colleges

Instructure’s Acquisition of Concentric Sky Bringing Some Changes to Canvas LMS Users [Kelly]

On 04/19/2022, in Canvas - and other Instructure-related items, CMS/LMS, colleges, community colleges, competency-based learning/education, credentialing, experimentation, higher education, skills, United States, universities, vendors, by Daniel Christian

Instructure’s Acquisition of Concentric Sky Bringing Some Changes to Canvas LMS Users — from thejournal.com by Rhea Kelly
Badgr Digital Micro-Credentialing Platform to be Rebranded as Canvas Badges, Optional ‘Pro’ Upgrades Coming

Excerpts:

Instructure said today its acquisition of Concentric Sky, maker of the Badgr digital credentialing platform, is complete, and the basic Badgr functions will be integrated into Canvas and rebranded as Canvas Badges.
…
Canvas Credentials will enable institutions to “seamlessly award badges that verify and track academic achievements, including competency-based education,” the company explained in a news announcement. With the stackable, shareable credentials, students will be able to track their personalized learning journeys and carry proof of their competencies and skills development.

Zoom Announces New Education Features, Enhancing Hybrid [Hyflex] Learning Experience for Educators & Students [Soulunii]

On 04/19/2022, in collaboration, colleges, communications, community colleges, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, digital audio, digital learning, digital video, distance education, education technology, engagement / engaging students, experimentation, face-to-face, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), Hyflex learning, India, innovation, instructional design, interaction design, interactivity, K-12 related, law schools, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning spaces, liberal arts, tools, training / L&D, United States, universities, vendors, videoconferencing, web-based collaboration, by Daniel Christian

Zoom Announces New Education Features, Enhancing Hybrid [Hyflex] Learning Experience for Educators & Students — from edtechreview.in by Stephen Soulunii

Excerpt:

According to a news release, the features span Zoom’s Chat and Meeting offerings and are designed to support teachers who need to engage and manage students joining class remotely or submitting homework assignments.
…
Breakout Rooms Enhancements
Breakout rooms, a popular education feature, also received enhancements in this latest release. Program Audio allows meeting hosts to share content with audio to breakout rooms, adding the ability to share videos with audio. With the LTI Pro integration enhancement, educators can populate breakout rooms from the course roster. This can be used to assign breakout rooms in advance, and then automatically sort students into breakout rooms.

Anywhere Polls
Anywhere Polls will allow polling content to live in a central repository that can be accessed from any meeting on an account, instead of being associated with a particular meeting. This will make it easier for instructors to reuse polls and will also be beneficial for grading. This feature will be available this year.

Momentum builds behind a way to lower the cost of college: A degree in three years — from hechingerreport.org by Jon Marcus
Skepticism about the cost and duration of a higher education drives a need for speed

Excerpt:

A rare brand-new nonprofit university, NewU has a comparatively low $16,500-a-year price that’s locked in for a student’s entire education and majors with interchangeable requirements so students don’t fall behind if they switch.

But the feature that appears to be really winning over applicants is that NewU will offer bachelor’s degrees in three years instead of the customary four.

“We didn’t think the three-year bachelor’s degree was going to be the biggest draw,” said Stratsi Kulinski, president of the startup college. “But it has been, hands-down. Consumers are definitely ready for something different.”

Teaching: Fresh Approaches to Faculty Development — from chronicle.com by Beckie Supiano

Excerpt:

Baranovic can’t imagine returning to the old model: He’s sticking to panels in Zoom. Among the benefits, he says: “This arrangement breaks institutional silos, allows faculty to talk more about their experiences, shares effective practices from sources faculty trust (their peers), creates a stronger sense of community, makes it easy for panelists (they receive the questions ahead of time if they want to prepare, but because they’re speaking to experience, they don’t really have to prepare), and creates a form of support that works like therapy but doesn’t feel like therapy.”

Next, Baranovic hopes to turn the panels into a podcast format for professors unable to attend in real time.

From DSC:
As someone who had been involved with Teaching & Learning Centers for years, I can tell you that it’s very disheartening to put together a training session for faculty members and have very few — if any — people show up for it. It’s a waste of time and it leaves the T&L staff and/or IT staff members feeling discouraged and unvalued.

