By Michael Goldberg and Ted Ladd, EdSurge
In our opinion, MOOCs can have the greatest impact when they combine the advantages of online education—the ability to watch lectures from anywhere and connection to a global network—with an in-person networking component that offers guidance, discussion and engagement.
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-05-30-for-best-results-pair-moocs-with-in-person-support
Share on FacebookJon Marcus, Hechinger Report
With the number of 18- to 24-year-olds down and expected to remain flat through at least 2035, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Twenty-nine percent of undergraduate and 77 percent of graduate students are 25 or older, the U.S. Department of Education reports. Among these older students, more than half are parents, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Two-thirds have low incomes, compared to 36 percent of their traditional-aged classmates. Fifty-seven percent work at least 20 hours a week, versus 39 percent of younger students. And 44 percent, compared to 19 percent of traditional undergrads, enroll part-time.
Share on FacebookSetting your vision and listing down the skills is one thing; learning and acquiring these skills is another. Don’t be rigid and be prepared to learn all the time. A business degree acquired 10 years ago is not enough, business environment changes and so do the technology and the work demands. In this age of technology, learning has become very easy. Make full use of internet to learn skills. You can also master the desired skills by doing affordable online courses for few hundred bucks from different online learning portals.
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/334467
Share on FacebookBY LAURA ASCIONE, eCampus News
Adults are quickly taking over a larger and larger part of the student population at colleges and universities–and understanding adult learners is key to institutional success. The idea of the “traditional student,” who graduates high school and enrolls in a university, graduating in four years, is transforming. The majority of today’s learners are adult learners–those juggling school with work or family responsibilities, or those seeking new skills or a complete career change. Many institutions are focusing on adult learner programs to help boost their growth and revenue as enrollment projections decline.
Share on Facebookby Katalin Wargo, EDUCAUSE Review
As at many colleges and universities across the nation, the teaching and learning landscape at William & Mary, a midsized liberal arts institution, is rapidly evolving. Online and hybrid programs are being woven throughout the William & Mary experience at such a fast pace that we have had to stop and ask ourselves what exactly we want that experience to be. As a continuation of our work on a contextualized approach to the digital learning environment, William & Mary’s University eLearning Initiatives created a new model of faculty development for online course design. The model deliberately cultivates human-centered digital learning by emphasizing connection, which we know to be difficult to foster within digital environments without intentional design.
Share on FacebookBy Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology
A researcher in Germany has developed technology for automatically detecting the usability and user-friendliness of virtual environments. Previously, said Patrick Harms from the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Göttingen, the only way to check these aspects of virtual reality and the virtual world was through manual testing. Harms wrote about his results in the May 2019 issue of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction.
https://campustechnology.com/articles/2019/05/29/new-tech-tests-usability-of-virtual-apps.aspx
Share on FacebookRay Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed
Blockchain is evolving into a robust platform that may shake many aspects of higher ed. We all have heard much about the potential for blockchain, particularly how it might serve as a distribution, validation and secure ledger of transcripts and associated certifications. MIT did the early work on this. Two years ago they began offering the distribution of diplomas via the Blockcerts Wallet app. While that sounds geeky cool, it represents much more than a technological advance. Substantively, it shifts control of transcripts from the registrar to the student. No longer can an unpaid parking ticket delay the delivery of your transcript to a prospective employer. How can you prepare to adopt blockchain into your institution?
https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online-trending-now/emergence-blockchain
Share on FacebookBy Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology
Carnegie Mellon University has moved forward in its efforts to release education tools into the world. Last week, the institution officially introduced OpenSimon, a community and collection of tools dedicated to “[catalyzing] a revolution in learning and teaching” for higher education and K-12. According to the university, the software that will eventually be made available under open source licenses represents an investment of $100 million in research and development. OpenSimon includes tools for multiple audiences: those teaching as well as those doing research or developing educational technology products.
Ruth Reynard, Campus Technology
Those of us in education have heard about integrated instruction for some time. Also known as “interdisciplinary instruction,” the term is used to explain approaches to teaching and learning that support problem solving and critical thinking. Bringing various academic disciplines together can help students think more deeply and more holistically about a topic or a project solution. Therefore, rather than presenting content in a linear fashion with prescribed beginning and ending points, an integrated approach not only encourages, but expects intersection points where related content can be part of the learning process. Topics and subjects are not seen as completely separate entities in an educational journey; instead, they are integrated at points, to make more sense of the whole.
Share on FacebookHeidi Stahl, Karin Roberts, William Washington, Campus Technology
Most important of all, when building for students, include the student voice. When planning for a new tool, even if you are going to choose a vendor product, including the student voice is critical to the decision process. Students are crucial but often invisible stakeholders; effort must be made to include their perspective, needs and goals when designing or choosing a product they’ll be using.
Share on FacebookRichard Rose, Campus Technology
If our SRUs stopped being timid about taking full advantage of technology, they could reconfigure themselves as very different institutions that could offer a great deal more earning potential — and charge a great deal less. To begin to see how this is possible, let’s look at the services SRUs perform for their students — and which services would benefit from a more complete reliance on technology.
