higher education

Surviving Among the Giants [Carlson]

On 09/24/2021, in adjunct faculty, adult learning, business side of he, change, changing business models, colleges, consortiums, content development, aggregation, repositories, cost of getting a degree, dangers of the status quo, Daniel S. Christian, education technology, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, higher education, ideas, innovation, instructional design, IT in HE, law schools, leadership, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning preferences, liberal arts, lifelong learning, Michigan, MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses, new business models, online learning, organizational change, platforms, reinvent, staying relevant, strategy, surviving, United States, universities, by Daniel Christian

Surviving Among the Giants — from chronicle.com by Scott Carlson
As growth has become higher ed’s mantra, some colleges seek to stay small.

Excerpts:

The pressures on the higher-education business model are changing those attitudes. The Council of Independent Colleges’ fastest-growing initiative is the Online Course Sharing Consortium, which allows small colleges to offer certain courses to students at other institutions. Currently, there are 2,200 enrollments among almost 6,000 courses on the platform.

“The higher-ed business model is broken,” says Jeffrey R. Docking, who has been president of Adrian College for 16 years. “But where it’s most broken — and the first ones that are going to walk the plank — are the small private institutions. The numbers just don’t work.” Combining some backroom functions or arranging consortial purchases is just “dabbling around the edges” — and won’t get close to driving down the cost of tuition by 30 to 40 percent over the next several years, which is what Docking believes is necessary.

From DSC:
Docking’s last (highlighted) sentence above reminds me of what I predicted back in 2008 when I was working for Calvin College. The vision I relayed in 2008 continues to come to fruition — albeit I’ve since changed the name of the vision.

Back in 2008 I predicted that we would see the days of tuition being cut by 50% or more

From DSC (cont’d):
I was trying to bring down the cost of higher education — which we did with Calvin Online for 4-5 years…before the administration, faculty members, and even the leadership within our IT and HR Departments let Calvin Online die on the vine. This was a costly mistake for Calvin, as they later became a university — thus requiring that they get into more online-based learning in order to address the adult learner. Had they supported getting the online-based learning plane off the runway, they could have dovetailed nicely into becoming a university. But instead, they dissed the biggest thing to happen within education in the last 500 years (since the invention of the printing press).

Which brings me to one last excerpted quote here:

“For so many years,” Docking says, “all of these really smart people in Silicon Valley, at the University of Phoenix, at for-profits were saying, We’re going to do it better” — and they came around with their “solutions” in the form of MOOCs, or massive open online courses, and other scaling plans. Small colleges didn’t want to hear it, and, Docking says, maybe it was to their peril.

Report: Community Colleges Drive Workforce Education, Training [Weissman]

On 09/20/2021, in business, career development, change, community colleges, higher education, learning ecosystem, training / L&D, United States, vocational / trades, workplace, by Daniel Christian

Report: Community Colleges Drive Workforce Education, Training — from insidehighered.com by Sara Weissman

Excerpt:

A new survey found that community colleges, and especially their noncredit programs, play an outsize role in providing job-focused education.

Opportunity America, a Washington, D.C., think tank focused on economic mobility, explained the survey findings in an accompanying policy report released Tuesday.

The report says community colleges are “poised to come into their own as the nation’s premier provider of job-focused education and training.”

Could Coursera become as prestigious as Harvard? This expert thinks so. [Young]

On 09/20/2021, in 21st century, change, changing business models, colleges, community colleges, disruption, future of higher education, higher education, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning preferences, lifelong learning, MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses, new business models, online learning, by Daniel Christian

Could Coursera become as prestigious as Harvard? This expert thinks so. — from edsurge.com by Jeffrey R. Young

Excerpt:

Big changes are coming to higher education, and those changes will be bigger and more disruptive than many college leaders realize as online education grows in both size and prestige.

