Online Learning Update

Abigail Hess, CNBC
In 2018, workers quit at the highest rates since 2001, and experts predict that the trend will continue into 2019. According to the most recent Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), over 3.5 million Americans quit their jobs every month, about 2.3 percent of the labor force. Analysts pointed to sluggish wage growth and a tight labor market that’s encouraged workers looking for higher salaries to find new opportunities as the driving force behind this trend. But according to LinkedIn’s 2019 Workforce Learning Report, 94 percent of employees say that they would stay at a company longer if it simply invested in helping them learn.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/27/94percent-of-employees-would-stay-at-a-company-for-this-one-reason.html

By Alicia Geigel, ULoop

An increasing number of students are preferring online learning over the traditional classroom method, according to Jordan Friedman of U.S. News. Friedman writes, “At 7.3 percent, public colleges and universities experienced the largest growth in online course enrollment from 2015 and 2016.” Making the decision to enroll in courses online can be intimidating and overwhelming for some students entering into uncharted territory. There are a few things to consider, like what specific classes to take online and when exactly to take them. While online classes are great in some ways, each student has to make sure that the learning method and responsibility of an online class is suitable for them.

https://www.uloop.com/news/view.php/273159/How-to-Decide-What-Classes-to-Take-Online-and-When

Michael Ashley, Forbes

Based on these types of frustrations it’s understandable that millennials, now comprising more than 35 percent of the workforce, have begun to push back on the way we search. Instead of relying on the manual querying model with all of its time-sucking and less-than-effective research implications, the new generation is paving the way for what’s being dubbed a “browse to content” model emphasizing information gathering and acquiring insights from numerous trusted, curated sources. “Millennials are different than Boomers and Gen-Xers in how they approach information gathering,” says Seuss. “For Boomers and Gen-Xers, search was the radical change in their professional lives. They went from having to go to a corporate library and browse magazines on shelves to being able to go online and find information instantly.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/02/25/might-a-i-spell-the-death-of-search/#755e2ae6608d

Vint Cerf, Forbes

Steve Case calls it the Third Wave. Others call it the fourth industrial revolution. Whatever we call it, the new jobs it creates will require new skills and new learning. Someone will have to program the billions of devices of the Internet of Things. Someone will have to re-program them when bugs are found. Someone else will have to install and configure them. Others will make them. And still more will invent new ways to use programmed devices, to outfit them with new AI capabilities. We are entering the endless world of software, where anything that you can program is possible. It is very important to recognize that the people whose jobs evaporate, because of AI or automation or invention in general, may not be prepared to do the newly created jobs unless they get retraining… again and again.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/02/25/with-ai-at-hand-dont-stop-learning/#6d6b9d481898

John Marcus, Hechinger Report

Most Americans believe state spending for public universities and colleges has, in fact, increased or at least held steady over the last 10 years, according to a new survey by American Public Media. They’re wrong. States have collectively scaled back their annual higher education funding by $9 billion during that time, when adjusted for inflation, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, or CBPP, reports. “It is a big, important quality-of-life issue, and here all but 29 percent of people got it completely wrong,” said Craig Helmstetter, managing partner of the APM Research Lab, which conducted the survey of more than 1,000 Americans in late November and early December.

Americans don’t realize state funding for higher ed is falling, new poll finds

William Condon, Ellen R. Iverson, Cathryn A. Manduca, Carol Rutz, and Gudrun Willett; Tomorrow’s Professor

To build a productive culture of teaching and learning within an institution is to maximize the ability of faculty to learn and students to learn. This interaction lies at the heart of institutions of higher education. It is because faculty learning and student learning are intertwined that institutions foster and support the scholarly work of faculty. This study shows that these interactions are no less profound when applied to the process of teaching and learning than they are when thinking about disciplinary content and practices. Making visible the substantial faculty learning taking place and the culture that supports its impact will start to address criticism that higher education in America has lost its way. However, the most powerful response will be to build on this substantial base, thereby strengthening opportunities for faculty to learn about teaching and learning, and maximizing the potential for this knowledge to be shared across campus among faculty, students, and staff in a culture that values and sustains improvements in learning for all.

https://tomprof.stanford.edu/posting/1701

By Digbijay Mishra, Economic Times

The number of students taking free courses is around 1.15 million. The number of paying students is much less, but it is increasing quite a bit.  I think we are entering an age of life-long learning which means as new technologies come, AI in particular, people will be forced to upskill themselves. However, globally we are way into the AI revolution already and I don’t see job losses today. I think it’s a myth. The people who claim job losses assume that jobs don’t change at all and they will be automated. But they miss the new jobs being created. But education is key. In the past, we assumed a single education is enough for your life.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/newsbuzz/half-our-india-students-take-ai-courses-sebastian-thrun-co-founder-udacity/articleshow/68134840.cms

