Online Learning Update

Olivia Sanchez, Washington Post

Mesa Community College’s partnership with Boeing is one of several models that could be replicated if a bipartisan bill to help finance community college workforce training for short-term credentials makes it through Congress.The Assisting Community Colleges in Educating Skilled Students to Careers Act — or ACCESS to Careers Act — is designed to increase the number of students who earn these types of credentials and the number of colleges meeting the needs of local employers. It could provide states with up to $2.5 million a year for up to four years to develop policies around this type of workforce training and provide community colleges with grants of up to $1.5 million each to carry out the programs. The bill was reintroduced in May by Sens. Todd C. Young (R-Ind.) and Tim Kaine (D-Va.) after a February 2020 version languished without success.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/community-colleges-workforce-training-partnerships/2021/07/01/1194f500-d9b6-11eb-8fb8-aea56b785b00_story.html

Tonya Drake – The Herald

A recent study from Strada, Center for Education Consumer Insights, indicates those who experienced a work change during the pandemic are more than three times more likely to intend on enrolling in education. And what’s more, these individuals are seeking diverse learning options during the economic recovery.Further, among disrupted learners who said they planned to enroll in an education or training program in the next six months, 25 percent said they would pursue an online non-college learning option. Likewise, the same share said they would pursue an employer-based learning option. The data indicates a shift in our approach to education. Workers and learners alike are seeking flexible, alternative learning options to meet their needs. Online higher education is well positioned to meet our changing needs and help disrupted workers get back on track as society re-opens.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-when-you-cant-get-to-college-bring-college-to-you/

DAVID MEYER, CEO Daily

People from “Generation Z” (those born after 1995) have very high expectations of their employers’ values—a fact that’s made clear in new research conducted by marketing agency Lewis for the HeForShe gender-equality movement. Most eye-catchingly, the study shows a paltry 19% of Gen Z workers would join a company that they don’t feel shares their values. And two-thirds of the survey’s 2,600 respondents from around the world said company values were more important than the firm’s leadership. Which values? Gender and racial diversity top the list. Just over two-fifths of the respondents said they would join a company that lacks the requisite diversity, but only if it had a strong diversity, equity and inclusion program in place, to try to improve. The same proportion said CEOs should be judged by their commitment to solving social issues.

https://fortune.com/2021/05/26/what-gen-z-workers-want-ceo-daily/

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/

Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed

Now, we see another major drop in births during 2020, with births down 4 percent over the year, but notably accelerating to 8 percent by December as the impact of COVID took hold earlier in the year, reducing births nine months later. In sum, competition is rapidly growing; the pool of “traditional” students is evaporating; employers are dropping degree requirements; and, with student debt now surpassing $1.7 trillion, we all know that families are looking for more cost-effective paths to the knowledge and skills they seek. “The fundamental business model for delivering education is broken,” said Rick Beyer, a senior fellow and practice area lead for mergers and affiliations at the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. “The consolidation era started a few years ago. It will continue. We will see more closures.” What, then, are the bright spots for postsecondary learning?

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online-trending-now/second-demographic-cliff-adds-urgency-change

Heather Long, Washington Post

The latest hiring numbers show encouraging signs that women are returning to the labor force, but major struggles remain for men and women without college degrees. Hiring has rebounded quickly for Americans with college degrees. In recent months, there has been a noticeable surge in people with two-year associate’s degrees getting back into the workforce, but Americans with only a high school diploma or less remain deep in crisis mode, even as employers claim they are having trouble finding workers.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/04/22/jobs-no-college-degree/

University of Wisconsin

The University of Wisconsin System is planning to expand its online education platform, especially for adult learners. The program will target about 815,000 adults in Wisconsin who have some college credit experience, but no degree, according to the UW System. Leaders say adult learners prefer to earn their education through an online platform. It also plans to communicate with employers to decide which career-ready programs to develop.

https://www.news8000.com/uw-system-planning-to-expand-its-online-learning-platform-targeting-adults/

