Online Learning Update

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology
Recent reporting by Class Central shed light on a new initiative in Europe among MOOC providers and the universities they work with to launch a program for creating portable credentials for learners. The European MOOC Consortium announced its Common Microcredential Framework in April. EMC was founded by five MOOC operators: FutureLearn, France Université Numérique (FUN), OpenupEd, Miríadax and EduOpen. The big goal of the framework is to “lay the foundations” of a new international credential that university partners could use to serve lifelong learners, according to the consortium.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2019/07/29/european-framework-offers-promise-of-portable-university-credentials.aspx

BY CONNOR BRADY, eCampus News

Virtual reality (VR) is continuing to grow in both popularity and accessibility. And more and more higher education institutions are embracing VR technology. According to Internet2’s 2018 VR/AR in Research and Education Study, 28% of higher education institutions are integrating VR into their campuses, and that number is only going up. With easy mobile access and affordable VR viewing hardware, more and more universities and colleges will find utility in offering immersive experiences for prospective students. But there are many different uses for VR. And once an education institution has proven some success in one area, the use of VR in applications like facilities management, fundraising, and other applications will become much more common.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2019/07/26/4-applications-for-vr-in-higher-education/

Steven Mintz, Inside Higher Ed

According to the figures reported, Arizona State spends $7,830 on instruction for each of its 103,530 students. Southern New Hampshire, in contrast, spends $1,224 and Western Governors, $1,980. Put another way, Southern New Hampshire’s per student instructional spending is just 16 percent of ASU’s, and WGU’s just 25 percent. Remember, this is spending on instruction, not athletics, information technology, research, development, or construction and maintenance. The figures “include wages and benefits to faculty and staff members who teach students at the institution, but they do not include costs that fall under the separate category of ‘academic support,’ like course development and academic administration.”

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-gamma/what-do-students-get-return-their-tuition

BY LAURA ASCIONE, eCampus News
Employers are increasingly expected to upskill their workers and give them training to build additional high-demand skills. An ambitious new partnership between the nonprofit Education Design Lab and Virginia Western Community College (VWCC) aims to design employer-driven pathways that will “upskill” highly-qualified healthcare professionals to high-growth careers in the region. Backed by a Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) grant from the U.S. Department of Labor, the partnership draws on VWCC’s reach as the state’s third-largest community college to meet growing demand from the region’s fast-growing medical centers.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2019/07/30/efforts-to-upskill-workers-grow-across-industries/

by Kayla Westra, EDUCAUSE Review

Why support online learners? This is the easiest of all the questions to answer. Student success is why we do what we do. Supporting students in ways that benefit their learning and help them achieve mastery is the lynchpin for any service; helping students navigate through the higher education landscape and complete their programs of study is the key for ancillary student services. Failing forward is key. Do not be afraid to try new approaches to online student services, and do not overanalyze situations to the point of paralysis. Identify needs, review costs, make a good investment, and adapt as needed.

https://er.educause.edu/articles/2018/10/online-student-services-what-where-who-when-how-and-most-importantly-why

Shelcy V. Joseph, Forbes

According to LinkedIn, technical skills related to data and artificial intelligence are currently some of the most in-demand skills and a large number of recent grads are learning them. This suggests a trend in hiring in favor of candidates with these skills. As a recent grad, you can gain a competitive edge by learning them. I spoke to Emily Poague, Vice President of Marketing, LinkedIn Learning, who shared crucial advice for recent grads entering today’s workforce.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/shelcyvjoseph/2019/07/29/the-most-important-skills-recent-grads-need-to-learn-today/#1c01b6657f33

Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed

So how does one go about making the right decisions, taking the correct course of action in this time when technology turns on a dime and competition springs up seemingly out of nowhere? There is no single path to assured security, but there is an array of steps that can be taken to help to assure success. They are a scaffold to creating a vision. Too often in meeting with online program leaders on campus visits, at conferences, and in “second-opinion” calls, I find colleagues have no clear vision beyond keeping within budget and maintaining the status quo with modest growth. That is not the recipe for success in this environment of expanding competition and changing best practices. Successful visioning for those in our field includes much information gathering:

