Educational Technology

By Nikki O’Keeffe, TD Insights

Sometimes my designs worked and sometimes they did not. I learned what participants liked and what they did not like through course evaluations and from talk around the office. The true results, however, showed on the job. It didn’t take long for me to realize that a decent e-learning program requires more than a set of clickable PowerPoint slides. The learner needs to experience real-life scenarios, try out tasks, and get feedback along the way. An extrinsic smiley face and a thumbs up icon at the end aren’t enough. Here are the top five lessons I learned from designing and developing e-learning programs.

https://www.td.org/insights/what-i-learned-from-designing-and-developing-e-learning

Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

Learners today have greater access to digital curriculum than ever before. Edtech innovations in digital curriculum are a practical solution for delivering individualized instruction as efficiently as possible. As a result, schools rely heavily on edtech for their curriculum needs. Textbooks, supplemental apps, AR/VR experiences, and digital instruction are part of the digital curriculum experience. Measuring the market size for digital curriculum is like trying to measure the universe. We know about many of the smaller components, but the bigger picture is one that changes constantly. Higher education and PK-12 schools use digital curriculum, and consumers purchase learning apps for use outside of formal learning environments. Estimates suggest that digital curriculum spending in 2014-2015 alone topped $15 billion.

https://www.thetechedvocate.org/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-digital-curriculum-but-were-afraid-to-ask/

By Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed

Leaders of companies colleges hire to take academic programs online discuss their role, the scrutiny they’re facing and why we should call them something other than OPMs. These are increasingly fraught times for the OPMs, with growing scrutiny from think tank analysts concerned about the corporate role in educational delivery and legislation in California that could limit the ability of such companies to operate in the state. The OPMs are also under attack from within their own ranks, as 2U’s co-founder, John Katzman, who now runs Noodle, another online enabler, said of the ed-tech industry at another panel here last week: “At a lot of schools, online programs are 20 percent more expensive than their on-campus counterpart. We’ve effectively raised the cost of education. So, I have to ask, are we properly using taxpayers’ dollars?”

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/05/08/their-industry-under-scrutiny-opm-leaders-ponder-their-role

By Grant T. Harris, Inside Higher Ed
Just as many academic institutions now regret their slow start in China, so will they come to regret missing out on early opportunities in this increasingly important and fast-growing region Grant T. Harris warns. American universities are largely unprepared for a key global phenomenon: Africa’s growing importance. The continent’s prominent demographic, economic and political trends are impossible to overlook, and any institution aspiring to sustain a global brand and position its students to thrive in international settings will need a deliberate Africa strategy. There is no denying Africa’s growing presence in global markets and international affairs. The region’s current population of 1.2 billion is expected to double by 2050, at which point one in every four people will be African.

https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2019/05/09/benefits-universities-intensifying-and-broadening-their-involvement-africa-opinion

As online learning has grown in both higher education and K-12 schools, it has traditionally taken different pathways. But hundreds of small colleges and one company have an incentive to try and change that.Thanks to a new and growing effort by the College Consortium, a company that supports online course sharing between institutions, higher education is taking a page from K-12 education to help schools expand their course options for students. The company is allowing colleges to control already-shaky budgets in two ways: by holding the line on costs as participating schools can rely on faculty from other colleges and don’t have to hire additional ones, and by supporting the top line through revenue sharing among schools.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-05-07-to-scale-online-and-save-small-schools-higher-ed-takes-a-page-from-k-12

edX

AI will never replace our amazing teachers – and I’m saying that as the CEO of the online learning platform edX and in the business of developing education technology. It’s no wonder, then, that when we say “education technology,” “ed tech,” or “online learning” you might automatically think teachers are being replaced. Online learning has the power to augment and improve what’s going on in the classroom. While MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are generally designed to help students learn autonomously, and in fact millions do, as part of a classroom experience, they function much like new-age textbooks. And let’s not forget that behind every online course there can be upwards of a dozen great teachers, professors, or teaching assistants who have perfected that course in front of students before adapting it for online use. It all comes back to teachers.

