Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Becky Frankiewicz, HBR
No clear alternative to universities has yet emerged, and while there’s no clear path to disrupting higher education, there are pain points which those of us in the education field and beyond could be confronting. At some point a viable alternative will likely emerge and we see six reasons that make the case for demanding something different.
https://hbr.org/2019/11/6-reasons-why-higher-education-needs-to-be-disrupted
Share on FacebookBusiness Matters
You know we’re at the cusp of change when online education beats traditional school education. Which is exactly what’s happening right now. According to various researches, students taking courses or classes online outperform the students getting a traditional education. Sure, right now, a certificate from a virtual university doesn’t hold much value as compared to the degree from a renowned institute but that is changing as well. Not only people in general but also employers are seeing online education in a new perspective, which is opening career opportunities for millions of students worldwide. Previously, online courses wasn’t thought of as “proper education” because the institute only exists in a virtual space. “It’s not real”, they’d say. But considering the advantages online education has over traditional schools, people are forced to recognize and acclaim it. Let’s take a look at some of these advantages.
Share on FacebookHeather Long, Washington Post
As humanities majors slump to the lowest level in decades, calls are coming from surprising places for a revival. Some prominent economists are making the case for why it still makes a lot of sense to major (or at least take classes) in humanities alongside more technical fields. Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller’s new book “Narrative Economics” opens with him reminiscing about an enlightening history class he took as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. He wrote that what he learned about the Great Depression was far more useful in understanding the period of economic and financial turmoil than anything he learned in his economic courses.
Share on FacebookSteve Mintz, Inside Higher Ed
Higher education needs to find more effective, efficient ways to educate students, without sacrificing rigor or the human interactions and feedback that lie at the heart of a quality education. And it needs to do this while somehow covering the escalating costs of financial aid, student services, technology, and compliance with government mandates. It is not enough to try to protect and preserve the status quo. Trends that are unsustainable inevitably come to an end. But that need not mean that brick-and-mortar institutions need to be replaced by universities in the cloud. It means that these schools must adapt.
Study International
Online education, from primary school to PhD, is booming. In the US, government data from 2018 shows that during 2016-17, students enrolling exclusively online grew by 15.4 percent, or about one in six students. More than 6.3 million students took at least one distance education course in the Fall 2016 semester, comprising 31.6 percent of all higher education enrolments, according to an annual survey by the Babson Survey Research Group and the Online Learning Consortium. In the UK, online learning made up eight percent of all taught provision at UK higher education providers.
https://www.studyinternational.com/news/working-professionals-love-online-degrees-heres-why/
Share on FacebookHallie Busta, Education Dive
Projections that the pool of traditional students will shrink, wariness of continued tuition increases and limited growth in state support for higher education are prompting institutions to shake things up. In many cases, that means making themselves available throughout learners’ lives as their education needs change. Doing so requires strengthening connections with local employers. Already, colleges and businesses are coming together to map the skills needed on the job to those offered in a certificate or degree, and some are even developing shared credentials.
Share on FacebookCosta Rica News
In the future, will having a degree even matter? According to Harvard business school professor Clayton Christensen, half of all traditional colleges are unlikely to even exist in ten years’ time due to the increase of online study. Therefore, it’s becoming clearer to many that the future of education lies in institutions embracing the idea of online learning and online programs. Here are some reasons to support online education as the future of learning.
https://thecostaricanews.com/six-reasons-why-online-programs-are-the-future-of-education/
Share on FacebookMark Haw, the Guardian
Many UK universities are struggling financially, but there’s one option that is rarely discussed: replacing lecturers with artificial intelligence (AI) machines. This might sound like sci-fi – after all, the lists of occupations vulnerable to AI rarely include teaching, which is still seen as too creative for computers. But a growing database of information harvested from online courses – clickstreams, eye-tracking and even emotion-detection – could make AI lecturers a common feature in the near future.
Share on FacebookTom Wheeler and David Simpson, Brookings
5G will be a physical overhaul of our essential networks that will have decades-long impact. Because 5G is the conversion to a mostly all-software network, future upgrades will be software updates much like the current upgrades to your smartphone. Because of the cyber vulnerabilities of software, the tougher part of the real 5G “race” is to retool how we secure the most important network of the 21st century and the ecosystem of devices and applications that sprout from that network.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-5g-requires-new-approaches-to-cybersecurity/
Share on FacebookBrook Silva-Braga, CBS News
For millions of students, Labor Day weekend marks the end of summer vacation and the start of another school year. But for the first time in 185 years, there will be no fall semester at Green Mountain College in western Vermont. The school fell victim to trends in higher education that could soon impact hundreds of other schools. One expert predicts that 25% of colleges will fail in the next 20 years.