Julien Barbier, University World News

The team-based project approach, meanwhile, is well suited to teaching students professional skills. Increasingly, employers are dropping the requirement of a college degree and are looking at student portfolios instead. “The real magic in an educational programme like this is in the project design,” said Michael Feldstein, CEO of Empirical Educator Project and publisher of e-Literate, an online journal about higher education. “Finding relevant content is the easy part.”The assumption of 19th century education was that building a student’s knowledge base is everything. But, today, with the biggest library that has ever existed at everyone’s fingertips (the internet), skills are what matter. The OS of education approach shifts 90% to 95% of a typical student’s time to applied learning. Content is not the problem. Learning how to learn is the future of education.

https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20210329143743399

Natalie Schwartz, HigherEdDive

The ideas making the rounds at the virtual SXSW EDU conference — usually hosted in Austin, Texas — weren’t anything new. Higher education experts and college officials spoke of the need for digital equity, unbundled degrees and better alignment between credentials and the skills employers are seeking. A year into the coronavirus pandemic, however, these ideas have taken on more urgency. Without accessible and flexible credentials, experts suggested, the country will struggle to meet workforce needs during the economic recovery and well into the future.

https://www.highereddive.com/news/3-ways-the-pandemic-is-changing-colleges-mandate-right-now/596752/

Casey Welch, eCampus News

Higher education leaders would do well to take COVID-induced changes into consideration when identifying new ways to meet students’ needs.  For example, career preparation has always been top of mind for college-bound teens. But more students now than ever before are beginning to realize the need to plan ahead. A recent survey found that 99 percent of Gen Z recognizes the value of making connections with employers, even when they don’t have jobs currently available.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2021/02/09/how-higher-ed-can-start-2021-off-right/

Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed

With enrollments falling, college budgets under strain and employers dissatisfied with the relevance of graduates’ learning, now is a time for more than replication or revision — it is time for reinvention. We are at the confluence of massive economic, technologic and social changes that demand higher education do more than small fixes. We will not thrive if we merely tweak the system to replicate practices of the lecture hall in an online delivery system. The shakeout of academic jobs, programs and even entire institutions is accelerating. We must recognize the forces at play and respond. The changes require more than merely adjusting our programs and approaches. They demand a completely new examination of the changing student needs, marketplace demand and revenue-generation models.

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/online-trending-now/time-reinvention-not-just-replication-or-revision

Annelies Goger and Chenoah Sinclair, Brookings Institution

One of these holistic solutions is to adapt apprenticeship for today’s economy and make it a more integral part of our education and training ecosystem in order to increase access to quality jobs, especially for young people—a group that has suffered the greatest job losses in the current recession. Apprenticeships, which combine on-the-job and classroom training over several years, can help people get a foot in the door to the labor market while also increasing access to higher education. They also help meet employers’ needs for a workforce with applied, technical, and problem-solving skills. Many peer countries are farther along in pursuing such education reform that promotes ongoing learning for a fast-paced 21st century economy.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2021/01/27/apprenticeships-are-an-overlooked-solution-for-creating-more-access-to-quality-jobs/

Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology
National University in California has partnered with GreenLight Credentials to create blockchain-secured digital student transcripts that can be shared with other educational institutions or prospective employers. The pilot program will provide 300 students with free access to a digital locker for their academic records, that can be accessed at any time and on any device.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2021/01/11/national-university-blockchain-initiative-pilots-digital-transcripts.aspx

Kristen E. Broady, Moriah Macklin, and Jimmy O’Donnell, Brookings Institution

We propose three avenues to make progress along these lines. First, doing more to support the higher education sector in skills training. Second, focusing federal worker training programs on particular occupations and skills. And third, doing much more to support private-sector unions. On all three fronts, enormous challenges were evident even prior to the pandemic. For example, for decades the higher education sector has faced significant declines in enrollment in the face of demographic changes and cuts in funding that could help to support necessary innovations. In addition, employer-paid and government-funded worker training have been on the decline for years. Finally, private-sector union membership has been declining for decades, meaning decreased support for on-the-job training and worker protections.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/preparing-u-s-workers-for-the-post-covid-economy-higher-education-workforce-training-and-labor-unions/

