At home, workers seek alternative credentials — from insidehighered.com by Lindsay McKenzie
Interest in alternative online credentials spiked after people started working remotely this spring. Will the surge continue long-term?
Excerpt:
Several leading massive open online course providers, coding bootcamps and business schools offering non-degree credentials reported manyfold increases in web traffic, inquiries and enrollments.
Also see:
The report also measures how far we have to go as a profession when it comes to race. For example, just 5% of all lawyers in the U.S. are African American, even though African Americans are 13% of the U.S. population. And Native Americans are severely underrepresented on the federal bench. Only two federal judges are Native American among 1,386 nationwide (that’s one-tenth of 1%), despite the fact that 1.3% of the U.S. population is Native American. There is a lot to digest in this fascinating compilation of statistics and trends.
Now in its second year, the ABA Profile of the Legal Profession is becoming a standard reference for anyone who wants to understand the legal profession — past, present and future.
— Judy Perry Martinez
Also see:
DC: For those in academia who still claim higher ed isn’t a business, please explain this one to me.https://t.co/4VufkA5dRL
— Daniel Christian (@dchristian5) August 14, 2020
Online, personalized learning considered the future for education in wake of pandemic — from purdue.edu
Excerpt:
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — COVID-19 has changed the outlook for education, highlighting the potential for online learning and the need for more personalized learning options for students, according to a Purdue University College of Education professor.
William Watson, associate professor of learning design and technology, said student education levels are more likely to be spread all along the spectrum this school year based on what educational support they received at home.
Using personalized approaches to online instruction allows learning to be based more on each student’s individual strengths, weaknesses, goals and motivations, he said.
“A personalized approach to learning supports student autonomy and the direction of each student’s learning process,” Watson said. “It values a student’s self-direction, motivation and engagement beyond simple knowledge acquisition.”
Big Ten Universities Partner to Offer Free Online Courses — from campustechnology.com by Rhea Kelly
Excerpt:
This fall, students at any of the seven participating Big Ten Academic Alliance universities will have access to free online courses at other Big Ten schools.
James Lang’s Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It — from tophat.com by Harleen Dhami
Navigating distraction in the virtual classroom starts with curating novel, community-oriented learning activities
Excerpt:
You suggest that how instructors teach is often at odds with how students learn. What’s the disconnect here?
The disconnect is taking for granted that students should pay attention. What we need to think about is how we structure the class in a way that sustains someone’s attention through an extended period of time. We need to think like playwrights. What do they do to maintain attention? They have acts and scenes, there’s an intermission, the action rises and falls. At the beginning of a play, something happens that is designed to intrigue you and get you engaged in the story. I argue in the book that we have to think both like a playwright and like a poet. You have to think like a playwright in terms of the structure. You have to think like a poet in terms of “what’s going to reawaken the attention of my students,” or awaken the attention of my students to this particular content for the day.
Breaking: In Historic Vote, Utah Supreme Court Approves Sweeping Changes in Legal Services Regulation — from legaltechmonitor.com by Bob Ambrogi
Excerpt:
In a historic vote that could set a blueprint for the rest of the country, the Utah Supreme Court has approved the most sweeping changes in a generation to the regulation of law practice and the delivery of legal services.
…
The vote creates a two-year pilot of a regulatory sandbox — a regulatory body under the oversight of the Supreme Court, to be called the Office of Legal Services Innovation, whose charge would be to license and oversee new forms of legal providers and services.
![Reflections on an UnCertain Decade [Susskind & Cohen]](http://danielschristian.com/learning-ecosystems/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/TheUncertainDecade-SusskindCohen-Aug2020.jpg)
Excerpt:
Richard Susskind and Mark A. Cohen, two of the global legal industry’s most respected names, conducted a series of four live online events titled “The Uncertain Decade.” Each event focused on key industry issues that included: digital transformation and its impact on the legal function, legal education and training, and alternative legal service providers.
DC: In case anyone out there is considering doing some interior design related work/enhancements to your apt or home.
Interesting read indeed! With thanks to Jesse Davidson for the resource.https://t.co/DvBZcyxWxb
— Daniel Christian (@dchristian5) August 13, 2020
Excerpt:
With moving day near, you’re inundated with decorative visions of your new digs. You’re so inspired, in fact, that your brain has a few too many tabs open. Ready to close some out?
Technology at your fingertips is ready to assist. Augmented reality allows you to overlay computer-generated graphics (such as that sofa you’ve been eyeing) onto real-life viewpoints.
These mobile apps will help you virtually outline your vision before you hit the ground aimlessly running-and most of them are free. Download away, then dare to dream.
Addendum on 8/14/20:
Solid points made by Martin Giles, Senior Editor, CIO Network for Forbes…below is the majority of his CIO newsletter for this week
Now that more and more companies are extending their work-from-home timelines, the issue of how to monitor and manage the productivity of remote workers is becoming even more pressing. Some businesses are rolling out software applications to track things such as workers’ keystrokes or watch what they are doing when they are on the internet. IT teams are central to these efforts, even if they aren’t the ones who initiate them.
Providing the technology is deployed appropriately, the use of such tools may not be illegal. But does it make sense to deploy them? Forbes CIO Network contributor Irina Raicu makes the case against doing so in a thought-provoking post.
