Online Learning Update

Karen Gilchrist, CNBC
Artificial intelligence and cloud computing are terms once reserved for the realms of science fiction. But, today, they’ve become an increasingly important — and lucrative — fixture of the employment landscape. “Some of the top skills we’re seeing that are in great demand are artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing,” Feon Ang, vice president for talent and learning solutions in Asia Pacific at professional networking site LinkedIn. The demand applies globally. However, it especially pertains to the most sought-after skills in Asia Pacific, which is currently suffering a “brain drain,” whereby talented workers are relocating overseas for better socio-economic prospects, Ang told CNBC’s “Capital Connection” Tuesday.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/22/linkedin-ai-big-data-cloud-computing-among-top-future-tech-skills.html

Stephen Shankland, CNET
Wi-Fi 6 is just now arriving in phones, laptops and network equipment. But engineers are already turning their attention to what’ll come next: Wi-Fi 7. With speeds as high as 30 gigabits per second, the next generation of Wi-Fi promises better streaming video, longer range and fewer problems with traffic congestion. The change will come in a series of steps, beginning with improvements to Wi-Fi 6, that lay the groundwork for the expected arrival of Wi-Fi 7 in 2024.

https://www.cnet.com/news/wi-fi-6-is-barely-here-but-wi-fi-7-is-already-on-the-way/

By: Marylouise Fennell and Scott D. Miller, University Business

When Scott Miller was appointed president of Bethany College in 2007, he and Marylouise Fennell created and tested a long-term social media strategy. The strategy focused on reinforcing the brand of a nationally ranked liberal arts college in a rural section of West Virginia, and on further engaging an already loyal base of alumni and friends. In 2015, Miller was appointed president of Virginia Wesleyan University. Here, he has established multiple social media platforms that he uses as president. This is in addition to his visibility through regular e-cards, e-blasts and opinion pieces; monthly presidential e- letters; a weekly online newsletter; and online commentaries for The Virginian- Pilot, HuffPost and other news outlets. Among his platforms are Flickr, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and a daily blog about campus life that feeds into the university’s website.

https://universitybusiness.com/ub-op-ed-the-advantages-of-social-media-for-college-presidents

Hallie Busta, Education Dive
Enrollment, finances, immigration, free speech. Many of the issues expected at the top of college presidents’ work lists are carryovers from last year, with a few new wrinkles. Higher ed watched this summer as one public system reacted to drastic cuts in state funding. And college leaders raised yet more flags that the current political climate is threatening the supply of international students. Meanwhile, issues around Title IX are likely to heat up again with the expected release of new regulations this fall. “It’s in many ways more of the same as well as a bunch of new complications,” said Terry Hartle, senior vice president of government and public affairs at the American Council on Education (ACE).

https://www.educationdive.com/news/5-issues-college-leaders-will-confront-this-year/562057/

Mark J. Perry, AEI Carpe Diem
The animated “bar chart race” visualization above shows the remarkable rise of women in American higher education over the last 70 years, with projections for the next decade from the Department of Education, for the female share of colleges degrees (Associate’s, Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctor’s) annually from 1950 to 2029. Here are some observations:

https://www.aei.org/publication/animated-chart-of-the-day-the-remarkable-story-of-female-success-in-us-higher-education/

Jack Karsteh, Brookings
Skills training typically comes through higher education or from companies themselves. However, rising college tuition costs and shrinking investments in training reduce the opportunity for employees to acquire the skills needed for new kinds of work. Now, newly-emerging technologies may help to fill this void in skills training. Augmented reality and virtual reality can bring computers to manual jobs far removed from an office, giving companies and workers more options for how and where retraining takes place. Rather than requiring employees to go to a classroom or an online portal, AR and VR headsets can teach workers new skills on-site.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2019/08/29/emerging-technology-can-replace-workers-or-train-them-for-new-work/

By KOH HIAN CHYE, Today

For a start, universities can use the data to generate predictions of students’ performance, which are then fed into early alert systems with other information such as the students’ current semester study load and their previous semesters’ cumulative grade point average. These can, in turn, provide information for faculty members to formulate intervention strategies to support individual students in their learning. For example, students who are expected to perform well in the semester can be further encouraged to not only achieve their potential but to surpass it. On the other hand, students who are expected not to perform as well can be advised to adopt good study habits and strategies and seek help early when they experience difficulties in their learning. These can contribute towards a positive learning experience and supportive learning environment.

