Moody’s: Coronavirus is accelerating shift to online education — from educationdive.com by Natalie Schwartz

Dive Brief:

  • The pandemic will hasten a transformation of higher education business models, according to a new Moody’s Investors Service report.
  • The crisis will accelerate many colleges’ plans to grow their online footprints, though not all schools have the resources to invest in digital infrastructure, the report notes. They will also likely expand non-degree and certificate programs.
  • Analysts predict that once the pandemic subsides, some colleges will struggle if they haven’t established a strong online presence.

“Some universities previously resistant to change will have to take more expansive steps to adapt to this transformation,” Pranav Sharma, assistant vice president at Moody’s, said in a statement. “Not all universities, however, have the resources or culture to move quickly and the coronavirus will expedite existential threats for some.”

Also see:

Active Learning while Physically Distant — from blogs.acu.edu

Excerpt:

  • Use a Google Form as an entrance or exit ticket. Upon entering class, a quick google form can engage students with a couple of quick questions. A google form as an exit ticket can provide good insight into student learning that day.
 

Information re: virtual labs from the Online Learning Consortium


 7 Things You Should Know About Virtual Labs — from library.educause.edu

Excerpt:

Virtual labs are interactive, digital simulations of activities that typically take place in physical laboratory settings. Virtual labs simulate the tools, equipment, tests, and procedures used in chemistry, biochemistry, physics, biology, and other disciplines. Virtual labs allow students to participate in lab-based learning exercises without the costs and limitations of a physical lab. Virtual labs can be an important element in institutional efforts to expand access to lab-based courses to more and different groups of students, as well as efforts to establish contingency plans for natural disasters or other interruptions of campus activities.

 


Addendum on 8/27/20:

 

From edsurge.com today:

THOROUGHLY MODERN MEDIA: This spring, a college theater course about women’s voting rights aimed to produce a new play about the suffrage struggle. When the pandemic scuttled those plans, professors devised a new way to share suffragist stories by creating an interactive, online performance set in a virtual Victorian mansion. And their students were not the only ones exploring women’s voting rights as the country marks the 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment.

…which linked to:

The Pandemic Made Their Women’s Suffrage Play Impossible. But the Show Went on— Virtually — from edsurge.com by Rebecca Koenig

Excerpts:

Then the pandemic hit. Students left Radford and Virginia Tech. Live theater was canceled.

But the class wasn’t.

“Neither of us ever said, ‘Forget it,’” Hood says. “Our students, they all wanted to know, ‘What are we doing?’ We came to them with this insane idea.”

They would create an interactive, online production staged in a virtual Victorian mansion.

“Stage performance is different than film or audio. If you just have audio, you only have your voice. Clarity, landing sentences, really paying attention to the structure of a sentence, becomes important,” Nelson says. “Students got a broader sense of the skills and approaches to different mediums—a crash course.”

 

From DSC:
Talk about opportunities for interdisciplinary learning/projects!!!  Playwrights, directors, actors/actresses, set designers, graphic designers, fine artists, web designers and developers, interactivity/interface designers, audio designers, video editors, 3D animators, and more!!!

 

The performance website, “Women and the Vote,” premiered on May 18, 2020

 

Using the TV as a key tool in our learning ecosystems

From DSC:

  • If one doesn’t have access to the Internet, a computer, or any such mobile technology as seen in the image above…could TV become the medium through which one could be educated during this next year of the Coronavirus situation? That is, until we can develop better and more equitable policies, plans, funding, systems, infrastructures, and connectivity for all students!
  • After that, could we see more televisions morph into smart/connected TVs?
  • Could PBS, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and other major networks collaborate with the U.S. Department of Education to help us educate all students? 
  • Could the largest internet company of 2030 be an online school as Thomas Frey predicts?

A few years ago, I had hoped that Apple was going to go all-in with their tvOS platform.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – SEPTEMBER 9: Apple CEO Tim Cook introduces the New Apple TV during a Special Event; 9/9/15.

 

Though it’s still early in the game, that really hasn’t happened to the extent that I had hoped. That said, more recently, I was encouraged to see this article from back in July:

LOUISIANA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND LOUISIANA PUBLIC BROADCASTING TO TELEVISE HIGH-QUALITY MATH INSTRUCTION THIS SUMMER

 



 

Let’s ask the employees of PBS, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and other networks if they would be willing to work with the U.S. Department of Education to help educate ALL students! Though educational TV is not new, I’m talking about taking things to a *whole* new level.

With that in mind, I created the following graphic:

Let's use television to minimize the learning gaps that will otherwise be experienced by many students this next year!

(One might ask why I used an old television in the above graphic. I was trying to get at the idea that one might not have a lot of resources to work with.)