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online-trending-now/visioning-your-unit%E2%80%99s-future

By Natalie Schwartz, Education Dive
U.S. News & World Report unranked the University of California, Berkeley and four other schools in its 2019 edition of its popular Best Colleges list after they acknowledged to the publication they provided incorrect information. It moved UC Berkeley into the unranked category after the school notified U.S. News that it misreported data about its alumni donations, which account for 5% of its ranking.  The four other schools to lose their spots due to providing incorrect data are Mars Hill University, Johnson & Wales University, Scripps College and the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/us-news-removes-uc-berkeley-4-other-schools-from-ranking/559745/

by Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

According to the Alzheimer’s Association, an estimated 5.7 million Americans of all ages were living with Alzheimer’s dementia in 2018. One in ten people aged 65 and older has Alzheimer’s dementia. Alzheimer’s, which has no cure, is the sixth leading cause of death in the country. In 2010 Congress passed the National Alzheimer’s Project Act with the aim to find a way to prevent the condition or to treat it effectively by 2025. Different scientific approaches, all using machine learning, might be getting closer to realizing that aim.

https://www.thetechedvocate.org/machine-learning-helps-science-tackle-alzheimers/

By Shailaja Neelakantan, Education Dive

Employer demand for new hires with skills like critical thinking and communication has pushed colleges to find ways to show that students have those abilities.  Microcredentials are a trend du jour in U.S. higher education, and while tech-related ones are still the most popular, those pertaining to so-called “soft” skills — such as initiative, oral communication, resilience, empathy and critical thinking — form a considerable share of the offerings. That’s at least in part because multiple recent studies cite company executives lamenting the lack of such skills in the recent college graduates they hire. Many colleges around the country have begun to offer soft skills badges, either as new courses or by embedding them into existing curricula.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/with-badges-colleges-take-a-hard-look-at-teaching-soft-skills/559657/

By Greta Anderson, Inside Higher Ed

Hundreds of high schools across the country have expressed interest in ditching letter grades and grade point averages for the mastery transcript, an interactive display of students’ work that’s attractive to colleges looking for a well-rounded, nonnumerical evaluation of applicants. The Mastery Transcript Consortium began its movement in 2017, with a list of 100 private high schools across the country agreeing to pilot letter-grade-less transcripts. As of July 2019, 278 U.S.-based and international member schools — 20 percent of them public — have signed on, and more than 15 schools will begin testing a prototype of the mastery transcript with students this coming school year.

https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2019/07/29/high-schools-prepare-present-holistic-picture-students

By Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology

In a recent survey, 54 percent of faculty respondents said they believe adding more technology to their classroom would definitely increase student engagement. And another 35 percent felt adding more tech could possibly do so. The survey, conducted by Censuswide on behalf of learning management company D2L, polled 500 university professors across the United States on their use of technology, students’ expectations, institutional support for tech and more. When asked about six specific uses of technology for teaching, women reported more technology use than men in nearly every category: communicating with students electronically; accessing and sharing course materials online; making or editing essays online; utilizing online forums; and automated plagiarism detection.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2019/07/24/survey-more-than-half-of-faculty-believe-classroom-tech-increases-student-engagement.aspx

BEN DICKSON, Venture Beat

We’ve seen a big push in recent months to solve AI’s “big data problem.” And some interesting breakthroughs have begun to emerge that could make AI accessible to many more businesses and organizations. What is the big data problem? It’s the challenge of getting enough data to enable deep learning, a very popular and promising AI technique that allows machines to find relationships and patterns in data by themselves. (For example, after being fed many images of cats, a deep learning program could create its own definition of what constitutes ‘cat’ and use that to identify future images as either ‘cat’ or ‘not cat’. If you change ‘cat’ to ‘customer,’ you can see why many companies are eager to test-drive this technology.)

https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/28/deep-learning-is-about-to-get-easier-and-more-widespread/

Which 50

Deal making landscape in the artificial intelligence (AI) tech space during 2014–2018 was dominated by global tech giants, according to GlobalData. Of the top five acquirers, four were based out of the US, with Ireland-based Accenture being the only exception in the list. The four US-based companies–Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Splunk–collectively accounted for 30 acquisitions in the AI tech space during 2014–2018, whereas Accenture acquired six companies in this area during the period.

