Online Learning Update

by Andrew Rikard, EdSurge

By measuring the number of times a text appears on different syllabuses, OSP calculates a “teaching score.” The more a text appears, the higher the score is. Topping the list is “The Elements of Style” with Plato’s “Republic” and “The Communist Manifesto” not far behind. Each individual entry shows the top books assigned with it, data they’ve turned into a myriad of visualizations, including the network below. The project recounts what teachers teach—what the next generation of young college grads will read. The metadata, which OSP plans to release to the public (date TBD), will be open to researchers and for-profit educational technology companies alike. From journal articles on literary canon development to great book recommendation software, the future looks bright for the data.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-08-04-more-than-a-million-syllabuses-at-your-fingertips

by UN News Centre

The United Nations department providing logistical support to field missions announced today the launch of a new mandatory online programme for all uniformed and civilian personnel to strengthen training on the standards of conduct, with a special focus on sexual exploitation and abuse. The programme is part of the UN’s wider effort to implement a series of corrective and preventive measures, following a number of allegations of such misconduct, including within the ranks of its peacekeepers. “The new e-learning programme is an important step in reinforcing our prevention efforts against misconduct by UN personnel,” said Under-Secretary-General for Field Support Atul Khare in a memo issued to journalists by the UN spokesperson’s office.

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=54535#.V5T-yUsrLow

Shannon O’Connor, eCampus News
Through seed money provided by foundations and donors, Carthage College is offering teletherapy to expand access to counseling services. Survey data from the Spring 2019 National College Health Assessment by the American College Health Association indicated that in the previous year, three out of five students experienced overwhelming anxiety, and two out of five students were too depressed to function. Many struggled with these and other mental health concerns, including substance abuse. Student mental health has been a growing concern for higher-ed administrators in recent years… then the COVID pandemic took hold, bringing with it disruptions to all aspects of campus life, including decreased or no access for students to medical and mental health services. According to an April 2020 survey by Active Minds, a national mental health advocacy group, 80 percent of college students say the pandemic has negatively affected their mental health.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2021/04/05/teletherapy-expands-access-to-student-mental-health-support/

Brandon Busteed, Forbes

EVERFI’s ‘AlcoholEdu for College’ course, which first debuted in 2000, has been taken by more than 10 million students, including more than 1/3 of all college first-year students who now take it each fall as a requirement for matriculation. How on earth did a course on alcohol abuse prevention become the largest course on the World Wide Web, you might ask? The answer is a very timely lesson about how to ensure online education is engaging and effective in the age of Covid-19.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brandonbusteed/2020/05/23/the-largest-online-course-ever-a-surprising-answer-and-timely-example/#20609d459d67

Kery Murakami, Inside Higher Ed

Three weeks ago the U.S. House of Representatives’ oversight committee threatened it might subpoena U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos if she didn’t confirm she would appear before the body on March 3 to answer an array of questions. It doesn’t sound like DeVos is going to go. Instead of an RSVP, the acting general counsel for the Education Department sent the committee a scathing letter pushing back at what he considers to be overreach by the committee — and saying the subpoena threat “signals an unhealthy appetite for the abuse of congressional power.”

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/02/26/education-department-says-house-committee-seeking-abuse-power-subpoena-threat

Jennifer Liu, CNBC

LinkedIn’s 2020 Emerging Jobs Report names artificial intelligence specialist as the job that saw the most growth in the the past five years. For example, hiring growth for AI specialists, which pays a national average of $136,000 per year according to LinkedIn salary data, has grown 74% each year, on average, since 2015. The one fast-growing job on the list that doesn’t fall within tech is No. 9 behavioral health technician, which has likely grown thanks to increased health insurance coverage for mental health and substance abuse treatment in recent years, according to the LinkedIn report.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/11/linkedin-emerging-jobs-report-2020-fastest-growing-us-job-pays-136k.html

