLearning Inside
In 2017, Western Governors University (WGU) was slapped with a huge bill from the federal government. Two years later, WGU has been informed that it doesn’t owe $730 million after all. If WGU is now off the hook, it is likely largely due to Secretary Betsy DeVos. But the WGU ruling also has broader implications for online learning nationwide. While it is unclear if the WGU audit was a direct factor, in early 2019, DeVos announced that she was changing the rules for what counts as a course at the postsecondary level. Her announcement has important implications for WGU and for many other online programs schools, since the change effectively means that federal funds can now be applied to a wider range of postsecondary courses. DeVos is proposing to give accrediting agencies more flexibility in approving programs that don’t fit traditional educational models. This includes courses that may not meet minimum benchmarks for instructor-student contact hours.
Share on FacebookAmy Miele, Smart Brief
Creating a high quality online course is not an easy task. Focusing on key elements is essential to providing students with engaging and effective educational experiences. It is important to have meaningful activities, stellar resources and quality assessments. The three pillars of student learning. Content is what students learn. Instruction is how students learn. Evaluation is how students are assessed. Here’s how these three pillars translate into the online learning environment.
https://www.smartbrief.com/original/2019/01/what-makes-online-course-great
Share on FacebookRaiguru Tandon, Business World
Hybrid learning has gained popularity as 62 percent of Indian adult learners like the concept of combining the convenience of passive learning online, with the quality of active learning in-person, according to a data compiled by Pearson India which has come up with a study of Adult Learners conducted across six countries. It highlights that 27 percent of Indian learners are already pursuing short-term courses while 28 percent of Indian adult learners plan to take-up single subject short term-course with a one-time fee. With reference to the adoption and demand for degrees, 46 percent of Indian learners plan to do post-graduate and 39 percent are currently pursuing BA degree courses. The survey was conducted among adult learners in Australia, India, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom aged 18 – 65 years.
Share on FacebookBy Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed
High tuition fees for distance education courses are keeping some community colleges in Colorado afloat. But should rural students pay the price? Dotted across Colorado’s varied landscape are thousands of students who live many miles from their closest community college. For these rural students, online learning is not just a convenience, but a necessity. Small colleges in remote areas don’t have the funds to offer all the programs students want on-site, said Garcia. But in the CCC system, the price of learning online is “considerably” more than learning in person, said Garcia. Students who are Colorado residents pay a baseline of $148.90 per credit hour for traditional instruction at a campus. The price for online learning is $263.90 per credit hour — a difference of just over $114. Some of the 13 colleges in the system charge students more.
by CAROLINE PRESTON, Hechinger Report
I asked Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, for his thoughts on this question. Carnevale told me that, first of all, the story of robots creating mass unemployment has been overhyped. Chris Burns has heard these sorts of predictions, too. Burns works for a business near Cincinnati that sells cloud computing and other technology services, and he says there is a big shortage of skilled IT employees both nationally and in his metro area. For his part, Burns told me he suspects that “soft skills” — things like critical thinking, problem solving and communication — are going to be key and that those abilities will serve young people no matter how their jobs evolve with new technologies. The growing importance of soft skills is a topic we’ve written about here at Hechinger. And Carnevale says he shares this perspective.
https://hechingerreport.org/how-do-schools-train-for-a-workplace-that-doesnt-exist-yet/
Share on FacebookBy Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology
An intriguing survey on American attitudes to artificial intelligence found that more people in this country support development of AI (41 percent) than oppose it (22 percent). But there’s no consensus on who should handle its governance: Americans place the greatest amount of trust in university researchers to build AI (50 percent), followed by the U.S. military (49 percent). The research was led by Baobao Zhang and Allan Dafoe, both with the Center for the Governance of AI in the Future of Humanity Institute, which is part of the University of Oxford. The survey project interviewed 2,387 respondents who were then matched to a sample of 2,000, framed by gender, age, race, education and other factors, such as religion and political affiliation, to reflect the make-up of the country.
https://campustechnology.com/articles/2019/01/23/who-do-we-trust-to-develop-and-manage-ai.aspx
Share on Facebookby Karen Hao, MIT Technology Review
Our study of 25 years of artificial-intelligence research suggests the era of deep learning is coming to an end. Through our analysis, we found three major trends: a shift toward machine learning during the late 1990s and early 2000s, a rise in the popularity of neural networks beginning in the early 2010s, and growth in reinforcement learning in the past few years.
Share on FacebookGil Press, Forbes
What is the state-of-AI in January 2019? Recent surveys show increased adoption of AI, some measurable impact, people-related challenges for enterprises trying to implement AI, and lots of issues related to data, the lifeblood of AI: what role does data play in the lives of organizations, how secure they keep it and their policies regarding data privacy. Moreover, the general public is still not sure if AI is good or bad for humanity and that may play an important role in the speed of its adoption as a business tool.
Share on FacebookMADISON MAHONEY, Yale Daily
Vero Bourg-Meyer FES ’15, program director for clean energy and finance at CBEY says “CBEY has been experimenting with types of online learning methods…. They allow us to bring Yale to a broader community.” The process of designing and developing the program and curriculum has been challenging. “We are trying to get the best of what Yale has to offer without requiring people to dedicate the time they could if they were on campus,” Bourg-Meyer explained. “Instead of fighting that fact, we’ve tried to build something around it. The challenge is one of balancing breadth and depth.”
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2019/01/25/yale-launches-online-certificate-program-for-clean-energy/
Share on FacebookBY JENNIFER BROFLOWSKI, Baltimore Post-Examiner
Online tutoring is often called the future of education, which offers students an anti-stress alternative to traditional classes in schools, colleges, and universities. While opponents and supporters of this statement argue whether online education is really more effective, there is no doubt that they open up opportunities for more people to get an education than before. Studies show that distance studying is really effective. In addition, it helps to reduce stress and all sorts of pressures that students may encounter during traditional education.
http://baltimorepostexaminer.com/5-advantages-of-online-courses/2019/01/24
Share on FacebookPersonal Data Protection Commission
The PDPC presents the first edition of A Proposed Model AI Governance Framework (Model Framework) – an accountability-based framework to help chart the language and frame the discussions around harnessing AI in a responsible way. The Model Framework translates ethical principles into practical measures that can be implemented by organisations deploying AI solutions at scale. Through the Model Framework, we aim to promote AI adoption while building consumer confidence and trust in providing their personal data for AI. We encourage organisations to use this Model Framework for internal discussion and implementation. Trade associations and chambers professional bodies and interest groups are welcome to use this document for their discussions, and adapt it for their own use.
https://www.pdpc.gov.sg/resources/model-ai-gov
Share on FacebookA Q&A with Ellen Wagner by Mary Grush, Campus Technology
Learning engineering has taken many forms since the term was coined by Herbert Simon back in the 1960s. Ellen Wagner, who chairs IEEE’s ICICLE SIG on Learning Engineering Among the Professions offers some perspective — from Simon’s original insight to LE’s application and potential today. “The evolution of ed tech has always demonstrated that as tech platforms get more complex, product teams turn to other disciplines to get the expertise they need.”
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