Educational Technology

Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed
More than a third of prospective college students are reconsidering higher education. And 43 percent of prospective students for one- and two-year programs are looking to delay enrollment, survey finds. More than one-third of prospective college students are reconsidering higher education in light of the coronavirus pandemic. Further, 43 percent of prospective students for one- and two-year programs are looking to delay enrollment.

https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2020/12/03/more-third-prospective-college-students-are-reconsidering-higher

Hazel Shearing, BBC News

When Bethany Wakenshaw started her nursing course this year, she could ask for practical advice from her teachers in person as she practised CPR and other life support skills. But after coronavirus cases began to rise again across the UK, her classes moved online last month. Despite the teaching staff’s best efforts, she finds online learning frustrating. “It’s so hard to concentrate when you’re in your own room because they can’t see you,” she says. “Even quickly checking your phone for five seconds can turn into being on your phone for 10 minutes.”  For those who are struggling – whether at uni or elsewhere – here are five tips to get better at learning online.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-55100898

Elizabeth Hernandez, Denver post

Colleges burdened by unrelenting COVID-19 costs in a state that poorly funds higher education are being harangued for not refunding some portion of students’ tuition. Meanwhile, members of the staff, faculty and administration whose salaries comprise a good chunk of tuition dollars are speaking out about working harder than ever while facing pay cuts and furloughs. The nuanced situation — disappointed students and families, diligent faculty and staff, and a butchered budget — worries Colorado’s higher education chief, who believes colleges must figure out how to convey their value to students before they lose them.

https://www.denverpost.com/2020/12/03/colorado-university-tuition-cost-covid-pandemic/

ASHISH GUPTA, eCampus News

COVID-19 has forced learning online, leaving vulnerabilities exposed–but ethical hackers could be an institution’s best strategy for secure learning. In the wake of COVID-19, colleges and universities across the U.S. have embraced virtual and hybrid learning to combat the spread of the virus and protect students and staff. Recent research analyzed the reopening models of 3,000 higher-ed institutions and found that only 4 percent are allowing in-person attendance, making learning management systems, or LMS solutions, critically important.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2020/12/04/using-ethical-hackers-to-protect-online-learning/

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

Chelsea Waite, Christensen Institute

In his book called Peer Learning in Higher Education, David Boud describes peer teaching as when “advanced students…take on a limited instructional role.” Similarly, peer teaching products are built on the idea that the locus of expertise is found in individual students—one student a whiz in math; another the recipient of the highest grade in her comparative literature course. For example, Brainly lets students crowdsource homework help by “[tapping] into the brainpower of thousands of experts worldwide”—in the form of other students. Anyone can ask a question or submit an answer, and answers are moderated by students who are vetted by the company. Knack enables students with skills in a particular subject to earn money by tutoring their peers.

https://www.christenseninstitute.org/blog/online-peer-learning-a-growing-trend-sees-two-different-approaches/

Tom Simonite, Wired

Thursday, China’s leading quantum research group made its own declaration of quantum supremacy, in the journal Science. A system called Jiuzhang produced results in minutes calculated to take more than 2 billion years of effort by the world’s third-most-powerful supercomputer. The two systems work differently. Google builds quantum circuits using supercold, superconducting metal, while the team at University of Science and Technology of China, in Hefei, recorded its result by manipulating photons, particles of light.

https://www.wired.com/story/china-stakes-claim-quantum-supremacy/

Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

The biggest uses for artificial intelligence in education haven’t been invented yet. But whatever they end up being, people working on AI applications need to keep educators and education policy makers well informed “early and deeply.” That’s the conclusion of a new report recently issued by the Center for Integrative Research in Computing and Learning Sciences.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2020/12/03/theres-more-to-come-for-ai-in-ed.aspx

Jill Duffy, PC Mag

First, anyone who has worked remotely for a long time will tell you there’s no sense in comparing your break schedule at the office to the one you follow at home. They are two different environments. The interruptions are different. Your focus is different. Your productivity will also be different. It takes time to figure out your new way of working. Second, the current situation is not normal. You might be more distracted by the news. You might get interrupted by children, pets, or other people in your home. Third, with all these changes, we are all under more stress than usual. Stress depletes our energy. When we’re low on energy, we need a break. I’ve argued, in fact, that putting self-care before productivity will keep you healthier and happier. Counterintuitively—for some, least— it will almost certainly improve your productivity in the long run, if done right.

https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/get-organized-how-to-take-better-breaks-to-boost-your-productivity

Renee Chmiel, University of New Haven

“Through online learning, you facilitate engagement between students and between students and faculty, and those discussion forums become very rich,” said Gallatin, who earned an undergraduate degree in biology from Fairfield University and an MBA with a concentration in marketing from the University of Bridgeport. “From a quality perspective, the design of an online class has strong outcomes. A well-done online class is equivalent to a well-done on campus class, and the outcomes are equivalent.”

https://www.newhaven.edu/news/blog/2020/cindy-gallatin.php

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/

Robert D. Williams, Brookings Institution

In short, the United States stands to benefit in multiple ways from adopting sensible federal privacy legislation. But in a world where data privacy, digital trade, and national security are increasingly intertwined, the data governance agenda for the next administration cannot stop there.