That’s the view of Arthur Levine, in a new book called “The Great Upheaval: Higher Education’s Past, Present, and Uncertain Future,” which he co-wrote with Scott Van Pelt, a lecturer and associate director of the Communication Program for the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

As more students turn to these degrees for their credentials, they may come to see these corporate platforms as the provider of learning rather than worry about which college is the one behind the scenes doing the teaching, Levine says.

From DSC:
My answer to the question “Is Accreditation a Barrier to Innovation?” would be “Yes, it is.” But admittedly, maybe that’s because I work for a law school these days…and in the legal education realm (as controlled by the American Bar Association), there is YET to be a fully 100% online-based Juris Doctor (JD) degree that I’m aware of. There are some schools that have applied for “variances,” but we’re talking 20+ years after institutions of higher education introduced online-based learning! Those programs who have applied for variances are under an incredible amount of scrutiny by the American Bar Association, that’s for sure. So the legal realm is NOT doing well with innovation.

But in regards to other areas of higher ed and its accrediting bodies…I’m sorry, but you can’t tell me that the run-up in the price of higher education over the last several decades had nothing to do with HE’s accrediting bodies and either their support of — or their lack of support of — those organizations who were trying to introduce something new.

But along these lines, I’d like to hear from folks like:

Burck Smith from Straighterline on his perspectives and his company’s experiences with the various accrediting bodies that Straighterline has had to deal with. His insights here would carry a significant impact/weight for me.
Or perhaps someone like James DeVaney from University of Michingan’s Center for Academic Innovation or Joshua Kim who writes about higher education and edtech/online learning
Or folks like Mary Grush or Rhea Kelly at CampusTechnology.com
Surveying organizations who could speak for a massive group of students/learners/employees
…and/or other folks who are either trying to innovate within the existing systems, have heard from both sides of the table here, and/or have tried and failed to innovate within the existing structures

We’ll see if institutions of traditional higher education can reinvent themselves in order to stay relevant and survive (especially colleges and universities…not so much the community colleges). The accreditation bodies will have a large part in whether this happens…or not.

Along these lines…let’s see what happens to the growth of alternatives to those types of institutions as well.

OPINION: Meet certificates and “microcredentials” — they could be the future of higher education — from hechingerreport.org by Arthur Levine and Scott Van Pelt
In years to come, they will become prevalent — and possibly preferred — to college degrees

Excerpt:

What is new is that we are calling them badges and microcredentials and using them primarily to certify specific skills, such as cross-cultural competency, welding and conversational Spanish.

So what are they? Microcredentials are certifications of mastery; badges verify the attainment of specific competencies.

No matter what we are calling them, they may be here to stay.

We now live in a time that is more open to rethinking college and university credentials. We are witnessing experimentation with competency-based education, through which students earn credits by demonstrating skills instead of spending time in courses. We are also seeing discussion of free or reduced tuition, along with subscription pricing that lets students take as many courses as they like for one low cost.

Also see:

Can an AI tutor teach your child to read? — from hechingerreport.org by Jackie Mader
Some AI reading programs are boosting early literacy skills

Excerpt:

Artificial intelligence has been used for years in education to monitor teaching quality, teach classes, grade assignments and tailor instruction to student ability levels. Now, a small but growing number of programs are attempting to use AI to target reading achievement in the early years — a longstanding struggle for America’s schools.

What Will Online Learning Look Like in 10 Years? Zoom Has Some Ideas [Noonoo]

On 09/16/2021, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, A/V -- audio/visual, change, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, collaboration, colleges, communities of practice, community colleges, corporate universities / corporate training, distance education, education technology, educational games / serious games, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, instructional design, interaction design, interactivity, internet, K-12 related, law schools, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, learning preferences, learning spaces, multimedia, online learning, online media, online tutoring, platforms, play, programming, remote teaching and learning, teachers, teaching & learning, teaching online, technologies for your home, tools, training / L&D, trends, TVs, United States, universities, vendors, videoconferencing, youth, by Daniel Christian

What Will Online Learning Look Like in 10 Years? Zoom Has Some Ideas — from edsurge.com by Stephen Noonoo

Excerpt:

This week at Zoom’s annual conference, Zoomtopia, a trio of education-focused Zoom employees (er, Zoomers?) speculated wildly about what hybrid Zoom learning might look like 10 years from now, given the warp speed advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning expected. Below are highlights of their grandiose, if sometimes vague, vision for the future of learning on Zoom.

