From DSC:
Another good example of a learning ecosystem! Here’s a shout out to all of you checking in here:
From Directed Learning to Self-Directed Learning: The role of L&D — from modernworkplacelearning.com
by
Upwork debuts The Upwork 100, ranking the top 100 in-demand skills for independent professionals — from upwork.com
Excerpt:
The Upwork 100 ranks the top 100 skills and sheds light on skills that are both quickly growing and also experiencing a high level of demand, providing an indication of current trends in the independent labor market and tech industry. It also serves as a barometer of the skills businesses are seeking and that independent professionals are providing by balancing real-time insights with consistent patterns based on real work that’s been completed.
DC: This type of feature will likely be a part of our future learning ecosystems; algorithms/spiders/etc searching for top needs &providing a menu of learning selections 2meet those needs (available 24×7). Next Gen Platform #LearningfromtheLivingClassroom https://t.co/yKnbKmyvgT
— Daniel Christian (@dchristian5) December 6, 2019
Ten predictions for the very near future of higher education — from forbes.com by Brandon Busteed
Excerpt:
Instead of going to college to get a job, students will increasingly be going to a job to get a college degree.
The 20 top tech skills that employers want and that can help you find a job, according to recruiting site Indeed — from businessinsider.com by Rosalie Chan and Bani Sapra
Excerpt:
The job search site Indeed released a report this month about the top tech skills of 2019 based on job descriptions that are being posted.
Andrew Flowers, an economist at Indeed, says that in today’s job market, there are two major trends that drive the top skills in tech. The first is the rise of data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. The second is the rise of cloud computing.
“Python has had explosive growth,” Flowers told Business Insider. “If I’m around the dinner table and a nephew asks what should I learn? Having done this report, I would say, learn Python.”
‘Academic capitalism’ is reshaping faculty life. What does that mean? — from edsurge.com by Rebecca Koenig
Excerpt:
Professors have long savored their position outside of commercial systems. But these days, there’s plenty of signs of capitalism within the academy—scholars seek support from funders in hopes that the findings will lead to commercial applications, departments market their courses to students as pathways to lucrative careers and universities replace tenure-track positions with adjunct jobs to cut costs.
Last week on the latest installment of EdSurge Live, our monthly online discussion forum, we dug into the topic, often referred to as “academic capitalism.”
Report: College leaders not confident they can beat new competition — from educationdive.com by Hallie Busta, with thanks to Ray Schroeder for posting this out on LinkedIn
Excerpt:
While they say their institutions are prepared to meet students’ changing needs, they are less confident in their ability to address new forms of competition or change how the public views higher ed.
…
The report comes as higher ed stares down potentially fewer traditional students, more competition online, less state funding, and concerns over public perceptions of higher ed. These pressures have made smaller public and private institutions vulnerable to consolidation and even closure.
2020 Top 10 Issues: Simplify, Sustain, Innovate: The Drive to Digital Transformation Begins — from Educause by Susan Grajek
Also see:
The 30th National Survey of eLearning and Information Technology in US Higher Education — from campuscomputing.net
Hiring and Retaining Campus IT Talent Are Challenges; Many Campus Leaders Are Not Well-Informed About nor Engaged with Digital Issues
Excerpt:
New data from the fall 2019 Campus Computing Survey highlight the challenges that IT leaders across all sectors of US higher education confront in hiring and retaining IT talent. More than three-fourths (77 percent) of the CIOs and senior campus officials participating 2019 survey cite “hiring and retaining IT talent” as a top institutional IT priority. Similarly, 78 percent point to uncompetitive campus salaries and benefits as a major problem in the quest to hire and retain IT talent. And reflecting the campus financial challenges that affect hiring and staff retention efforts, fully two-thirds (67 percent) agree/strongly agree that institutional IT funding “has not recovered from the budget cuts” experienced by colleges and universities across all sectors of higher education since the “Great Recession of 2008.”
Example products/awards:
Also see:
Five principles for thinking like a futurist — from er.educause.edu by Marina Gorbis
Thinking about the future allows us to imagine what kind of future we want to live in and how we can get there.
Excerpt:
In my twenty years at the Institute, I’ve developed five core principles for futures thinking:
As the microcredential market booms, don’t forget the learner — from edsurge.com by Kathleen deLaski
Excerpt:
While this system of microcredentials theoretically will make learning more affordable, portable and relevant, will a diverse range of learners know how and why to take advantage of it? And perhaps more importantly, will they trust it?