Over the years, I developed a preference for putting things into an asynchronous digital format for faculty members and adjunct faculty members to access per their own schedules. The institutions that I was working for got a greater ROI from those sessions and they were able to visit an internal “course” or website to reference those materials on-demand.

I also like the idea of podcasting here, but that takes a lot of time and effort — and isn’t always possible when you are one person trying to assist hundreds of faculty members (from a technical support and an LMS admin standpoint).

As an Instructional Designer, I also want to comment that it’s hard to help steer a car if you can’t even get into the car. Those institutions that are using team-based approaches will be far more successful in designing and developing more polished, effective, accessible learning experiences. Very few people can do it all.

Short and Sweet: The Educational Benefits of Microlectures and Active Learning [Zheng]

On 04/18/2022, in A/V -- audio/visual, active learning, adjunct faculty, assessment, colleges, community colleges, education technology, engagement / engaging students, higher education, instructional design, interaction design, interactivity, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, tools, universities, by Daniel Christian

Short and Sweet: The Educational Benefits of Microlectures and Active Learning — from er.educause.edu by Hua Zheng; with thanks to the Learning Now TV Newsletter – April 2022
The combination of short videos and the techniques of active learning can create rich, engaging educational experiences to maximize learning.

Excerpt:

The goal of interspersing a microlecture with active learning approaches is to improve student engagement and learning performance when participating in online, hybrid, or face-to-face instruction. Empirical studies have shown that active learning approaches, such as combining pause points with interactive quizzes, tasks requiring written responses, or note taking, can improve student performance.

Inflation and labor shortages set to squeeze college budgets, Moody’s says [Seltzer]

On 04/18/2022, in business side of he, colleges, community colleges, higher education, law schools, United States, universities, by Daniel Christian

Inflation and labor shortages set to squeeze college budgets, Moody’s says — from highereddive.com by Rick Seltzer

Dive Brief:

Colleges face their highest expense growth in over a decade as rising costs combine with wage inflation, labor shortages and a push to hire, according to two new reports issued this week by Moody’s Investors Service.
At the same time, volatility has returned to the investment market, and recent public funding increases are waning, Moody’s said. Colleges also face mounting enrollment uncertainty that raises risks for tuition-dependent institutions that lack a national brand and deep pockets.
Most of the U.S. higher education sector will remain financially stable in the near term thanks to strong endowment values and liquidity levels that grew recently, the reports said. But Moody’s analysts expect the converging pressures to squeeze many colleges’ budgets in fiscal 2023 and beyond.

Subject: Race on Campus: Pronouncing Students’ Names Correctly Is Important. Here’s How. — from chronicle.com by Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez

Excerpt:

When the pandemic moved classes online, Kohli said, platforms like Zoom helped the name-pronunciation process. On Zoom, users can change the way their name is displayed and include a phonetic spelling, making it simpler for everyone to get names right.

If the class is in person, Kohli says modeling behavior after the Zoom interface and asking students how their names are pronounced and how they’d like to be addressed.

For in-person classes, look at your roster ahead of time, Baker-Brown said. If you see a name you don’t recognize, break up the syllables and sound it out.

Then, practice. Repeat it until you get it right, and saying the name becomes second nature.

From DSC:
One other idea that I’m sure is out there, but it needs to be more commonly implemented:

Each learner should be able to record their name in the CMS/LMS for others to hear how their name is pronounced

#Canvas #Moodle #Blackboard #D2L #edtech #corporatetraining #L&D #vocationalprograms #K12 #HigherEducation

2021 Year End report ADA Digital Accessibility Lawsuits [usablenet.com]

On 04/14/2022, in accessibility / UDL, business, colleges, community colleges, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate / business world, higher education, instructional design, law schools, legislatures / government / legal, marketing/social marketing, United States, universities, voice recognition / voice enabled interfaces, web design and production, by Daniel Christian

2021 Year End report ADA Digital Accessibility Lawsuits — from info.usablenet.com (need to complete form to get access to the report)

Excerpts:

