Online Learning Update

by Adam Gordon, Forbes
Many leaders in industries going through digital transformation experience a certain spine-tickling moment when “futures flip-over” happens. That moment is when you get-it that the previously marginal online offering has become the default and the traditional solution has become the exotic. It has happened in music, in newspapers, etc., and this is where university campuses and business schools are fast heading as education designers, coders and entrepreneurs close in on online platforms that replicate and in many ways improve on the traditional live experience. All for much less money.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamgordon/2018/01/05/as-universities-go-online-architects-rework-buildings-for-active-learning/#38e5d2db2a24

by Hannah Kuchler, Financial Times
This September, his start-up, MissionU, accepted its first intake of students — 30 would-be data analysts who are starting a one-year course with no upfront costs. Designed to prepare them for the workplace, MissionU works closely with businesses ranging from Lyft, the ride-hailing app, to digital music streaming service Spotify to teach both technical and soft skills. The deal is that students repay 15 per cent of their income to MissionU for the first three years after graduation in which they earn at least $50,000.

https://www.ft.com/content/e3f6f18e-a9c6-11e7-ab66-21cc87a2edde

By Campus Technology

Khan Academy, an online learning platform used by more than 100 million learners worldwide, has added education content that aims to teach new college grads, job seekers and young professionals how to manage their money. In a new video series on careers and personal finance, 20- and 30-year-old professionals working across special education, the music industry and other fields openly discuss their career choices and disclose their incomes and budgets. The series is available now on KhanAcademy.org for free

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2017/06/07/khan-academy-launches-financial-literacy-video-series-for-college-grads-and-job-seekers.aspx

BY ADAM STONE , Converge

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/higher-ed/The-Rise-of-the-Online-Higher-Education-Leader.html

by Adam Marchick, Voice Labs

In 2016, Amazon Echo evolved from novelty to in-the-home powerhouse, with over seven million devices in households. Google Home launched in November, legitimizing a multi-platform ecosystem of voice-first devices. These two devices (Google Home, Amazon Echo) are simply the start of a much bigger future, where hundreds of millions of consumers will enjoy a more natural way of interacting with machines – conversational voice. Using only your voice, you can now seamlessly play music, turn on your lights, order a pizza and get breaking news. While early innovation is about taking phone and mobile app use cases and porting them to voice-first platforms, in 2017 we will see unique voice-first experiences that will take the world by storm. Get ready for always communicable family members, a personalized home assistant that makes life easier, and a conversational device that anticipates your needs.

http://voicelabs.co/2017/01/15/the-2017-voice-report/

by Yonhap News

An online class in which South Korean idol stars talk about Korean traditional and pop culture will open for foreigners this month, a Seoul-based foundation disseminating the Korean language and culture abroad said Friday. “Korean Wave stars like girl group Laboum and Sungjae, a member of boy group BTOB, will show up in the Internet class at www.sejonghakdang.org,” the King Sejong Institute Foundation said. The Korean Wave refers to the global popularity of Korean dramas, films and pop music. The stars, who have a lot of fans abroad, will introduce traditional Korean music, pop songs, current foods and fashion in the class, and will join campaigns to disseminate Korean culture, the foundation under the Culture Ministry said.

http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/culturesports/2017/01/06/0701000000AEN20170106012500315.html

by Knowledge at Wharton

Computer scientist Donald Knuth summed it up well: “‘AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires ‘thinking’ but has failed to do most of what people and animals do ‘without thinking.’” Experts classify today’s AI as Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) because it is programmed to solve particular types of problems but doesn’t have the breadth of human intelligence. AI may progress from ANI to AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence. “It’s not [just] picking out your music, helping you search on Google, or helping an airline set ticket prices. It’s … smart, generally.” According to many experts, said Tim Urban, author of the popular blog Wait But Why, which counts Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg among its fans, if AGI is developed, then the third category of AI won’t be far behind: artificial superintelligence, or ASI. This is software that theoretically would be smarter than humans.

