Online Learning Update

By Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Ed
Scott Pulsipher, president of Western Governors U.: The inspector general’s report looked only at how the university’s teaching model matched up with regulations, and “made no effort to evaluate the quality.” An audit last year by an independent arm of the U.S. Education Department questioned whether the teaching model of Western Governors University, built around competency-based learning, ran afoul of a federal law. Western Governors begged to differ. Now it has data, in the form of a new survey by Gallup Inc., to make the case that its mentor-based model produces graduates who are more likely to be “thriving” in work and life than are graduates of other colleges.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/With-Its-Model-Under-the-Gun/243078

By Matt Parke, Working Nation

Solutions tells the stories of three individuals whose lives were changed by the non-profit organization Per Scholas and a manufacturing apprenticeship from Trident Technical College and Cummins Inc. Their pathways to in-demand careers in cybersecurity, information technology and advanced manufacturing may be different, but they are united by a common thread. Each subject is gaining new skills without going the traditional route of a four-year college. With more than 6 million job openings and higher education slowly adapting to the new normal of rapid technological change, getting a better read on skills training is essential to keeping our workers moving forward.

What works? Evidence-based training programs do

By Joe Barnhart, Campus Technology

Humor is a tough nut to crack. In the face-to-face classroom, it works great to keep the troops awake and actively breathing. Effective techniques include goofy activities, oddball writing assignments and witty comments. Prodding students into a laugh proved to be a viable strategy and I was very successful at it. What really helped was reading the class’s body language: those subtle shifts in attitude where I could deliver one of my dry zingers, producing the desired jovial results. Those experiences proved to me that humor was a dominating factor when creating an interactive classroom. So, moving to the online format was a little disconcerting. Could humor achieve the same responses online as in real life? Well, I’ve come to find out the answer is, “Absolutely!”

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2018/03/28/working-the-online-crowd-humor-and-teaching-with-tech.aspx

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

Source: “From College to Life: Relevance and the Value of Higher Education” from Strada Education Network and Gallup. In college, relevance matters. A new survey of consumers found that the more tied their college courses are to their work and daily lives, the greater they believe they’ve received a “high-quality education” that was worth the cost. Among respondents to a Strada Education Network and Gallup survey, those who “strongly” agreed that the courses they took are directly relevant to what they do at work and that they learned important skills during their education that come in useful day-to-day were nearly three times more likely to strongly agree that they had received a high-quality education, compared to those who strongly disagreed. And the same group was five and a half times more likely to strongly agree education was worth the cost, compared to those who strongly disagreed.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2018/04/04/when-learning-matches-work-and-life-students-appreciate-their-education-more.aspx

By Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology

The majority of online education leaders agree that most relied-upon metrics currently in use by online programs are student retention and graduation rates and student course/program evaluations, according to a recent survey from Quality Matters and Eduventures Research. While those two indicators topped the list by far, other quality measures, such as faculty training, summative student assessment, program reputation and external rankings, were less commonly cited by the survey respondents.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2018/04/02/online-ed-leaders-agree-top-2-indicators-of-program-quality.aspx

by Matt Krupnick, Hechinger Report

Distance and technology hinder the college aspirations of a surprising number of rural Americans. About 3 million adults live more than 25 miles from a college or university and lack the sufficient internet speeds to take online courses, the Urban Institute reported in February. While that’s only 1.3 percent of the nation’s population, nearly 12 percent of Native Americans and indigenous Alaskans live in these so-called education deserts, the institute found. That makes them 16 percentage points less likely to attend college than Americans who live close to college campuses, and even less likely to complete it — by 18 percentage points.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/millions-of-u-s-adults-live-in-education-deserts-far-from-colleges-and-fast-internet

by the Guardian

We wanted to discover what students felt we did well so we could encourage more of the same and celebrate our successes, hoping to improve our scores in the National Student Survey and the teaching excellence framework. The feedback from the 1,000 responses was pleasingly positive in some areas. We felt smug that our students largely appreciated our efforts. But there was an unsettling, underlying narrative in the responses which felt shocking. Students were essentially asking: why don’t academics have more humanity? They highlighted the lack of kindness, integrity and understanding when academic staff were interacting with them. Seemingly these are the things students really want more of – and so they should. We all deserve these in our lives.