https://which-50.com/global-tech-giants-remain-most-active-acquirers-in-ai-tech-says-globaldata/

By Rebecca Koenig, EdSurge

Use of free course materials among college students is up, with 22 percent downloading at least one such resource during the spring 2019 semester, according to research published Wednesday by the National Association of College Stores. That’s an all-time high, and a big increase since the fall of 2015, when only 3 percent of students reported downloading free course materials. The percent of students who reported downloading free materials has increased each semester since. That figure includes texts procured legally, like open educational resources (known as OER), and illegally, such as pirated files shared through torrent websites.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-07-25-more-college-students-are-downloading-course-materials-for-free-or-skipping-them-entirely

By Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed
California’s new process for giving online students enrolled at public and private nonprofit colleges outside the state a way to submit complaints about their institutions still falls short of new federal rules governing state authorization. But the U.S. Education Department now considers the state to be in compliance with the new rules, the federal agency said in a letter Friday.

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2019/08/05/us-says-california-compliance-state-authorization-rules

By Rebecca Koenig, EdSurge

Yet in May, Humberstone crossed the commencement stage at ASU, becoming one of nearly 3,000 Starbucks employees who have earned bachelor’s degrees online through the company-university partnership program. It’s been five years since the launch of the Starbucks College Achievement Plan, which combines scholarship and reimbursement funds to help baristas, store managers and other employees earn their first bachelor’s degrees at minimal personal cost. Having learned what works and what doesn’t for this group of adult learners, officials at both the coffee company and the university say they remain optimistic they’ll fill the venti-sized goal they originally set for themselves: reaching 25,000 graduates by 2025.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-07-25-5-years-since-starbucks-offered-to-help-baristas-attend-college-how-many-have-graduated

Stephen Gossett, Builtin

He based his hunch on American educator Edgar Dale’s well-known but controversially non-scientific theory dubbed the Cone of Experience, which posits that people remember far more about something through direct experience of it as opposed to just reading, seeing or hearing about it. And early research indicates that Chacon’s instincts about VR were correct. A Penn State University study found that students who used immersive virtual reality to accomplish a task did so more than twice as fast as students who used traditional computer programs.

https://builtin.com/edtech/virtual-reality-in-education

Kamlesh Jang Bahadur, Forbes

2018 witnessed positive developments in the educational sector on espousing innovative technology to evolve digital curriculum for the prospective generations. We are inhabiting in the transforming phase where advanced technology advancement has given a new definition to the education system. The latest technology is making students industry-ready with digital and personalized learning modules with added convenience and exposure. The Indian education sector is rapidly changing its learning paradigm with the advent of technology by making education accessible to maximum students.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/337276

Michele W. Berger, Penn Today
The weeklong DReAM Lab, put on by the Price Lab for Digital Humanities and the Penn Libraries, offered participants the chance to study a range of subjects, from text analysis to augmented reality and Afrofuturism. When presented online, digitized manuscripts can be displayed in a variety of ways, with the entire book shown in a page-turner, for instance, or with images laid out in a grid. Though each interface type serves a different function, for Penn Libraries’ Dot Porter they together offer a valuable teaching tool. “In many digital formats, you often can’t see how big the book is, how thick it is. You lose the sense of the book as an object,” says Porter, curator of Digital Research Services in the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. “When you’re with a manuscript in real life, you get a sense of how the pages feel or where one section ends, another begins.” And those physical cues are important to the reader.

https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/deep-dive-digital-humanities-penn-dream-lab

Safaa Nhairy, Entrepreneur Middle East

Studying and learning are no longer confined to the classroom- internet users can learn anytime and anywhere with just a tablet or a smartphone. In 2017, the estimated value of the online learning industry was US$176.12 billion. A forecast from Research and Markets predicts that e-learning revenues will triple to $325 billion by 2025. More and more US business schools are shutting down their MBA programs, because millennials are reluctant to incur substantial debt just to get a diploma. One alternative they have come up with is to turn toward short-term specialty degrees in subjects such as coaching, web programming, and entrepreneurship, which can help them land a job quickly or launch their own business.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/337234