Online Learning Update

BY DENNIS, Baltimore Post

Digital learning is, in many ways, already making inroads into our education system. The internet, and everything surrounding it, has changed the way in which we can carry out research and writing. This trend seems set to continue, and with our technology continually advancing, it will most likely expand in the coming years. How this will change our education, and the way we learn, is yet to be determined. What we know for sure is that it will change both of these things. This article will delve into some of the major ideas surrounding online learning in higher education, which will hopefully give some people a chance to understand the basics of the debates.

How online learning will change education

by Darcy Richardson, Education Dive

Today, employers want T-shaped employees, with a depth of knowledge in one area but also skills that translate to many different jobs, such as critical thinking and clear written and verbal communication. Higher education must do more to help adult learners become the candidates that employers need and want to retain. We have a responsibility to help these learners achieve their professional goals by means of accessible, high quality, and relevant courses. Meeting this growing need is becoming more pressing and is directly tied to the future growth of our economy.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/how-to-help-adult-students-succeed/528940/

by Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed

In April, a research study commissioned by Credential Engine counted at least 334,114 credentials in the U.S. That number included 213,913 degree programs and 66,997 certificate programs offered by Title IV-eligible postsecondary institutions, 23,454 high school diploma programs, 13,656 registered apprenticeships, 8,864 state-issued occupational licenses, 5,465 boot camp certificates, 23 MicroMasters and 24 Nanodegrees. The total number of U.S. credentials is actually much higher. This first count did not include non-credit-bearing postsecondary certificates, awards by institutions that are not eligible for Title IV funding, unregistered apprenticeships or alternative credentials like digital badges. Subsequent research by Credential Engine that isn’t yet published suggests there are at least 500,000 credentials available in the U.S. and possibly up to 750,000.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/07/31/credential-engine-seeks-map-credential-landscape

by Mark Lieberman, Inside Higher Ed

The U.S. Department of Education’s first grant for open educational resources, totaling $5 million, will be awarded in late September to between one and three applicants, the department announced today in a call for proposals published in the Federal Register. In an effort to develop OER content that can be disseminated to the widest possible audience for the largest possible savings, the department plans to award grants to one, two or three consortia that each include at least three higher education institutions, subject matter and technology experts, and an advisory group of at least five employers or work-force representatives.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018/07/30/department-education-sets-september-date-one-three-oer-grants-5

by Gary Miller, PressBooks

I retired from The Pennsylvania State University in 2007 after a long career in educational media at Penn State and the University of Maryland University College.  In the last decade of my career, I served as Associate Vice President for Outreach for Continuing and Distance Education at Penn State and was the founding Executive Director of the Penn State World Campus.  After my retirement, I began a blog and wrote many postings about my experience with educational media and, in particular, the emerging role of online learning at our universities.  I’ve collected 16 of those posts into this collection, which I hope will be of interest to colleagues in the field.  Because these were all independent postings, I am sorry to say you may find some ideas being repeated along the way, but I hope you will find the collection to be helpful in your own work.

“https://psu.pb.unizin.org/notesontheolr/part/main-body/”

Introduction

BY BRADLEY FUSTER, eCampus News
The current campus-based, semester-delivery model is unlikely to sustain itself into the next century.  Since the proliferation of the internet and digitization of information, we have witnessed several warning signs. Online course delivery, e-textbooks, the rise and fall of large for-profit institutions, MOOCS, certificates, and micro-credentialing have each commanded attention in the past two decades. While some of these innovations have persisted and some failed, each represents a foreshock prior to a large seismic event that we have not yet experienced.

Future-proof your college before it’s too late

BY ROB SPARKS, eCampus News
Institutions can better serve students by using technology to evaluate skills development and its relevance to workforce needs.  At a time when higher education institutions are being held increasingly accountable for student outcomes and striving to prove their worth as an investment, the six-year completion rate for those who enrolled in 2011 was 56.9 percent. This number indicates that colleges and universities could be doing more to ensure that students see tangible value from their education in the form of a defined career path.

