Online Learning Update

HR News UK

E-learning demands quality, from both sides. Programs have to deliver knowledge and good learning content, while learners have to have self-discipline, consistency, and determination to learn. The fact that e-learning can be reached anywhere and at any time is probably the biggest advantage. Learners don’t need to travel or move and rent a place in another city or country. With good planning, it’s possible to fit it in the most hectic schedules. It’s also easy on the budget in most cases, which makes it extremely appealing. Another advantage is the possibility to have several, different learning formats.

https://hrnews.co.uk/the-numerous-benefits-of-e-learning/

Thomas Tobin, EDUCAUSE Review

The colleges and universities that are furthest along in their accessibility efforts tend to have IT leaders and staff who share certain practices. They typically chop off the end of the word “accessibility,” focusing their efforts on expanding access, regardless of the ability profiles of their learners.20 They shift their goals away from making content accessible and look instead at making interactions easier to engage in.21 And they have largely moved beyond the mental model of universal design (UD) in the physical environment, which is static, bounded, and predictable—instead designing interactions according to UDL, which sees interactions as dynamic, open, and emergent.

https://er.educause.edu/articles/2019/8/taking-it-way-beyond-accessibility-5-4-1-approach

Taylor Kendal, EDUCAUSE Review

Berners-Lee’s oft-quoted view of the future-past of the web applies equally well to the higher education ecosystem: its future is so much bigger than its past. I believe that in just a decade, the postsecondary education ecosystem will be both utterly unrecognizable and strikingly familiar. It will consist of bootcamp-university hybrids, algorithm-driven space-sharing agreements, discipline-specific micro-schools, AI-driven instruction/courses, and perhaps most noticeable and widespread, entirely new means of validating the knowledge and skills that such an ecosystem is providing or was meant to provide its students. Yet while surrounding pressures will necessitate some degree of adaptation, this landscape will still be dotted with legacy systems, slow-rotting code, and familiar conversations regarding how we plan to prepare future generations for the ever-changing technological revolution looming just over the horizon.

https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2019/8/forecasts-flexchainedu-and-the-promise-of-future-horizons

BY KALYN BELSHA, ChalkBeat

While the organization says it charged Chicago schools for one-off training sessions in the past, it is now formally selling its services to districts, putting it in direct competition with other education technology vendors — though there is little concrete evidence of Khan Academy’s ability to help students academically. The organization is banking that its nonprofit status and its familiarity to students and teachers, will serve as selling points. “I do think being not-for-profit increases the trust level that folks can have with us,” CEO and founder Sal Khan said. “If we really want to reach all of the students, especially the ones that might be most in need, we really have to triple down on our work with classrooms and districts.”

https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2019/09/13/how-khan-academy-the-popular-free-tool-for-students-wants-to-play-a-more-official-role-in-americas-classrooms/

Hallie Busta, Education Dive

And while reports indicate new technology is fundamentally changing existing jobs and resulting in the creation of new ones, Matthew Sigelman, CEO of labor market analytics firm Burning Glass Technologies, said that trend is incremental. Rather than seeing many new jobs emerge, he argued, it’s more often that existing ones are adding new requirements. That could raise the salary and knowledge levels of the workers required and make jobs harder to fill. Sigelman gave the example of a marketing manager, a position that now often requires the ability to work with customer data. That went “from being really quick to fill to really hard to fill,” he said. “(This) represents a real challenge for educators in terms of how they can keep their programs up to date,” he said, as well as for workers and employers.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/whats-at-stake-for-colleges-as-employers-rethink-hiring-and-training/562916/

Becky Metrick, Penn Live

HACC President Dr. John Sygielski said it has been in the fabric of community colleges since their inception to be engaged in their communities, but even the definition of how to do that has changed. “We’re using less traditional faculty, more part-time faculty, who are willing to do a certificate; putting pressure internally to bring the external into the institution,” Sygielski said. “As a college president, we are much more town ministers than we are academic philosophers.” Mason said with Penn State Harrisburg’s goal of dissemination knowledge, the hope is that students work with local companies, in local industries, and have the students return to the local community to share what they’ve learned. “Today when we talk about the dissemination, the technology transfer, you’re creating new knowledge that industry will pick up on,” Mason said. He said he doesn’t see any Pennsylvania institutions that are not engaged in the public and private sectors.

