Online Learning Update

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology
In spite of the notion that students could conceivably take online courses from an institution anywhere in the world, two-thirds stick close to home — choosing a college or university within 50 miles of where they live. In fact, 44 percent selected a school within 25 miles of their homes. And the share of students enrolling in a school more than 100 miles from home fell from 37 percent in 2014 to 15 percent in 2019.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2019/06/04/survey-students-choosing-online-programs-closer-to-home.aspx

By Jason Yan, Daily Pennsylvanian
Wharton professors will teach ‘fintech’ — a cross between finance and technology — to students around the world in a new online program. Wharton Online released the fintech specialization on Coursera, an online learning platform, on May 30. The program, titled “Fintech: Foundations and Applications of Financial Technology,” contains four courses and covers subjects from cryptocurrency and blockchain to crowdfunding and robo-advising. The courses will each cost a monthly fee of $79 and will be taught by Wharton finance and Penn Law professors.

https://www.thedp.com/article/2019/06/penn-wharton-fintech-finance-online-tech

Evangeline J. Tsibris Cummings and Vincent J. Del Casino Jr., Inside Higher Ed

Building and managing their own online programs helps institutions transform themselves and prepare for the future, Vin Del Casino and Evie Cummings argue. To survive and prosper in this moment of massive change in higher education and the noise of “mega-universities” and to lead higher education into its next quarter century, it will take great courage, clarity of vision and purpose, and the empowerment and high expectations for impact among our faculty and staff. We must be mindful that while it requires leadership at your university, building an effective and integrated online experience also demands partnership with external stakeholders — state officials, university boards and accrediting agencies — whose focus on student completion and success must be geared toward the long game of a sustainable future.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/views/2019/06/05/universities-can-go-online-without-corporate-partner-even-age

Edward J. Maloney and Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed

The answer always depends on the individual asking, but anyone who claims that there is a single route to a career in digital learning has not spent much time with leaders in the profession. A strength of the field is the range of diverse perspectives and training that practitioners bring to the work. Whatever one’s educational background, and independent of the decision to study for a Ph.D., there are a number of areas that everyone working in digital learning should know. These are subjects that neither of us learned anything about in our own traditional Ph.D. programs, but they have proven vital navigating our careers in higher education digital learning.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/technology-and-learning/4-things-every-digital-learning-leader-should-know

by AARON CANTÚ, The Hechinger Report

Across the country, many universities are seeing increases in Latinx populations. Between 2000 and 2015, the number of Latinx college students more than doubled, to 3 million. Their share of overall college enrollment rose between 1996 and 2016 from 8 to 19 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In response, some universities are starting to cater to their growing Latinx populations. They’re adding more faculty who reflect the school’s increasing diversity, introducing cultural programming and establishing counseling and mentoring programs to help Latinx students overcome stubborn academic resource gaps.

https://hechingerreport.org/universities-try-to-catch-up-to-their-growing-latinx-populations/

Tiernan Ray, ZD Net
The “Era of neural disinformation” is upon us, a future in which machines can generate fake news articles in enormous volume that humans will get suckered into believing is real.  The only hope for society lies with … another machine.  Researchers at Allen Institute and the Paul Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington have tuned the “GPT-2” neural network to create “Grover,” a program that both creates convincing fake articles but also is able to detect those fakes, pointing to a way to combat propaganda.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/to-catch-a-fake-machine-learning-sniffs-out-its-own-machine-written-propaganda/

MIKE COLAGROSSI, Big Think

Nontraditional education options are on the rise.  U.S. college enrollment has declined for the eighth consecutive year.  A recent survey found that a majority of freelancers found skills training to be more important than having a degree. It’s becoming harder for universities to keep up with a rapidly changing workforce.  It should come as no surprise to mostly anyone who is paying attention, that we’re in a seriously fast moving and complex technology-driven economy. One of the likes we’ve never seen before and one that’s only going to get wilder.

https://bigthink.com/personal-growth/skills-degrees

Allana Akhtar and Andy Kiersz, Business Insider

College is more expensive than ever, leading many business leaders and experts to offer ways to get good jobs without needing a degree. Yet college graduates still earn more than non-college graduates in every state in the US, according to data from the 2017 American Consumer Survey. Here’s how much more college graduates make in every state.