The UsableNet data and research team reviews hundreds of website and app accessibility lawsuits in federal courts under ADA and in California state courts for our bi-annual lawsuit reports.
…
Highlights from the report include:

The top-line numbers in 2021
The trend of repeat digital lawsuits
Where key cases have brought some relief and re-focus on connecting to brick and mortar
A break-down of the impact on E-commerce
Top plaintiffs and plaintiff firms
The increase in lawsuits involving accessibility widgets and overlays

Also relevant/see:

The 4 W’s of digital accessibility (and how to begin) — from blog.usablenet.com

Is the End of Hybrid Learning Leaving Disabled and High-Risk Students Behind? [Lu]

On 04/14/2022, in accessibility / UDL, colleges, community colleges, distance education, higher education, Hyflex learning, law schools, leadership, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning preferences, neurodivergent/special needs, strategy, student-related, universities, by Daniel Christian

Some Colleges Are Ending Hybrid Learning. Students Are Pushing Back. — from chronicle.com by Adrienne Lu
Daily Briefing: Is the End of Hybrid Learning Leaving Disabled and High-Risk Students Behind?

Excerpt:

Some students, though, want their colleges to make hybrid learning permanent. They argue that scaling up remote learning during the pandemic made higher education more accessible — not only for students with disabilities and the immunocompromised, but also commuter students, those balancing schoolwork with jobs, and students with caregiving responsibilities — and helped to protect vulnerable faculty members.

10 Books Of Visual Ideas (from 2006 to 2012) — from theelearningcoach.com by Connie Malamed
Explanatory, Information and Data Visualization Graphics

Excerpt:

When the importance of visualization became popularized, an explosion of books were published for those who were hungry to understand and appreciate this graphic format. It was an obvious win for practitioners who were trying to improve communication and understanding. These books also served as inspiration for people who were needed visual ideas on demand, like instructional designers.

So that we don’t lose the value of these older books, I’m republishing this article listing ten compelling books from the early days of visualization: 2006 to 2012. The one exception, is Tufte’s book from 1990. I recommend these books for visual examples and for inspiring ways to visualize concepts, statistics and data. They are also a part of our graphic design history.

The list is organized into two categories. Books that feature explanatory graphics and those that portray information graphics and visualizations.

All of the topics covered in The Future Trends Forum [Alexander]

On 04/11/2022, in accessibility / UDL, accreditation, adjunct faculty, Alternatives, blended learning, business side of he, change, changing business models, CMS/LMS, colleges, community colleges, cost of getting a degree, credentialing, curriculum, data related items, education technology, emerging technologies, experimentation, faculty, future of higher education, game-changing environment, higher education, hybrid learning, Hyflex learning, ideas, innovation, IT in HE, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning preferences, learning spaces, learning theories, new business models, new media literacies, online learning, open courseware and systems, research, science, STEAM-related, teaching & learning, tools, United States, universities, videoconferencing, Virtual Reality (VR) / worlds / learning, Web3, XR - extended reality, by Daniel Christian

The Future Trends Forum Topics page — from forum.futureofeducation.us by Bryan Alexander

Excerpt:

The Future Trends Forum has explored higher education in depth and breadth. Over six years of regular live conversations we have addressed many aspects of academia.

On this page you’ll find a list of our topics. Consider it a kind of table of contents, or, better yet, an index to the Forum’s themes.

Also see:

300 videos: the Future Trends Forum passes another milestone — from bryanalexander.org by Bryan Alexander

Since we launched in early February, 2016, the Forum has successfully published three hundred videos to YouTube. Week after week, month by month, over more than six years we’ve held great conversations, then shared them with the world, free of charge.

“Colleges Are Hiring. But Do People Want to Work There?” [McClure] + other changes in the K12 and higher education ecosystems

On 04/08/2022, in adjunct faculty, career development, colleges, community colleges, education reform, faculty, higher education, K-12 related, leadership, learning ecosystem, reinvent, society, staying relevant, strategy, surviving, teachers, United States, universities, by Daniel Christian

Colleges Are Hiring. But Do People Want to Work There? — from chronicle.com by Kevin R. McClure
Higher ed used to be insulated from the whims of the labor market. No more.