Christian Hubbs, Mises Institute
Artificial Intelligence is widely seen as a strategic technology and has thus engendered national development plans from countries across the globe to promote its progress. For quite some time, the United States has been conspicuously on the sideline. Yes, AI has been hailed as a transformative family of technologies that will bring about a radically improved standard of living for people around the globe. On the other hand, there are numerous potential uses of this technology to inflict incredible harm on individuals, and the risk of abuse becomes greater the more AI research is funded or directed by government agencies. Malinvestment (or “malscience,” in this case) is encouraged by political funding of R&D, and the Pentagon has explicitly stated they seek to use this technology in military applications. Rather than not going far enough, Trump’s Executive Order has already gone too far by explicitly bringing this technology into the political realm because the state is simply too dangerous to grant a leading role in AI development.

https://mises.org/wire/dangers-government-funded-artificial-intelligence

Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed

In our field, we have a wide array of risks — technological infrastructure within and outside the university, including bandwidth, physical interruptions due to hurricane, tornado, earthquake or related natural disasters; policy and regulatory at the state and federal levels; accessibility shortcomings; global malware challenges; online, in-class verbal sexist, gender-preference, racist and analogous abuse; academic integrity issues; competitive risks in meeting game-changing new models of degree and certificate offerings; and maintaining our reputation as leaders in the field. These are the things we think about when we wake up in the middle of the night. These are the what-if challenges that are always in the back of our minds.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online-trending-now/identifying-and-mitigating-most-important-risks-online

by Alina Tugend, NY Times

David Danks, a professor of philosophy and psychology at Carnegie Mellon, just started teaching a class, “A.I, Society and Humanity.” The class is an outgrowth of faculty coming together over the past three years to create shared research projects, he said, because students need to learn from both those who are trained in the technology and those who are trained in asking ethical questions. “The key is to make sure they have the opportunities to really explore the ways technology can have an impact — to think how this will affect people in poorer communities or how it can be abused,” he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/02/education/learning/colleges-grapple-with-teaching-ai.html

by Brett Samuels, the Hill

The Education Department has in recent months largely dismantled a team charged with investigating abuses by for-profit colleges, The New York Times reported Sunday. The investigative team was created in 2016 to look into widespread fraud claims against for-profit colleges. Roughly a dozen investigators and lawyers were later added to the unit. The Times reported that the team now consists of three employees, who focus mainly on student loan forgiveness applications. The investigations into for-profit colleges have largely come to a stop, according to the report.

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/387507-education-department-dismantles-team-focused-on-fraud-at-for-profit

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

The productive use of predictive analytics in higher education is almost a foregone conclusion. Being able to predict whether a student will enroll in your institution, stay on track in his or her studies or need extra support to succeed seems like just the kind of data that can help colleges and universities meet their enrollment goals, better target recruiting efforts and more strategically apply their institutional help. However, the application of data in this way also cries out for a set of ethical practices to prevent its abuse. For example, the same data that can help students succeed could also be used to pinpoint which low-income students not to bother recruiting because their chances of enrollment are smaller than more affluent candidates.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2017/05/17/report-proposes-ethical-practices-for-use-of-predictive-analytics-in-higher-ed.aspx

By Sri Ravipati, Campus Technology

Trolls are commonplace online, with close to a third of American internet users witnessing harassment online and nearly half personally experiencing it. To help combat internet trolls, Google’s technology incubator Jigsaw and Counter Abuse Technology Team last Friday launched Perspective, “an early-stage technology that uses machine learning to help identify toxic comments,” according to the blog post announcement. Perspective works by reviewing comments and scoring them based on how similar they are to comments that are typically considered negative or “toxic,” the blog post explained. “To learn how to spot potentially toxic language, Perspective examined hundreds of thousands of comments that had been labeled by human reviewers. Each time Perspective finds new examples of potentially toxic comments, or is provided with corrections from users, it can get better at scoring future comments.”

