Online Learning Update

by Kathleen Chaykowski ,FORBES

After launching in India last year, Udacity has made its way to China. The Mountain View, Calif-based online education company, cofounded about four years ago by Google GOOGL -5.53% X founder and Stanford University research professor Sebastian Thrun, is opening offices in China and making more than 100 of its free online courses available to anyone in China under the domain name youdaxue.com, the company said this week. On Wednesday, the company also announced it is launching its first in-person, instructor-led study sessions for students in its “Nanodegree” programs, which cover topics from iOS and Android development to machine learning and require students to complete a series of projects.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenchaykowski/2016/04/21/udacity-debuts-in-china-launches-in-person-group-tutoring/#586d9c9d4bd0

By Anthony Spadafora, Beta News

Adults in the UK are turning to online learning platforms in order to stay competitive in their fields and to learn new skills, despite their increasingly busy schedules. Coursera, which offers online courses from some of the top universities worldwide, has noticed that the number of new users registering for its educational platform has increased by 50 percent over the course of the past 12 months. In the UK, the company has over half a million users that are registered for a variety of courses. Coursera has noted that of those currently studying, 30 percent are using their smartphones to access their courses, which illustrates the flexibility of studying online.

http://betanews.com/2016/04/21/uk-online-courses

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/higher-ed-2023

By Public Affairs, UC Berkeley

Online courses may not have overwhelmed undergraduate education in a disruptive “tsunami,” as once predicted. But teaching and learning technology is “going to change the landscape of everything we do,” UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks told an audience at Stanford University on Friday. Dirks made that prediction in conversation with Stanford president John Hennessy, kicking off the fourth annual “learning summit,” held this year on the Stanford campus. “We’ve seen that online resources can be very important,” Dirks said. “But at the same time they don’t substitute for being there” – for personal contact with faculty or the sense of community that residential undergraduate institutions provide. So far, he added, MOOCs have been “most spectacularly successful for students who have graduated.” Hennessy concurred, observing that massive open online courses (MOOCs) have gotten their greatest traction among professionals already working in their field.

https://news.berkeley.edu/2016/04/18/berkeley-chancellor-stanford-president-kick-off-online-learning-summit/

By Tara García Mathewson, Education Dive

University Ventures Managing Director Ryan Craig and eLumen CEO Joel Hernandez write for TechCrunch that the rise of CBE programs, which have thus far inspired minimal demand from students, may be like smartphones that needed apps to take off after the iOS and Android operating systems were already created. CBE programs’ “clickable credentials” will create unprecedented access for employers and graduate school admissions officers to see the actual skills of graduates, the programs will prove the value-added element of college that is now somewhat obscure, and career services departments may be able to develop ways to market their students to prospective employers by specific, proven skillsets. Craig and Hernandez add CBE programs will greatly help the problem of remediation, with tailored curricula designed to teach students chosen competencies as well as supporting skills through remedial content.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/is-demand-high-enough-for-cbe-expansion/417685/

by WCET

WCET conducted analysis on the Department of Education’s IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) data since the initial release of distance education data for the Fall, 2012. Most recently, we produced a comprehensive report, WCET Distance Education Enrollment Report 2016, that analyzes trends in the distance education data reported between 2012 and 2014. With three years of IPEDS data now available for distance education, it seemed like a good time to revisit the challenges of early distance education data reporting. We wanted to see if the challenges of accurately reporting distance education enrollments for the colleges we investigated in 2014 persisted. Observing institutions’ IPEDS data reporting since 2012 suggests that they are gaining the experience and improving their systems and reporting processes to ensure that the data is an accurate reflection of distance education at their institutions.

https://wcetblog.wordpress.com/2016/04/18/investigating-ipeds-distance-education-data-reporting-progress-has-been-made/

by Leena Rao, Fortune

Udacity’s founder Sebastian Thrun is stepping down as chief executive officer, the company announced on Friday. Vishal Makhijani, the company’s chief operating officer, will be Udacity’s new CEO. Thrun, who will remain as president and chairman of Udacity, said that he will continue to work full-time at Udacity, but he will take on a role focused on what he is passionate about—innovation. Thrun added that he has taken inspiration from his former employer when restructuring his role at Udacity. “While at Google, I was impressed with the way Larry and Sergey organized Google. Eric [Schmidt] was the CEO, but Larry and Sergey enjoyed the freedom of focusing on innovating within the company,” he said.

http://fortune.com/2016/04/22/sebastian-thrun-udacity/

By Froma Harrop, Real Clear Politics

Happily, there exists an alternative to four bankrupting years on campus. There’s almost no learning, be it liberal arts or STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), that can’t be had free — or close to it — online. MOOCs (massive open online courses) are perfectly suited to disrupt the campus model. As suggested above, expense isn’t the only thing powering this revolution. It’s the sense that the people running the universities have lost their minds. Either that or they’ll say almost anything to get protesting students off their backs. (In doing so, they’re also softly egging the students on to say absurd things that could haunt them when prospective employers Google their names.)