Excerpts:

This perhaps comes as a surprise to some college hiring officials. For a long time, colleges have operated under the assumption that they can easily replace people. And until recently, that was true. Colleges were viewed as places where employees can enact their values, where jobs were spared the ravages of recessions, and where deep relationships can be forged with students and colleagues. When someone left a job, institutions would post the opening and often receive more than enough applicants, especially for faculty positions. Why try hard to retain someone if you can always count on a deep pool of applicants?

That rosy vision of higher education was already starting to sour prior to the pandemic. And after the last two years, it isn’t safe to assume we can field the same numbers of applicants.

That’s largely because employee morale at colleges is tanking. Some in the industry have told me it’s the lowest they’ve ever seen. There are several likely reasons for it, including low pay and frustration that administrations aren’t taking health concerns of frontline workers during the pandemic seriously enough. But perhaps the biggest cause for the drop in morale is understaffing. Higher-education workers are exhausted from years of employment rolls that aren’t just lean — they’re malnourished.

Has the Campus Workplace Changed Forever? — from chronicle.com by Megan Zahneis
College leaders are trying different strategies to adapt to a new reality.

Excerpt:

Despite hopeful signs that the worst of the pandemic is behind us, there is a growing understanding that remote and hybrid work, at least in some form, is here to stay. With the benefit of hindsight and enough time to consider things more thoughtfully, institutional leaders and academic administrators are increasingly engaging with essential questions about remote work: What is the best way to manage teams at a distance? What does it take to recruit, retain, and engage faculty and staff members? What can higher education learn from other industries that have long embraced telecommuting?

Also relevant/see:

Our Nation’s Teachers Are Hustling to Survive — from edsurge.com by Emily Tate
Nearly 1 in 5 American public school teachers work a second job outside of the classroom. Why is this their reality?

Rothrock’s story is not exceptional—at least in her line of work, in this country. If she were any other highly educated American professional, that might be different. But Rothrock is a teacher. That a teacher must work a second, part-time job on weeknights and weekends, year-round, more than 20 years into her career, in spite of a master’s degree and a modest lifestyle, is so universally accepted among her peers and colleagues in education that it barely warrants notice.

It’s (Past) Time to Redesign the Teaching Profession — from by Katie Kimbrell

Excerpts:

According to a recent Forbes article, national research found that 54% of teachers surveyed in 2021 are considering leaving the teaching profession within the next two years. More urgently, Edweek reported that 48% of teachers have considered quitting in the last 30 days.

To be clear, these numbers are cataclysmic.

Our local numbers are probably not dissimilar from elsewhere in the country: According to a regional study by LeanLab Education, teacher burnout was among the top three challenges mentioned consistently by the near 250 educators surveyed. In a recent online survey by Kansas PAC, Freedom to Learn, 78% of teachers (of 780 responses) would not recommend their profession to students, while 80% of teachers would not recommend their profession to friends and family.

When it comes to the teaching profession, what we’ve designed simply isn’t working anymore (when and if it ever did is another debate).

What Does “Learner-Centered” Higher Ed Really Look Like? Insights from Leaders at SXSW EDU — from wgulabs.org by Nicole Barbaro

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

What does the future of higher ed look like? Leaders from across the education sector dove deep into this question at the annual SXSW EDU conference that was held in Austin, Texas [last] month. During his keynote session, US Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, echoed the need for transformation by stating, “We’re closer to a reset in education than ever before. Let’s not build back something that wasn’t working for everyone.”

So, how should higher ed build back?

As a “learner-centered” ecosystem. Leaders across education agree that we must put students at the center of our design. But what does it look like in practice to be learner-centered?

A learner-centered future breaks down institutional silos and works in networks to innovate and support students. And with the ubiquity of online learning in today’s higher ed ecosystem, there’s no reason not to collaborate. “There is no possible future in which online education is not an integral part of higher ed.” affirmed Executive Director of the University Innovation Alliance, Bridget Burns during a panel discussion at SXSW EDU.