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/expert-predicts-25-of-colleges-will-fail-in-the-next-20-years/#
Share on FacebookBy Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed
The newly announced $24K BU MBA, created in partnership with edX, is a big deal. The Boston University Questrom School of Business is ranked in the top 50 global business schools by US News, in the top 70 by the Economist. Questrom is a brand name business school in a market where the value of the MBA is directly proportional to the status of the institution. Who are the losers in this $24K BU MBA? I’d say every regionally known MBA program. From looking at US News, it looks like there are 475 MBA programs.
https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/5-reasons-why-bus-24k-mba-big-deal
Share on FacebookBernard Marr, Forbes
The attribution of human feelings and beliefs to inanimate things is called anthropomorphism. It is important to keep this principle in mind and make use of it when creating responses that resonate with people. Consumers will become frustrated with a bot similar to how they would with a human if their queries don’t produce a helpful response. They always want to receive the right response at the right time. Anything less than that will lead to frustration. There’s more than the technology to consider when building out a chatbot. Be intentional about your bot’s personality so that it can produce the best results for your company.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2019/08/02/why-ai-and-chatbots-need-personality/
Share on Facebookby Kayla Westra, EDUCAUSE Review
Why support online learners? This is the easiest of all the questions to answer. Student success is why we do what we do. Supporting students in ways that benefit their learning and help them achieve mastery is the lynchpin for any service; helping students navigate through the higher education landscape and complete their programs of study is the key for ancillary student services. Failing forward is key. Do not be afraid to try new approaches to online student services, and do not overanalyze situations to the point of paralysis. Identify needs, review costs, make a good investment, and adapt as needed.
Share on FacebookMatthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate
Whether you choose to look at size or money, China comes out tops every time in terms of edtech. In 2018, Chinese startups received over 50% of all the capital invested by venture capitalists in edtech worldwide. Chinese edtech companies received more money than the total amount invested in edtech firms from all other countries combined, according to a study by HolonIQ. Education is a $6 trillion industry and is expected to grow to $8 trillion by 2015, according to HolonIQ. However, education is receiving a relatively small portion of global investments when one looks at all sectors. Global investment in all sectors is worth $90 trillion while the education sector is worth only $150 billion.
https://www.thetechedvocate.org/why-is-china-the-worlds-leader-in-edtech/
Share on FacebookLisa Morgan, Information Week
Affective computing systems, including care robots and virtual assistants, can facilitate more intimate human-machine relationships. Already, systems have been designed to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression and dementia. Meanwhile, individuals are being nudged in ways that impact their consumption and political choices, whether they realize it or not. Recognizing emotion and responding appropriately to it are more difficult problems, let alone creating AI systems that actually experience emotion. Nevertheless, humans want AI to at least sense emotion now because they’re tired of screaming at interactive voice recognition (IVR) systems, chatbots and virtual assistants out of frustration.
Share on FacebookPenny Bishop, the Conversation
The term “personalized learning” is becoming more common. Indeed, 39 states mention personalized learning in their school improvement plans, as required by the Every Student Succeeds Act. Not only are states legislating personalized learning, but philanthropists are funding it and, in some cases, families are pushing back against it. Penny Bishop, a researcher who focuses on learning environments, answers five questions about personalized learning.
Share on FacebookBY LAURA ASCIONE, eSchool News
Research shows the number of girls who want to pursue STEM careers continues to decline–here’s what can be done about it. A new survey shows that the number of girls interested in pursuing STEM careers is alarmingly small–and it continues to decline. The survey from Junior Achievement, conducted by the research group Engine, shows that only 9 percent of girls ages 13-17 express an interest in STEM careers, down from 11 percent in a similar 2018 survey.
https://www.eschoolnews.com/2019/06/27/why-is-girls-interest-in-stem-careers-shockingly-low/
Share on FacebookMeredith Trimble, Government Loop
Digital maturity in the public sector, however, isn’t just about internal strategies. All areas of government interaction with data, including operations, connecting with partners, and connecting with residents, benefit from modern technologies that are prevalent in our everyday private lives.
Full digital maturity in resident engagement includes:
Customizable, mobile, digital experiences with government that match private-world experiences;
Public self-service to conduct business through a single, constituent portal 24/7, or self-report issues; and
Public access to the same quality of real-time data surfaced through effective internal data sharing and aggregation.
https://www.govloop.com/community/blog/why-you-should-pair-ai-with-open-data/
Share on Facebook
by Will Knight, MIT Technology Review
New guidelines on freedom and privacy protection signal that the Chinese state is open to dialogue about how it uses technology. And while China’s government is widely criticized for using AI as a way to monitor citizens, the newly published guidelines seem remarkably similar to ethical frameworks laid out by Western companies and governments.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613610/why-does-china-suddenly-care-about-ai-ethics-and-privacy/
Share on FacebookJP Mangalindan, Yahoo Finance
Cuban told Yahoo Finance Editor-in-Chief Andy Serwer in a recent interview he has taken several online courses to stay up-to-date on programming languages and evolving technologies, including machine learning. Doing so arguably makes him a savvier investor when some tech startups pitch him. “I mean, I’ve been on Amazon doing the machine learning tutorials,” Cuban said. “Right now I’m going through… I’ve taken Python online classes.” “I just started JavaScript neural networks,” added Cuban, referring to computing systems that act similarly to biological neural networks and adapt to perform tasks. “There’s a little tutorial where they’ve got most of the libraries … And if you have a background in programming, it’s not hard.”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-cuban-coding-113412974.html
Share on FacebookBY LAURA ASCIONE, eCampus News
Adults are quickly taking over a larger and larger part of the student population at colleges and universities–and understanding adult learners is key to institutional success. The idea of the “traditional student,” who graduates high school and enrolls in a university, graduating in four years, is transforming. The majority of today’s learners are adult learners–those juggling school with work or family responsibilities, or those seeking new skills or a complete career change. Many institutions are focusing on adult learner programs to help boost their growth and revenue as enrollment projections decline.
Share on FacebookPowered by WordPress