Online Learning Update

by MIT Technology Review Insights

Key takeaways:  Artificial intelligence (AI) is a focal point of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the latest era of technological advancement. As AI becomes widespread, it is essential to consider the potential effects of the technology on society. Challenges include establishing guidelines on the use of AI, determining how to ensure AI systems are safe and ethical, measuring their effectiveness, and devising ways to interact with them.

https://s3-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com/mittr-intl/Gettingsmart.pdf

By Kathryn Moody Riia O’Donnell, HR Dive

To provide its corporate team members with opportunities for growth and learning, Papa John’s pizza has launched a new partnership with Purdue University Global, the company announced. The Dough & Degrees program will cover 100% of tuition costs for undergraduate and graduate degrees through Purdue Global’s online platform. Courses are open to eligible employees in any of the associate, bachelor’s or master’s degrees that Purdue Global’s online program supports, including business, IT, cybersecurity, finance and accounting degrees. A company spokesperson said that the program will not only allow existing employees to improve their skill sets, but will help the company be an “employer of choice” for job seekers who are looking to grow as they work.

https://www.hrdive.com/news/papa-johns-to-offer-free-degrees-to-corporate-employees/548706/

By Robert Ubell, EdSurge

From the very start of digital education, the big question has always been: ”How can students learn effectively, if they’re not face-to-face with their instructors?”  Clever techies have stepped up to the challenge with their ingenious gadgets, transforming remote students into tangible beings with a heartbeat, devising uncanny innovations, most now surprisingly part of mainstream education, right on campus. Looking back now, here are my picks for what have emerged as the most influential tools for online learning that have helped bring digital education from an experiment to a mainstream practice.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-02-20-online-learning-s-greatest-hits

Tom Simonite, Wired

“AI has really become a transformative technology that’s changing industries, markets, and society,” says Lynne Parker, who leads work on AI in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “There are a number of actions that are needed to help us harness AI for the good of the American people.” Parker previously contributed to work by the Obama administration that, a month prior to Trump’s election, led to reports on AI’s potential and societal implications, and a plan for future research. She is also working on a new national AI research strategy, slated for release soon.

https://www.wired.com/story/trumps-plan-keep-america-first-ai/

Catalin Cimpanu, ZD Net

Governments and private organizations have around 20 minutes to detect and contain a hack from Russian nation-state actors. New statistics published today by US cyber-security firm Crowdstrike ranked threat groups based on their “breakout time.” “Breakout time” refers to the time a hacker group takes from gaining initial access to a victim’s computer to moving laterally through its network. This includes the time the attacker spends scanning the local network and deploying exploits in order to escalate his access to other nearby computers. The “breakout” metric is crucial for organizations, as this is the time they have to detect infections and isolate hacked computers before a simple intrusion turns into a compromise of its entire network.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/you-have-around-20-minutes-to-contain-a-russian-apt-attack/

Max Eddy , PcMag

A VPN, or virtual private network, is one of the smartest ways to protect your online privacy and maintain your data security. We’ve tested scores of them, and these are the best VPN services for Windows. When you access the internet over Wi-Fi, do you think about who might be spying on your data, or even stealing it? If not, you’re in the majority—unfortunately. Everyone ought to be using a virtual private network, or VPN, whether it’s at a coffeeshop or even at home. Yet when PCMag ran a survey on VPN usage, we found a surprising 71 percent of our 1,000 respondents had never used a VPN at all. Even among net neutrality supporters—who you might think would be better informed on security and privacy issues—55 percent had never used a VPN.

https://www.pcmag.com/roundup/296955/the-best-vpn-services

David Raths, Campus Technology
What is the current state of the gender gap in the higher education IT workforce? According to the latest research from Educause, there’s good news and bad news: On the one hand, the number of female IT staffers has been increasing; on the other, fewer women are being promoted into CIO positions. In a Dec. 6 webinar, D. Christopher Brooks, Educause’s director of research, described the glass ceiling women face in higher ed IT: “For staff members, we are pretty close to parity in terms of distribution between men and women holding those positions. The place we run into problems is as people move up the ladder in terms of managerial responsibility,” he noted. “Between 2016 and 2018 we saw a slight dip in the percentage of women holding CIO positions. We have made some progress, but we are still confronted with some pretty serious glass ceiling issues prohibiting women from moving up the management chain.”

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2019/02/14/working-to-close-the-gender-gap-in-it.aspx

BY LAURA ASCIONE, eCampus News
Internet, or education? If you ask Gen Z, the internet wins: an astonishing 64 percent of Gen Z would rather have unlimited internet access and no college degree than a college degree and no internet access, according to a new study. According to Reality Bytes: The Digital Experience is the Human Experience, it seems the internet and being connected are absolutely necessary for Gen Z-ers. The study, conducted by The Center for Generational Kinetics and commissioned by WP Engine, is a follow-up to a 2017 study.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2019/02/19/does-gen-z-value-degree-over-digital-connection/

Tom Vander Ark, Forbes

Working with North Texas school districts, community colleges and universities as well as Dallas County Promise, Kutty assembled a team to build a technology platform that will give students ownership of their academic transcripts and access to stackable, lifelong credentials. The benefit of a distributed ledger technology like Blockchain is that it allows employers and colleges to have instant verification of a multiple-source transcript. For convenience and security, that beats a paper transcript received in the mail. Once students grant consent, Greenlight gives employers and colleges the ability to see all credentials in one place. It’s like LinkedIn but with credentials verified by institutions.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomvanderark/2019/02/14/how-blockchain-is-helping-dallas-students-tell-their-story/#5c63c6394f6f