The Argos Education Blog is Up [Feldstein]

On 04/07/2022, in blogs / blogging / vlogging, colleges, community colleges, digital learning, digital textbooks, education technology, experimentation, faculty, higher education, ideas, innovation, instructional design, IT in HE, publishing, textbooks, United States, universities, vendors, by Daniel Christian

The Argos Education Blog is Up — from eliterate.us by Michael Feldstein

Per Michael:

I’m trying to maintain some separation between my writing on e-Literate and content about Argos (the startup I co-founded with Curtiss Barnes). It won’t be perfect because I write about what I think about and right now I’m thinking about Argos-related stuff a lot. But I’m going to post about Argos-centric topics—the design, the thinking behind the company, etc.—on the new Argos blog. You can read my posts, posts by my colleagues (like the great one by Anita Delahay that’s up now), and news updates.

Read and subscribe here.

From Argos Education:

Retaking textbooks
Several disruptive teams at Carnegie Mellon University and Arizona State University have been designing, building, and distributing next-generation digital textbook replacements.

Their products are provably effective, sell for significantly less than digital products from textbook publishers, and can generate more money for the programs creating them than they cost to create.

Argos believes this model is the future. We exist to bring that future into being.

Reflections on “The University in Ruins” [Neem]

On 04/06/2022, in 21st century, Bias | Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DE&I), business side of he, career development, change, colleges, communities of practice, community colleges, cost of getting a degree, dangers of the status quo, Daniel S. Christian, disruption, faculty, future of higher education, game-changing environment, generational differences, global / globalization, hearts -- matters of the heart, higher education, history, innovation, leadership, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, pace of change, reinvent, social learning / networks, social media, society, staying relevant, strategy, streams of content, surviving, United States, universities, vision/possibilities, by Daniel Christian

The University in Ruins — from chronicle.com by Johann N. Neem
The “innovations” that promise to save higher ed are a farce.

From DSC:
First of all, I appreciated Johann Neem mentioning and/or discussing several books in one posting:

Ronald G. Musto’s The Attack on Higher Education (2021)
Arthur Levine’s and Scott J. Van Pelt’s The Great Upheaval (2021)
Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins (1996)
Ronald J. Daniels’ What Universities Owe Democracy (2021)

And as a disclosure here, I have not read those books.

Below are excerpts with some of my comments:

It’s already happening. Today, we walk among the ruins of an institution that once had a larger purpose. It’s not clear what role universities should play in society, and to what or to whom they are accountable, other than their corporate interests.

To some, that’s not a problem, at least according to Arthur Levine and Scott J. Van Pelt in The Great Upheaval (2021). They see higher education undergoing the same transformation that reshaped the music, film, and newspaper industries. Rather than place-based education overseen by tenured professors, they anticipate “the rise of anytime, anyplace, consumer-driven content and source agnostic, unbundled, personalized education paid for by subscription.”

Between Musto’s existential fears of disruption and Levine and Van Pelt’s embrace of it lies a third path. It takes the form of a wager — outlined by Ronald J. Daniels in What Universities Owe Democracy (2021) — that universities can and should continue to matter because of their importance in civic democratic life.

The article covers how the learning ecosystems within higher education have morphed from their religious roots to being an apparatus of the nation-state to then becoming a relatively independent bureaucratic system to other things and to where we are today.

Along the journey discussing these things, one of the things that caught my eye was this statement:

Hopkins, in this sense, lived up to its founding president Daniel Coit Gilman’s 19th-century aspiration that universities be places that acquire, conserve, refine, and distribute knowledge.

From DSC:
While I completely agree with that aspiration, I think more institutions of higher education could follow what John Hopkins University did with their efforts concerning the Covid-19 situation, as Neem mentioned. Generally speaking, institutions of higher education are not distributing knowledge to the levels that Gilman envisioned years ago.

In fact, these days those working within K12 are doing a whole lot better at sharing information with society than those who work within higher education are. For example, when I search Twitter for K12 educators who share content on Twitter, they are out there all over the place — and many with tens of thousands of followers. They share information with parents, families, fellow educators, students, school boards, and others. Yet this is not the case for those working in higher education. Faculty members normally:

aren’t out on Twitter
don’t blog
don’t have a podcast
don’t write for society at large. Instead, their expertise is often locked up — existing behind paywalls in academic journals. In other words, they talk to each other.