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-more-college-graduates-earn-than-non-graduates-in-every-state-2019-5

by Will Knight, MIT Technology Review

New guidelines on freedom and privacy protection signal that the Chinese state is open to dialogue about how it uses technology. And while China’s government is widely criticized for using AI as a way to monitor citizens, the newly published guidelines seem remarkably similar to ethical frameworks laid out by Western companies and governments.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613610/why-does-china-suddenly-care-about-ai-ethics-and-privacy/

ANNE FISHER, Fortune
Artificial intelligence can be a “black box”—mysterious and more than a little intimidating. Meanwhile, new permutations of the tech are sprouting up like mushrooms, especially for recruiting and hiring. Yet as employers have increasingly tried to make their workforces more diverse and inclusive, the A.I. industry itself has taken some flak for being almost exclusively white and male. The irony there is that A.I., used correctly, has “a shot at being better at decision-making than we humans are, particularly in hiring,” says Aleksandra Mojsilovic. A research fellow in A.I. at IBM, Mojsilovic holds 16 patents in machine learning, and helped develop algorithms that can check other algorithms for unintended bias. An essential part of using A.I. to encourage diversity, she notes, is making sure the teams that build what goes into the black box are themselves a diverse group, with a variety of backgrounds and points of view.

http://fortune.com/2019/06/01/ai-artificial-intelligence-diversity-hiring/

Miles Brignall, the Guardian

Tutorials available online showing how to get details of stolen cards, says tech firm. Want to use stolen credit card details to buy online? There’s a class for that. Card fraud is evolving, with amateur fraudsters able to “enrol” in online “classes” where they can learn how to use stolen card details to buy smaller-value items. That’s the claim from a UK tech firm, which says a new breed of opportunistic fraudster is learning how to commit crime via online tutorials and guides available on the so-called “dark web”. Featurespace, a Cambridge-based artificial intelligence (AI) firm, showed Guardian Money examples and screengrabs of these tutorials, many of which will point people towards specific “carding” sites that sell people’s details.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/jun/01/now-there-are-online-classes-in-how-to-use-stolen-cards

Abeer Anwaar, Block Publisher

According to the press release published on May 30, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania has officially introduced a new online program focusing on fintech in general, which also includes digital currencies and the distributed ledger technology (DLT). As the acceptance and popularity of cryptocurrency and its underlying blockchain technology increases, the need to study it in more detail also becomes necessary. In light of that necessity, several universities around the globe are offering courses on the new technology. Among them is an Ivy League university from United States, the University of Pennsylvania.

https://blockpublisher.com/learning-crypto-and-blockchain-is-now-made-easy-by-an-ivy-league-university/

Patrick Blessinger, Enakshi Sengupta and Taisir Subhi Yamin; University World News

In short, service-learning is a curricula-based approach to teaching and learning that allows students to directly put academic theory into real-world practice. The specifics of a service-learning project will depend on the institutional mission, the academic discipline and programme, the grade level and course type and the specific learning objectives. The research knowledge base on service-learning shows that it can have a positive impact on student engagement, retention and graduation rates. Service-learning is an approach that complements and enhances traditional classroom (face-to-face, hybrid or online) courses through civic engagement and community development.

https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20190526153905418

By: Brian Udermann, Faculty Focus

One of the concerns I frequently hear from instructors considering teaching online is that they will lose the interaction and sense of community they have with their students when they teach face-to-face. That doesn’t have to be the case; many online instructors successfully create a sense of community in their courses. There are a variety of definitions of community. Most include wording or phrases such as “having something in common,” “feelings of being connected,” “shared goals or aspirations,” and “regular interaction.” This article will explore seven strategies faculty can use to promote and increase community in the online environment.

https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/seven-strategies-to-promote-community-in-online-courses/

JP Mangalindan, Yahoo Finance

Cuban told Yahoo Finance Editor-in-Chief Andy Serwer in a recent interview he has taken several online courses to stay up-to-date on programming languages and evolving technologies, including machine learning. Doing so arguably makes him a savvier investor when some tech startups pitch him. “I mean, I’ve been on Amazon doing the machine learning tutorials,” Cuban said. “Right now I’m going through… I’ve taken Python online classes.” “I just started JavaScript neural networks,” added Cuban, referring to computing systems that act similarly to biological neural networks and adapt to perform tasks. “There’s a little tutorial where they’ve got most of the libraries … And if you have a background in programming, it’s not hard.”

