From DSC:
Some interesting reflections here:

Summer gigs for students are scarce. Think like an entrepreneur and build your own. — from edsurge.com by Dan Murphy

Excerpt:

If you are a student looking for new ways to continue along your trajectory during the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, I want to share what I’ve learned with you. Students from any background can use these ambiguous times to do something beneficial. Here are my recommendations for how to spend your summer.

If there is a personal project or business opportunity you’ve been interested in trying out, there’s no better time than the present to dive into something new and challenging, acquaint yourself with failure, pick yourself back up again, and build the muscle needed for high-growth, lifelong learning. Find that one thing that is meaningful to you and relentlessly chase the goals associated with it.

 

DC: Ouch! Likely a *major game-changer* — esp given the current landscape of #HigherEducation. [Christian]

From DSC:
Readers of this blog will know that I’m a big fan of online learning. That said, I realize it’s not for everyone. Our son, who is studying to become an actor, hates it.

Given:

  • our current technological tools, setups, and  infrastructures
  • the ways that we are used to doing things
  • our past and current educational systems 
  • and folks’ learning preferences

…it’s hard to do some things online. I get it.

That said, I wouldn’t rule out the further significant growth and development of online-based learning experiences by any stretch of the imagination. The Coronavirus will force traditional institutions of higher education (plus many K-12 school systems as well as corporate training programs) to invest much more aggressively in the research and development of online-based learning experiences. And with AI-based tools like Otter.AI, our future virtually/digitally-based learning ecosystems could be very powerful indeed.

As but one example, consider that AI technologies — as unseen but present participants in future videoconferencing calls — will “listen” to the conversation and likely provide us with a constantly updating sidebar that will consist of beneficial resources such as:

  • relevant research
  • websites
  • journal articles
  • blog postings
  • former team conversations
  • etc.

The output from that sidebar will likely be able to be saved /downloaded just like we do with transcripts of chat sessions. The available options for such a service will be customizable, and filtering mechanisms can be turned on, or off, or be adjusted.

Otter dot AI

 

All of that said, it IS time to reduce the investments that are being used to create new athletic facilities and/or other new physical buildings. And it’s time to start reallocating those millions of dollars of investments into creating/developing highly-effective online-based learning experiences. 

Don’t get me wrong. Going to campus is an ideal learning experience, and I hope that for everyone out there. But if the current trends continue — especially the increasing costs of obtaining a degree — that won’t be an option for a growing number of people (especially with the aftermath/ripple effects of the Coronavirus on our society).

#CostOfObtainingADegree #StudentRelated #AI #InstructionalDesign #IntelligentSystems #IntelligentTutoring #FutureOfHigherEducation #Innovation #LearningEcosystems #HigherEducation #Change #NewBusinessModels #Reinvent #StayingRelevant #Surviving

 

Dawn of the Age of Digital Learning [Moe & Rajendran]

Dawn of the Age of Digital Learning — from medium.com by Michael Moe and Vignesh Rajendran
An Acceleration of Trends That Have Been Building for Years

Excerpts:

Some of these new online learners will sink. Some will crawl out of the pool and never go back in. But we believe most will get the hang of it, like it, and will no longer be confined to the shore. Effectively, the genie is not going back in the bottle… digital learning has come of age. We have a B.C. (Before Coronavirus) world transitioning to A.D. (After Disease).

The Coronavirus has brought forth the Dawn of the Age of Digital Learning — a time for builders to create the platforms, tools, and technology to propel society forward.

We now believe Digital Learning will reach 11% of the education market by 2026, representing a ~$1 Trillion market and a 30% CAGR, close to double the rate of growth projected in Before Covid-19

 

From DSC:
So many of the things in this article reminded me of the things, developments, trends, needs, and possibilities that I have been tracking for years in this vision of a next-generation, global learning platform that I have entitled:

We need a next gen learning platform -- I call this vision Learning from the Living Class Room

My guess is that the large, primarily online institutions/organizations will come out of this ordeal in much better shape than the majority of the traditional institutions of higher education. It won’t matter what faculty members at liberal arts institutions think about online learning. And as much as some faculty members won’t like to see or hear about it, students will no longer need for such faculty members to be sold on it. Students will come to realize that it was under those faculty members watch that their own enormous gorillas of debt were created. And they are beginning to witness and hear that it’s taking (or will take) older family members decades to pay down their debt.

So, I think that the market will decide the fate of many traditional institutions of higher education. Lifelong learners will vote with their feet — and fingers actually, by typing in a new URL — and simply move to the SNHU’s, ASU’s, UMass Online’s, WGU’s, and Liberty University’s of the world. After 5-10 years of investments in online learning, there will likely be some pretty amazing learning experiences out there.