Abigail Hess, CNBC
Gone are the days where workers could comfortably plan to stay in one job, or industry, for their entire career. Research from the World Economic Forum shows that one million U.S. jobs are expected to disappear by 2026 and one-third of U.S.workers could be jobless by 2030 — all due to automation.  In January, LinkedIn analyzed hundreds of thousands of job postings in order to determine which skills companies need most in 2019. They found that employers are actively looking for workers with both soft skills and hard technical skills and matched these skills with free LinkedIn Learning courses. LinkedIn found that the skill employers needed most in 2019 was creativity, so it makes sense that the course that became most popular among workers in January was called “Creativity Bootcamp.” According to LinkedIn, 77,182 people took the course in January alone, and 183,273 have taken it overall.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/22/linkedins-most-popular-courses-teach-body-language-and-creativity.html

By Michael Sano, EdSurge

The #DLNchat community recently explored this question of work and learning, and while there was some disagreement about how much society can predict about specific jobs in the coming decades, there was agreement about how higher ed institutions can help prepare its students for whatever careers lie ahead. Automation looms large in many predictions about the future of work. In response, #DLNchat-ters posited that universities can strengthen the cultivation of skills like critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration and literacy. “Prensky says to let technology do what it does best and hone our skills, as humans, to do what we do best—responding, reacting, engaging as humans who understand nuance and beauty,” said Erin Crisp. Many argue this focus on so-called “soft skills” has long been what learners gain from a liberal-arts education. Just don’t call them “soft skills” at #DLNchat.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-02-21-how-the-future-of-work-will-influence-the-future-of-learning-dlnchat

By Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed

In the summer of 2011 we produced eduMOOC — a constructivist massive open online course about online learning with the help of a small group of talented and expert professionals at the University of Illinois Springfield as well as colleagues around the country who were then, and continue to be, among the leaders in our field of online learning. By the time it concluded in August, eduMOOC had reached 2,700 learners in 70 countries — making it among the largest such classes produced up to that time.  MOOCs will continue to evolve. The groundbreaking work of Ashok Goel at Georgia Tech in developing a virtual teaching assistant is a key milestone in enabling these large-scale classes to engage students and to potentially personalize learning. In the meantime, the essential online, at-scale characteristics will make them affordable and attractive to students around the world.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online-trending-now/maturing-mooc

Adi Gaskell, Forbes

The future of work is likely to herald a wide range of new jobs, many of which we can scarcely conceive today (although that hasn’t stopped consultancy firm Cognizant having a go). There has been understandable attention given to the kind of skills these jobs might require. For instance, at the tail end of last year, the University of Memphis proposed that collaborative problem solving would be the most important skill in the coming decades. “Collaborative problem solving is an essential skill in the workforce and the community because many of the problems faced in the modern world require teams to integrate group achievements with team members’ idiosyncratic knowledge,” the researchers explain.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adigaskell/2019/02/22/what-are-the-top-10-soft-skills-for-the-future-of-work/#3f6bdec87f1f

Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed

Dr. Katie Linder is the Research Director for Ecampus at the Oregon State University. Katie agreed to answer my questions about her work as a leading alternative academic scholar and practitioner.   As the director of this unit, I get to design and conduct original research on online teaching and learning, assist faculty with conducting this kind of research, and create tools that help the field of distance education digest current and future research to advance online student success, educational development, leadership and program administration.  Along with my team, I get to work on a lot of really amazing projects as part of my job. We studied how instructional designers engage in research on teaching and learning; explored how closed captioning helps students learn; collaborated with colleagues to write the first book on high-impact practices in online classrooms; researched student device preferences for online learning; launched a database of efficacy studies comparing online, blended/hybrid, and face-to-face modalities; and, most recently, launched a Report Reader Checklist tool to help contribute to increased research literacy in our field.

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/qa-alt-ac-katie-linder

John Liu, EdScoop
University administrators and faculty are increasingly buying in to the idea of open educational resources — encouraging the adoption of free online textbooks on a course-by-course basis, said David Harris, editor in chief of OpenStax, a Rice University-based publisher. “What we’re seeing is a shift in the market from what we would call individual adoption to institutional-supported adoption and adaption of OER,” Harris told EdScoop. “The institutions are now helping faculty drive affordability for students. That’s a significant change.”

https://edscoop.com/university-students-saved-177-million-in-2018-using-openstax-oer/

By Kenneth C. Green, Inside Higher Ed

It’s time to add OER – Open Education Resources – to a list of technologies (or technology resources) that might really be a catalyst for major change in higher education. The basic OER arguments, offered with great passion by OER advocates and evangelists, are compelling.  First, commercial textbooks are expensive.  Second, OER offers a seemingly pragmatic strategy to provide “Day One” access to core course materials for students in critical gateway courses.  And third, the absence of copyright and related clearance issues means that OER provides significant flexibility for faculty as they select and mix curricular materials from various sources for their syllabi.