https://www.todayonline.com/commentary/how-analytics-can-help-universities-support-students-learning-better

Reza Mousavi, Arizona Daily Register

Education has become flexible and mobile by merging with technology. Using the technology for education has led to a huge growth in online courses worldwide as it has already solved the location limitation and nowadays many students can complete course work and assignments wherever they are. Now By using technology in education, students with family commitments or those who are working full time can complete their online courses in which all colleges and universities offer these. As we already mentioned, today students don’t have any problem regarding the location as they can study from anywhere in the world and they can enroll in it.

https://arizonadailyregister.com/effect-of-technology-in-education-2780/

Maria Korolov, CSO

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) offer all the same opportunities for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations as earlier technological advances, but they also have unique risks. AI and ML require more data, and more complex data, than other technologies. The algorithms used have been developed by mathematicians and data scientists and come out of research projects. Meanwhile, the volume and processing requirements mean that the workloads are typically handled by cloud platforms, which add yet another level of complexity and vulnerability.

https://www.csoonline.com/article/3434610/how-secure-are-your-ai-and-machine-learning-projects.html

By Aaron Mamiit , Digital Trends

The goal of Szlam and his team is to create an A.I. assistant that is capable of helping people with different kinds of tasks, and they believe that Minecraft will help them achieve that. A generalist A.I. assistant will be more useful to the regular user, compared to an A.I. system that can only do one thing well.  Within Minecraft, the A.I. assistant will need to learn the various concepts of the game and the nature of the possible requests. The requests may become very complex, but the opportunity for learning is massive, with the possibility of pushing A.I. research to the next level.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/facebook-training-ai-minecraft/

Ben Gilbert, Business Insider

“Can a chimpanzee really understand humans? Not really,” he said. “We just seem like strange aliens. They mostly just care about other chimpanzees. And this will be how it is, more or less.” Moreover, he couched that context in optimism: “In fact, if the difference is only that small, that would be amazing – probably it’s much, much greater.” It’s this stark difference in intellectual capacity between AI and human beings that has Musk worried for the future of our species. “What do you do with a situation like that? I’m not sure. I hope they’re nice,” he said. That’s why, he said, he founded his company Neuralink.

https://www.sciencealert.com/elon-musk-says-human-intellect-and-ai-is-like-the-difference-between-chimps-and-humans

Stephanie Chasteen and Warren Code, Tomorrow’s Professor

Many departments and universities are trying to spread the effective use of research-based instructional practices among their faculty, such as active learning and effective course assessments. One strategy that was used at the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of British Columbia was to provide direct, targeted help to faculty in the form of an educational expert who was also well-versed in the relevant subject matter. This Discipline-Based Education Specialist (DBES) partnered with faculty members to transform their courses, resulting in on-the-job learning and direct feedback to faculty members. This program (the Science Education Initiative)met with many successes – and challenges. The overall approach of the SEI is also adaptable to a wide range of initiatives aiming at helping faculty transform their teaching.

https://tomprof.stanford.edu/posting/1732

Brook Silva-Braga, CBS News
For millions of students, Labor Day weekend marks the end of summer vacation and the start of another school year. But for the first time in 185 years, there will be no fall semester at Green Mountain College in western Vermont. The school fell victim to trends in higher education that could soon impact hundreds of other schools. One expert predicts that 25% of colleges will fail in the next 20 years.