Jack Deem, et al; OJDLA

Virtual teams have become a major component in the delivery of online courses at Purdue University Global (PUG) and in higher education in general (Olson, et. al, 2015). To help provide employers with qualified candidates for their talent needs, teamwork has been established as one of the six professional competencies that Purdue University Global (PUG) students are assessed for in all programs.  Cross functional working teams were established to review the team project processes. The objective of these teams was to develop recommendations for improving team projects in the curriculum. Initial results showed the main factors impacting student satisfaction with team assignments in the virtual classroom included; poor communication within the team, time schedule issues; and, lack of training for both students and faculty.

https://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/fall233/deem_beyer_dana_chicone_ringler_ferebee_strouble233.html

Jeffrey R. Young interviews John Warner, author , EdSurge

Think of your local college or university. They are an employer. They are a cultural hub. They are a technology hub. They fulfill all of these roles simultaneously, just in their day-to-day operations. They’re then also educating the populace of your state, community and locality. And in that way, they are creating these assets that the state, the locality, the community is going to be able to use on a continuous and ongoing basis. To me that’s infrastructure—the same way that we look at our libraries and our K-12 schools as infrastructure or roads. The problem is we haven’t been treating them that way. We’ve been treating them as the sort of private good.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2020-12-01-how-to-save-public-higher-ed-new-book-makes-case-for-rethinking-the-value-of-colleges

ALBERT RABOTEAU, eCampus News

Many educators and employers agree there’s a disconnect between the skills today’s workers need on the job and what students are taught in school. It’s a complex problem that touches on K-12, higher education, and industry. While finding solutions won’t be easy, a group of more than 60 leaders from education and workforce development are looking to make headway.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2020/12/02/reimagining-education-for-todays-complex-and-fast-changing-world/

Natalie Schwartz, Education Dive

AWS has been laying the groundwork for years to influence how cloud computing education is conducted worldwide. In the U.S. alone, 84 two-year institutions, districts or systems — including the Maricopa Community Colleges, in Arizona — and 67 four-year colleges have taught at least one of its courses, according to an Education Dive analysis of its publicly available list. These schools are AWS Academy members. Community colleges are used to working hand-in-hand with employers, including AWS, to develop curriculum. But these kinds of partnerships aren’t as typical for four-year schools, which tend to value academic freedom over corporate influence.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/why-4-year-colleges-are-tapping-amazon-to-help-deliver-cloud-computing-degr/589750/

Udacity

Now more than ever before, employers favor skills over degrees, and the skills learned through project-based learning mirror what employers are looking for. As we posted in our last blog, the 4th Industrial Revolution is reshaping technology, and 42% of the core skills needed to perform existing jobs will change. A massive upskill effort will be needed to reskill more than 1 billion people by 2030 to get them ready for the new world of work. Project-based learning can help provide training that is focused on teaching critical thinking — figuring out all the steps needed to create a solution. As far as teaching modalities go, it offers numerous benefits to the students taking part.

https://blog.udacity.com/2020/11/project-based-learning-works-here-are-5-reasons-why.html

Chelsea Toczauer, Online Universities

There is also the consideration of whether blockchain technology could, in turn, further accelerate a transition to alternative college business models as a result of the continued persistence of the pandemic as vaccine development and rollout remains in testing. The big difference with blockchain dissemination of credentials is the student owns it, Schroeder explains. “You of course can’t change what the university puts on related to your grades and classes—that’s written in stone and will be included in their documentation,” he notes. “But let’s say that you intern at a newspaper or a radio or television station someplace. You can write that in and link it to that employer for the internship.

https://www.onlineeducation.com/features/blockchain-backed-college-business-models

Jeroen Kraaijenbrink, Forbes

Lifelong learning is important at three levels: For the individuals who learn, it increases their knowledge and skills and thereby increases their employability for future jobs and satisfies their desire to learn and develop. For organizations it is an important source of innovation and helps making sure that they can keep up with the changes in their environment and be an attractive employer. And for society, lifelong learning increases the likelihood that key challenges such as poverty, inequality and climate change can be resolved.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeroenkraaijenbrink/2020/09/04/using-covid-19-as-catalyst-for-lifelong-e-learning/#33b9f9c37e42