 

With an eye towards the future…what questions should we be asking about learning experience design (#LXD)? [Christian]

From DSC:
Some of the following questions came to my mind recently:

  • In this age of the Coronavirus, how can we think differently about learning experience design (#LXD)?
  • How can *teams* of people come together to reimagine what learning could look like in the future? Who might be some new players at the table? More students? Artists? Actors? More animators? More technicians and people from A/V? Specialists in XR? Corporate trainers coming together with Instructional Designers from higher ed and from K-12? #learningecosystems #future
  • How can we better tighten up the alignment between K-12, higher ed / vocational programs, and the corporate world?
  • How can we make self-directed learning more prevalent (which would release an enormous amount of energy & creativity)? #heutagogy

Maybe those aren’t even the right questions…

If not, what do you think? What questions should we be asking about learning these days?

#LXD #learningecosystems #future #lifelonglearning #onlinelearning #highereducation #K12 #corporatelearning #heutagogy

 

The main thing we need to remember is that this space no longer serves as an accessory to face-to-face teaching. It is now our main contact point with learners, so it needs to play different roles: communication channel, learning path, interaction platform and community space. Teachers therefore need a certain degree of freedom to design this space in the best way that suits their teaching style and philosophy as well as their course content and learning objectives.

What became obvious in the past months is that when it comes to teaching and learning
 fully online, the learning experience design aspect, including look, feel and logic of the platform from the users’ perspective- be it teachers or students-, are at least as important as the content.

(source)

 

Facial Recognition Start-Up Mounts a First Amendment Defense — from nytimes.com by Kashmir Hill
Clearview AI has hired Floyd Abrams, a top lawyer, to help fight claims that selling its data to law enforcement agencies violates privacy laws.

Excerpts:

Litigation against the start-up “has the potential of leading to a major decision about the interrelationship between privacy claims and First Amendment defenses in the 21st century,” Mr. Abrams said in a phone interview. He said the underlying legal questions could one day reach the Supreme Court.

Clearview AI has scraped billions of photos from the internet, including from platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram, and sells access to the resulting database to law enforcement agencies. When an officer uploads a photo or a video image containing a person’s face, the app tries to match the likeness and provides other photos of that person that can be found online.

From DSC:
Many, if not all of us, are now required to be lifelong learners in order to stay marketable. I was struck by that when I read the following excerpt from the above article:

“I’m learning the language,” Mr. Abrams said. “I’ve never used the words ‘facial biometric algorithms’ until this phone call.”

 

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.

 
 

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.”

 

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.

 

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:

  • law schools, dental schools, medical schools, and seminaries
  • vocational programs
  • traditional undergraduate and graduate programs
  • K-12 systems
  • Homeschooling-based situations
  • Places of worship
  • Communities of practice — as well as lifelong learners

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.

 

Pandemic turns smartphones from luxury to must-have as India’s schools go online — from news.trust.org by Roli Srivastava
Smartphones help classes continue as schools remain closed, but the poorest families are struggling to keep up

Excerpts:

India is the world’s second-biggest smartphone market after China, and nearly half of the country’s almost one billion mobile users already have a phone with internet access.

With no clear sign of schools reopening soon, internet access has become a must for children to follow classes, prompting more low-income families to scrape together the money to buy a cheap or second-hand smartphone for the first time.

Customised lessons for first to 12th grade students will be aired on television and radio in a “one class-one channel” initiative planned by the federal human resource department.

 

 

The Spanish Flu to Covid-19: How this Pandemic is Pushing Courts to Modernize — from legaltalknetwork.com by Bridget Mary McCormack and Daniel Linna

Episode notes:

Even before the global pandemic, Michigan courts were moving more quickly than many others to modernize. Michigan Chief Justice Bridget Mary McCormack talks with host Dan Linna about accelerating the state’s plans to offer online hearings, online dispute resolution, and to continue efforts to establish e-filing statewide.

Not everything is going smoothly, but McCormack notes some judges are almost current on their dockets. And importantly, she believes that many temporary quick fixes will lead to permanent changes that improve access to justice statewide and increase public trust in the judicial branch.

 

How might tools like Microsoft’s new Whiteboard be used in online-based learning? In “learning pods?” [Christian]

The new Microsoft Whiteboard -- how might this be used for online-based learning? Learning pods?

The new Microsoft Whiteboard -- how might this be used for online-based learning? Learning pods?

Questions/reflections from DSC:

  • How might this be used for online-based learning?
  • For “learning pods” and homeschoolers out there? 
  • Will assistants such as the Webex Assistant for Meetings (WAM) be integrated into such tools (i.e., would such tools provide translation, transcripts, closed captioning, and more)?
  • How might this type of tool be used in telehealth? Telelegal? In online-based courtrooms? In presentations?

#onlinelearning #collaboration #education #secondscreen #edtedh #presentations #AI #telehealth #telelegal #emergingtechnologies

 
© 2024 | Daniel Christian