Online Learning Update

Kristine Harrington, Arizona Family
As Arizona students settle in for a new year of online learning, cybersecurity experts warn the risk of identity and data theft has increased.] As Arizona students settle in for a new year of online learning, cybersecurity experts warn the risk of identity and data theft has increased. “Anytime there is a crisis like we have right now with the COVID-19 pandemic malicious actors will take advantage,” said Doug Levin, president of the K-12 Cybersecurity Resource Center, which has tracked some 900 cyber-attacks on school districts since 20-16. “That ranges from phishing attacks, data breaches, ransomware incidents, and other sorts of things.” Levin expects to see more cybercrimes with more students attending school online.

https://www.azfamily.com/news/arizona_schools/cybersecurity-experts-warn-of-more-attacks-in-online-learning-environment/article_847afa36-d6a8-11ea-9839-a32b4471460d.html

Matt Feldmann, THE Journal

Many educators are interested in using games in the classroom to boost motivation and engagement. When it comes to learning, though, the lesson from video games is that real learning itself is all the reward necessary. When I think about the most rewarding learning experiences I’ve seen or experienced, they happened when a person persevered to truly learn, not when they customized an avatar, scored points, or earned a new badge.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2020/08/04/the-fine-line-in-game-based-learning.aspx

STEVEN M. BAULE, Campus Technology
Cybersecurity remains top of mind as higher-ed IT leaders navigate a new campus landscape this fall.  As we approach a fall semester that most probably is going to continue to be, at least in part, a virtual experience for many of us, there are many issues for information technology managers to consider. Cybersecurity is one of those.  Over the past few years, cybersecurity has become a prime concern at all levels of society, from small town municipalities to the development of cyberwarfare commands in all branches of the military. Passwords are quite literally the key to many IT systems.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2020/08/04/balancing-cybersecurity-and-user-productivity/

Whitney Kilgore and Veronica Diaz, EDUCAUSE Review
A new initiative aims to provide the skills and expertise that instructional designers need to help higher education meet its growing demands for online education. In this time of crisis, instructional designers have emerged as essential change agents within institutions—they are the force that is propelling this technology-enabled revolution in teaching and learning.

https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2020/8/upskilling-instructional-design-talent-preparing-for-quality-online-learning

Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed
As we prepare for the fall term, most colleges and universities are reacting to the evolving pandemic, responding to changing conditions. But who is creating a vision for the future?  How do we replace campus face-to-face interaction with dispersed or virtual face-to-face, up-close, personal interaction? Beyond our already-proven online learning pedagogies and practices, can we leverage advancing VR, AR, AI, and associated technologies to create a more meaningful and satisfying personal experience? Who is leading the visioning on your campus?

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online-trending-now/many-are-reacting-who-visioning-future?

Tracie Marcella Add, Derek Dube and Khadijah A. Mitchell, Inside Higher Ed

Although colleges have more time to prepare this fall, concerns about equity and inclusion are still apparent. Fostering inclusive classrooms is vital, and all instructors can take certain small steps to start building such learning environments from the start of the course, regardless of modality. While designing inclusive courses is essential for effective teaching — whether we are teaching during a pandemic or in normal times; teaching online, hybrid or face-to-face courses; or teaching undergraduate or graduate-level courses — the uncertainty of this coming fall makes it more important than ever to address inclusion concerns.

https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2020/08/05/small-steps-instructors-can-take-build-more-inclusive-classrooms-opinion

Jeffrey Selingo, the Atlantic

As colleges unveil their reopening plans for the fall, concerns about the safety of faculty teaching in classrooms populated with young adults have taken center stage. But largely left out of the conversation have been the people actually getting campuses up and running: the staff.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/colleges-are-deeply-unequal-workplaces/614791/