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-cuban-coding-113412974.html

Bill DeBaun, College Access

A new National College Access Network analysis shows that students are right to be concerned: Affordability is decreasing at two- and four-year public institutions, whose mission is to provide a postsecondary pathway to benefit individuals and the public at large. In 2016-17, just 48% of community colleges in our sample were affordable for the average Pell Grant recipient, according to NCAN’s affordability formula. Only 27% of four-year public institutions were affordable. From academic years 2012-13 to 2016-17, the percentage of affordable institutions declined nationally, while affordability gaps rose.

http://www.collegeaccess.org/BlogItem?dg=9c193a4e63164902adadb8d5612ff29e

Federico Guerrini, Forbes

Artificial Intelligence is going to transform the world, changing a lot of things for all categories of people in the process; children will be among the most affected. You and I live in an age where we’re starting to be impacted, but we’ve spent a lot of our lives not really having interacted with AI. We’re also adults that have some volition and agency. For children, it’s different,” Erica Kochi, co-founder of UNICEF Innovation Unit, tells me. Whether it’s the learning algorithms powering You Tube Kids’ content, the smart toys which listen and keep track of every interaction of their little consumers, or the educational robots that could soon replace teachers in the classroom, there are already multiple instances of children being surrounded by AI-enabled products that provide guidance, suggestions, company and fun.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2019/06/28/what-to-expect-from-generation-ai/

Staffing Industry Analysis

Two-thirds of the world’s population is falling behind in critical skills, including 90% of developing economies, according to a new report from online learning platform Coursera. The report, Coursera’s Global Skills Index, takes an in-depth look at skill trends and performance around the world. Countries that rank in the lagging or emerging categories (the bottom two quartiles) in at least one domain make up 66% of the world’s population, indicating a critical need to upskill the global workforce. The report suggested that such a large proportion of ill-prepared workers calls for greater investment in learning to ensure they remain competitive in the new economy.

https://www2.staffingindustry.com/row/Editorial/Daily-News/World-Two-thirds-of-population-falling-behind-in-critical-skills-report-finds-50118

By Jeffrey R. Young, EdSurge

The other day I was scrolling through Twitter when a message caught my eye. It came from George Siemens, a longtime leader in trying to understand the impact of technology on higher ed. He wrote: “I no longer think there’s a huge difference between for-profit and public higher education. Sit in enough faculty meetings, meet with enough leadership, and it becomes clear that it’s all about money. The difference between for-profit and public is mainly about appearances. In public institutions, we claim the higher ground but almost everything is driven by student numbers, enrollment, and dollars. Education could be less expensive, it could be more engaging, it could have a bigger impact, but we are confined to a system that values dollars first.”

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-05-30-is-there-still-a-meaningful-difference-between-for-profit-and-public-higher-ed

Newz Hook
The National Association for the Blind is organising online programmes on digital accessibility training for visually impaired people. This is important given the potential growth of job opportunities companies need people who can test websites and other digital mediums to ensure they are accessible for people with disabilities. With information technology accessibility (ICT Accessibility) among the key mandates of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act (RPWD Act), digital accessibility is offering many promising employment opportunities for people with visual impairments. Companies are looking for qualified people who can ensure that their digital systems are usable and accessible to people with disabilities on a sustained basis.

https://newzhook.com/story/22390

Matthew Beedham, the Next Web

Ireland‘s new blockchain Master’s was developed in collaboration with Technology Ireland ICT Skillnet, a government funded ICT training organization, and Dublin City University. The course is targeted primarily at IT professionals looking to build their blockchain dev skills. The “MSc in Blockchain” aims to close the skills gap that ICT Skillnet claims is currently preventing adoption of the technology, and to help Ireland become one of the world’s leading developers of blockchain related technology, according to the prospectus.

https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/05/31/universities-decentralized-online-blockchain-courses/