2021 CHLOE 6 Report
CHLOE 6: Online Learning Leaders Adapt for a Post-Pandemic World — from qualitymatters.org

CHLOE 6: Online Learning Leaders Adapt for a Post-Pandemic World

Excerpt:

The 2021 report, authored by Quality Matters and Eduventures® Research, tracks how institutions are reassessing their priorities related to online learning and shifting focus to ed tech enhancements, faculty professional development and online quality. The report was compiled from responses from 422 chief online officers (COO) representing 2- and 4-year colleges and universities.

More than half of the survey respondents (57%) across all sectors of higher education, including predominantly in-person institutions, indicated that, going forward, the pandemic experience is leading to a positive reassessment of institutional priorities related to online learning. Key survey findings from the 69-page report include:

  • An elevated commitment to online learning quality assurance goals, including having courses meet quality standards, supported by a commitment to faculty professional development.
  • An average 10-15% increase across institutions in online professional development and student orientation to online study to serve formerly in-person faculty and students.
  • The largest yearly increases ever in ed tech investment in 2020 and 2021 across all sectors of higher ed.
 

It’s like Netflix for education: UND considers subscription tuition model — from grandforksherald.com by Sydney Mook; with thanks to Ray Schroeder for this resource out on LinkedIn
Think of it as Netflix or Hulu – popular television subscription services – but for a UND education. Students could pay a flat rate and take as many (or as few) online courses as preferred, so long as they aren’t considered a full-time, degree-seeking student.

Excerpts:

UND wants to add a flat-rate subscription option to its tuition model.

Think of it as Netflix or Hulu – popular television subscription services – but for a UND education. Students could pay a flat rate and take as many (or as few) online courses as preferred, so long as they aren’t considered a full-time, degree-seeking student.

“You enroll, you have a subscription and during that subscription, you can binge watch,” said Jeff Holm, vice provost for online education and strategic planning at UND.

UND says it wants to “provide competency-based, online education that provides ‘micro-pathways’ or smaller targeted units of learning to individuals as a way to enhance their skill set and knowledge for advancing in the labor market or reskilling for a new employment opportunity.”

 

6 Emerging Technology Trends in Higher Education — from edtechmagazine.com by Amelia Pang
From artificial intelligence to microcredentials, here’s a look at the future.

Excerpts:

1. The Growth of Artificial Intelligence in Higher Ed
2. Actualizing the Potential of Data Analytics to Improve Education
3. A Permanent Place for Blended and Hybrid Course Models
4. The Expansion of Open Educational Resources
5. Microcredentials Provide Business Opportunities for Higher Ed
6. More Investments in Quality Online Learning

 

Planning for a blended future: A research-driven guide for educators — from everylearnereverywhere.org by Every Learner Everywhere in partnership with Online Learning Consortium (OLC) & National Research Center for Distance Education and Technological Advancements (DETA)

Excerpt:

The purpose of this guide
This resource is a collaboration among the National Research Center for Distance Education and Technological Advances (DETA), the Online Learning Consortium (OLC), and the Every Learner Everywhere Network. It is designed to serve as a resource for educators — faculty, instructors, instructional staff, instructional improvement staff, instructional designers, learning experience designers and developers, technological support staff, and other stakeholders — to guide strategic planning for blended learning courses and programs.

Therefore, blended learning is instruction that blends technological, temporal, spatial, and pedagogical dimensions to create actualized learning. Students feel they are successful when they actually learn and that does not always equate to grade and course completion.

Blended learning is instruction that blends technological, temporal, spatial, and pedagogical dimensions to create actualized learning.

KEY IDEAS

  1. Designing courses to meaningfully integrate the different environments and temporal cadence (online and onsite, live and overtime) while incorporating an active learning approach can improve student outcomes in blended and hybrid courses.
  2. Faculty must become guides for students and their engagement by intentionally and strategically using a variety of modalities to scaffold learning.
  3. By designing and scaffolding blended courses effectively, faculty can avoid the common pitfall of course and-a-half-syndrome, which occurs when the online portion of a course is tacked on, creating busywork for students.
 

Growth Mindset Leadership & The Pygmalion Effect — from by Trevor Ragan and the Learning Lab; featuring Robert Rosenthal, Christine Rubie-Davies, and Michael Merznich. With thanks to Chris Church, Tenured Professor and prior Associate Dean of Academic Programs at the WMU-Cooley Law School
Our mindsets impact others more than we realize. As leaders, we can use this to improve the learning environment.

Excerpt:

We know that our individual mindsets (growth mindset & fixed mindset) can impact our capacity to grow. But how do our mindsets impact others?

Renowned researcher, Robert Rosenthal outlines his work and shows how our expectations can have a huge impact on the performance and development of the people around us.

Christine Rubie-Davies from the University of Auckland shows us how teacher expectations play a role in student development.

From DSC:
I highly recommend that all professors, teachers and student teachers, trainers — and even those supervising others — check this piece out! Nice work Trevor & Company! Below are some snapshots from this presentation.