Share on FacebookJohn G. Paul, IBL News
During the same session at the University of Naples Federico II, Anant Agarwal, CEO at edX, and Simon Nelson, CEO at FutureLearn, stressed the impact of in-demand MOOCs on up-skilling and re-skilling employees as well as setting up lifelong learning habits. Simon Nelson, whose company received a recent investment of $64 million, announced that FutureLearn will invest money in creating high-quality content. So far the three big MOOC providers have not invested in content, relying instead on universities’ and industry partners’ offerings.
Share on FacebookRina Caballar, Techopedia
Women make up only 22% of AI professionals worldwide, according to analysis done by LinkedIn and the World Economic Forum for its 2018 Global Gender Gap Report. In the more specialized area of machine learning, only 12% are women, based on a study done by Wired in partnership with Montreal startup Element AI. Artificial intelligence and machine learning continue to be male-dominated fields. But what would an artificially intelligent world designed and led by women look like? From making AI more human to automating the construction industry and reimagining the healthcare sector, here are seven women blazing the trail in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics.
https://www.techopedia.com/7-women-leaders-in-ai-machine-learning-and-robotics/2/33884
Share on FacebookEmily Glassberg SandsVinod Bakthavachalam, Harvard Business Review
We find stark skill contrasts between developed and developing markets, with North America and Europe far outpacing Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East, on average. That said, the U.S. fails to reach the top quartile of countries in any of the three domains, and shows strong regional heterogeneity, with the South in particular lagging in key skill areas. Among industries, manufacturing and telecommunications demonstrate skill strengths; the tech industry also excels (as expected) in technology and data science, but is weaker in business.
https://hbr.org/2019/05/ranking-countries-and-industries-by-tech-data-and-business-skills
Share on FacebookNilanjana Saxena, EDUCAUSE Review
The education-to-employment gap continues to be the subject of much discussion, often surfacing in policy debates across both the developed and the developing world. The gap, which centers on skill acquisition, has led to relatively high levels of youth unemployment worldwide, as is visible in recent data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the 2018 QS report “The Global Graduate Skills Gap in the 21st Century,” which calls the skills gap “a global and significantly widespread issue.” “The Future of Jobs Report 2018” from the World Economic Forum (WEF) also elaborates on the problem by emphasizing the skills with which the current and future workforce must be equipped in order to succeed in an increasingly technology-driven workplace.
https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2019/5/how-can-edtech-address-evolving-school-and-workforce-needs
Share on FacebookDouglas Merrill, Harvard Business Review
More than half of technology executives in the 2019 Gartner CIO Survey say they intend to employ AI before the end of 2020, up from 14% today. If you’re moving too slowly, a competitor could use AI to put you out of business. But if you move too quickly, you risk taking an approach the company doesn’t truly know how to manage. In a recent report by NewVantage Partners, 75% of companies cited fear of disruption from data-driven digital competitors as the top reason they’re investing. Answering these questions requires expertise in technology. But you can’t just add a tech expert to the board and count on him or her to keep the rest of the board up to speed.
https://hbr.org/2019/05/what-boards-need-to-know-about-ai
Share on FacebookStan Schroeder, Mashable
Need more convincing that it will soon be impossible to tell whether a video of a person is real or fake? Enter Samsung’s new research, in which a neural network can turn a still image into a disturbingly convincing video. Researchers at the Samsung AI center in Moscow have achieved this, Motherboard reported Thursday, by training a “deep convolutional network” on a large number of videos showing talking heads, allowing it to identify certain facial features, and then using that knowledge to animate an image. (ed note: We all must inform others that this technology has arrived – it has the power to mislead and to bring about very serious consequences).
https://mashable.com/article/samsung-ai-deepfake-video/
Share on FacebookUpwork
75% of the top 20 fastest-growing skills were new to the index in Q1 2019. The 20 fastest-growing freelance skills in Q1 2019 experienced more than 170 percent year-over-year growth, while demand for the top 10 skills grew more than 370 percent year-over-year.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190514005803/en/
Share on FacebookForbes Technology Council
5. Blogs And Newsletters
I have found that the best way to stay abreast of changes is to subscribe to blogs and newsletters that have a short synopsis of the reports they post. Reading pertinent headings will help you decide which articles you want to dive into deeper. I read them for half an hour every morning and it helps me stay up to date. – Afshin Doust, Advanced Intelligent Systems Inc.
Share on FacebookBy James Paterson, Education Dive
Universities continue to be “highly vulnerable” to cyberattacks, but those most at risk also tend to have the financial resources to protect themselves, according to a new report from Moody’s Investors Service. Institutions house a wide range of student records, sensitive research and medical information in potentially leaky networks. Additionally, that data is often dispersed among several campuses with “countless access points” on each; global interconnectedness also poses a risk. However, budget constraints may make it difficult for colleges to keep up their defenses as threats grow more complex. Moody’s identified 101 data disclosures at U.S. institutions in 2017, an increase from 15 in 2014. It expects the “upward trend” to continue.
Share on FacebookBy Mikel Amigot, IBL News
Chatbot–based customer services are increasingly in demand. Advancements in AI technology, natural language processing, neural networks and speech recognition are making chatbots more effective and affordable. However, they are still in an early phase of development. These revolutionary applications – which allow users to engage in interactive conversations using text or natural voice – have the potential to save businesses a fortune – over 8 billion annually by 2020 according to Juniper.
https://iblnews.org/2019/05/23/chatbots-gain-traction-among-business-now-a-course-about-them-on-edx/
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