Online Learning Update

October 31, 2020

ASU initiative focuses on innovations to empower learners

Filed under: Online Learning News — Ray Schroeder @ 12:10 am

LAURA ASCIONE, eCampus News

With a shifting landscape facing learners of all kinds, Arizona State University (ASU) is launching a new initiative to accelerate the university’s efforts to redesign American higher education and focus on innovation. The overall goal is to broaden access to world-class education methods and cutting-edge technological innovations that are tailored to empower students and be responsive to their specific needs and goals.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2020/10/16/asu-initiative-focuses-on-innovations-to-empower-learners/

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Columbia University Launches Open Online Course ‘Learning Success’ on EdX.org

Filed under: Online Learning News — Ray Schroeder @ 12:04 am

by Columbia CTL

Columbia University has released an open online course, Learning Success, to provide students everywhere with learning strategies to be successful in higher education courses. The self-paced course is free and open to all on edX.org with an optional paid verified certificate program. The course provides students with foundational study skills, strategies for more effective reading, writing, test preparation and time management, and proven tips for students taking STEM and other technical courses. It also covers metacognition—the awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes—in relation to learning, as well as growth vs. fixed mindsets, to provide students with a better understanding of how they learn.

https://ctl.columbia.edu/announcements/online-course-learning-success/

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Why has COVID-19 been especially harmful for working women?

Filed under: Online Learning News — Ray Schroeder @ 12:03 am

Nicole Bateman and Martha Ross, Brookings

COVID-19 is hard on women because the U.S. economy is hard on women, and this virus excels at taking existing tensions and ratcheting them up. Millions of women were already supporting themselves and their families on meager wages before coronavirus-mitigation lockdowns sent unemployment rates skyrocketing and millions of jobs disappeared. And working mothers were already shouldering the majority of family caregiving responsibilities in the face of a childcare system that is wholly inadequate for a society in which most parents work outside the home. Of course, the disruptions to daycare centers, schools, and afterschool programs have been hard on working fathers, but evidence shows working mothers have taken on more of the resulting childcare responsibilities, and are more frequently reducing their hours or leaving their jobs entirely in response.

https://www.brookings.edu/essay/why-has-covid-19-been-especially-harmful-for-working-women/

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October 30, 2020

How Making My Teaching Accessible Made It Better

Filed under: Online Learning News — Ray Schroeder @ 12:09 am

Katie Rose Guest Pryaland, Tomorrow’s Professor

And my students really got into it. “Put that on the Class Record!” they would request when I said something they found particularly helpful during class. They would take their own notes, and then supplement those notes with the record. I started using the record to prepare my lectures. I would type up an outline of the class that I’d prepared in advance, and then fill in the blanks as we went through class. And at the end of every class, I’d review, fix typos, explain a few things that needed further information and then post the PDF. And if I forgot to post that PDF, I’d receive no fewer than five emails from students politely requesting I do so. In short, all of my students loved the Class Record.

https://tomprof.stanford.edu/posting/1822

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Women are advancing in the workplace, but women of color still lag behind

Filed under: Online Learning News — Ray Schroeder @ 12:05 am

Adia Harvey Wingfield, Brookings

An oft-cited statistic, for instance, reveals that as a result of factors including, but not limited to, motherhood penalties, gender discrimination, and occupational segregation, women make 79 cents for every dollar men earn. But Black women earn only 64 cents on the dollar, and for Latinas it is a dismal 54 cents. As it was in the early 20th century, women of color continue to experience occupational and economic disadvantages that reflect the ways both race and gender affect their work experiences.

https://www.brookings.edu/essay/women-are-advancing-in-the-workplace-but-women-of-color-still-lag-behind/

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How to Become an Instructional Designer: 13 Experts Give Their 3 Key Tips

Filed under: Online Learning News — Ray Schroeder @ 12:02 am

 

Scott Winstead, My eLearning World

There has never been a better time to work as an instructional designer. Businesses, government institutions, and non-profit organizations all seek instructional designers capable of leading teams in creating educational resources for employees and customers. Position yourself to take advantage of the many opportunities that await you. Consider the following suggestions from 13 experts in the field for becoming an instructional designer or building upon your current skills.

https://myelearningworld.com/how-to-become-an-instructional-designer-tips/

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October 29, 2020

Princeton University Agrees To Nearly $1 Million In Back Pay To Female Professors

Filed under: Online Learning News — Ray Schroeder @ 12:10 am

Brakkton Booker, NPR

One of the nation’s most prestigious universities has agreed to pay nearly $1 million in back pay to female professors following allegations of pay discrimination. The Ivy League university will pay $925,000 in back pay and at least $250,000 in future wages, as part of an agreement announced by the U.S. Department of Labor. The agreement resolves pay disparities uncovered by a multi-year investigation that affected more than 100 female full professors, the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs said.