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/04/19/higher_ed_needs_major_disruption_130318.html

by Leena Rao, Fortune

Similar to the Indian expansion, Udacity has localized many of its most popular nanodegree certifications to China, including courses in iOS, Android, and machine learning development. Udacity has a local team in China that is providing in-person reviews and coaching in Mandarin. Udacity said it is working with Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com, and ride-sharing company Didi Kuadi to build customized courses for students. Udacity previously partnered with Google to create coursework targeted at Indian students.

http://fortune.com/2016/04/18/udacity-expands-to-china/

By Darryl K. Taft. eWeek

IBM and Coursera next month will begin teaching a new online course for developers to learn how to create applications for the Internet of things. Starting next month, Coursera, the education platform that forms partnerships with top universities and organizations worldwide to offer courses online, is teaming up with IBM to develop an online course to teach programming for the Internet of things (IoT). The new course, “A developer’s guide to the Internet of Things (IoT),” is aimed at providing instruction on how to build IoT applications and will cost $79. Although it is an entry-level course, the assignments use both the Python and JavaScript programming languages, so basic skills in these languages are required.

http://www.eweek.com/developer/ibm-coursera-team-up-on-iot-developer-course.html

by Richard Adams, the Guardian

Oxford, along with all other universities, faces an “uncomfortable future” unless it embraces online degrees and draws up plans for raising billions of pounds to go private, according to the university’s new official history. The book, to be launched by Oxford University Press this week, says new technology has the potential to make universities such as Oxford “redundant” and that it is “only a matter of time” before virtual learning transforms higher education. Laurence Brockliss, the historian and author, argues that Oxford itself should offer undergraduate degrees via online learning, and in doing so could solve the controversies it faces over student access. “I would like Oxford to pilot something, and say we are going to offer 1,000 18-year-olds online courses in different subjects, to experiment and see how it works and how it can be improved,” Brockliss said.

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/apr/17/oxford-university-online-degree-historian-laurence-brockliss

The opinion of Kayla Simon, Daily Nebraskan

When you’re standing in the ocean and a wave begins to descend upon you, you have two choices. You can churn the water trying to get away or you can ride it back to shore. The advent of massive open online courses (MOOCs) has started a trend — one that spells disaster for some universities. If students can access information, videos and even accreditation without paying for it, they very well may. To compete, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln needs to adapt. Instead of fighting the riptide of the information age, UNL should expand its horizons and appreciate the broader education these measures can offer. UNL can prove its worth compared to MOOCs by making all course syllabi public information.

http://www.dailynebraskan.com/opinion/simon-unl-should-make-course-syllabi-public/article_a68b0ef0-050f-11e6-9548-afe697c502c4.html

by David Z. Morris, Fortune

And commits nowhere near enough money to make it happen. On Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking at a World Bank event, urged world governments to build better Internet connectivity. He was specifically promoting a U.S. plan to bring 1.5 billion people who currently lack Internet access online by 2020. Kerry said 3 out of 5 people worldwide are now without access, which he called “unacceptable.” It’s an urgent problem, because Internet access can have profound transformative effects even at the far margins of the global economy. Subsistence farmers can find better prices for crops, banking becomes more accessible, and of course educational opportunity multiplies. The World Bank has said that for every 10% rise in high-speed Internet access, a country’s GDP grows by up to 2%.

http://fortune.com/2016/04/16/u-s-promotes-plan-to-get-1-5-billion-more-people-online/

by eCampus News

A new report suggests that the Learning Differences Massive Open Online Course for Educators (MOOC-Ed), provided by the Friday Institute for Education Innovation at NC State University, may help teachers around the world advance their knowledge of learning differences and better meet the learning needs of their students. Written by researchers on the Friday Institute’s evaluation team, What’s the Value of a Learning Differences MOOC-Ed? analyzes how participants found value in the course using a “value creation framework” developed by Etienne Wenger, Beverly Trayner, and Maarten De Laat (2011). They suggest that, in order to appreciate the richness of the value created by learning communities or networks such as MOOC-Eds, it is helpful to think about value creation in terms of cycles.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/online-learning/moocs/learning-differences-mooc/

