Online Learning Update

George Lorenzo, Workforce Monitor

NSF’s largest investment to cultivate the STW is with the Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program, viewable online at ATE Central. NSF provides $60-$65 million annually in grants to America’s public undergraduate and secondary schools, and to the U.S. workforce. ATE “promotes innovation in workforce and technician preparation through a diverse set of national, regional, and local projects and centers based primarily at two-year institutions.” Since it was officially launched in 1993, ATE has invested $1.24 billion in 1,446 projects and 64 centers. Currently there are 352 active projects and 26 active centers.

https://wfmonitor.com/2021/05/24/the-mother-lode-and-unsung-heroes-of-americas-workforce-development-nsfs-advanced-technological-education-program/

Sydney Mook, Grand Forks Herald

UND wants to add a flat-rate subscription option to its tuition model. Think of it as Netflix or Hulu – popular television subscription services – but for a UND education. Students could pay a flat rate and take as many (or as few) online courses as preferred, so long as they aren’t considered a full-time, degree-seeking student. “You enroll, you have a subscription and during that subscription, you can binge watch,” said Jeff Holm, vice provost for online education and strategic planning at UND.

https://www.grandforksherald.com/news/education/7038856-Its-like-Netflix-for-education-UND-considers-subscription-tuition-model

Shannon O’Connor, eCampus News

The survey results report three key insights. First, 80 percent of students surveyed do not feel the learning experience has been worth the cost of tuition. Second, survey respondents have appreciated the flexibility of remote learning and while they are looking forward to a return to the physical classroom, most want to see elements of online learning continue. Third, when it comes to realizing the value of their investment, on-campus experiences and activities are not nearly as significant a factor as the role of instructors in the classroom. The Top Hat Field Report: 3,052 College Students on the Good, the Bad and Learning Post-COVID survey was conducted by Top Hat, an active learning courseware platform for higher education. The report provides insights to help institutions and educators create the right conditions for more students to receive and perceive meaningful value from their college investment as they plan ahead for fall 2021.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2021/05/19/lessons-from-a-year-of-pandemic-learning/

India Today

Today, thanks to the internet and the wide variety of online education portals, education has become more accessible than it was ever before. The pandemic has only further bolstered the online education sector. What was once viewed as a secondary choice for those who could not make it into leading universities is now the norm rather than the exception. In fact, a popular online education platform saw a roughly 430% increase in enrollments in 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. The total number of enrollments? A whopping 69 million!

https://www.indiatoday.in/education-today/featurephilia/story/7-ways-online-degrees-can-help-students-shape-their-career-1806035-2021-05-23

Pramod K. Nayar, The Wire
The repute of degree and institutions are not lost because of a shift in the mode of learning-teaching mode, they are lost because of poor teaching, irrespective of the mode employed. For over a year, the battle for effective pedagogies online has raged, and opinion remains, as expected, divided on multiple aspects, from syllabus to assessment and the exacerbated digital inequality. Worries over the collapse of the traditional classroom, the absence of classroom debates, the watered-down syllabi and mass copying have been expressed across the world by educators, administrators and students. A year before the pandemic forced education into online modes, Forbes carried a report on studies that showed the value of online education and degrees was in fact increasing among American consumers.

https://thewire.in/education/how-different-is-digitised-learning-really

National Laboratory for Education Transformation via Workforce Monitor

In the “newest economy,” ones education, knowledge, skills and experiences are defined as authenticated forms of currency that are shared in a marketplace of buyers (employers) and sellers (individuals). This marketplace currently exists but is disconnected, inequitable, and not transparent. It does not have a central hub that could reveal such forms of currency within “a more organized, decentralized technology and data leveraged ecosystem. . .” In a Harvard Business Review essay published in 1992, Peter Drucker popularized the term “knowledge economy” (fist coined in the mid-1960s). Drucker prognosticated how Western society would encounter a transformational rearrangement, resulting in an unimaginable new world that would take hold in 50 years. That new world arrived about 20 years earlier than predicted, as today the knowledge economy exists over the Internet.

https://wfmonitor.com/2021/05/12/the-newest-economy-welcome-to-the-credential-currency-revolution/

Oksana Chernenko and Veronica Saltykova, University World News
The impact of digitalisation on higher education, strategies for using online tools in teaching and methods of effective communication in an electronic environment are topics that have been studied for at least two decades. Interest in them arose long before the COVID-19 pandemic and the forced total transition to distance learning. During this period, the methodological arsenal of researchers and teachers has accumulated many materials on how to teach students effectively in digital environments. But only in the spring of 2020 did digital education become a reality for all teachers.