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/will-superhuman-artificial-intelligence-turn-us-paper-clips/

by Christopher Watkins, Udacity

To begin at the beginning, front-end web development is all about creating the actual experience of being on the web. What you see, what you hear, what you learn, what you do—in short, how you engage with a website—that’s what front-end web developers build. To do this, front-end developers deploy a mix of programming and design strategies, and ideally the goal for a front-end developer is to create beautiful websites, that also function well. Learning about front-end web development often begins with understanding the difference between front-end and back-end development. I’ll choose a musical metaphor to try and explain: imagine a website as an electric guitar. The components that actually make it possible for the guitar to emanate sound—wiring and pick-ups, for example—are back-end components. The features that make the guitar feel great to play—the action, the body shape, the neck width, plus “the look” of the instrument—those are front-end components.

http://blog.udacity.com/2016/08/five-ways-learn-front-end-development.html

by Tim Dodd, Financial Review

Australian universities are joining the global trend to offer credit towards a degree to students who complete free online courses. The massive open online course (or MOOC) World Music offered by Open2Study now attracts bachelor degree credit at James Cook University. James Cook University school of creative arts lecturer David Salisbury, who presents the four-week World Music MOOC on Open2Study, said awarding credit for the online course was a fair reward for a student’s effort. The course introduces students to music from four different cultures – African, Indian, Latin American and Indonesian – and so far over 8000 students have enrolled in it. Dr Salisbury said he was rewarding students who completed the MOOC with 10 per cent bonus marks if they were enrolled in a degree subject that included the world music material.

http://www.afr.com/leadership/innovation/earn-credit-towards-a-degree-from-free-online-courses-20160707-gq18kg

by Alice Mani, Deccan Herald

Conventional teaching tools have changed dramatically over the past several decades. Schools have gone from blackboards and chalk to whiteboards with dry erase markers — and in some places, from textbooks to laptops that place a wide range of up-to-date information at students’ fingertips. One of the latest developments in the education world is the growing use of YouTube, the popular video sharing website where any user can upload and share videos of every possible kind. The first thing that many people associate with YouTube is that it is an easy and convenient way to view music videos, television or movie clips. Meanwhile, it is also becoming clear that YouTube has much more potential than that.

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/555058/an-effective-e-learning-tool.html

by Bradley Fuster, US News

As an online professor, I recently had the pleasure of catching up with a student for coffee. He is a busy young professional, pursuing his master’s degree online in music education at SUNY Buffalo State, while teaching full time and coaching sports after school. As he is ​a techno-forward student who is always on the go, I picked his brain for the most useful and innovative gadgets on the market to assist online learners. As online education becomes more mobile-centric, students can leverage these technologies ​to work smarter. While no gadget will ever substitute for industriousness, here is a list of eight accessories that can make online learning just a bit easier and increase a student’s productivity.

http://www.usnews.com/education/online-learning-lessons/articles/2016-03-14/8-tools-to-increase-productivity-for-online-students

by Beth Baker, Next Avenue

Each week, the Virtual Senior Center offers some 30 online classes to homebound clients, from tai chi and exercise to contemporary history discussions and gallery talks with museum curators, as well as music appreciation and singing — even Mandarin. Participants use a simple touch-screen computer to join in, as well as to Skype, play games or use the Internet. Selfhelp partnered with Microsoft and the City of New York to develop the center. “The whole point is to marry technology with homebound seniors, to alleviate loneliness and depression,” explains Carmella Chessen, Selfhelp’s outreach/volunteer coordinator. “We want them to join four classes a week as a minimum. They have to want to be social and to learn the computer.” They also cannot have cognitive issues, she adds.

http://www.nextavenue.org/the-online-classes-that-help-the-homebound-connect/

BY KEVIN MANEY, Newsweek

A company called Udacity, partnering with Google, shows us that we’ve been focused on the wrong disruption. The big change won’t be the digitization of college—it will be the unbundling of the college degree into discrete, focused chunks, which Udacity calls nanodegrees. In other words, technology will assault the college degree, not the experience of college, and that will make all the difference. Technology tends to unbundle stuff. Look how it’s unbundling television, or how it unbundled the music album. The college degree is a bundle that doesn’t work for everybody and creates unnatural market conditions, which is why college costs consistently rise faster than inflation. The next generation will be able to pull apart the college bundle the way people today are pulling the plug on cable.

http://www.newsweek.com/college-nanodegrees-379542

by Ryan Craig and Allison Williams, EDUCAUSE Review

In other industries, unbundling has driven fundamental change. Over the past decade, sales of recorded music are down 50 percent and continue to fall each year. Digital technology has forced a revolution in a business model that, in the past, relied on bundling the music that consumers wanted (singles) with the music that they didn’t want (the rest of the album). Now, in a music industry unbundled by technology, consumers purchase only the products they want. In the television industry, viewers now watch individual shows, thanks to DVRs and Netflix, rather than channels or networks. Once viewers are given a mechanism for paying only for the shows they watch rather than the thousands they don’t, cable and satellite TV bills will collapse. Where does this leave the higher education bundle? At present, degrees remain the currency of the labor market. But as currency, they’re about as portable as the giant stone coins used on the island of Yap. What if technology could produce a finer currency that would be accepted by consumers and employers alike?