 

L&D in Lockdown: What’s taking place? — from modernworkplacelearning.com by Jane Hart

Excerpt:

So what are L&D doing differently?

Zoom is still being used to power virtual sessions, but L&D folk are using different formats than traditional training, e.g.

  • leaders’ talk shows
  • virtual interactive sessions for staff to share how they are doing, what has inspired them, energised them, what they are learning and they will take into the future.
  • virtual coaching to support people managing change and virtual working.
  • 30-min “pop up” trainings on simple, urgent topics like MS Teams

Others in L&D are experimenting with new (for them) formats, e.g.

  • book summaries and podcasts
  • weekly newsletters on key topics, mostly to create faster distribution channels
  • converting face to face items to virtual offerings in various forms, accelerating online access and remote learning campaigns
  • curation of internal and external content
  • experimenting with creative practice via an online platform (eg simple drawing exercises designed to help people learn, engage, relax, talk, draw, experiment)
  • taking the time to reflect and make a better learning experience? Running things online that people said couldn’t be done virtually.

Also see:

 

Flipped Learning -- April 2020 -- from flr.flglobal.org

The April issue of FLR looks at how we’re all managing the social-emotional cost of making a rapid transition to online learning.

Featured articles include:

  • Teaching From Home Is Exhausting: How Are You Keeping Your Spirits Up?
  • Why Is Online Teaching and Learning So Awesome and So Awful?
  • 10 Ways to Help Students Cope With How COVID-19 Is Disrupting School Life.
  • What Teachers Need From Administrators While Shifting to Remote Learning.
  • Why the Two Most Important Online Teaching Skills Today Are Grace and Choice.
  • We Miss Seeing Our Students, How Can We Fill That Hole in Our Soul?
  • Unmasking the Social-emotional Cost of Going Online Overnight?
  • Teaching During a Pandemic Is Fragile: Self-care Is Good, Self-compassion Is Better.
 

OLC Innovate™ 2020 Conference Moves to June with All-Virtual Format — from prweb.com
Produced by the Online Learning Consortium, in partnership with MERLOT, OLC Innovate 2020 Virtual will gather digital learning leaders and practitioners, online, June 15-26, to focus on innovation in digital, blended and online learning.

Excerpt:

BOSTON (PRWEB) MAY 01, 2020
The Online Learning Consortium (OLC) announced today that its annual OLC Innovate™ Conference is moving to an all-virtual format for 2020. OLC and conference partner MERLOT will gather the digital learning community, online, June 15-26, for OLC Innovate™ 2020 Virtual Conference (#OLCInnovate). This year’s theme, “Building Bridges in Digital, Blended and Online Learning,” frames a 10-day online program that highlights inspiring innovators and thought leaders from higher education, K-12, military, health care and workforce education.

 

With thanks to my sister, Sue Ellen Christian, for forwarding me Jeremy Caplan’s site/newsletter.

Also see:

…and this one as well:

Three words of advice that I wish I had heard when I first started teaching

 

From DSC:

Will tools like Otter be much more integrated into our future learning ecosystems, meetings, & teleconferences?

 
 

A quick-start instruction manual for teaching from home -- from edsurge.com by Andrew Ng

A quick-start instruction manual for teaching from home — from edsurge.com by Andrew Ng

Excerpt:

How can you migrate a live, in-person class to an online setting quickly, without needing to redesign the class? If you have time to redesign the class into five-minute videos and auto-graded homework, that’s great! But if you don’t, here’s what you can do.

We will go through three quick options with increasing levels of complexity and equipment/setup needed. I recommend using the most sophisticated of these options that you feel comfortable with.

Also, see this PDF file for the full guide.

 

From DSC:
NOTE: The K-12 education system that I’m talking about in this posting is the pre-COVID-19 education system.



What Cory Henwood describes here…

The paradigm of one -- as described by Cory Henwood

is what I describe as the quickly moving K-12 education train that stops for no one!

K-12 education in America is a like a quickly moving train that stops for no one.

(image source)


This becomes especially troublesome for those on either side of the 80% bell curve.
I know about this, as one of our daughters has been living through this phenomenon for years. We are seriously considering homeschooling for her as we want her learning experiences to be more positive ones for her. We want to provide more choice, more control for what she wants to learn about — and the pace at which she can go through those experiences. We want there to be more joy in her learning experiences. This will hopefully help her build more positive perspectives about learning in general.

This is not a mute issue…nor is this a topic that’s focused on just students with special needs. In fact, this topic is relevant to every single student in America — as everyone is now required to be lifelong learners these days. Grades need to diminish in importance. The enjoyment of learning needs to rise.