Raicu argues that deploying intrusive tech such as keyloggers sends a signal to workers that employers don’t respect their autonomy and dignity. It also penalizes effective workers, who are being made to pay a price in terms of lost privacy so that managers can identify poor performers. Deploying intrusive tracking technologies in homes that are now doubling as workplaces also contributes to the normalization of their use more broadly across society.
Under pressure from business heads and HR departments, tech leaders may be tempted to fold rather than fight the tools’ deployment. But there’s another reason tracking tech can backfire that should resonate with anyone worried about cyber threats—which means just about every CEO and board director in America and beyond.
The sensitive, personalized data monitoring tech gathers is a tempting target for hackers and a breach could trigger a legal nightmare. Given that the bad guys have stepped up their attacks to take advantage of the chaos the pandemic has sown, this threat is even more concerning.
Excerpt from Irina’s article:
However, indiscriminate deployment of tracking tools would create a surveillance work culture that is likely to cause significant harm, while at the same time failing to deliver the results that business leaders expect.
From DSC:
I see this same type of stuff going on within K-12, higher ed, and even in law schools. Often, we establish cultures whereby students are treated with great suspicion. It’s us vs. them. The verbiage is around cheating and plagiarism and the use of tools like Turnitin, Respondus, Examity, and many others. Why isn’t the focus on being on the same team? i.e.,
Why is unity / being on the same team so difficult to achieve in human relationships? I don’t have the answers. It’s just very disappointing.
It’s clear that we have some major disconnects in our motivations and views of other people. We should be working as members of the same team.
With the need for speed within most organizations today, TRUST is key. Reminds me of this book by Stephen M.R. Covey:
Addendum on 8/14/20:
First They Came for Adjuncts, Now They’ll Come for Tenure: And who will be left to stop them? — from chronicle.com by Ed Burmila
Excerpts:
If, by their own accord or by caving to outside political pressures, university administrators take the current crisis as an opportunity to eliminate tenure once and for all, who’s going to stop them?
Put another way: Are there enough academic workers with a stake in the tenure system left to defend it?
…
As go the adjuncts and the nonacademic staff today, so go the tenured faculty tomorrow.
It is in the interest of tenured faculty to fight for their non-tenure-track colleagues. But the key question, as The Chronicle’s Emma Pettit asks, is: Will it be too little too late? When contingent labor protested for years about poor working conditions, it did not find many allies willing to fight alongside it. Now the roles are reversed: Tenured faculty will soon need the rest of the profession to help fight attempts to erode tenure.
Addendum on 8/20/20:
Higher ed group offers ideas for supporting contingent faculty — from educationdive.com by Hallie Busta
Dive Brief:
From DSC:
After reading Jeff Young’s article re: learning engineering and seeing the Nudge application from Duke University...it once again occurred to me that we really need a standard for loading questions into a memory-refreshing application. Just like HyperText Markup Language (HTML) made the World Wide Web so successful and impactful, we need an easy-to-use standard for dumping questions into a personalized database of questions for each cloud-based learner profile.
After taking a module, you would be asked if you wanted to be reminded of / quizzed upon the key ideas presented therein. You would then receive periodic quizzes on those items. You can choose to opt-out of that learning module’s content at any time.
Such an application would help reduce the impact of the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve. This type of standard/feature would really help students and people in:
A person could invoke a quiz at any point, but would be quizzed at least once a day. If you missed a day, those questions would not be taken out of the pool of questions to ask you. If you got a question right, the time interval would be lengthened before you were asked that question again. But questions that you struggled with would be asked more frequently. This would also help interleave questions and aid in recall. Such spaced repetition would cause struggle from time to time, aiding in deeper learning.
How ‘Learning Engineering’ Hopes to Speed Up Education — from edsurge.com by Jeffrey R. Young
Excerpts:
Simon spent the latter part of his career as a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, making the case for bringing in a new kind of engineer to help improve teaching. He knew it would mean a major change in how instruction of complex subjects happens, moving it from a “solo sport” of a sage on the stage to a community-based one where teams build and design learning materials and experiences — and continually refine them.
Ten years ago, only about 1,300 instructional designers worked at U.S. colleges, but that has grown to more than 10,000 today.
Even so, we’re still a long way from having a mature practice of learning engineering in place. But proponents of the approach say they are beginning to build the infrastructure necessary for their moonshot of turbo-charging the speed and the quality of learning. Some learning engineers believe they can help students reach mastery of complex subject matter as much as 10 times faster than with traditional approaches.
My name is Daniel Christian and this blog seeks to cover the teaching and learning environments within the K-12 (including homeschooling, learning pods/micro-schools), collegiate, and corporate training spaces -- whether those environments be face-to-face, blended, or online.
Just as the organizations that we work for have their own learning ecosystems, each of us has our own learning ecosystem. We need to be very intentional about enhancing those learning ecosystems -- as we all need to be lifelong learners in order to remain marketable and employed. It's no longer about running sprints (i.e., getting a 4-year degree or going to a vocational school and then calling it quits), but rather, we are all running marathons now (i.e., we are into lifelong learning these days).
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