Zoom very much sees itself as one day innovating on personalized learning in a substantial way, although beyond breakout rooms and instant translation services, they have few concrete ideas in mind. Mostly, the company says it will be working to add more choices to how teachers can present materials and how students can display mastery to teachers in realtime. They’re bullish on Kahoot-like gamification features and new ways of assessing students, too.

Also see:

An Eighth Grader Was Tired of Being Late to Zoom School. So He Made an App for That. — from edsurge.com by Nadia Tamez-Robledo

“I could not find anything else that exists like this to automatically join meetings at the right times,” says Seth, a high school freshman based in Walnut Creek, Calif. “Reminders are just really easy to ignore. I’ll get a notification maybe five minutes before my meeting, and it’ll just sit there and not do anything. [LinkJoin] interrupts whatever you’re doing and says, ‘Join this meeting. In fact it’s already opening, so better get on it.’”

Check out “The Learning Scientists Podcast”

On 09/15/2021, in accessibility / UDL, active learning, adjunct faculty, adult learning, assessment, blended learning, colleges, community colleges, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate universities / corporate training, digital learning, education technology, elearning, face-to-face, faculty/staff, flipping -- inverted learning, formal learning, higher education, homeschooling/homeschoolers, hybrid learning, ideas, instructional design, K-12 related, law schools, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, learning preferences, learning spaces, learning theories, library / librarians, memory, metacognition / metacognitive skills, online learning, pedagogy, podcasting, productivity / tips and tricks, professional development, student teaching/teacher education, student-related, teachers, teaching & learning, teaching online, universities, vision/possibilities, by Daniel Christian

Active Learning: 5 Tips for Implementing the Approach — from techlearning.com by Erik Ofgang
Active learning provides ways to get your students engaged without needing to revamp how you teach.

Excerpts:

However, neither listening to a lecture or reading a textbook is the most efficient way to learn or what active learning is truly about. “What exactly do we mean by active learning?” Deslauriers says. “We mean that first, you have to be engaged. Obviously, that’s number one. Number two, you have to be engaged productively. And number three, the productivity has to be toward a goal that is deemed worthwhile*.”

— Louis Deslauriers, Director of Science Teaching and Learning
in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University

From DSC:
I appreciated seeing/reading this solid article. Just a couple of reflections and highlights here…

* But worthwhile for whom? For the faculty members? The teachers? The trainers? Or for the learners, the students, or the employees? Where is agency here? Where does more choice and control come into play here? Where’s the motivation for me to learn something if someone keeps telling me what’s important to THEM? What’s relevant to THEM? Why should I care about this topic? How is it relevant? How will it help me get a job and/or make a positive difference in this world? Can I choose how deep I want to dive in?

Later…Deslauriers goes on to make a great point when urging a pause for students to practice some metacognition:

Does this make sense to me?
How is this relevant? <– DSC: There it is.
Does it connect with something I already know? And if so, how do I integrate with what I already know?
What sort of questions do I have right now?
Can I repeat what the instructor just did? Or is it going to require a lot of practice?

“There’s no way you can undergo these mental processes when someone keeps talking,” Deslauriers says. But if educators pause during their lectures and encourage this type of focus, they can help their students learn more efficiently.

Instructors can hand out electronic clickers, use web-based tools such as Google forms, or even go completely low-tech by giving color-coded cards to students that correspond to different answers.

Also see:

Why Traditional Lectures Won’t End Anytime Soon in Higher Ed Despite Better Approaches Being Available — from techlearning.com by Erik Ofgang
For years, research has shown that students learn more through active learning than from passive traditional lecture, but the old habit is hard to break.

FLEXspace with LSRS v.3 Integration: Your Key to Future Proofing Learning Spaces [Grush & Co.]