https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20210518112537958

Louise Nicol and Alan Preece, University World News
Commodification is increasingly likely to be a word that universities need to recognise, understand and apply to their business planning as technology levels the playing field for international student recruitment. Investopedia tells us that it means ‘a basic good used in commerce that is interchangeable with other goods of the same type’. When you put it alongside Clayton Christensen’s ‘jobs to be done’ and the growing availability of university comparison or application sites, it’s easy to see emerging comparisons with the marketplace for car insurance. The point about the ‘jobs to be done’ approach is that it highlights that the purpose of buying a particular good or service is to ‘make progress in specific circumstances’. For most international students (and increasingly home students) the purpose of getting a degree is to get a job and to have decent career prospects.

https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20210517102802250

Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed

There is an appropriate emphasis on relevant knowledge and skill development for degree and certificate students — that’s what gets employees retained and promoted. Professional contacts and networking are often what get them hired. It was Jerod Kintz who wrote, “It’s not who you know that matters — it’s who knows you that’s important. Personal branding builds up your reputation to the point where you have a presence even in your absence.” We may do an excellent job of educating and training our students, but if they don’t successfully make contacts, their careers may never reach their real potential. Read more for strategies to do just that.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online-trending-now/networking-gets-graduates-and-certificate-completers

Rebecca Koenig, EdSurge
Community colleges are staking a claim in the territory of online course marketplaces. They’re about a decade behind their university counterparts, who helped to found edX in 2012, the same year that startup Coursera launched its competing service, now worth millions. But leaders of a new platform called Unmudl say the time is right for community colleges to collaborate and make their workforce-training programs available more widely by marketing them through a shared website.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2021-05-21-with-new-online-marketplace-community-colleges-hope-to-better-compete-with-for-profits

Jill Berman, MarketWatch

During the 2018-2019 academic year, just 41% of community colleges were affordable for the average Pell grant recipient, according to an analysis released this month by the National College Attainment Network. That’s down from 49% during the 2014-2015 academic year. “College is getting increasingly unaffordable for Pell Grant recipients each year,” said Carrie Warick, the network’s director of policy and advocacy. The organization’s definition of affordable was designed “for a student doing everything right, and really giving the benefit of the doubt to the institution.”  But even given that generous reading, which accounts for contributions from grants, loans, work-study wages, summer work earnings, as well as family, Pell grant recipients were short $855 in covering tuition, basic bills, like housing and food, and $300 for emergencies, the organization found. That’s up from $240 during the 2014-2015 academic year.

https://www-marketwatch-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/more-than-half-of-community-colleges-are-not-affordable-for-low-income-students-11620913585

Sheridan Hendrix, The Columbus Dispatch

Ohio State University’s Board of Trustees approved tuition increases for this year’s incoming freshmen, a massive surcharge for out-of-state online learners, an interim budget plan for the summer months, discussed what campus will look like this fall and finalized a number of other actions at their meetings this week. The board also approved a $19,493 surcharge for non-resident students who take all of their classes online, up from just $5 a year ago. Non-resident students taking all of their Ohio State courses online will now pay $34,717 a year, compared to $14,806 last academic year.

https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/education/2021/05/20/ohio-state-board-trustees-approve-tuition-increases-interim-budget/5126061001/

Anna Patty, Sydney Morning Herald

The federal Australian budget included $26.1 million for 5000 short-course places for domestic students at non-university higher education providers. The funding aims to help private providers, struggling with the loss of international student enrolments, to change their business models and serve more domestic students. A spokesman for the federal Department of Education said the short courses were undergraduate certificates or graduate certificates, regulated under the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF). The short courses are a type of micro-credential. The short course is a credit-bearing micro-credential, meaning that it can be used to ‘stack’ into a full qualification at a later time.”

https://www.smh.com.au/business/workplace/shift-to-short-courses-and-online-learning-to-expand-careers-20210322-p57cvl.html

Jessica Holdman – Post and Courier

“The concern is really the rush,” said Rebecca Stern, an English and literature professor who serves on the Faculty Senate. “I think most of us are in agreement that it would be great to develop our online offerings further. This is not about faculty refusing to go online. It’s about wanting to deliver something that meets the standards of the Columbia campus.” Faculty Senate Chairman Mark Cooper agreed the effort moved “just a bit too quickly at the end of an exhausting year,” taking a process that would ideally have taken another year and compressing it into roughly five months.