Using workforce data to improve student outcomes

By David Raths, Camus Technology
Getting faculty to try out new technologies can be a challenge. And while many universities have established programs to foster digital innovation campuswide, their efforts are constantly evolving with new developments in teaching and learning and changing mindsets around learning analytics, learning design and more. From internal grant programs to forming communities of practice, here are four ways academic technology leaders are fine-tuning their approaches to working with faculty.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2018/07/25/4-ways-to-fine-tune-academic-innovation-in-higher-ed.aspx

by CA Sana Baqai, the Hindu

With the pioneering of digitalisation in India, education sector has taken complete advantage of the opportunity of online education. E-learning in India is not new yet it is, in a way of approaching the students. With the advantages of studying at the comfort of your home, re-watching a video to clarify or revise and studying at a time comfortable for you, e-learning is giving a tough competition to the classrooms.  Not only is it helping students but at the same time it is also a hot job these days for teachers who want to teach from home and do not want the hassles of arranging tuition classes. Not only does it save you time and money it also gets you to reach a far greater number of students than classroom teaching, and that’s what a lot of teachers these days are looking for.

https://www.thehindu.com/education/connect-with-your-virtual-teacher/article24539181.ece

by Gary Robbins, San Diego Union Tribune
Its main campus is 2,300 miles away. But Penn State University is on the prowl in San Diego, searching for students willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars to earn a degree online. The University of Maryland is doing the same. So are Purdue, Old Dominion, Colorado State, Arizona State, the University of Arizona, Southern New Hampshire University and Grand Canyon University. There’s a feeding frenzy going on in San Diego and other California cities, where big out-of-state schools are trying to capitalize on the promise of online education, largely to offset a huge drop in college enrollment that’s most acute in the Northeast and Midwest.

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/education/sd-me-online-learning-20180715-story.html

By James Paterson, Education Dive
A new Morning Consult study shows that 46% of students surveyed believe textbooks and other course materials have a “big impact” on their financial situations, and some experts say the costs heighten stress and force students to make tradeoffs that affect their ability to pay for housing and food, according to Inside Higher Education. About 43% of students surveyed said they skipped meals because of the expense for books, about 70% said they took on a part-time job because of the the added costs and around 30% said they had to take fewer classes. Some respondents even changed their major or opted out of a specific course so they would not have to pay the extra money. The head of the the education technology firm Cengage, which sponsored the survey of more than 1,600 students, said that textbooks and other course materials cost on average $1,200 a year per student, though learners often find other avenues — including renting books or copying what they need — but still pay almost half that.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/survey-students-say-textbook-costs-have-big-impact-on-finances/528744/

By Regina Gong, EdScoop
In his now-classic book “The Tipping Point,” Malcolm Gladwell explains how everything from “Sesame Street” to Airwalk shoes has sky-rocketed in popularity and shaped society. Gladwell posits that when the right elements are in place, a good idea can gain traction, reach a “point of critical mass,” and then spread like wildfire. Open educational resources (OER) are reaching the type of tipping point that Gladwell describes. While the rise of OER — freely available, openly licensed materials that can be downloaded, edited, and shared — has happened gradually over the past decade, these resources are now poised to transform both K-12 and higher education for the better.

https://edscoop.com/oer-is-at-a-tipping-point-heres-how-to-keep-it-moving-in-the-right-direction

By Adam Lane, Udacity

He got kicked out of high school in Ohio. Today, he’s the co-founder of a blockchain technology firm. His company is making money, and he’s now contributing his subject matter expertise to Udacity’s Blockchain Developer Nanodegree program. In short, life is going really well for Parker. Yet his trajectory could easily have been very different, were it not for his dedication to learning and one unexpected conversation that opened his eyes to a new career. He spent the next few months studying with Udacity, working part-time jobs, and going to school full-time. It was difficult to balance it all, but his interest in programming had grown into a passion, and he wanted to turn it into his career.

Parker McCurley’s Amazing Journey To Becoming A Blockchain Developer

By Colin_Peterson,  The Triangle
Online courses at universities have become more widely taken advantage of recently, with the quick advancement of technology, which has allowed people to access the internet in the most remote areas. It is largely because those courses work so well if you are busy with various other aspects of life. Taking a course online gives you all kinds of flexibility and freedom to choose when to do your work as long as you get it all completed by the deadline. In general, taking a course online works very well if your living and commuting situations make taking traditional classes difficult. However, if commuting hassles don’t bother you much, you might prefer tradition because you’ll have a more coherent way of communicating.