Jane Stevenson, Toronto Sun

The Canadian university experience is already looking pretty different now that the global pandemic has sparked a shift to more online or remote learning. But how might it look 50 years from now? “The future of learning arrived in March (during the pandemic lockdown) — we just weren’t ready for it enmasse,” said Athabasca University president Neil Fassina. “But because we all needed to make the shift, I think that’s actually going to create a race to a quality. Institutions around the world are going to be pushing as hard as they can to create the best quality learning experience possible — whether it be face to face or online now — because the world has woken up to the possibilities of online.”

https://torontosun.com/news/national/people-wary-of-online-learning-at-universities-poll

KOLD
The University of Arizona announced its intention to create a new nonprofit entity — University of Arizona Global Campus — and acquire the assets of Ashford University. University of Arizona Global Campus will be a fully online university providing access to affordable high-quality higher education with flexible opportunities to students from diverse backgrounds around the world who seek to achieve their educational and life goals. As student populations turn increasingly to online platforms for higher education, University of Arizona Global Campus will meet students wherever they are in their educational journeys.

https://www.kold.com/2020/08/03/university-arizona-expands-online-learning-access-through-new-nonprofit/

CHRIS HUGHES, Baptist News

CBF-partner theology schools are making significant shifts as they prepare for a fall semester to commence in the middle of the global pandemic. After finishing the spring semester with online instruction, some are planning to offer a variety of options for students for the fall, including both in-person and online classes, while others will remain entirely online. “Currently, we are planning for a blended approach that will combine face-to-face and online modalities,” said Jonathan Lee Walton, dean of the Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, N.C.

https://baptistnews.com/article/trend-toward-online-learning-gives-seminaries-an-advantage-amid-covid/#.XyipaWgZ4d4

Frank Bruni, NY Times
Students at Minerva spend four years entirely online. Is this the future of higher education?  Minerva drew attention at the outset, because it was one answer to intensifying questions about the affordability of college, the country-club excesses of some campuses and the erratic devotion to actual instruction. But it’s an object of even greater fascination now, because it willingly made changes that other schools are suddenly forced to consider, thanks to the coronavirus. Mitchell Stevens, an associate professor of education at Stanford, told me that even before the pandemic higher education “was in many ways being held together by prayers, Band-Aids, international students and a lot of debt.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/opinion/sunday/minerva-college-coronavirus.html

Steve Ranger, ZDNet

Ransomware has been around for more than three decades, so it’s hardly an unexpected threat. And yet, organisations large and small are still being taken completely by surprise by the file-encrypting malware, leaving them to decide between rebuilding many of their computer systems from scratch to rid themselves of the ransomware or paying up to the crooks in the hope that they will hand over the encryption keys. So why aren’t we learning the lessons from all the companies that have already been hit by ransomware over the years? Here are a few reasons.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/ransomware-why-the-internets-biggest-headache-refuses-to-go-away/

By Duncan Slade, Daily Athenaeum – West Virginia University

In May, faculty knew fall classes were quickly approaching and would include some level of remote instruction. The spring semester’s emergency remote learning had soured some students to the entire concept of online education. Faculty had four months, not two weeks, to plan how they would show students the broad possibilities of online learning. Her classes this semester will look very different as students will use a virtual lab platform in conjunction with short video lessons to take measurements on a patient at a doctor’s office, grow glowing bacteria, and extract DNA from a strawberry.

https://www.thedaonline.com/news/university/faculty-work-to-improve-online-class-delivery-for-fall-semester/article_d76e86d6-d383-11ea-8582-5ff53ac9bb32.html

Joe Brandt, NBC10

Some college classes may not offer as many courses this fall if conditions change with the coronavirus pandemic. It’ll depend on whether that course can be brought online, or must be taught in person. But other fields of study require in-person contact for accreditation, or from sheer practice. Art schools are still planning to give students face-to-face time with an instructor in studio courses. Many technical programs with hands-on work also plan to do that in person. In either case, that will necessitate in-person contact during a pandemic that has infected more than 4.3 million Americans.

https://www.pennlive.com/news/2020/08/most-fall-classes-will-be-online-what-about-courses-that-cant-be.html