https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2018/mar/16/students-want-most-treated-with-respect-academics-anonymous

by Sue Gee, iProgrammer
Launched on campus in 2015 Foundations of Data Science is Berkeley’s fastest growing program with more than 1,000 students enrolling every semester. Now it is available on edX as a Professional Certificate made up of three 5-week courses. Intended to help students from any major or any background to address questions that interest them, Foundations of Data Science is an introductory stats class taught in a modern hands on way that introduces Python and weaves in issues like data privacy and bias. It gives students a new lens through which to explore the issues and problems that you care about in the world. You will learn the core concepts of inference and computing, while working hands-on with real data including economic data, geographic data and social networks.

http://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/11692-data-science-course-for-everyone-now-online.html

By: Jill Alred and Candace Adams, Faculty Focus

Online learning presents new challenges beyond those of a traditional classroom because students must become more responsible for their learning. Many learners are unfamiliar with the online learning environment, which may include unfamiliar technology, isolation from instructors and university staff, and a lack of face-to-face interaction other learners. As online instructors, we must give additional attention to strategies that will keep our learners engaged, create a successful learning environment, and provide a rewarding learning experience where learners feel supported, valued, and connected.

https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/strategies-for-creating-a-successful-online-classroom/

By KYLE SPENCER, NY Times

Community colleges have long catered to low-income students who dream of becoming the first in their families to earn a college degree. And for many, that remains their central mission. But as middle- and upper-middle-class families like the Shahverdians face college prices in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, more of them are looking for ways to spend less for their children’s quality education.  “This is about social norms,” said Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of higher education policy and sociology at Temple University in Philadelphia. “More middle-class parents are saying, I’m not succumbing to the idea that the only acceptable education is an expensive one.”

by Laurie Quinn, Evolllution

In January 2018, Champlain College Online released Adult Viewpoints 2017: Online Learning & the Back To School Decision, a survey that reveals significant new findings on how US adults between the ages of 23 to 55 perceive the value of higher education, the barriers and motivators for them to return to school, and the quality of online learning. In this interview, Dr. Laurie Quinn shares her insights into the survey’s findings and her views on the opportunities and challenges facing online higher education more broadly.

Post-Traditional Perspectives: Understanding the Needs of Adult Learners

by Gina Krishnan , Business Today
“Online learning is about lifelong learning,” says Ishan Gupta, Managing Director, Udacity, India. What he means is that the speed of change in the IT industry – and its ripple effect across other industries – requires professionals today to keep upgrading their knowledge and skills throughout their working lives. Those who stop doing so, cease to acquire further qualifications at the right time, risk redundancy, as the current paradox in the IT industry clearly shows – even as experts in Data Analytics, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Blockchain and more are in desperate demand, large numbers of people are being laid off.

https://www.businesstoday.in/magazine/the-hub/rise-of-the-net-trainers/story/273850.html

by Patrick O’Grady, Valley News

The decision to close the Granite State College campus on Pleasant Street is a reflection of the rapidly changing method of taking courses to earn degrees, college President Mark Rubinstein said this week. Granite State, which opened in the city to great fanfare in 2006, officially moved out of the renovated first floor of the former Odd Fellows building at the end of March, when the lease expired. In a phone interview this week, Rubinstein said more and more students have elected to take courses online rather than in a classroom setting, a shift that led to the decision late last year to close the Claremont campus.

http://www.vnews.com/Granite-state-college-sees-no-need-for-Pleasant-Street-presence-with-more-and-more-students-taking-classes-online-16651079

By PHILLIP ERICKSEN, Waco Tribune

Virtual reality, defined as a computer-generated simulation of an interactive three-dimensional environment, has wide potential, from entertainment to education. VR is already in use for general instruction in some college classrooms, and Baylor officials are exploring its potential. Education by VR is far more relaxing than the nightmarish fantasies some games feature. One application at Baylor lets users take close looks at human anatomy — lungs before and after years of smoking, for instance, or immersive experiences inside of a stomach.