https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/to-enhance-data-security-federal-privacy-legislation-is-just-a-start/

Charlotte West, PBS

College isn’t normal for anyone this fall. Uncounted numbers of students like Chen have chosen to forgo the typical first-year experience to stay closer to home, whether to help out their families or to safeguard their own health. Their first impressions of college are turning out to be challenging, isolating, frustrating and confusing, with a few bright spots. Harvard gave freshmen the option to start their college careers in residence in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but Chen and 250 other first-year students chose to stay at home — in Chen’s case, with her family in Oakland.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/ive-never-seen-the-campus-what-its-like-to-attend-harvard-from-your-childhood-bedroom

Robert Gibson, EDUCAUSE Review

Even though their traditional work rhythm has been disrupted, employees at higher education institutions still want professional development opportunities. A full 94 percent of employees indicated that they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their career development.1 There is no reason to think this desire has changed during this turbulent period.

https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2020/11/rapid-professional-development

Patrice Prusko and Whitney Kilgore, EDUCAUSE Review

The unpredictable world that we currently inhabit has turned many lives upside-down, with everyone needing help, feeling stressed about what’s been lost, and just needing someone to listen and care. On top of the already extensive list of job responsibilities that make us feel like a Swiss Army knife, we have now added to our emotional labor by becoming caregivers at a time when we most need care ourselves. For many of us, this has led to compassion fatigue.3 The instructional designers we spoke with mentioned the difficulties they have in balancing work and life. “It’s hard to say no, because faculty are stressed and we care. How do you say no?” pondered Robert. An unexpected outcome of our current role is emotional labor.4

https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2020/12/burned-out-stories-of-compassion-fatigue

Erika James, Corey Anthony & Stephanie Creary, Knowledge at Wharton
The renewed attention on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace has been enough to fill any manager’s agenda this year. But this is 2020. The coronavirus pandemic has heaped even more pressure on leaders tasked with keeping their employees healthy and safe, while also trying to keep DEI at the top of a growing list of priorities. “Both of them are exhausting, and we only have so much in our reserves to be able to continue down this path,” Wharton Dean Erika James said.

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/how-to-be-an-inclusive-leader/

Sean Burns, EDUCAUSE Review

Through a survey of privacy professionals and in-depth interviews with more than twenty privacy leaders from a variety of higher education institutions—including research institutions, smaller colleges, and community colleges—the research summarized in this report provides a comprehensive and in-depth view across the current landscape of data privacy and highlights opportunities for improved practices and policies that may be available to higher education, technology, and privacy leaders.

https://library.educause.edu/resources/2020/11/the-evolving-landscape-of-data-privacy-in-higher-education

Rachid Ait Maalem Lahcen, Ram Mohapatra, and Baiyun Chen, EDUCAUSE Review

As we all know, the COVID-19 pandemic locked down higher education campuses and forced social distancing. Neither faculty nor students had access to their offices, computer centers, or books and printed references in the library. Face-to-face interaction between faculty and students quickly became a thing of the past. Two strategies may help instructors successfully transition to remote teaching by using technology as a way to focus on the critical aspect of making human connections with students.

https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/11/prioritizing-strategies-for-a-better-transition-to-remote-instruction

University of Minnesota Medical School

In August, Medical School faculty, staff, trainees and students were invited to provide suggestions about how best to support our academic community during the enduring pandemic. The listening sessions focused on caregivers and those parenting school-aged children, while also managing their professional duties. Major themes are addressed on this page, providing suggestions and resources as you move forward this fall and next spring. Every action we take is grounded in diversity, equity and inclusion.

https://med.umn.edu/covid-fatigue

Lilah Burke, Inside Higher Ed

The project We Rate COVID Dashboards has been evaluating college and university attempts at transparency. Eight months into the pandemic, how are institutions doing?  Many things about this college semester have been new. For one, in most other years students would not regularly check a webpage to track the spread of disease on their campuses. But while COVID-19 dashboards are now ubiquitous, they are not created equal. That’s why Howard Forman and Cary Gross, both professors at Yale University College of Medicine, started We Rate COVID Dashboards, a project to evaluate and assess how well higher ed is communicating about spread on campus. The project, which is both a website and a Twitter account, assigns a letter grade to dashboards based on a rubric of nine criteria. Are the cases separated into students and staff? Is it updated every weekday?

the Economist

The researchers found that people who played the games for longer reported feeling better, on average, than those who barely played at all (see chart). They stopped short of claiming that playing time directly affected well-being, noting that people who already felt good might have been more inclined to pick up a controller. Nor did they look at the effect of playing on people who are not habitual gamers. They did find, however, that certain feelings provided by video games, such as a sense of freedom and competence, improved the players’ sense of well-being while they played. A greater feeling of social connection from playing with others in the game, crucial when friends cannot meet in person, also boosted their mood.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/11/27/playing-video-games-in-lockdown-can-be-good-for-mental-health