Online Learning Update

Steven W. Hemelt and Kevin M. Stange, Brookings Insitution

WILL ONLINE INSTRUCTION LOWER COSTS OVER THE SHORT RUN?
Based on our analysis, the short answer is, surprisingly, no. Simply moving more instruction online does not fundamentally alter the cost equation. We look at many departments over time and associate changes in online offerings with changes in average instructional cost per student. We find a negligible association between online credits and instructional costs, as shown in Figure 2. Shifting online instruction from zero to 10% of credits is associated with about a 1.04% reduction in departmental instructional costs, which we cannot statistically distinguish from no effect. Patterns are similar for undergraduate and graduate education.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2020/07/28/why-the-move-to-online-instruction-wont-reduce-college-costs/

Joyce Lau, Times Higher Education

India’s plans to completely overhaul its higher education system and to open it to international branch campuses have been hailed as impressive by observers, although they remain uncertain about how the country will achieve its lofty goals. Government plan envisions “top 100 universities in the world” being given permission to operate in the country. The National Education Policy (NEP), approved after 12 months of public consultation, sets out a 20-year blueprint to nearly double higher education capacity.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/08/06/india-adopts-major-plan-higher-education-expansion

Michael Wesch, EDUCAUSE Review

The hard part can be getting the confidence to talk to the camera, but making simple videos for online teaching can help you engage with students. This video was produced by Michael Wesch, professor at Kansas State University. You can find more videos like this on his YouTube channel @Michael Wesch.

https://er.educause.edu/multimedia/2020/7/make-super-simple-videos-for-teaching-online

By Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology
Learning platform edX recently convened the first (virtual) meeting of its MicroBachelors Program Skills Advisory Council, a group launched in early 2020 that brings together foundations, corporations and academic institutions to “solve shared challenges around reskilling and upskilling in order to address the demands of the future workplace.”

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2020/07/28/edx-advisory-council-calls-for-short-term-credential-programs-industry-aligned-curricula.aspx

Emily A. Vogels, Lee Raine, Janna Anderson, Pew Research

Experts who were canvassed about the relationship between people’s technology use and democracy also expressed serious concerns about how things will unfold in the next decade. Ray Schroeder, associate vice chancellor of online learning at the University of Illinois, Springfield, wrote, “Dramatic shifts in employment and education are likely to take place in the coming decade…. New education models such as just-in-time AI-enhanced adaptive learning will emerge, as will truly personalized learning. These will grow in the context of broad social structures that emerge both within and outside formal education as we know it.”

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/06/30/innovations-these-experts-predict-by-2030/

Matthew Dembicki, CC Daily

Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, El Paso Community College (EPCC) in Texas was already shifting from being primarily an academic transfer institution to expanding more of its career and technical education (CTE) programs based on local demand for those skills among employers, according to President William Serrata. “I believe the pandemic will accelerate this shift,” said Serrata, chair of the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) board of directors, during a panel discussion Friday at the virtual Education Writers Association National Seminar.

https://www.ccdaily.com/2020/07/shifting-more-toward-cte/

Mary Grush, Campus Technology
At Georgia State University, students learn not only the technical competencies deemed necessary for “digital literacy”; they learn how to pair their new technical understanding with fledgling leadership skills. And while the GSU program, “Digital Learners to Leaders” (DLL) began as a popular co-curricular option back in 2018, it has gained recognition on campus as a solid support for students’ academic, career, and personal choices. It is now incorporated into many of GSU’s undergraduate programs.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2020/07/13/when-learning-becomes-leading-leading-becomes-learning.aspx

BY SAAD EL YAMANI, eCampus News

Thanks to the hard work of faculty and the dedication of students, college campuses are hotbeds for innovation and discovery. The internet, antibiotics, the Richter scale, and Google’s algorithm are just a handful of the innovations that have been created on university soil. But, when it comes to technology’s role in supporting innovative teaching and learning practices in higher ed, U.S. institutions face significant barriers.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2020/07/24/higher-ed-is-digitized-now-lets-modernize-it/

Kate Valenti and Linda Feng, EDUCAUSE Review

Pre-pandemic measurements of student engagement would have drawn from in-person observation as well as metrics from the student’s digital ecosystem, such as number of LMS logins. Now, institutions must learn how to measure the active interest and motivation of their students and assess learning progress in a fully online interaction, with the added challenge that every single student has a valid reason to be distracted or “disengaged.” Discussion during the ELI session drew out several implications of the move to online interaction, both in the early stages of the crisis and now as we all plan for the fall semester.

https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2020/7/answering-new-questions-in-the-wake-of-covid-19-insights-from-an-eli-analytics-roundtable

Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology
Google has announced three new certificate programs on Coursera: Data Analytics, Project Management, and User Experience Design. Part of the company’s Grow with Google initiative, the Google Career Certificates are available to anyone, with no degree required to enroll. Google’s first certificate program, the Google IT Support Professional Certificate, launched in 2018, with 80 percent of participants reporting that the program helped them advance their job search or career within six months.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2020/07/14/google-adds-3-new-certificates-on-coursera.aspx

Lauren Lumpkin, Washington Post
A Dartmouth study shows a marked increase in anxiety and depression among college students during the initial outbreak of the novel coronavirus. The study, published last month in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, suggests the impact of the coronavirus reaches beyond physical health and safety. More Americans are dealing with the mental health effects of spending more time indoors, away from loved ones and, in many cases, unemployed, experts say. But mental illness has long been a pressing concern for college students: More than 40 percent have felt “so depressed that it was difficult to function,” according to a 2019 report from the American College Health Association.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/coronavirus-has-made-already-stressed-college-students-even-more-anxious-and-depressed-study-finds/2020/07/24/75608c50-cdb6-11ea-bc6a-6841b28d9093_story.html