Today the Online Learning Consortium (OLC) released an # infographic depicting the state of online learning in higher education. Drawing from over 15 public, private, and self-sponsored sources, the graphic presents the increase in online enrollment and the implications on access and affordability for low-income and non-traditional students.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-04-13-olc-maps-the-online-learning-landscape

by Doris Cheung, EDUCAUSE Review

Online formative feedback using Google Forms and Sheets combined with FormMule facilitated instant data collection and structured feedback for a course at the University of Colorado Law School to optimize learning outcomes. By giving and receiving ongoing, timely feedback, students can practice and modify their behavior during the learning experience, which stimulates motivation and deeper learning. Adopting a low- or no-cost approach can make formative feedback easy to implement. Investing time and effort to give and receive feedback benefits both instructors and students by providing valuable information to adjust teaching and learning and helps ensure shared goals.

http://er.educause.edu/articles/2016/4/optimizing-student-learning-with-online-formative-feedback

by Jason A. Kaufman and David McNay, EDUCAUSE Review

Telepresence courses help colleges and universities serve geographically distributed students and thus achieve their goals of helping all students succeed. An annual survey at Minnesota State University, Mankato of telepresence students has shed light on their experiences with telepresence learning compared with learning in traditional classrooms. Findings from these surveys suggest that focusing on building community and connecting with students on both sides of the classroom can help mitigate the technological limitations of telepresence courses today.

http://er.educause.edu/articles/2016/4/community-in-the-telepresence-classroom

BY ELIANA OSBORN, Good Call

Taking courses online is a great way to meet the demands of work and family while still pursuing higher education. The problem is that too many students don’t have a great experience with online classes, leading to low pass rates and academic consequences. New research published in the journal Computers and Education reveals some design features that lead to greater student success. Shanna Smith Jaggars with the Community College Research Center at Columbia University and Di Xu of the University of California-Irvine looked at different elements of online courses to see which ones were related to higher grades. The biggest factor leading to student success? Quality interpersonal interaction.

https://www.goodcall.com/news/research-reveals-student-instructor-relationships-shape-online-learning-success-06004

By David Raths, Campus Technology

Retention and graduation rates may be good indicators of a college or university’s success, but they have little to do with students’ personal development as connected learners and contributors to the digital commons. What does student success mean in a digital ecosystem? The most prevalent measures involve retention and graduation rates — students pass their classes, move through the curriculum and ideally graduate in four years — but those “institutional outputs” are the lowest-common-denominator definition, according to Gardner Campbell, vice provost for learning innovation and student success, dean of University College and associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. Campbell took part in a recent Future Trends Forum video chat to share his thoughts about how higher education might rethink ideas of student success in a digital age.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/04/11/redefining-student-success-in-a-digital-ecosystem.aspx

by Alan J. Reid, Denise Paster, Campus Technology

The CCC initiative has positively impacted Coastal Carolina’s first-year composition program by providing a programmatic framework for teaching and assessing academic literacy skills central to students’ development and success. This is not to say that the initiative was implemented flawlessly; as the program evolved both technically and conceptually, faculty and student populations had to adjust to a new format for teaching and learning in first-year composition courses. As we reflect on this initiative two years later, we would like to share our insights on designing and building an entirely organic digital badge program in the hopes that others might embrace a similar model that recognizes and rewards student achievement.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/04/06/a-digital-badge-initiative-two-years-later.aspx

By Tara García Mathewson, Education Dive

A new study by researchers at the University of Washington has found significant differences in the types of people who take massive open online courses in developing countries, as compared to users in the United States — and they have different outcomes. In the U.S., MOOC users are disproportionately wealthy and already well-educated, and they more often take MOOCs for personal, rather than professional, reasons. But in developing countries, less than half of survey respondents had completed college, and they reported taking the courses to advance their education or career. Perhaps because of the motivations behind taking MOOCs, completion and certification rates are higher, and 49% of respondents said they had received certification for a course while 79% said they completed a course.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/people-in-developing-countries-use-moocs-differently-1/417358/