https://www.pennlive.com/news/2019/09/higher-education-is-not-monolithic-five-takeaways-from-pennlives-reader-panel-on-higher-education.html

Muhua Zhang, Yanyan Li, I-JET

The purpose of this study was to explore the students’ satisfaction of VRLs and their continuance intention to experience VRLs in future study. The VRL developed by Unity3D PRO was integrated into an undergraduate course named “Introduction to computer science”. 240 college students from China Three Gorges University took the course and had the virtual and remote laboratory experience for 16 weeks. Students’ satisfaction and continuance intention were investigated by a three-part questionnaire based on the Expectation-Confirmation Model and Flow Theory. The results indicated that the flow experience of students in VRL was at general level while the female students’ perception of flow was higher than the males. Correlation analysis found that the flow experience had an extremely significant correlation with the students’ perceived usefulness, confirmation, satisfaction and continuous intention.

https://online-journals.org/index.php/i-jet/article/view/10799

IBL News

Coursera announced Thursday that the global pharma company Novartis will provide unlimited access to the platform catalog of 3,600 courses to its 108,000 employees. This global force will also have access to a stackable curriculum on data science, digital technologies, and soft skills. This offering follows a pilot earlier this year with 2,000 employees enrolled in certified classes on Coursera.

https://iblnews.org/novartis-108k-employees-will-have-unlimited-access-to-courseras-course-catalog/

By Hallie Busta, Education Dive
A new report from The Century Foundation cracks open about four dozen agreements between public universities and the online program managers (OPMs) that run their online courses, certificates and degrees, offering insight into how such deals are structured and the potential risks for institutions. The report outlines several “red flags” in these relationships, including contracts directly tied to enrollment or tuition revenue, and the inability for the university to “reasonably terminate” a contract or change providers. It also includes best practices for institutions to use when structuring deals. OPMs and universities have faced continued pressure to be more transparent about the terms of their relationships, and that’s likely to continue with projections that the market for online learning will keep growing and consolidating.
https://www.educationdive.com/news/a-look-inside-public-universities-opm-contracts/562763/

By Riia O’Donnell , HR Dive
The skills gap grew by 12% last year, according to a survey of 600 HR leaders by Wiley Education Services and Future Workplace. Nearly two-thirds of HR leaders reported a skills gap in their organizations, up from 52% in 2018.  Forty percent of respondents said the cause of the skills gap is changes in technology and needed skills. Nearly a third of respondents attributed the gap to a lack of qualified candidates.  Ninety percent of respondents said they’d hire a job seeker who lacks a four-year college degree, though 68% said a degree is useful in validating certain skills.

https://www.hrdive.com/news/the-skills-gap-grew-by-12-last-year-survey-says/562443/

By Emily Glassberg Sands, Coursera

Urgency around upskilling is a global one, but there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Each country has a unique set of circumstances – economic, political, social – that shape their skills landscape today. Industries, too, face challenges unique to their verticals that require tailored talent strategies. This first edition of the Coursera Global Skills Index looks closely at these trends, benchmarking 60 countries and 10 industries across Business, Technology, and Data Science skills. The findings draw from an innovative data methodology that uses machine learning to map skills to the content that teaches them and then robustly measure skill proficiencies based on the assessment performance of the millions of learners on Coursera.

https://blog.coursera.org/introducing-the-coursera-global-skills-index/

By Andrew Kreighbaum, Inside Higher Ed
The Center for Excellence in Higher Education, a for-profit college chain based in Salt Lake City, is halting enrollment of new students at physical locations as it looks to shift to mostly online instruction. “We’re going through a reevaluation of what is the right model for delivery of higher education,” said Eric Juhlin, the company’s CEO. CEHE, which operates Stevens-Henager College and College America, has about 2,100 students

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2019/09/12/profit-college-phasing-out-enrollment-physical-campuses

By Natalie Schwartz, Education Dive
Only 60% of student services positively impact student retention, according to a new analysis of more than 1,000 initiatives across 55 colleges from Civitas Learning.  Of the remaining 40% initiatives that had a “neutral impact,” however, 15% of participating students saw a lift in their persistence rates.  The news follows recent studies that suggest colleges can make a bigger impact by personalizing their messaging to address students’ biggest needs.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/report-40-of-student-success-initiatives-dont-help-retention/562712/