https://blog.edx.org/ai-will-never-replace-teachers

Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

The EdTech industry is dominated by white employees, white leaders, and white entrepreneurs. If you doubt this statement, just attend an Edtech conference. Admittedly, educators and others don’t attend Edtech conferences to discuss equity. They go to get inspired, learn from each other and discover the latest technology that can benefit their teaching and their students. That’s all very well, but if we expect technology to transform how we teach and how students learn, it’s imperative that we integrate equity into our efforts. We need to have those awkward discussions.

https://www.thetechedvocate.org/it-is-time-for-the-edtech-industry-to-stop-denying-its-equity-and-race-problem/

KYLE WIGGERS, Venture Beat

“We’ve come to know that AI-powered experiences can get a lot of information to a person with a disability, which ultimately empowers their independence,” Mary Bellard, senior accessibility architect at Microsoft, told VentureBeat in an interview ahead of the company’s annual Build developer conference in Seattle. “[We’re working] to make sure we’re not just developing tech for tech’s sake, [but] working on technology that a particular disability community wants and is interested in driving with us.”

https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/06/how-microsoft-is-using-ai-to-improve-accessibility/

By Kathryn Vasel, CNN Business

While Silicon Valley has made some strides in creating opportunities and more inclusive workplaces for women, Melinda Gates believes there’s still work to be done. “If you talk with women and men in Silicon Valley, some companies have changed, but quite a few still haven’t,” the co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation tells CNN’s Poppy Harlow during a Boss Files interview. “And, what I know to be true is that we need more pathways for women into technology.” Having a bad reputation for supporting women in the workplace can be costly for a company.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/06/success/melinda-gates-ai-gender-equality/index.html

Frederic Lardinois, Tech Crunch
If you write in Microsoft Word Online, you’ll soon have an AI-powered editor at your side. As the company announced today, Word will soon get a new feature called “Ideas” that will offer writers all kinds of help with their documents. If writing is a struggle for you, the most important feature of Ideas is surely its ability to help you write more concise and readable text. You can think of this as a grammar checker on steroids, as it goes beyond fixing obvious mistakes and focuses on making your writing better. It uses machine learning, for example, to suggest a rewrite when you mangled a complex phrase. Ideas will also help you write more inclusive texts.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/06/words-new-ai-features-will-help-you-write-better/

John Roach, Microsoft

For example, he explained, systems today can add a new appointment to your calendar but not engage in a back-and-forth dialogue with you about how to juggle a high-priority meeting request. They are also unable to use contextual information from one skill to assist you in making decisions from another, such as checking the weather before scheduling an afternoon meeting on the patio of a nearby coffee shop. The next generation of intelligent assistant technologies from Microsoft will be able to do this by leveraging breakthroughs in conversational artificial intelligence and machine learning pioneered by Semantic Machines.

https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/microsoft-build-future-of-natural-language/

by Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

Driving the substantial growth in the edtech industry, China already generates $300 billion in an industry that demands quality education products and services. In 2018, most of this effort was targeted for early childhood and K-12 education, but vocational and test prep transactions came close to matching the need in the first two sectors combined. In addition, the white-collar vocational education market has witnessed 12.6% growth in a single year.

The implication is clear: edtech in China is an ever-expanding business.

https://www.thetechedvocate.org/look-to-china-for-edtech-innovation/

Quentin Bellard, Kimberly S. McCoy, and Richard Varner, Faculty Focus
It is imperative that educators find new ways to incorporate technology to stay current. This can be done by considering tools and applications that will not only enhance a students’ educational experience but also support teaching and learning. We offer three tools/applications that supports this notion here

https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-with-technology-articles/3-cool-tech-tools-to-consider-for-the-digital-classroom/