The agenda for Trevor Ragan's presentation re: the Pygmalion Effect

 

Whatever you think your limits are...you're wrong.

 

There are many labels that we put on others -- and that has real consequences and ramifications...both positive and negative depending upon the label.

Teachers expectations of someone matters!

 

The Pygmalion Effect -- our labels and expectations can become self-fulfilling prophecies

 

Put the label of learner at the top! We can all grow and learn, even though we aren't all equally gifted in all disciplines.

 

Teaching: Why an Active-Learning Evangelist Is Sold on Online Teaching — from chronicle.com by Beth McMurtrie

Excerpts:

Now, says Mazur, the results are in and he’s convinced: online teaching is better. Not in all circumstances, to be sure. But in his applied-physics courses, students showed larger learning gains and felt more supported than students had in in-person classes. In fact, they appear to have learned so much more effectively in this new format that he wonders if it’s “almost unethical,” to return to the classroom this fall.

“I have never been able to offer a course of the quality that I’m offering now,” he says. “I am convinced that there is no way I could do anything close to what I’m doing in person. Online teaching is better than in person.”

One benefit of this setup, says Mazur, is that students go at their own pace. He has thought a lot about how classroom-based work, even when it is student-led, is hostage to the clock and the instructor. Not every group works at the same pace, yet everyone has to wait until others are ready, or rush ahead when they fall behind. When groups set their own pace, it gives them the space to work through problems or get help as needed. The value of self-paced learning is also evident outside of class, says Mazur, who built more asynchronous work into his online course.

“I have never seen students work this hard for my course,” he says. “Never. And so consistently.”

Also see:

A snapshot of Eric Mazur's physics class from Canvas.

But he’s so convinced of how valuable this model is that he asked Harvard to allow him to keep teaching online this fall. 

Also relevant/see:

 

President Speaks: 5 higher education trends the pandemic is accelerating — from highereddive.com by Adam Weinberg
Technology, student choice and career prep will factor more heavily into colleges’ decision-making going forward, one president explains.

Excerpt:

Over the last several weeks, it has become clearer what the post-COVID-19 higher education landscape will look like. The trends that will shape the sector’s future are not new. But the pandemic has accelerated them.

Trends are like water. As they run faster, they cut deeper and in unexpected ways. Here are five that COVID-19 has given momentum to.

 

 

Student Experiences Learning with Technology in the Pandemic — from educause.edu

Excerpts:

However, as most institutions pivoted to remote learning as a result of the COVID-19 global pandemic in 2020, we also pivoted to conduct a special fall 2020 study to gain insights on the student experience during what has been an exceptional time of disruption. In this report, we share results from the study related to student experiences with technology in the for-credit courses they were taking in fall 2020 in which they felt they were learning the most. Specifically, we asked students to think about their best course—the one in which they learned the most—and tell us about the learning environments and modalities of those courses, as well as instructors’ uses of technology in, the organizational and design features of, and the most and least effective uses of technology they experienced in those courses.1

Steps You Can Take
Institutional leaders should consider the following steps as they continue to respond to the most immediate needs of students and plan for a post-pandemic future.

  • Invest in the design, development, and implementation of hybrid course models and the people who support them.
  • Connect faculty with instructional designers and instructional technologists.
  • Put students at the center of your teaching.

The best student experiences were the ones that were focused on student learning experiences and did so from a position of empathy, care, and flexibility. If we learn one thing from higher education’s pandemic year it’s that higher education needs to invest in promoting caring, student-centered, and adaptive pedagogies.

 

With New Online Marketplace, Community Colleges Hope to Better Compete With For-Profits — from edsurge.com by Yashvi Peeti

Excerpt:

Community colleges are staking a claim in the territory of online course marketplaces.

They’re about a decade behind their university counterparts, who helped to found edX in 2012, the same year that startup Coursera launched its competing service, now worth millions.

But leaders of a new platform called Unmudl say the time is right for community colleges to collaborate and make their workforce-training programs available more widely by marketing them through a shared website.

It’s a vision quite different from the traditional mission of community colleges to serve their communities—the literal, physical ones that surround their campuses.

Also see:

unmudl.com

 

Skills to jobs courses from Unmudl

 

If You Thought Working From Home Was Messy, Here Comes Hybrid Work — from wsj.com by Chip Cutter
Mandatory Mondays and Fridays. Unused desks and crowded conference rooms. Employers and workers navigate a return to offices.

Excerpts:

Some companies that are hiring say they can’t find knowledge workers willing to come into an office five days a week, according to chief executives, human-resource chiefs and recruiters.


It’s become really sort of a requirement if you’re looking for top talent,” Mr. Herrington says. “Those folks are pretty much saying, ‘Hey, if I can’t have a bit of a hybrid work environment, then I’m probably not going to be interested.’”