Chris Matyszczyk, ZDNet

Microsoft was proactive in sending many of its employees home. It’s also been proactive in studying the consequences. The results of this study were recently published in the Harvard Business Review and, as if it were possible, they’ve elevated my concerns for the future of humankind. We’re supposed to believe that tech makes us more efficient and makes our lives easier and better. In some areas, that’s surely true. Yet one overarching result of being stuck at home — at work — is that the working day has become longer. “People were ‘on’ four more hours a week, on average,” say the researchers.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-told-employees-to-work-from-home-one-consequence-was-brutal/

Josh Kim, Inside Higher Ed

As with any attempt to articulate big categories in which individuals fall, this effort to place digital learning professionals within broad categories of progressive/moderate/libertarian is imperfect. People are never one thing. They have beliefs and priorities that span ideologies, and circumstances and constraints dictate their actions. I am trying to offer this modest and flawed taxonomy to get at what I think are the ideological roots of much of the controversies and disagreements that confront our digital learning community.

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/learning-innovation/ideological-taxonomy-our-postsecondary-digital-learning-community

Tori Mondelli, EDUCAUSE
Sixteen educators from across the country find common cause in putting student well-being at the center of instruction. Now, the collection aids small and/or budget-restricted centers for teaching and learning. The idea that student well-being ought to be at the heart of our decisions about course design, instructional activities, assessment, and student success was the generative idea. My co-editor of the collection, Thomas J. Tobin, shared how the “ethos of care” lineage stretches back to Florence Nightingale’s instruction for nurses. It was picked up by 20th-century pre-K–6 educators, and, presently, the concept gains ground with higher educators thanks to scholars including Maha Bali and others. Make no mistake, it’s a gendered and racialized concept. It’s also humanizing.

https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2020/7/community-of-practice-coalesces-to-launch-open-pedagogies-of-care-collection

WRGB

Finding a way to teach students remotely isn’t new for SUNY Empire State College, the college has been providing distance-learning for its students since the institution opened in 1971… and has been offering online classes since 1995. Among SUNY schools, SUNY Empire is considered the leader in online education. It’s been offering its expertise and guidance on remote learning not only to other higher ed institutions but even K-12 educators.

https://cbs6albany.com/news/coronavirus/suny-empire-no-stranger-to-remote-learning-offers-guidance-to-fellow-ny-schools

Michael Muchmore, PC Magazine

With all the prohibitions against in-person gatherings, most business and education has moved online, and as a consequence Zoom’s users have has grown from about 10 million daily to over 200 million, according to the company’s blog. And it’s not just businesses, either. Some of the services below have lower participant limits, but most don’t cut your group off after a specified time. All the services linked below have free accounts for the public to use, but they vary greatly in functionality. Read on for the details on each—how many participants they allow, the platforms they work on, and their special features or requirements.

https://www.pcmag.com/products/zoom-alternatives-best-free-services-for-group-video-chatting-during-the

Dian Schaffhauser, THE Journal
Plenty of discussions about the use of artificial intelligence talk about how AI could help educators by shrinking the amount of time they have to spend on the trivia that pervades their work and freeing them up to focus on the job of teaching. In the latest CoSN IT leadership survey, more than half of respondents (55 percent) said that AI would have a significant or even transformational impact on teaching and learning within the next five years, if privacy issues can be addressed to everybody’s satisfaction.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2020/07/08/sending-ai-off-to-school.aspx

Jeremy Bauer-Wolf, Education Dive

While more than three-quarters of colleges’ chief online officers deemed the abrupt transition to virtual classes earlier this year to be largely or very successful, half said their schools will require faculty training in remote learning this fall, according to a new report. The annual Changing Landscape of Online Education (CHLOE 5) survey polled 308 college COOs in May. Three-quarters of officials said poorly prepared faculty presented the biggest challenge pivoting to online learning this spring, and 62% said it was underprepared students. As the pandemic persists and more institutions forgo in-person instruction this fall, they will be looking for ways to improve their online offerings.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/half-of-colleges-will-require-faculty-training-for-an-online-fall-report-f/582007/

Agustian Sutrisno, University World News
The COVID-19 pandemic impacts the landscape of transnational higher education (TNHE) in three dimensions: student mobility, economic recession and international political tension. As a health catastrophe, COVID-19 affects cross-border mobility, opening up opportunities for TNHE to absorb the demand for international qualifications. The 1997 Asian Financial Crisis shows how TNHE may come into its own during a recession. However, the international political climate is less than certain and TNHE providers are facing a landscape filled with rising nationalistic rhetoric and self-serving interest.

https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20200714143605966

Marcus Casey, Brookings Institution

Automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are projected to either replace or fundamentally change human effort in many occupations. Some jobs may become obsolete. But the potential gains in productivity and efficiency from these technologies will likely transform legacy industries and lead to the emergence of new industries, generating new tasks and jobs. Displaced workers and new labor market entrants alike will therefore need to invest in skills and knowledge that complement these technologies.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/07/22/looking-towards-the-future-automation-training-and-the-middle-class/

Brookings Institution
In 2018, private, four-year colleges accounted for just 20 percent of total freshman enrollment, as compared to 45 percent for public, four-year colleges and universities.[1] Public four-years go beyond enrolling many students, however – they are the workhorses of upward mobility for the middle class. In our new report, which draws on data produced by Opportunity Insights, we show that students who attend college – particularly a four-year college – are significantly more likely to experience upward mobility in adulthood, relative to their parents’ position in the income distribution, than nonattenders.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/07/22/public-colleges-are-the-workhorses-of-middle-class-mobility/