Cryptopolitan

Not so long ago all learning was delivered offline. Nowadays it is a given that students will have an internet connection and will be able to access their content at all times. Learning Management Systems were designed as SaaS to always be online or at least linked to a central database. They were designed to track learning activities that occur in the LMS, and lack the capability to record informal or social learning actions. An offline player, in the context of elearning, is a program which allows learners to download elearning content when they are connected to the internet, then complete the training later when disconnected. The benefits of this, for students as well as for a multilingual distributed workforce that may have poor access to the internet, can be great.

https://www.cryptopolitan.com/leveling-the-playing-field-with-internet-connectivity-plus/

SIG UELAND, Practical eCommerce
Designers and developers can learn new skills and find a community of peers through free online resources. There are plenty of self-guided tutorials and educational resources for beginners and advanced learners to find professional training at no cost.

https://www.practicalecommerce.com/13-free-learning-resources-for-designers-developers

Pang-Chieh Ho, Digg
In the latest demonstration of how far artificial intelligence has come, designer Es Devlin and Google have developed Poem Portraits, an algorithm that can be used to generate poetry from one suggested word. The way it works is you “donate” a word to Poem Portraits and it will create a unique poem for you based on that word. The algorithm itself works a bit like predictive text, as Devlin has explained to Engadget, and was trained on millions of words from 19th-century poetry.

http://digg.com/2019/google-ai-poem-portraits

Kantele Franko, AP

Just a year after the online Western Governors University launched its Ohio affiliate , state lawmakers are considering eliminating recognition that lets its students benefit from certain state-funded aid, including need-based grants. That’s part of the budget bill passed Thursday by the House. It now heads to the Senate. The change was advocated by Republican Rep. Jay Edwards, a member of House leadership whose district includes Ohio University. He said the state’s recognition of Salt Lake City-based WGU was unfair to existing public schools in Ohio that are big employers, receive significant state funding, and already offer various online educational opportunities. WGU Ohio has about 3,100 students.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/lawmakers-consider-ending-recognition-of-online-university/2019/05/09/ac2779f4-72a6-11e9-9331-30bc5836f48e_story.html

By John Waters, Edsurge

Language learning is something of a sweet spot for AI, thanks to the capabilities of two core types of AI tech: machine learning and natural language processing. Machine learning algorithms support adaptive, personalized and spaced learning, while natural language processing technologies help with the extremely complex challenges associated with understanding and translating human language. A growing number of vendors are offering AI-powered language-learning apps to companies and the general public (Speexx, Busuu, Duolingo) for hundreds of languages, but Ponddy’s products were developed specifically for secondary and university teachers of Mandarin.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-05-03-ai-is-everywhere-now-it-wants-to-teach-you-chinese

Thomas Franck, CNBC

Job gains in the services sectors continued to rocket higher in April as hiring remained hot for computer system designers, social workers and health-care professionals. Manufacturing, on the other hand, posted a third straight month of lackluster employment figures. CNBC studied the net changes by industry for April jobs based on the data from the Labor Department contained in the jobs report released Friday. The government said the U.S. economy added 263,000 jobs last month, more than the 190,000 increase expected by economists polled by Refinitiv.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/03/heres-where-the-jobs-are-in-one-chart.html

By Ann Scott Tyson, Christian Science Monitor

“Why we wrote this story”:  Military uses of artificial intelligence have raised concerns about working with Chinese researchers. But some U.S. experts also feel a duty to consider AI’s potential role in human rights abuses, in a society less free than their own.

https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2019/0503/In-race-to-dominate-AI-US-researchers-debate-collaboration-with-China

Stephanie Wang, Chalkbeat Indiana

If online students fail to log into classes as often as required, virtual schools must kick them out, under a new Indiana law signed Wednesday by Gov. Eric Holcomb. Students who want to go to an online school now also have to complete an orientation session with a guardian to better understand the expectations of a virtual learning environment. These new rules, which leave room for the state and charter authorizers to bring stronger oversight of virtual schools, come in response to years of poor student outcomes at Indiana’s online schools and a bubbling scandal at two large virtual charter schools on the brink of closure.

https://www.ibj.com/articles/73621-after-years-of-debate-law-increases-oversight-of-virtual-schools