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/digital-tweed/reframing-conversation-about-oer

Sam Shead, Forbes

The U.K. government is planning to fund thousands of postgraduate students that want to study a Masters or a PhD in artificial intelligence as it looks to keep pace with the U.S. and China. AI is poised to become the most significant technology for a generation but there are only so many people that know how to develop the technology, which could have a huge impact on industries such as healthcare, energy, and automotive. Business Secretary Greg Clark and Digital Secretary Jeremy Wright announced on Thursday that the government will commit up to £115 million towards training the next generation of AI talent.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/samshead/2019/02/20/uk-government-to-fund-ai-university-courses-with-115m/#73a9fcbb430d

By Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology
In a recent survey, community college students cited online learning as one of their top five challenges to success. Conducted by researchers from North Carolina State University, the Revealing Institutional Strengths and Challenges (RISC) Survey polled 50,097 students at 10 community colleges across the United States on the challenges they face in five areas: academic support services; campus environment; finances and financial aid; succeeding in their courses; and work and personal issues. Work was the No. 1 challenge reported by students, cited by 34 percent of survey respondents. That was followed by paying expenses (also 34 percent), family and friends (30 percent), online classes (21 percent) and parking on campus (21 percent).

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2019/02/21/online-learning-a-top-challenge-for-community-college-students.aspx?admgarea=news

San Diego Union-Tribune
Online education has not lived up to its hype yet, but if any state can make a go of it, it should be California, the tech capital of the world. The online college is the brainchild of former Gov. Jerry Brown. Heather Hiles, a former tech entrepreneur and senior official with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is expected to begin work today as the first president and CEO of former Gov. Jerry Brown’s pet project: California’s first and only online community college. Hiles’ background and ambition seem perfect for the online college, which has as its goal helping the millions of adults who lack a college degree or certificate they need to get well-paying jobs and to begin promising careers. To achieve this goal, the online college will offer specialized courses that are specifically designed to qualify students for existing jobs and that can be finished in a year — a format unlike any seen in the state’s other 114 community colleges.

http://www.govtech.com/education/Editorial-High-Hopes-for-First-Online-Community-College.html

Scott Carlson, Chronicle of Higher Ed
Colleges, heed the warnings of my industry. Newspapers are generally for-profit enterprises; colleges in most cases are not. But the parallels between journalism and academe are striking: We both deal in knowledge and have public service at our core. We have legacy institutions (Harvard, The New York Times) and upstarts (Coursera, Vice Media). Smart, intractable, and often underpaid people — professors and reporters — form the foundation of our industries, taking complex or specialized information and breaking it down for an audience. For many of those people, their academic or journalistic professions are all they ever imagined doing with their lives. To watch their industries crumble is a source of great heartache. And while we might blame macro trends and disruptions — anti-intellectualism, the internet, the machinations of our political opponents — the fact is, we kind of did it to ourselves.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/What-Higher-Ed-Can-Learn-From/245723

EAB

As projections for undergraduate enrollment wane, many colleges and universities are looking to adult learner programs for growth and revenue. However, the adult learner market is complex, and adult learners’ mindsets are shifting. In order to gain market share and effectively recruit students, institutions need to understand how today’s adult learners think. To help our partners better understand this mindset, EAB recently conducted a
survey of current and prospective students of graduate, undergraduate degree completion, online, and certificate programs. As we will elaborate in the following pages, the responses indicate that today’s adult learners are savvy, digital consumers who approach their education with a consumer-like mindset.

http://pages.eab.com/rs/732-GKV-655/images/Understanding%20the%20Shifting%20Adult%20Learner%20Mindset.pdf

By Jeffrey R. Young, EdSurge

Two universities—Duke University and Carnegie Mellon University—are releasing templates and best practices for getting IRB approval for classroom research and are encouraging other colleges to use them.  Leaders of the effort admit that templates alone are unlikely to lead to a revolution in self-study by faculty. But the tools are the first output of a nationwide effort to spread teaching innovation in higher education. That broader project, called the Empirical Educator Project, was started a year ago by e-Literate, a blog run by two longtime edtech consultants, Michael Feldstein and Phil Hill. The group held an invitation-only summit where they encouraged participants to identify projects that they can share with colleagues elsewhere.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-02-15-does-innovative-teaching-work-a-new-effort-aims-to-help-faculty-find-out

By Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed

Today’s teenagers appear likely to reinforce, rather than reverse, the widening gender gap in four-year college enrollment, a survey by Pew Research Center finds. The Pew study explores the views of teens aged 13 to 17 on a range of issues, including anxiety, academics and future plans. All told, 59 percent of those surveyed said they planned to attend a four-year college, but that was true for 68 percent of girls and 51 percent of boys. Twelve percent of students said they would enroll in a two-year college, and 5 percent or fewer said they would work full-time, enroll in a technical school or join the military.

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2019/02/21/more-teenage-girls-boys-plan-4-year-college