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2017/02/27/google-debuts-troll-fighting-ai-tool-to-moderate-online-comments.aspx

by Shelby Evans, Arkansas Traveler

Incoming UA students will be required to participate in an online Title IX training course, a UA official said. The mandatory training is in response to many university Title IX issues, Chancellor Joseph Steinmetz said in an email to all new students. “Part of the reason that sexual misconduct on college campuses is a growing issue is that people don’t always understand what constitutes sexual misconduct, what they can do to prevent it, how to get help, how to report it or the connections between alcohol abuse and sexual misconduct,” Steinmetz said. The university is addressing this problem through education and awareness with Haven: Understanding Sexual Assault, a short informational course, Steinmetz said.

http://www.uatrav.com/news/article_518289e6-76a8-11e6-90d3-af29a2f4796e.html

By Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Ed

“I have long ago dealt with the issue of: What if something I create is put to bad use?” the mathematician says. “And I have found that, throughout history, the benefit of building good things outweighed the hazards,” he says, citing lasers and the Internet as net-positive inventions despite ample opportunity for abuse. “That’s true in my research; it’s also true in my teaching.” That ethical dilemma became relevant to Mr. Ghrist’s teaching only recently, when he began teaching a massive open online course on single-variable calculus through Coursera, the Silicon Valley-based MOOC company. A group of philosophy professors at San Jose State University last month slammed Michael Sandel, a government professor at Harvard, for offering a MOOC through another provider, the nonprofit edX. The administration at San Jose State is encouraging its faculty members to use edX courses in their own teaching.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/mooc-professors-claim-no-responsibility-for-how-courses-are-used/43881

by Tomorrow’s Professor

Online learning is no longer foreign to traditional universities, where courses formerly held in large lecture halls are migrating to the Web. But at residential liberal arts colleges, whose appeal often lies in the promise of small classes and regular face time with professors, online education has had a harder time gaining a foothold. That could soon change. Several top-rated liberal arts colleges have begun experimenting with online course modules. Professors at those colleges hope the technology, which tutors students in certain concepts via artificially intelligent tutoring software in lieu of static textbooks or human lecturers, will help level the playing field for academically underprepared students while giving instructors more flexibility in planning their syllabuses.

http://derekbruff.org/blogs/tomprof/2012/10/24/tp-msg-1206-online-learning-and-liberal-arts-colleges/

by Jeff Young, Chronicle of Higher Ed

PowerPoint is boring. Student attention spans are short. Today many facts pop up with a simple Google search. And plenty of free lectures by the world’s greatest professors can be found on YouTube. Is it time for more widespread reform of college teaching? This series explores the state of the college lecture, and how technologies point to new models of undergraduate education. Last month, we began inviting students across the countries to fire up their Web cameras or camera-phones to send us video commentaries about whether lectures work for them. Below are highlights from the first batch of submissions, which are full of frustration with “PowerPoint abuse” – professors’ poor use of slide software that dumps too much information on students in a less-than-compelling fashion.

http://chronicle.com/article/Lecture-Fail-/130085/

by Suzanne Craig, the Boise State Arbiter

Online classes are growing increasingly popular, so too are the chances to abuse the honor system. After all, there isn’t any instructor sitting to watch, or hovering over suspicious characters. While this list might seem rudimentary to a particularly clever student, these are the three main ways students can cheat online classes.

http://arbiteronline.com/2011/01/27/cheat-your-way-to-an-a-online-that-is/

by Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan

Open Education is a current theory that knowledge should be transparent and accessible to anyone who wants to learn. Technology and the Internet have increased the global community’s access to knowledge. The hope is that openness will help create a more democratic and equitable global society, as our information networks dissolve traditional geographic and cultural boundaries. Benefits, however, must be weighed against possible complications. The public nature of this work can lead to privacy and security abuses, global communication might have to contend with local law, and democratic organizations, although they may lack the built-in abuses of hierarchies, can lead to chaos and inefficiency. This conference will examine specific examples about how openness is implemented in higher education and the resulting successes and problems. The three tracks will be about open education, open access (journals), and open source (computer code).

http://www2.oakland.edu/elis/conference.cfm?countrytabs=0

by Pandula Siribaddana, Helium

In online learning, one of the most discussed issues would be the plagiarism issues in submitted online assignments as well as postings in different forums. Being a knowledge base of its own, the internet can provide the learners with enormous amount of information which at times may be abused by some to obtain good results by not necessarily achieving the intended outcomes of the course. Such abuses of submitting someone else’s work as if it is your own is known as plagiarism and is something that most institutions do not tolerate even for a single instance.

http://www.helium.com/items/1929729-distance-learning-how-to-avoid-plagiarism-in-your-postings