Brookings Institution
A product of the Brookings Workforce of the Future initiative, this interactive database searches information from 380 metropolitan statistical areas.  Fields allow you to compare to other cities.  Great detail in major employment fields.

https://www.brookings.edu/interactives/visualizing-vulnerable-jobs-across-america/

Nika Schoonover, DePaulia

Ghanem spoke first, discussing the steps DePaul took at the start of the pandemic and what precautions they plan to take. She mentioned the switch to online finals at the end of the winter quarter, the move to remote learning in the spring and summer sessions, and the use of a virtual commencement for graduating students. “At this point, what we are preparing for the fall, is to really reduce the footprint, have alternative teaching modalities, while making sure that our face to face classes are really for those classes that cannot be offered in a different modality focusing predominantly on lab type classes,” Ghanem said. “We have eliminated unnecessary travel for our faculty, our staff as well as our students, and we created a density analysis.”

https://depauliaonline.com/49665/news/depaul-interim-provost-discusses-fall-quarter-online-learning-at-virtual-seminar/

By Emma Kerr, U.S. News & World Report

Students who rely on part-time jobs funded by the federal work-study program to pay for college may see their financial aid options limited or rescinded this fall because of the coronavirus pandemic. Whether students can access work-study funding, which is a form of aid that requires them to work for wages paid in part by the U.S. Department of Education, will depend on the policy in place at the college they attend. Work-study typically only accounts for a small piece of the pie when it comes to paying for college: In 2019-2020, 18% of families relied on work-study to pay for college, and the average aid amount among those families was $1,847, according to Sallie Mae’s How America Pays for College 2020 study.

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/what-work-study-looks-like-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic?

William H. Frey, Brookings Institution

To many Americans—especially baby boomers themselves—this news may come as a shock. For them, the term “millennial” has been associated with a youthful, often negative, vibe in terms of habits, ideology, and politics. Now, the oldest millennial is 39, and with their numbers exceeding those of baby boomers, the millennial generation is poised to take over influential roles in business and government. But the current political environment suggests this takeover could be contentious. Millennials and their juniors (Gen Z and younger) are more racially diverse than those that preceded them, with nearly half identifying as a racial or ethnic minority.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/07/30/now-more-than-half-of-americans-are-millennials-or-younger/

Mashable

When you’re looking for a new job, there are certain skills you’ll need just to get noticed. We recommend taking an online course to walk you through the specifics, but here are some pointers to get started. Get serious about LinkedIn. If you’re hitting that “Easy Apply” button on LinkedIn, your profile better look pristine. Convenience means there’s probably a larger applicant pool. So get a real headshot and spend more time on LinkedIn than Instagram.

https://mashable.com/roundup/how-to-find-a-job-online-learning/

Will Douglas, MIT Technology Review

The tool spots similarities between programs to help programmers write faster and more efficient software. Intel’s Jutin Gottschlich and his colleagues call this machine programming. Working with a team from Intel, MIT and the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, he has developed a system called Machine Inferred Code Similarity, or MISIM, that can extract the meaning of a piece of code—what the code is telling the computer to do—in much the same way as natural-language processing (NLP) systems can read a paragraph written in English.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/07/29/1005768/neural-network-similarities-between-programs-help-computers-code-themselves-ai-intel/

JIANG XUEQIN, Big Think
Jiang Xueqin is a China-based educator and writer and researcher at the Global Education Innovation Initiative at Harvard Graduate School of Education.  Jiang Xueqin endorses learning journals as a good method to promote meta-learning for students during the coronavirus pandemic. Learning journals can be kept for any activity and have three components: defining a goal “concretely and precisely,” writing down the process, and writing down observations and reflecting on the experience.
While learning journals are primarily a personal exercise, Xueqin says that teachers can play a crucial role as coaches who motivate the student and find ways for them to improve with new learning strategies.

https://bigthink.com/future-of-learning/learning-journals