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/13/923233877/princeton-university-agrees-to-nearly-1-million-in-back-pay-to-female-professors

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New Zoom Competitor Targets Higher Ed Users

Filed under: Online Learning News — Ray Schroeder @ 12:05 am

Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed

Ed-tech start-up Engageli has raised $14.5 million to build a videoconferencing platform. Unlike Zoom, the platform has been purposefully designed with college and university faculty members and students in mind. Unlike popular videoconferencing tools such as Zoom, the Engageli platform will be built from scratch specifically for higher education use. It will “seamlessly integrate hybrid, synchronous and asynchronous online instruction all in one platform,” said Dan Avida, CEO of Engageli.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/10/15/ed-tech-veterans-launch-zoom-challenger-engageli

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Report: Enrollment Continues to Trend Downward

Filed under: Online Learning News — Ray Schroeder @ 12:02 am

Madeline St. Amour, Inside Higher Ed

Several concerning enrollment trends are holding strong as the latest, and more comprehensive, data show. Experts and advocates are particularly worried about community colleges.  The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center has bad news. Again. Its latest fall 2020 enrollment report continues to show downward trajectories nearly across the board in higher education. As of Sept. 24, undergraduate enrollment is now 4 percent lower than it was last fall — a 1.5-percentage-point decrease from earlier this semester.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/10/15/worrying-enrollment-trends-continue-clearinghouse-report-shows

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October 28, 2020

Inter-Institutional Sharing of Courses Online

Filed under: Online Learning News — Ray Schroeder @ 9:51 am

Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Education

A series of events has converged to put new impetus behind inter-institutional sharing of courses online. The COVID-19 pandemic, rapid deployment of remote learning, growth of MOOCs and mounting financial pressure on colleges and universities have combined to open minds on this topic. It is impossible to chronicle all of the course-sharing initiatives that are springing up almost daily around the world. As the pace of such sharing of courses and degrees across colleges in this time of COVID-19 is rapidly picking up speed, so also have the range of models among otherwise fierce recruitment competitors, who also happen to be affiliated universities.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online-trending-now/inter-institutional-sharing-courses-online

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October 2020: Misinformation, Disinformation, Hoaxes, and Scams

Filed under: Online Learning News — Ray Schroeder @ 12:10 am

Jay Gallman, EDUCAUSE Review

Help campus community members learn how to identify misinformation and disinformation campaigns and avoid falling victim to online hoaxes and scams.

This post is part of a larger campaign designed to support privacy, security, and IT professionals as they develop or enhance their security awareness plans. The campaign is brought to you by the Awareness and Training Community Group sponsored by the EDUCAUSE Higher Education Information Security Council (HEISC). View the other monthly blog posts with ready-made content on the awareness campaigns resource page.

https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2020/10/october-2020-misinformation-disinformation-hoaxes-and-scams

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Professors adapt teaching styles to technology, online learning

Filed under: Online Learning News — Ray Schroeder @ 12:05 am

Hallie Everett, KState Collegian

Don Saucier, psychology professor, said for him, the most important aspect of teaching online is consistency. “Every class is going to have a rhythm, it’s going to have a structure to it,” Saucier said. “Every Monday morning, that’s when my lecture material goes out. Every Tuesday afternoon, I have the highlight session where they’re synchronous with me and I go over the things that are the most important, and I’ll handle their questions.”

https://www.kstatecollegian.com/2020/10/13/professors-adapt-teaching-styles-to-technology-online-learning/

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UI spent hundreds of thousands to upgrade Zoom, other online learning software

Filed under: Online Learning News — Ray Schroeder @ 12:02 am

Sabine Martin, Daily Iowan

The shift to primarily online courses has added extra expenses for the University of Iowa, as it works to upgrade software and provide online-learning tools for students tuning in from home. In the first week of classes at the UI in the fall semester, students, faculty, and staff logged 2,457,091 meeting minutes on Zoom. Communication Manager of the Office of the Chief Information Officer Nicole Dahya said September data shows that the UI has averaged 1.93 million minutes on Zoom per day because of an increased number of online courses. In February, UI Information Technology Services believed it had very clear plans about what kind of technology was necessary to run campus in the future. As COVID-19 cases rose, however, Chief Information Officer Steven Fleagle said the world turned upside down.

https://dailyiowan.com/2020/10/13/ui-spent-hundreds-of-thousands-to-upgrade-zoom-other-online-learning-software/

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October 27, 2020

Stop spending on bricks-and-mortar and start investing in online education

Filed under: Online Learning News — Ray Schroeder @ 12:05 am

David Ramadan, Richmond Times-Dispatch

Thus, there is a lesson to be learned from the COVID-19 crisis we’re living through: Online learning is here to stay at every educational level. But teaching the basics — classes required for freshmen and sophomores that are the building blocks of higher education — also is where online learning can shine. It also is evident that those who might prefer a blackboard have a long way to go. The days of a camera aimed at an overhead projector slide are more than just old school, and the idea that we’ll be able to capture and hold the attention of the TikTok generation with a barebones Zoom call isn’t going to get it.

https://richmond.com/opinion/columnists/david-ramadan-column-stop-spending-on-bricks-and-mortar-and-start-investing-in-online-education/article_2ee9c3e9-3cf7-5a56-91f6-f7dabbac2c1f.html

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The State of AI in Higher Education

Filed under: Online Learning News — Ray Schroeder @ 12:04 am

Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

Matthew Rascoff, associate vice provost for Digital Education and Innovation at Duke University, views the state of artificial intelligence in education as a proxy for the “promise and perils of ed tech writ large.” As he noted in a recent panel discussion during the 2020 ASU+GSV conference, “On the one hand, you see edX getting more engagement using machine learning-driven nudges in courses, which is pretty amazing. But on the other hand, we have all these concerns about surveillance, bias and privacy when it comes to AI-driven proctoring.”