The pros and cons of online classes

BY ALLISON COLLINS, the Missourian
Nearly half of all MU students took an online class during the 2016-17 school year, according to the university’s website. They are popular for a variety of reasons. Some students like to free up their daily schedule for work or other activities, while others like the convenience of pacing their work around other deadlines and busy times during the semester. Online classes can even help students graduate faster. Online classes can be a great resource to a busy college student, but misperceptions about them can cause confusion. Successfully completing an online class demands strong study habits and good time management skills.

https://www.columbiamissourian.com/special_section/collegetown/true-or-false-breaking-down-myths-about-online-classes/article_86d3b8fc-7d79-11e8-a16c-07e31dc22113.html

By Tina Nazerian, EdSurge

EdSurge recently sat down with Clarissa Shen, Udacity’s chief operating officer, to learn more about how Udacity selects what will be taught on its platform and its industry-centered education strategy. Here’s an excerpt of the interview, which has been edited and condensed:  With the so-called ‘new collar economy,’ there are a lot of jobs popping up that haven’t existed, and a lot of jobs that do exist that are going away. There’s a little bit of art and science to this. I won’t say we always get it right, but I think we look at not just the number of jobs, but growth for those jobs. Because certainly, there’s a lot of jobs that you could say are out there but they may be actually declining. So, we want to always look at where the options are, that they’re at least growing.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-07-26-how-udacity-decides-what-subjects-to-offer-courses-in-and-why-it-isn-t-doing-new-university-partnerships

Richard V. Reeves and Katherine Guyot, Brookings

One of the most striking social science findings of recent years is that only half of today’s 30-year-olds earn more than their parents. Raj Chetty and his coauthors showed that rates of absolute mobility—that is, the share of children with higher inflation-adjusted incomes than their parents—declined from around 90 percent for children born in 1940 to just 50 percent for those born in 1984.  For many people, mobility does consist of doing better than your parents did, in absolute terms. This seems to have become steadily harder to achieve for those born into middle-class families in particular from 1950 onward. The challenge is to learn from these historical trends in order to secure a better future for the middle class.

Fewer Americans are making more than their parents did—especially if they grew up in the middle class

by Victor Tangermann, Futurism
Security firm Kaspersky Lab just exposed an international cryptocurrency mining ring that is using malware software called PowerGhost to spread across vast corporate networks. The malware is infecting anything from workstations to entire server farms, using corporate hardware to dedicate a portion of the computer’s power to mine a yet-unknown cryptocurrency. Once a computer is infected, a script downloads the mining tool, which uses the hardware’s processing power to solve complex computational problems. The small amounts of cryptocurrency it mines gets sent back to the attacker’s wallet; the virus, meanwhile, launches a copy of itself to infect other computers connected to the same network. Previous analyses by Kaspersky Lab and security firm Skybox suggested that it is more profitable for cybercriminals to install cryptocurrency mining malware, rather than holding data hostage using ransomware. Browser-based cryptojacking attacks rose 80 percent in 2017, they found.

Cryptomining Malware Is Infecting Corporate Networks Worldwide

By Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed
The Education Department plans to eliminate rather than revise Obama-era rules that required for-profit and vocational programs to prove that they are preparing graduates for gainful employment, according to a memorandum obtained by The New York Times. A decision to pull the plug on the gainful-employment regime, which had been bitterly contested by for-profit colleges and strongly supported by advocates for consumers and students, would represent the latest in a series of actions by the Trump administration to undermine or reverse rules put in place by the Obama administration to protect the integrity of federal financial aid programs.

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2018/07/27/report-education-dept-will-end-gainful-rules

By Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology

A new center at Columbia University will focus on research and innovation in blockchain technology. The institution partnered with IBM to create the Columbia-IBM Center for Blockchain and Data Transparency, which will “combine cross-disciplinary teams from the academic, scientific, business and government communities to explore key issues related to the policy, trust, sharing and consumption of digital data when using blockchain and other privacy-preserving technologies,” according to a news announcement.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2018/07/23/columbia-u-opens-research-center-devoted-to-blockchain-tech.aspx

By Martin Slagter, MLive

Eastern Michigan University and Washtenaw Community College have bolstered efforts to attract non-traditional students through online offerings in recent years as credit hours for in-state students have been on the decline.  MaggiAnn Monroe is the kind of “non-traditional” student that colleges and universities are trying to attract to their online degree programs. Monroe, 36, graduated as a licensed practical nurse eight years ago before earning an associate degree in nursing from Kellogg Community College in 2015. Today, she works as a registered nurse at Henry Ford Allegiance Health in Jackson. After completing her first shift work and driving home, she makes dinner for her children before putting them to bed. When the day is “done,” she gets back to work earning her bachelor of science in nursing degree from Eastern Michigan University. She does her work online.

https://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2018/07/as_credit_hours_fall_emu_and_w.html