http://er.educause.edu/articles/2015/8/data-technology-and-the-great-unbundling-of-higher-education

by Michael Moyes and Pat Raymond, Evolllution

Massive Open Online Courses can be a highly successful mechanism to bring students into credit-bearing offerings, but institutions must be strategic about their programming and marketing. When Massive Open Online Courses burst onto the scene in 2012, there was a great deal of excitement around the capacity for these offerings to transform the higher education space. While they have been successful in creating access to higher education for underserved populations, many administrators saw an opportunity to both deliver high-quality programming to students they may never have reached and to encourage these students to also enroll in online credit-bearing programs offered by the institution. While some institutions have not seen the return they were hoping for from these courses, others, like Berklee Online—the continuing education division of Berklee College of Music, which offers a range of for-credit and non-credit online music education options—have enjoyed great success.

http://evolllution.com/attracting-students/enrollment_strategies/free-degree-moocs-open-door-future-online-students/

By Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed

Online learning platforms are out of tune with creative arts education, according to the ed-tech start-up Kadenze. Its platform, which launches today, aims to become a hub for online courses in art, design, music and other disciplines underrepresented online. Those courses have proven challenging to teach to an audience in dozens, let alone the hundreds or thousands, as faculty members struggle to translate face-to-face instruction to an online setting or evaluate students based on highly personal work. As a result, massive open online course platforms often feature lineups heavy on courses in which student performance can be determined with quizzes and peer-graded writing assignments.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/06/16/kadenze-launches-online-education-platform-creative-arts-courses

By Andrew Barbour, eCampus News

Technology advances and competition have made live streaming easier than ever to deploy, but schools must be careful to pick a solution that meets their needs—and their budgets.  With commencement season in full swing, parents and alumni are flooding campuses nationwide to partake in the festivities. For those unable to make the trek in person, many schools are now broadcasting the ceremonies via live streams, giving audiences a front-row view of the proceedings. Live streaming is nothing new, of course, but industry changes in recent years have made the technology far more accessible to institutions of higher education. As a result, schools are expanding their live-stream operations to encompass everything from graduation ceremonies to musical events, sports, and religious services.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/technologies/campus-live-streaming-787/

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/3-big-issues-we-heard-about-at-sxswedu/56063

by First Post

Snapdeal and Shazam have partnered with The Wharton School, while Instagram will work with University of California, San Diego and 500 Startups with University of Maryland. Google has partnered with University of Maryland and Vanderbilt University, Johns Hopkins University and iHeartMedia with Berklee College of Music have already conducted pilots. “In a job market that is increasingly filled with job descriptions that didn’t exist a decade ago or less, workers and employers alike are recognising the value of online certificates,” Coursera CEO Rick Levin told PTI. “Approximately half of Coursera’s learners come to us seeking knowledge to boost their careers, and that ratio is even higher in places like India where online learning certificates have gained early acceptance,” he said.

http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/coursera-partners-with-google-snapdeal-to-develop-online-courses-254403.html

by Hyperbot

Mike King, course author, instructor and Assistant VP of Marketing for Berklee Online is up next on Hypebot.com’s Year End Virtual Panel. Discussing what 2014 meant for Berklee Online, King says “Massive Open Online Courses have made a significant, positive, impact on our business over the past year. We have seven free online courses available on Coursera right now, and two with EdX, covering music business, music production, songwriting, guitar, vocal production, and even a Gary Burton improvisation course.” Continue reading on the full panel post linked below.

http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2014/12/mike-king-course-author-instructor-cmo-instructor-berklee-online-looks-back-on-2014.html

by Craig Douglas, Boston Business Journal

Berklee’s expansion has many drivers, some rooted in its traditional on-campus operations and others that are more entrepreneurial in nature. Together they have solidified Berklee’s enrollment and boosted its student residency numbers to record highs in the current fall semester. This September, Berklee broadened its enrollment reach with the launch of its first-ever online degrees in music business and music production. Chief Financial Officer Mac Hisey said the programs have around 240 students today and are on track to exceed expectations with approximately 300 enrollees by year end. The degree programs were targeted to enroll only 250 students in this first year and augment Berklee’s already 10,000-strong population of students taking courses online. “It’s actually expanding our demographic,” he said.

http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/mass_roundup/2014/10/berklee-college-hits-the-high-notes.html