The simple answer: only if we intentionally focus on designing around that question.
Also see:
Excerpt:
Higher education is in the throes of a Learner Revolution that will fundamentally change the way students and institutions interact. We see the beginning of this movement now and will see all colleges and universities responding —- or not, at their peril — within a decade. Trends ranging from declining numbers of traditional students, to the rise of artificial intelligence, to the shrinking half-life of job skills have conspired toward this wake-up call moment for all but the most exclusive global higher education brands. At the same time, and partly because of the pressure, leaders are addressing the needs and goals of a changing student population. The calls for “student-centered” design can be heard throughout the ecosystem today, in a way that was just beginning when we started the Education Design Lab.
Colleges and universities must be much more deeply attuned to the twin pressures of learners’ decreasing appetite for debt and employers’ honing of their hiring requirements. That means, in part, an increasing focus on work-relevant skills and competencies—both technical skills and soft skills such as communication and systems thinking. Degrees as the most valuable workforce currency are beginning to give way to more nuanced competencies.
…
Yet, for the estimated three-quarters of students with at least one non-traditional characteristic, higher education has been in need of serious redesign for at least two decades.
Delivering learning across a lifetime: Higher education’s new paradigm — from evolllution.com with thanks to Mr. Amrit Ahluwalia for his work on this
Excerpt:
Higher education is no longer a single engagement in an individual’s life, or a stop-off point between high school and a career.
Today, and into the future, higher education’s role is ongoing as the demands of the future labor market will require individuals to continuously up-skill and re-skill to remain relevant. As such, while the traditional two- or four-year postsecondary model will continue to play an important role, colleges and universities must expand their repertoire to consciously deliver learning across individuals’ lifetimes.
Read on to learn how the 100 Year Life is changing the fundamental learning needs of individuals across the labor market, and to understand how postsecondary institutions can evolve to fulfil their missions within this new paradigm.
From DSC:
This important perspective/trend reminds me of the graphic below…
Also see:
The employee of the future, he added, “typically will have a new job every five years, probably for 60 to 80 years, and probably every one of those will require skills you did not learn in college.”
In case you missed it, WMU-Cooley’s President and Board of Directors took a look at our tuition rates and made the decision to reduce them by 21 percent starting Fall 2020! https://t.co/FjC6hk4vnE pic.twitter.com/NkCMAzoomE
— WMU-Cooley Law School (@WMUcooleylaw) October 16, 2019
From DSC:
Regular readers of this blog will know that for years, I’ve made it one of my goals to try and raise awareness of the need for institutions of higher education to lower their tuitions! For example, Yohan Na and I designed the graphic below way back in 2009.
Through those years, I cringed when I kept hearing various Boards say, “We only increased our tuition by ___ % — the lowest percentage increase in our state.” The direction was completely wrong! It needed to go down, not up. If you work in higher ed, I encourage you to find a way for that to happen at your own institution.
So I’m very pleased to report that the WMU-Thomas M. Cooley Law School — where I work — was able to reduce tuition by 21%!!!
Don’t get me wrong, some tough decisions were made to pave the way for that to occur. But this will be the case no matter which institution of higher education that you look at. An institution will have to make some tough choices to reduce their tuition. But it HAS to occur. We can’t keep this upward trajectory going.
If we don’t change this trajectory, we will continue to put enormous gorillas (of debt) on our graduates’ backs! Such debt will take our graduates decades to pay off.
We need to be aware of these invisible gorillas of debt. That is, our students move on…and we don’t see them. But their gorillas remain.
Addendum on 10/18/19:
Victoria Vuletich, the assistant dean at the Grand Rapids, Michigan campus of Western Michigan University Cooley Law School, was interviewed by the State Bar of Michigan’s Legal Talk Network to discuss what the law school experience is like for the current generation of students.
Information Technology (IT) skills and jobs are widely misunderstood to be housed primarily in the tech sector, and they are also thought to be inaccessible to all but a small minority of people who have focused intently on computer science. Building on our prior research efforts and mining a database of more than 150 million unique online U.S. job postings, Oracle Academy and Burning Glass Technologies produce new evidence that neither of these perceptions are borne out by data. To the contrary, 90% of IT skills and jobs are concentrated in 10 non-tech industries, leaving only 10% in the tech sector. The rapid growth of IT jobs is more than 50% greater in non-tech industries than in tech industries.
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