Later on…

As Daniels intuits, without a larger purpose to hold them fast, there is nothing to prevent universities from being buffeted by winds until they have lost direction. That is what Readings foresaw: Globalization liberates universities from national fetters, but at the risk of ruin.

From DSC:
While globalization may have something to do with universities becoming unanchored from their original purposes, globalization isn’t at the top of my mind when I reflect upon what’s been happening with colleges and universities these last few decades.

To see but one area of massive change, let’s take a brief look at college sports. There are now multimillion-dollar stadium projects, enormous coaches’ salaries, and numerous situations where tax-paying citizens can’t even watch sporting events without tons of advertisements being thrown into their faces every few seconds. Personally speaking, on numerous occasions, I couldn’t even access the games at all — as I wasn’t paying for the subscriptions to the appropriate providers.

Also, as another example of becoming anchored — and going back to the 1980’s — I attended Northwestern University for my undergraduate degree in Economics. While I have several wonderful lifelong friends from that experience for whom I’m deeply grateful, even back then NU had already moved far away from its motto which is based on Philippians 4:8.

Instead, please allow me to tell you what that learning community taught me and strongly encouraged me to think about:

You are only successful if you have the corner office, drive the higher numbered BMW’s, and have many people reporting to you.
If you make a lot of money.
You are supposed to compete against others vs. being in relationships with others. As but one example here, our test scores were published — by our Social Security numbers — outside our professors’ offices for all to see how we measured up to our classmates.

In fact, I’m not even sure that I would use the word “community” at all when I reflect upon my years at Northwestern. Instead, a WIIFM approach was encouraged (i.e., What’s In It For Me? where you are supposed to look out for #1). It took me years to unlearn some of those “lessons” and “learnings.”

But I realize that that’s not the case with all learning communities.

As Neem alluded to, I love the idea that an institution of higher education can — and often does — impact students’ hearts as well as minds. That was the focus at Calvin College (now Calvin University). Our oldest daughter went there and she was profoundly and positively influenced by her experiences there. In that context, students were encouraged to be in relationships with one another. There was plenty of hugging, praying for one another, etc. going on in that setting. There truly was community there.

***

Neem doesn’t think much of Levine’s and Van Pelt’s perspectives. He claims there’s nothing new in their book. He seems to discard the arguments being made about the cost of higher ed and, like many others, clings to the intellectual roots/purpose of higher ed.

While I’m not against intellect or pursuing knowledge — in fact, I’m all for it — I just have a problem when the price of doing so continues to become out of reach for soooooo many people.

Personally, I’ve tried to lower the cost of obtaining a degree within higher education for many years…but I was/we were only successful in doing so for a few years (and that was during a pilot of online-based learning). Yohan Na and I created the graphic below in 2008 for example — as I was trying to raise awareness of the dangers of the status quo:
.

.

So from a cost/access perspective, Levine’s and Van Pelt’s perspectives here sound pretty good to me. It appears to be much more affordable and realistic for the masses. Otherwise, the image/reality of the ivory tower is maintained…allowing “intellectuals” to continue to live and operate within their own sphere/hive/tribe.

Also, we need an AI-backed system of presenting which skills are needed and then how to get them. The ways things are set up today, institutions of traditional higher education have not been able to deal with the current pace of change out there.

As a final comment here…
The changing directions/purposes of institutions of higher education present a good example of why I entitled this blog Learning Ecosystems — as the systems that we use to learn and grow in are constantly morphing:

People come and go
Tools and vendors come and go
Purposes, focuses, and/or mission statements change
Our sources of information (i.e., our streams of content) come and go
Etc.

Learning Ecosystems

Momentum builds behind a way to lower the cost of college: A degree in three years [Marcus]

Reflections on “Teaching: Fresh Approaches to Faculty Development” [Supiano]

Short and Sweet: The Educational Benefits of Microlectures and Active Learning [Zheng]

Inflation and labor shortages set to squeeze college budgets, Moody’s says [Seltzer]

2021 Year End report ADA Digital Accessibility Lawsuits [usablenet.com]

The Argos Education Blog is Up [Feldstein]

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