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2020/10/09/the-state-of-ai-in-higher-education.aspx

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Call for proposals: Policy, Leadership and Organizational Change in Distance Education

Filed under: Online Learning News — Ray Schroeder @ 12:02 am

An upcoming special issue of The American Journal of Distance Education.  Are you conducting or have you recently completed research on leadership, institutional quality and policy, organizational transformation and/or governmental policies in online/eLearning/distance education? If so, please consider responding to a call for proposed articles for Policy, Leadership and Organizational Change in Distance Education, an upcoming special issue of The American Journal of Distance Education.

 
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October 26, 2020

Tutoring: A time-tested solution to an unprecedented pandemic

Filed under: Online Learning News — Ray Schroeder @ 12:10 am

Andre Nickow, Phillip Oreopoulos, and Vincent Quan, Brookings

When it comes to interventions that can help students get back on track, tutoring—defined here as one-on-one or small-group instructional programs—readily comes to mind. As educators will attest, tutoring ranks among the most widespread, versatile, and potentially transformative instruments within today’s educational toolkit. Long before the advent of the contemporary education system, scholars had instructed students individually and in small groups, with more formal tutoring interventions experiencing a renaissance in the mid-1980s. But what promise does tutoring hold in addressing today’s learning crisis?

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2020/10/06/tutoring-a-time-tested-solution-to-an-unprecedented-pandemic/

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How Technology Can Support Student Success during COVID-19

Filed under: Online Learning News — Ray Schroeder @ 12:05 am

Susan Grajek and D. Christopher Brooks, EDUCAUSE Review

The COVID-19 pandemic is prompting many colleges and universities to abruptly and comprehensively adopt online learning, remote work, and other activities to help contain the spread of the virus. In the past decade, institutions have recognized the importance of advising, early alerts, degree planning, and other services to help students attain their academic goals affordably and efficiently. A wide range of new applications and technologies to support student success are now available and may prove invaluable to help students adapt to fully remote learning. EDUCAUSE data from 2019 reveal that many, but far from all, institutions, students, faculty, and staff are ready and able to use these technologies during the pandemic.1

https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2020/3/how-technology-can-support-student-success-during-covid19

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Strapped for students, colleges finally begin to clear transfer logjam

Filed under: Online Learning News — Ray Schroeder @ 12:03 am

Jon Marcus, Hechinger Report

Much of the attention suddenly being paid to transfer students is in institutions’ self-interest — most notably their need to fill seats in the midst of the Covid-19 disruptions. Some colleges are also positioning themselves to scoop up refugees from institutions that have already, or are likely to, shut down or merge. At least 11 schools have announced just since March that they will close their doors, with hundreds more under financial stress.

https://hechingerreport.org/strapped-for-students-colleges-finally-begin-to-clear-transfer-logjam/

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October 25, 2020

Making best use of the link between emotions and learning

Filed under: Online Learning News — Ray Schroeder @ 12:10 am

Ted Sun, University World News

At university level, all faculties can make learning more meaningful and create practical value for their students. It is the responsibility of educators to make a lasting impact on their students. The current world needs graduates who can think critically in emotionally charged situations. We need leaders who are proactive in preventing problems from occurring and who are not sitting around waiting for crises to occur. To accomplish this, universities need to inspire and develop educators to transform the current cookie-cutter factory of education into an individualised educational model that is consistent with the student-centred learning message in their marketing.

https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20200930185422174

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Six problem-solving mindsets for very uncertain times

Filed under: Online Learning News — Ray Schroeder @ 12:05 am

Charles Conn and Robert McLean, McKinsey

These leaders learn to adopt a particularly open and curious mindset, and adhere to a systematic process for cracking even the most inscrutable problems. They’re terrific problem solvers under any conditions. And when conditions of uncertainty are at their peak, they’re at their brilliant best. Six mutually reinforcing approaches underly their success: (1) being ever-curious about every element of a problem; (2) being imperfectionists, with a high tolerance for ambiguity; (3) having a “dragonfly eye” view of the world, to see through multiple lenses; (4) pursuing occurrent behavior and experimenting relentlessly; (5) tapping into the collective intelligence, acknowledging that the smartest people are not in the room; and (6) practicing “show and tell” because storytelling begets action (exhibit).

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/six-problem-solving-mindsets-for-very-uncertain-times

 

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