Online Learning Update

Shravan Goli, eCampusNews

Recent McKinsey research examining higher education finds that the risk of “outcome inequities” for students could worsen in the U.S., impacting completion, employment, and lifetime earnings. This, even as colleges battle falling revenue and declining enrollments with a business model at its “breaking point.” Universities that quickly ramped up digital infrastructure early in the pandemic now need a more measured, long-term digital transformation roadmap to help address the challenges brought on by COVID-19. What’s clear is the institutions that succeed in integrating AI into theirtransformation roadmap will have a distinct advantage over their competitors, which will translate into higher enrollments, higher revenues, and higher rates of student achievement.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2021/06/30/how-to-make-the-ai-revolution-a-reality-in-higher-education/

Ed Glantz, Chris Gamrat, et al; EDUCAUSE Review

Five pandemic-introduced innovative teaching adaptations can improve student engagement in the next normal for higher education. The question now is, should any of these innovations and adaptations be retained to form the “next normal” in higher education? We know that disruption historically informs innovation. For an example from the pandemic, a US insurance agency has observed that employees can effectively work remotely and now plans to close six offices: 32 percent of employees (four times more than previously) will work from home.Footnote1 Educators should similarly look beyond the recent negative experiences to identify and cultivate worthy improvements. Here we suggest five teaching enhancements as possible candidates for continued acceptance.

https://er.educause.edu/articles/2021/3/improved-student-engagement-in-higher-educations-next-normal

Lovina Andersen, Seattle Times

To understand what works and what doesn’t with hybrid education, I surveyed 41 college peers last November on whether they preferred online, in-person, or hybrid classes. For the 38 people who preferred in-person or hybrid, 79% cited social interaction as their primary reason. I couldn’t agree more. During those last months of my senior year, I felt the loss of a social atmosphere keenly. As a college freshman in Provo, Utah, a thousand miles from home and surrounded by 33,000 strangers, I felt it even more. Even in my few in-person classes, mandatory social distancing and masks made it hard to connect with peers. Bonding opportunities like group projects, close seating and classroom discussions were restricted or abandoned for fear of contamination.

https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/student-voices-the-future-is-hybrid-in-higher-education/

REBECCA L. WATTS,  Baltimore Sun

Local industries, ranging from health care to information technology, all require a qualified and skilled workforce to maintain and continuously modernize their service and product offerings. Without a top-notch talent pool prepared with relevant 21st century skills, businesses face the possibility of failing to remain competitive. Reversing that trend will require expansive, collaborative efforts aimed at job training and workforce development. Innovative approaches to college education provide a key long-term strategy for workforce investment and labor market recovery. These approaches must focus on skill-based mastery, at an affordable cost, with a flexible schedule that allows learners to stay employed while earning a degree.

https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/op-ed/bs-ed-op-0628-online-learning-20210628-qzkomt36avdl3ly2c4rnkj5toi-story.html

D. Christopher Brooks, EDUCAUSE Review

About two-thirds of respondents reported that institutional deficiencies to support the adoption and maintenance of AI are the main challenges to the implementation of AI at their institutions (see figure 4). Nearly three-quarters of respondents said that ineffective data management and integration (72%) and insufficient technical expertise (71%) present at least a moderate challenge to AI implementation. Financial concerns (67%) and immature data governance (66%) also pose challenges. Insufficient leadership support (56%) is a foundational challenge that is related to each of the previous listed challenges in this group.

https://er.educause.edu/articles/2021/6/educause-quickpoll-results-artificial-intelligence-use-in-higher-education

EAB

Wisr co-founder and CEO Kate Volzer is joined by Dr. Angela Clark-Taylor, Director of the Flora Stone Mather Center for Women at Case Western Reserve University. The two talk about their chance meeting in 2019 and the work they’ve done together since to support and empower women working in higher ed. Dr. Clark-Taylor shares actionable advice derived from her research on gender equity. Both offer insights they’ve collected through their work leading professional development conferences and webinars designed to help women push through career barriers and pull other women up along the way.

https://eab.com/insights/podcast/workplace/women-leadership-higher-ed/

FIONA CUST, Nursing Times

Online can offer a very rich virtual workspace in which interactions can occur among students in real time or through discussion boards. Students have reported appreciating the flexibility and convenience of being able to work in their own time and location, and fitting this around the demands of, for example, childcare.  The flexibility offered in a blended learning approach may also foster a sense of autonomy – the learners can, on many levels, plan their own learning and take an increased responsibility for this. We aim to develop independent, autonomous, lifelong learners – it may signify that this approach can assist in the achievement of this.

https://www.nursingtimes.net/opinion/blended-learning-has-the-potential-to-meet-the-challenges-in-nurse-education-18-06-2021/

Ruanda Garth McCullough and Richard Sebastian, Faculty Focus

If students can see themselves and their communities in what they’re learning, then they learn differently—and better. This is the idea behind culturally responsive teaching (CRT). With CRT, students’ cultural knowledge is seen as an asset in the classroom, not something that should be checked at the door. Cultural responsiveness is not new, but in this year of reckoning with racial inequity, there is renewed interest among higher education instructors. Bringing cultural responsiveness into teaching isn’t just about checking a box or making an instructor feel good about doing “the equitable thing.” CRT yields tangible benefits for students, facilitating brain processing and cultivating critical thinking skills. Research has shown that students are most satisfied with instructors who respect and are inclusive of cultural differences.