https://www.postandcourier.com/columbia/news/usc-professors-voice-concerns-over-fast-tracking-of-new-online-degree-programs/article_be87cf30-b981-11eb-b36d-f7c60d0a019b.html

SPARC

The rising cost of higher education is about more than tuition—expensive textbooks and course materials remain a looming barrier to college affordability and access. Open Educational Resources (OER) are a solution to high-cost materials and state legislators are starting to take notice. Nearly half of all states have considered OER legislation in past years, and it has increasingly become a go-to strategy for legislators seeking to make college education more affordable and effective. States can catalyze and support action at institutions by providing resources, incentives, and policy frameworks. The OER State Policy Playbook provides policy recommendations for U.S. state legislators interested in tackling college affordability through OER. Download this resource and share it with interested policymakers.

https://sparcopen.org/our-work/oer-state-policy-playbook/

Sara Weissman, Inside Higher Ed

A new report points to significant and ongoing disparities in which students attend underresourced colleges versus wealthier, more selective universities. The report also identifies stubborn inequities in degree completion in the United States across racial, ethnic and socioeconomic lines and widening gaps in higher education attainment between states. “The system is becoming more and more stratified by socioeconomic status,” said Margaret Cahalan, co-author of the report and director of the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, which researches the academic outcomes of low-income, first-generation and disabled college students, and advocates for improved educational opportunities for them.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/05/20/nontraditional-students-concentrated-underresourced-institutions

Emma Whitford, Inside Higher Ed
The president of West Texas A&M University hopes the short videos will encourage students to attend the regional public university and stave off potential enrollment declines. For weeks, Wendler squeezed recording sessions in between meetings and other appointments. From behind his desk, he watched a teleprompter slowly scroll through the names and desired majors of students who had been admitted to the public regional university in Canyon, Tex. Wendler completed 3,000 videos, each 16 seconds to 19 seconds long, over the course of 200 hours. He didn’t have a script, but most videos followed a similar format.

https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2021/05/19/president-sends-personalized-video-every-admitted-student

Emma Whitford, Inside Higher Ed

The former Green Mountain College campus will become home to a new grade school, WCAX reported. The private liberal arts college in Vermont closed in 2019, citing falling enrollment and rising expenses. Since then, its campus has sat empty. The Bhakta family bought the property a year ago for $4.5 million. They plan to use at least part of the campus for a K-6 school that will focus on “project-based and service-learning,” WCAX reported. Other former college campuses have been turned into grade schools. The former campus of Marygrove College, which also shut its doors in 2019, now hosts the School at Marygrove.

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2021/05/21/former-green-mountain-campus-becomes-grade-school

Jeremy Bauer-Wolf, HigherEd Dive
State funding cuts cause modest decreases in graduation rates and college credentials awarded, according to a new report by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. SHEEO analyzed empirical research to study how changes in state funding for public colleges and financial aid affected student outcomes. The organization argues that investing in public colleges, which three-fourths of students nationwide attend, will be key as an economic recession stresses state budgets and exacerbates inequities in higher ed.

https://www.highereddive.com/news/college-student-outcomes-and-state-funding-are-intertwined-report-finds/600458/

Tom Wheeler, Brookings

The mountain hollows around McKee (pronounced “hollers” by the locals) were once home to Daniel Boone. Today, homes can use urban-grade high-speed fiber connections to stream Daniel Boone movies and television shows. But the importance of those high-speed connections is far beyond television shows. The ability to work from home was standard practice long before the rest of us discovered it during the pandemic. The ability to find employment without leaving home has been important to everyone, but particularly important to individuals with disabilities. Thanks to the fiber-to-the-home connection, when COVID hit, students were prepared for remote learning.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2021/05/19/changing-lives-by-connecting-all-americans-to-broadband-internet/

Derek Newton, Undark

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is being used to shoot off these seemingly personal appeals and deliver pre-written information through chatbots and text personas meant to mimic human banter. It can help a university or college by boosting early deposit rates while cutting down on expensive and time-consuming calls to stretched admissions staffs. AI has long been quietly embedding itself into higher education in ways like these, often to save money — a need that’s been heightened by pandemic-related budget squeezes.

https://undark.org/2021/05/18/how-ai-is-infiltrating-higher-education/