On 09/14/2021, in colleges, community colleges, education technology, future, higher education, instructional design, law schools, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, learning spaces, liberal arts, smart classrooms, universities, by Daniel Christian

FLEXspace with LSRS v.3 Integration: Your Key to Future Proofing Learning Spaces — from campustechnology.com by Mary Grush
A Q&A roundtable with FLEXspace and LSRS leaders and innovators

Excerpt:

A little more than a year ago, the EDUCAUSE Learning Space Rating System was integrated into FLEXspace. Now, users have a “one-stop shop” to access both the media-rich resources of FLEXspace and the quantitative evaluations of the LSRS.

Here, a round table discussion provides five perspectives on what the integration has meant to users.

Using a Systems Approach to Build a World-Class Online Program [Norton & Zoghi]

On 09/14/2021, in colleges, community colleges, content development, aggregation, repositories, digital learning, faculty/staff, higher education, ideas, instructional design, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, online learning, strategy, teaching & learning, teaching online, United States, universities, using teams, by Daniel Christian

Using a Systems Approach to Build a World-Class Online Program — from onlinelearningconsortium.org by Dr. Michele Norton and Dr. Ben Zoghi, Texas A&M University
In this blog, we unpack some of our insights and capitalize on them as we take a systems approach to continue building a world-class online program.

Excerpt:

Insight 1: Shifting from Assigning Tasks to Developing Collaborative Partnerships
We often create to-do lists for all the aspects of our online course: the videos, the articles, the quizzes, putting it on the LMS, etc. We forget that they all go together to create one learning experience for our students.

The person who edits the videos has ideas you may never have thought of, even if they are not experts in your content. Thoughts are everywhere; you have to value each person that has a hand in the process and be open to building a collaborative partnership instead of navigating a transactional checklist.

Amazon offers to pay college tuition for most US workers [Meyersohn]

On 09/12/2021, in Amazon, colleges, corporate / business world, cost of getting a degree, funding / grants, higher education, United States, universities, by Daniel Christian

Amazon offers to pay college tuition for most US workers — from cnn.com by Nathaniel Meyersohn

Excerpt:

New York (CNN Business)Amazon is offering to cover four-year college tuition for most of its approximately 750,000 hourly workers in the United States, the latest major employer to offer the perk to attract and retain hourly employees in a tight job market.

Starting in January, Amazon for the first time will pay for tuition, fees and books for warehouse, transportation and other hourly employees who want to pursue bachelor’s degrees. It will also begin covering high school diploma programs, GED’s and English as a Second Language (ESL) certifications for employees.

Amazon (AMZN) has not finalized a list of colleges workers will be eligible to attend using the benefit.

“In a truly connected campus, time, space and location should be absolutely irrelevant.” [Karbhari]

On 09/08/2021, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, business side of he, change, changing business models, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, CMS/LMS, collaboration, colleges, communications, community colleges, content development, aggregation, repositories, experimentation, face-to-face, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, generational differences, higher education, ideas, innovation, instructional design, IT in HE, learning, learning agents, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, learning preferences, learning spaces, platforms, smart classrooms, TVs, United States, universities, vendors, vision/possibilities, by Daniel Christian

In a truly connected campus, time, space and location should be absolutely irrelevant. “We should be able to build a digital twin of space and services and we need to think about things that are physical and digital – ‘phygital’,” he pointed out. https://t.co/cyud0rigZl

— Daniel Christian (he/him/his) (@dchristian5) September 8, 2021

Personalized Learning Using AI — from datafloq.com by Dmitry Baraishuk

Excerpt:

Process of Implementing Personalized Learning Using AI

The system tested every learner using short quizzes and games. Then AI adapted the learning path to each learner’s knowledge of a topic based on the test results.
If a pilot struggled with a certain topic, the AI LMS repeated it by presenting the information in a new way.
After completing a section, every pilot was retested and progressed to the next module.