Hallie Busta, Education Dive

2U wants online program managers (OPMs) to be more transparent about the nature of their relationships with colleges and universities, and it’s leading the charge. That’s according to a six-part framework it announced Wednesday calling on its competitors to join it in pulling back the curtain on how they work with institutions to deliver online programs. Among the items it wants to share are who OPMs’ customers are, how they set tuition prices, and their student outcomes such as retention and graduation rates. That move isn’t too big of a jump for a company that is publicly traded and has made a habit of disclosing certain measures and outcomes in the past, analysts say.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/whats-behind-2us-new-opm-transparency-push/562732/

by Betsy Reinitz, EDUCAUSE

Additionally, as analytics initiatives get underway, colleges and universities will need to make decisions about how to allocate resources to sustain and grow analytics. Not everything can be done, and these decisions about what to do and what not to do can be difficult. As one summit presenter, San Cannon, Chief Data Officer at University of Rochester, said, “Everybody gets a say but not everybody gets their way.”3 Having all of the appropriate stakeholders participate in that conversation through a governance process is necessary for making resource decisions that ensure the analytics initiative addresses the goals set out for it.

https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2019/9/keys-to-an-analytics-future-governance-collaboration-and-communication

Edward J. Moloney and Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed

We want to contribute to the advancement of the larger ecosystem of postsecondary education, and of the institutions in which we work, by employing the digital learning expertise that we have on the wide set of challenges that our schools face. We think that IDL has the potential to evolve from a website/newsletter/community that focuses mostly on digital learning topics, to one centered on a digital learning perspective. The language that we think that might help this evolution is that of learning innovation. Connecting the research on learning with how universities are changing is one way to broaden the conversation while also grounding the discussion within the expertise of the existing IDL community.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/technology-and-learning/higher-ed-through-learning-innovation-lens?

Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

Classroom technology is on the brink of massive change, and it’s a change many educators are eagerly waiting for. The promise of 5G networks brings with it a robustness like nothing we’ve seen before. Internet travel will be faster, and the connections will be more reliable than ever. That’s big news because only two-thirds of schools in the United States consider their internet connections to be fast enough for instructional access. When the internet is down, so is classroom instruction. The next generation of internet connectivity will nearly eliminate dropped connections, regardless of the digital media in use.

https://www.thetechedvocate.org/5g-networks-promise-to-make-instructional-technology-better/

By Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed
Student services company Chegg announced plans last week to acquire the online coding school Thinkful. To investors in the ed-tech space, the deal was not a surprising one — lots of ed-tech companies have been busy acquiring boot camps of late. Earlier this year, online program management company 2U snapped up Trilogy Education for a cool $750 million, and Zovio (formerly Bridgepoint Education) acquired Fullstack Academy for $17.5 million in cash plus 4.5 million shares of common stock.

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/09/11/chegg%E2%80%99s-journey-textbook-rental-company-education-provider?

Cade Metz, New York Times

For years, big tech companies have used huge salaries, bonuses and stock packages to lure artificial intelligence experts out of academia. Now, a study released on Friday says that migration has hurt the post-college prospects of students. The study, the first of its kind, was conducted by researchers at the University of Rochester. They found that over the last 15 years, 153 artificial intelligence professors in North American universities left their posts for industry. An additional 68 moved into industry while retaining part-time roles with their universities.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/technology/when-the-ai-professor-leaves-students-suffer-study-says.html

By Brandon Busteed, Scientific American

School currently focuses too exclusively on knowledge and not enough on skills.  There’s a pile of evidence about the most effective “education.” Summarized, it points to relationship-rich and work-integrated learning experiences. The most important aspects include working on long-term projects that take a semester or more to complete and having a job or internship where you can apply what you are learning in the classroom. Both experiences double the odds that graduates will be engaged and successful in their work later. And graduates who had an internship during college are twice as likely to have a good job waiting for them upon graduation, too.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/we-desperately-need-a-merger-between-education-and-work/

By Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed

More and more colleges are deploying virtual assistants or chatbots to communicate with students on all aspects of college life, creating a virtual “one-stop-shop” for student queries. Colleges initially were deploying this technology only in specific areas, such as financial aid, IT services or the library. Now institutions are looking to deploy chatbots with much broader capability. For the companies that make this computer software that conducts text or voice-based conversations, this changing usage on campus marks a significant shift.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/09/06/expansion-chatbots-higher-ed