http://www.wacotrib.com/news/higher_education/virtual-reality-excites-baylor-students-professors-for-the-future/article_2552eb05-e81f-5392-9bc5-6955c0673e09.html

by NEIL C. HUGHES, the Next Web

The stakes are now much higher than a large corporation experiencing a data breach. We have already seen the devastating effects that a cyberattack can have on the aviation industry. Attacks on power grids and even hospitals highlight how everything with an online connection is now a target. The genie is officially out of the bottle, and it has never been easier to learn the tricks of the trade online. Machine-learning software is readily available, and video tutorials are also just a search away. By automating the tailoring of content to a potential victim, cybercriminals can quite quickly wreak havoc on a business or individual.

https://thenextweb.com/contributors/2018/04/05/cybersecurity-ai/

by Marilyn Odendahl, the Indiana Lawyer

Now, the American Bar Association appears poised to allow law schools to meet the demand for more online options. The Council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar has proposed a new rule for distance education that would increase the amount of law courses that can be taught on the internet. Under the current Standard 306, law schools may not grant more than 15 credit hours from online courses toward a J.D. degree, and may not enroll any first-year students in distance education. The proposed new rule would permit law schools to offer up to one-third of the credits for a J.D. degree online, and first-year students would be able to take up to 10 credits online.

https://www.theindianalawyer.com/articles/46586-aba-proposal-would-allow-law-schools-to-offer-more-classes-online

by Sean Michael Morris, Inside Higher Ed

Learning done online — from automated corporate training to classes offered in an LMS to MOOCs — has always been viewed with some skepticism, viewed as something “less than.” And for most of its evolution, online learning has warranted this criticism. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy made possible by antiquated pedagogies and educational technologies that limit teaching to button mashing, knowledge consumption and test taking.  But we’re not still in those early years. It’s not pragmatic today to think that classroom and online college experiences can remain separate — in terms of quality, but especially in terms of ideology.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/views/2018/04/04/are-we-giving-online-students-education-all-nuance-and-complexity

by Ned Lautenbach, Orlando Sentinel

Online education expands access. A new report by the Board of Governors, which oversees Florida’s 12 public universities, shows that 65 percent of undergraduates who took only distance-learning courses during the 2016-2017 academic year were women, a group with a history of underrepresentation in STEM fields. Similarly, the average age for students in distance-learning programs is 28 (compared to 22 for traditional programs), indicating that students are advancing their educations at a time when they’re likely to have family or job responsibilities.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/os-ed-state-push-for-online-learning-benefits-all-stem-too-20180403-story.html

By Sydney Johnson, EdSurge

Many economists call the current era of technology growth a boom era, not unlike previous gold rushes such as the Dot-com bubble. But the thing about bubbles is, they usually pop. And that has some people concerned. Is another bust on the horizon? It’s not only tech employees who are paying attention to these patterns. In higher education, the number of computer science bachelor’s degrees follows market trends in finance and technology in particular—growing when times are good and plummeting when economies crash.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-04-03-computer-science-degrees-and-technology-s-boom-and-bust-cycle

by Mark Lieberman, Inside Higher Ed

As tuition and student debt levels continue to rise, so has the political and public pressure on colleges to keep costs for students under control. Online education, still emerging, hasn’t escaped those conversations. Legislatures in several states have taken steps in recent years to curb fees that institutions charge exclusively to online students, or to incentivize institutions to spend less on their online programs. (They’re also taking a look at fees charged to both residential and online students, but that’s a separate issue with its own nuances.)

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018/04/04/states-pursue-methods-reduce-burden-students-online-programs

by Jarrett Carter, Education Dive
A new survey of online education leaders from Quality Matters and Eduventures Research indicates that instructional design (ID) support can be a major part of how well online learners interact with each other in digital classrooms, as reported in Campus Technology. Courses where ID professionals were mandated to support classroom created a nearly 30% increase in student-to-student engagement against classroom where instructional design personnel were not used or not a mandated resource in the learning experience. According to Campus Technology, only 31% of 182 surveyed chief online officers said their campuses required instructional design input in online offerings, and that most ID help was requested for large online programs and mostly used at for-profit institutions in comparison to four-year and two-year institutions.  Common reasons participants gave for not including ID in were a lack of resources and to preserve faculty independence in teaching and learning.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/instructional-design-improves-engagement-in-online-courses/