…

Personalized learning with AI encompasses all the core aspects of online training:

personalized learning path;
relevant content based on knowledge level, skills, interests, and goals;
automated knowledge checks;
prediction of knowledge gaps;
proactive learners’ support;
tutoring, etc.

The Story is in the Structure: A Multi-Case Study of Instructional Design Teams — from the Online Learning Consortium by Jason Drysdale (other articles here)

Excerpt:

Given the results of this study, it is recommended that institutions that are restructuring or building new instructional design teams implement centralized structures with academic reporting lines for their teams. The benefits of both centralization and academic reporting lines are clear: better advocacy and empowerment, better alignment with the pedagogical work of both designers and faculty, and less role misperception for instructional designers. Structuring these teams toward empowerment and better definitions of their roles as pedagogy experts may help them sustain their leadership on the initiatives they led, to great effect, during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study also revealed the importance of three additional structural elements: appropriate instructional design staffing for the size and scale of the institution, leadership experience with instructional design, and positional parity with faculty.

Also see:

A Practitioner’s Guide to Instructional Design in Higher Education — from by Jill E. Stefaniak, Sheri Conklin, Beth Oyarzun, & Rebecca M. Reese

Top 300 Tools for Learning 2021 [Hart]

On 09/03/2021, in 24x7x365 access, A/V -- audio/visual, active learning, adjunct faculty, Adobe, adult learning, analytics, animation, Apple, art, blogs / blogging / vlogging, business, career development, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, CMS/LMS, collaboration, colleges, communications, communities of practice, community colleges, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, creativity, design, digital audio, digital learning, digital photography, digital storytelling, digital video, e-books, e-publishing related items (EPUB and more), e-readers, education technology, educational games / serious games, elearning, engagement / engaging students, experimentation, face-to-face, faculty/staff, flipping -- inverted learning, Google, higher education, homeschooling/homeschoolers, innovation, instructional design, interactivity, IT in HE, K-12 related, learning, learning ecosystem, online learning, online media, open courseware and systems, platforms, podcasting, presentations, productivity / tips and tricks, professional development, programming, reading, remote teaching and learning, RSS, social learning / networks, social media, STEAM-related, storytelling, streams of content, student teaching/teacher education, student-related, teachers, teaching & learning, teaching online, technologies for your home, tools, training / L&D, trends, UK, United States, universities, vendors, videoconferencing, web-based collaboration, webinars, workplace, writing, youth, by Daniel Christian

Top 300 Tools for Learning 2021 — from toptools4learning.com by Jane Hart

Excerpt:

2021 was the YEAR OF DISRUPTION! There were a substantial number of new tools nominated this year so the main list has now been extended to 300 tools to accommodate them, and each of the 3 sub-lists has been increased to 150 tools. Although the top of this year’s list is relatively stable, there is quite bit of movement of tools on the rest of the list, and the effect of the new tools has been to push other established tools down – if not off the list altogether. Further analysis of the list appears in the right-hand column of the table below.

This table shows the overall rankings as well as the rankings on the 3 sub-lists: Top 150 Tools for Personal Learning (PL150), the Top 150 Tools for Workplace Learning (WL150) and the Top 150 Tools for Education (ED150). NEW tools are shaded YELLOW, tools coming BACK on the list are shaded GREEN. The most popular context in which each tool is used is also highlighted in BLUE. Click on a tool name to find out more about it.

Learning Ecosystems

Surviving Among the Giants [Carlson]

Report: Community Colleges Drive Workforce Education, Training [Weissman]

Could Coursera become as prestigious as Harvard? This expert thinks so. [Young]

FLEXspace with LSRS v.3 Integration: Your Key to Future Proofing Learning Spaces [Grush & Co.]

Using a Systems Approach to Build a World-Class Online Program [Norton & Zoghi]

Amazon offers to pay college tuition for most US workers [Meyersohn]

“In a truly connected campus, time, space and location should be absolutely irrelevant.” [Karbhari]

The Story is in the Structure: A Multi-Case Study of Instructional Design Teams [Drysdale]

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