From DSC:
I’ve often noticed that the problems that we work on in higher ed are occurring in K12 and also in the corporate world. How to move forward from this Covid19 situation is another similar problem being worked on. Perhaps with some different/additional questions for HE and K12:

  • Where do the students prefer to be? In face-to-face (F2F)-based situations? 100% online? Hyflex? Hybrid? Other?

But really, I wonder if things don’t boil down to what the market will dictate…?

 

One wonders what this type of tech will do for online-based learning, &/or hybrid/blended learning, &/or hyflex-based learning in the future [Christian]

From DSC:
It will be interesting to see — post Covid19 — how vendors and their platforms continue to develop to allow for even greater degrees of web-based collaboration. I recently saw this item re: what Google is doing with their Project Starline. Very interesting indeed. Google is trying to make it so that the other person feels like they are in the same space with you.

.
Time will tell what occurs in this space...but one does wonder what this type of technology will do for online-based learning, and/or hybrid/blended learning, and/or hyflex-based learning in the future…?

 

States and School Systems Can Act Now to Dismantle Silos Between High School, College, and Career — from crpe.org by Georgia Heyward, Sarah McCann, & Betheny Gross | May 2021

We offer four ways states can engage K–12:

  • Invest in virtual platforms that support college and career navigation.
  • Incentivize bold experimentation with hybrid learning to design new models that blend school and workplace learning or connect with postsecondary microcredentials.
  • Step in to encourage and regulate high-quality, postsecondary microcredentials that stack toward associate and bachelor degrees.
  • Combine policy with technical assistance to help districts credit out-of-school learning.
 

Let’s Teach Computer Science Majors to Be Good Citizens. The Whole World Depends on It. — from edsurge.com by Anne-Marie Núñez, Matthew J. Mayhew, Musbah Shaheen and Laura S. Dahl

Excerpt:

To mitigate the perpetuation of these and related inequities, observers have called for increased diversification of the technology workforce. However, as books like “Brotopia” by Emily Chang and “Race after Technology” by Ruha Benjamin indicate, the culture of tech companies can be misogynistic and racist and therefore unwelcoming to many people. Google’s firing of a well-regarded Black scientist for her research on algorithmic bias in December 2020 suggests that there may be limited capacity within the industry to challenge this culture.

Change may need to start earlier in the workforce development pipeline. Undergraduate education offers a key opportunity for recruiting students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic, gender, and disability groups into computing. Yet even broadened participation in college computer science courses may not shift the tech workforce and block bias from seeping into tech tools if students aren’t taught that diversity and ethics are essential to their field of study and future careers.

Also mentioned/see:

  • Teaching Responsible Computing Playbook
    The ultimate goal of Teaching Responsible Computing is to educate a new wave of students who bring holistic thinking to the design of technology products. To do this, it is critical for departments to work together across computing, humanistic studies, and more, and collaborate across institutions. This Playbook offers the lessons learned from the process of adapting and enhancing curricula to include responsible computing in a broad set of institutions and help others get started doing the same in their curricula. 
 

A second demographic cliff adds to urgency for change — from insidehighered.com by Ray Schroeder
The demographic cliff we have been anticipating since the drop in births with the 2008 recession now has a younger sibling — the COVID-19 cliff is coming with another deep drop in recent births.

Excerpts:

In sum, competition is rapidly growing; the pool of “traditional” students is evaporating; employers are dropping degree requirements; and, with student debt now surpassing $1.7 trillion, we all know that families are looking for more cost-effective paths to the knowledge and skills they seek. “The fundamental business model for delivering education is broken,” said Rick Beyer, a senior fellow and practice area lead for mergers and affiliations at the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. “The consolidation era started a few years ago. It will continue. We will see more closures.”

What, then, are the bright spots for postsecondary learning?

Online learning tops the list despite some bad press for the hastily put-together remote learning of last year. Adult students, in particular, prefer the flexibility and mobility of online. Enrollment in online programs has continued to increase while overall higher ed enrollments have declined each of the past dozen years.

 

Video Lectures: 4 Tips for Teachers — from techlearning.com by Erik Ofgang
Creating short and engaging video lectures for students is a growing trend at education institutions

Excerpt:

To encourage a more professional type of evergreen video resource, the institution has invested in lecture capture studios, adding five new ones over the past year so each campus has at least one. Some of these studios are DIY, others require a crew, but all enable professors to record lectures in a professional recording environment, complete with green screens and high-quality lighting and audio. The recordings are then edited by the studio team who can help the professor follow the best pedagogical practices for video recordings, including keeping videos short and engaging.

Picture of a recording studio setup to record a professor at IUPUI

From DSC:
A great example of using of teams to create higher-quality, engaging, interactive learning content. 

 

Also see:

Adorama Business Solutions Equips New Classroom Studio for West Coast Baptist College Creative Arts Department — from svconline.com
Workspace Allows Department to Expand Video Production and Editing Course Offerings

Picture of a new classroom studio within a learning space

Picture of a new classroom studio within a learning space

 
© 2025 | Daniel Christian