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/expert-predicts-25-of-colleges-will-fail-in-the-next-20-years/#

BY KRISTIN HOUSER, Futurism
In 2010, a 25-year-old American could expect to live to the age of 79.34. By 2017, that dropped to 79.15, continuing a troubling trend of decreased life expectancy in the nation. Now, an international group of researchers has published a study exploring which Americans live longer. Their conclusion? People with college degrees tend to have longer lifespans. “[E]stimated life expectancy at age 25 years declined overall between 2010 and 2017,” the authors wrote in their study, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Tuesday. “However, it declined among persons without a 4-year college degree and increased among college-educated persons.”

https://futurism.com/neoscope/life-expectancy-educated-americans

Young Entrepreneurs Council, Forbes

The only way to grow as a person is to continue learning. So, learning shouldn’t stop when you finish high school or graduate college — it should be a part of your everyday life. At the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is self-actualization, which is defined as “a desire to become everything one is capable of becoming.” This can be achieved by learning.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2019/08/29/five-easy-ways-to-engage-in-lifelong-learning/

Nahia Orduña, World Economic Forum

As Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, explained in the 2018 Future of Jobs report, it’s critical that individuals take a proactive approach to their own lifelong learning. In addition, businesses and governments need to actively support workforces in learning and developing skills. Automation and AI will generate prosperity and millions of new jobs, but as many as 375 million people worldwide will need to shift occupational categories and upgrade skills during the transition. We need talent—including the talent of those who took a career break, or senior workers who finished their studies a long time ago but can add unique perspective, and especially people who have different backgrounds

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/lifelong-learning-in-the-digital-workplace-is-essential-heres-why/

By Geoff Colvin, Fortune
Traditionalists may look aghast at CS50, Harvard’s introductory computer science course, which last year became the school’s most popular course of any kind. It’s taught by a young professor in jeans and a black T-shirt, David Malan, whose lectures are highly polished, fast-paced performances filled with props, demonstrations, and student involvement. Students aren’t required to attend, though; lectures are recorded in a slick, multi-camera format with production values that rival commercial TV, and most students watch them online. In addition to being Harvard’s No. 1 course, it’s offered simultaneously at Yale, with Malan teaching, an arrangement apparently unprecedented in the rival schools’ 318-year coexistence.
https://fortune.com/2019/08/29/harvard-computer-science-cs50-edx/

Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed
We are actually building something that has never been built before. We’re creating a program at both a flagship and a system that has a wide portfolio of programs that are stackable, incorporate prior learning assessment options, and have a pathway for every student. Our degrees are all LSU degrees; LSU Online is the brand associated with the online delivery modality of our same high-quality LSU degrees. We are not a separate college or university; we are LSU. Also unique about our model is that we’re combining the high-quality of LSU degrees with in-sourced marketing, recruitment and retention.

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/3-questions-sasha-thackaberry-vice-provost-digital-and-continuing

AACC 21ST CENTURY CENTER
Since hitting a peak in 2010, the total community college enrollment has decreased each fall after the Great Recession, declining by more than 1 million students nationally between 2010 and 2017…. one of the most striking findings is the dramatic and continuing rise in enrollment for the less-than-18-year-old students. That’s according to an a recent report from the American Association of Community Colleges. The number of part-time students younger than 18 dramatically increased, going from 287,000 in 2001 to more than 773,000 by 2017—an increase of 170 percent. This age group also saw an increase – though much less dramatic – in the number of students attending community college full time.

http://www.aacc21stcenturycenter.org/article/enrollment-and-age/

By: Jeremiah E. Shipp, Faculty Focus

Our role as faculty must extend beyond grading assignments but include verbal and written encouragement, which is vital for the academic and personal development of students (Lowe, 2005). Encouragement can come in many forms such as positive feedback on assignments, emails, phone calls, and video messages. To encourage online learners, faculty can utilize a video technique called “Midweek Motivation,” which consists of creating short videos that can be used to help students persevere through any academic and personal challenge they may be experiencing. The video topics are unlimited, but in my experience I have shared professional challenges I have overcome and funny stories.

https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/online-course-encouragement/

KATERINA MANOFF, the Atlantic

Eager to attract students to new online graduate programs, selective universities have adopted surprisingly aggressive telemarketing practices. Many online graduate programs from the nation’s top universities promise an experience that’s nearly indistinguishable from studying on campus. They offer live seminars taught by tenured professors, close collaboration with talented classmates, and degrees identical to those granted by traditional programs. But in one area, even the best online programs differ drastically from their in-person counterparts: the intensity of the recruitment. Prospective students—many of whom are busy professionals unfamiliar with online education and apt to rely on brand names as heuristics—must often navigate slick, insistent marketing operations run by for-profit third-party companies.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/08/online-graduate-programs-recruitment/596077/