https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/equality-inclusion-and-diversity/how-open-education-enables-culturally-responsive-teaching/

Harrison Schwartz, Seeking Alpha
Increasing student dissatisfaction and declining enrollment suggest that many people are rethinking traditional methods of higher education. The historical value of universities is becoming defunct as the internet allows a more efficient, less expensive, and more accessible vector of transmitting knowledge. Innovative platforms like Coursera offer students a huge “marketplace” of high-quality courses far less expensive than those in traditional universities. Given Coursera’s minimal barriers to growth and its massive total addressable market, I would not be surprised to see its annual revenue rise by 10X or more within years.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4434604-coursera-the-amazon-of-online-education-may-grow-by-magnitudes

By Erika Welz, New York
The MBA is not dead.  In fact, its demand is seeing a resurgence, in part due to increasing accessibility thanks to an online format. For those already earning a decent salary and leading too-busy lives, taking the time out to complete a physical, two-year MBA program is not always practical, making the pandemic boost to online learning a boon. “Now, more types of business professionals are going for online MBAs. There’s so much growth here,” said Lance Lambert, editorial director of Fortune Education, a hub curated by a team of expert journalists designed to help readers develop skills and advance their careers.

https://nypost.com/2021/06/13/thanks-to-advancements-in-online-education-mbas-are-surging/

John Nworie, EDUCAUSE Review

The pandemic tested the resilience of colleges and universities as they executed online learning on a massive scale by creating online courses, adopting and adapting to unfamiliar technologies, engaging faculty en masse in remote teaching, and successfully meeting the instructional needs of students. Those experiences and lessons should not be discarded. The next phase for higher education in a post-COVID-19 world is to harness what worked well during the emergency response period and use those experiences to improve institutional practices for the benefit of both internal and external constituencies in the future.

https://er.educause.edu/articles/2021/5/beyond-covid-19-whats-next-for-online-teaching-and-learning-in-higher-education

Mary Beth Marklein, University World News
NAFSA, a United States organisation that advocates for international education, kicked off its annual conference on Tuesday 1 June with a talk by peripatetic journalist Nicholas Kristof, who said humility is one of the most valuable lessons he has learned in his travels around the world. Humility “breeds a certain amount of empathy”, which “makes it harder to demonise people”, said Kristof, who is known for his coverage of complex issues around global poverty, gender inequality and human rights for the New York Times.

https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20210602123427641

Milan Kordestani, Medium

Higher education looks completely different than it did a few decades ago. What does the future hold for students in an age driven by the Internet and technological innovation? Now, you can get a high-quality education — that actually carries weight in the job market — right from the comfort of your own home. That said, costs will still need to come down before most students can take advantage of these new opportunities. Thankfully, as more people come to take online education seriously, the market for online degrees will become more competitive. Tuition costs will come down, allowing even more people to see the benefits.

https://milankordestani.medium.com/the-future-of-higher-education-in-the-age-of-the-internet-28e478c6495

JW Marshall interviews Ray Schroeder, MarketScale

Online learning was steadily growing pre-pandemic. Then it reached a considerable acceleration, but universities are taking a new look at their model to continue gaining new students and remaining solvent. The answer could be subscription-based learning. Discussing this topic and more, Voices of eLearning host JW Marshall spoke with Ray Schroeder, Associate Vice-Chancellor, University of Illinois-Springfield, and Senior Fellow, UPCEA (University Professional and Continuing Education Association). Schroeder has been an educator for 50 years and launched the University of Illinois-Springfield online learning program in 1997. After 24 years in higher ed online learning, he reported that of the last graduating class, 98% had taken at least one online course.

https://marketscale.com/industries/education-technology/is-the-future-of-higher-education-a-subscription-model/

IBL News

“The new normal will be blended education in 2025,” said Anant Agarwal, Founder and CEO at edX during the annual Open edX Conference, which took place in a virtual format yesterday. “50% will be online and 50% in person,” he explained. During the conference’s opening keynote, Mr. Agarwal predicted that the shift will also impact the corporate world. “Remote work and learning are here to stay, and all businesses will go into some kind of blended work model.”

https://iblnews.org/the-new-normal-will-be-blended-education-says-agarwal-at-the-annual-open-edx-conference/

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

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

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/

Melissa Coade, the Mandarin

Modelling released by Victoria University’s Mitchell Institute has demonstrated the hit that the international education sector will take by the end of 2022 as a consequence of Australia’s borders staying shut. According to the modelling, the sector will shrink by over 50% to $20.5 billion by the end of 2022. By the end of 2019 the sector was worth $40.3 billion. “The trend is strongly down from this point onwards,” Report author Dr Peter Hurley said. “While most of the economy is recovering, Australia’s third-largest export sector is yet to hit bottom.”

https://www.themandarin.com.au/156955-australias-international-education-sector-faces-major-slump-with-students-snubbing-online-learning/

Christian Schneider, EDUCAUSE Review

The shift to online education during the pandemic has demonstrated that if we question some of our assumptions, we can create new rituals and approaches that will continue to evolve and persist long beyond the pandemic. In some important ways, online interactions can be better than in-person ones. We can overcome categorization and biases of appearance and concentrate on the humanity in one another. We can enhance the intensity of human interaction, diversity, and quality of collaboration and quality of work.

https://er.educause.edu/articles/2021/4/reimagining-online-culture-project-based-learning-inclusion-and-reach-in-online-education