Note: There were some times in public and charter schools that provided courses and topics of great interest to her, and provided some great joy to her. Plus, there were some incredibly-dedicated teachers and staff that created a team around our daughter. I’m very grateful for them and for their efforts. But positive learning experiences were becoming too few and too far between. The train left the station *for everyone* at such-and-such a time, and stopped *for everyone* at such and such a time. The education system required that she and her classmates move at a certain (high) speed — regardless of their mastery of the content. Teachers know what I’m talking about here…big time.

We need to get to what Cory discusses about when he discusses competency-based education.

We need to get to what Cory discusses about competency-based education.

Plus, we need to get to a place where there is:

 

For Southern New Hampshire, the future of the campus may be online — from educationdive.com by Hallie Busta
The president of the online giant talked with Education Dive about its decision to move all freshmen online this fall and bigger plans to reshape instruction.

Excerpts:

The university hopes to introduce a variety of online, hybrid and/or project-based programs in the fall of 2021. By that point, it also aims to have reduced tuition for campus programs from $31,000 to $10,000 — a 61% cut that makes the cost equivalent to what online students pay.

LEBLANC: Let’s imagine campuses can’t open for the whole year. To stay on pace, students typically would need to complete 10 courses. For us, if you enroll online, those courses are about $1,000 each. There’s your $10,000. I don’t know what version of taking undergraduates and keeping them fully online justifies me charging them more than I do the 130,000 students who are paying $1,000 a course. It simply reflects what we charge now.

While this announcement got a lot of attention, I know a lot of my colleagues are thinking very hard about how to reinvent their institutions to be meaningful again in a world that looks very different than it did just three months ago.

 

From DSC:
The successful education providers of the future — and by that I mean those organizations who can educate the masses, not the elite — will be those who can significantly reduce the price of obtaining the skills and knowledge that someone needs to remain marketable and relevant in the workplace. For. Sixty. Years.

Learning from the living class room

 

Shared Responsibilities: What It Will Take to Deliver a True National Lifelong Learning Ecosystem — from evoLLLution.com by Denise Amyot | President and CEO, Colleges and Institutes Canada

Building a more flexible and accessible postsecondary sector will require concerted efforts from postsecondary institutions, governments, and employers, all of whom have a role to play in making the culture of lifelong learning a reality. 

 

Coursera Machine Learning Tool Matches On-Campus Courses with MOOC Resources — from campustechnology.com by Rhea Kelly

Excerpt:

CourseMatch can “ingest” on-campus course catalogs in more than 100 languages and map them to the most relevant Coursera courses in any of the languages available on the platform.

From DSC:
Interesting.

 

5 easy ways to infuse learning science into remote teaching — from campustechnology.com by Andrea Hendricks
These practices will help engage students and improve outcomes throughout the online learning process.

Excerpt:

Here again, good organization is essential. I organize my content by units that are aligned to tests, so my students always have a clear learning goal in mind. If I have six tests in a semester, I divide the content into six units. Each unit contains an overview for the module, a submodule for each section, a review of the key concepts from the unit, a set of review problems for the unit, and a test. Within section submodules, I give an overview of the objectives, activities for students to engage with and learn the content (reading assignments, videos, animations, homework problems), and a discussion question. I also include modules on getting started with the course, the technology we’ll be using as well as tutoring information and resources.

 

From DSC:
Let’s hope that Cisco Webex learns from Zoom, Blackboard Collaborate, and likely other products/vendors as well — in terms of providing easy-to-setup and use, seamless breakout rooms.

The breakout rooms in the Cisco Webex’ Training Center product are audio-only, which represents a major gap/disadvantage for numerous courses out there. (And, last I knew, there aren’t breakout rooms in the Cisco WebEx Meeting Center product.) The idea of community, presence, and collaboration is supported by providing audio and video. Video is critically important in certain courses.

Plus we are finding at WMU-Cooley that we need to create main rooms PLUS additional breakout rooms and assign students to each breakout room. But then, audio and video issues abound. Such a complex setup requires that the faculty member (i.e., the host) of such meetings needs to be pretty savvy in order to make things work well. 

The transitions of going from the main meeting room to breakout rooms needs to be quick and easy. Bb Collaborate did a great job with this, and I hear Zoom does a good job with this as well. Cisco Webex does not.

Cisco — if you’re going to be in the world of higher ed and in the K-12 world, you need to fix this ASAP. 

Flipping things around…Zoom, you had better learn from Cisco Webex if you want to play in the worlds of education as well. Your “Zoombombing” and security-related issues are not good.

Also see:

 
© 2024 | Daniel Christian