learning hubs & pods & microschooling

Will #AI — in real-time — be able to present helpful resources in the smart classroom of the future? [Christian]

On 09/26/2018, in 21st century, A/V -- audio/visual, Amazon, Apple, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, assistive technologies, bots, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, Daniel S. Christian, digital learning, education technology, emerging technologies, face-to-face, formal learning, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, heutagogy, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, learning spaces, lifelong learning, Microsoft, Natural Language Processing (NLP), online learning, platforms, productivity / tips and tricks, smart classrooms, tools, training / L&D, universities, user experience (UX), voice recognition / voice enabled interfaces, web-based collaboration, webinars, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
Microsoft’s conference room of the future “listens” to the conversations of the team and provides a transcript of the meeting. It also is using “artificial intelligence tools to then act on what meeting participants say. If someone says ‘I’ll follow up with you next week,’ then they’ll get a notification in Microsoft Teams, Microsoft’s Slack competitor, to actually act on that promise.”

This made me wonder about our learning spaces in the future. Will an #AI-based device/cloud-based software app — in real-time — be able to “listen” to the discussion in a classroom and present helpful resources in the smart classroom of the future (i.e., websites, online-based databases, journal articles, and more)?

Will this be a feature of a next generation learning platform as well (i.e., addressing the online-based learning realm)? Will this be a piece of an intelligent tutor or an intelligent system?

Hmmm…time will tell.

Also see this article out at Forbes.com entitled, “There’s Nothing Artificial About How AI Is Changing The Workplace.”

Here is an excerpt:

The New Meeting Scribe: Artificial Intelligence

As I write this, AI has already begun to make video meetings even better. You no longer have to spend time entering codes or clicking buttons to launch a meeting. Instead, with voice-based AI, video conference users can start, join or end a meeting by simply speaking a command (think about how you interact with Alexa).

Voice-to-text transcription, another artificial intelligence feature offered by Otter Voice Meeting Notes (from AISense, a Zoom partner), Voicefox and others, can take notes during video meetings, leaving you and your team free to concentrate on what’s being said or shown. AI-based voice-to-text transcription can identify each speaker in the meeting and save you time by letting you skim the transcript, search and analyze it for certain meeting segments or words, then jump to those mentions in the script. Over 65% of respondents from the Zoom survey said they think AI will save them at least one hour a week of busy work, with many claiming it will save them one to five hours a week.

Coursera’s CEO on the Evolving Meaning of ‘MOOC’ [Schaffhauser]

On 09/12/2018, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, adjunct faculty, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, business, business side of he, career development, changing business models, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, collaboration, colleges, communities of practice, community colleges, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, cost of getting a degree, credentialing, Daniel S. Christian, digital learning, education technology, faculty/staff, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, global / globalization, higher education, learning, learning agents, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses, web-based collaboration, by Daniel Christian

Coursera’s CEO on the Evolving Meaning of ‘MOOC’ — from by Dian Schaffhauser
When you can bring huge numbers of students together with lots of well-branded universities and global enterprises seeking a highly skilled workforce, could those linkages be strong enough to forge a new future for massive open online courses?

Excerpts:

Campus Technology: Coursera used to be a MOOC operator, but now it’s a tech company, an LMS company, a virtual bootcamp and more. So how are you describing Coursera these days?

Maggioncalda: As a learning platform. We like to say to our universities, “Coursera is a platform for your global campus.”

You have [traditional universities] teaching with some of the world’s best professors, with some of the most cutting-edge research, to a population of people who have sat right here in front of you, on a small parcel of land, and who pay a lot of money to do that. It’s been very high quality that’s been available to the very few.

What we’re interested in doing is taking that quality of education and making it available to a vast group of people. When you think about our business model, I like to think about it as an ecosystem of learners, educators and employers. What we do is we link them together. We have 34 million learners from around the world. Our biggest country represented is the United States, followed by India, followed by China, followed by Mexico, followed by Brazil. A lot of the emerging markets and the learners there are coming to Coursera to learn and prosper.

…

[Editor’s note: Coursera currently hosts 10 online degree programs. And most recently, in July 2018, the University of Pennsylvania announced that it was launching its first fully online master’s degree, delivered through Coursera and priced at about a third of the cost of its on-campus equivalent.]…

…

CT: Let’s talk about the University of Pennsylvania deal. Do you think that’s going to put some competitive pressure on the other Tier 1 schools to jump into the fray?

Maggioncalda: This is a very well-regarded program. The University of Pennsylvania is a very well-regarded university. I think it’s causing a lot of people to re-evaluate what they were imagining their future might look like: Maybe learners really do want to have access that’s more convenient and lower cost and they don’t have to quit their jobs to take. And maybe there is literally a world of learners who can’t come to campus, in India and Europe and Latin America and Russia and Asia Pacific and China.

As a learning platform. We like to say to our universities, “Coursera is a platform for your global campus.”

Jeff Maggioncalda, Coursera CEO

In two years we’ve had over 1,400 companies hire Coursera to deliver university courses at work to their employees.

Now we’re starting to link the 34 million learners out there to the employers who are looking for people who have certain skills, saying, “Look, if you’re on Coursera learning about this thing, there might be companies who want to hire people that know the thing that you just learned.”

Jeff Maggioncalda, Coursera CEO

Learning from the Living [Class] Room:
A global, powerful, next generation learning platform — meant to help people
reinvent themselves quickly, cost-effectively, conveniently, & consistently

A new, global, collaborative learning platform that offers more choice, more control to learners of all ages – 24×7 – and could become the organization that futurist Thomas Frey discusses here with Business Insider:
- “I’ve been predicting that by 2030 the largest company on the internet is going to be an education-based company that we haven’t heard of yet,” Frey, the senior futurist at the DaVinci Institute think tank, tells Business Insider.
A learner-centered platform that is enabled by – and reliant upon – human beings but is backed up by a powerful suite of technologies that work together in order to help people reinvent themselves quickly, conveniently, and extremely cost-effectively
A customizable learning environment that will offer up-to-date streams of regularly curated content (i.e., microlearning) as well as engaging learning experiences
Along these lines, a lifelong learner can opt to receive an RSS feed on a particular topic until they master that concept; periodic quizzes (i.e., spaced repetition) determine that mastery. Once mastered, the system will ask the learner as to whether they still want to receive that particular stream of content or not.
A Netflix-like interface to peruse and select plugins to extend the functionality of the core product
An AI-backed system of analyzing employment trends and opportunities will highlight those courses and “streams of content” that will help someone obtain the most in-demand skills
A system that tracks learning and, via Blockchain-based technologies, feeds all completed learning modules/courses into learners’ web-based learner profiles
A learning platform that provides customized, personalized recommendation lists – based upon the learner’s goals
A platform that delivers customized, personalized learning within a self-directed course (meant for those content creators who want to deliver more sophisticated courses/modules while moving people through the relevant Zones of Proximal Development)
Notifications and/or inspirational quotes will be available upon request to help provide motivation, encouragement, and accountability – helping learners establish habits of continual, lifelong-based learning
(Potentially) An online-based marketplace, matching learners with teachers, professors, and other such Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
(Potentially) Direct access to popular job search sites
(Potentially) Direct access to resources that describe what other companies do/provide and descriptions of any particular company’s culture (as described by current and former employees and freelancers)
(Potentially) Integration with one-on-one tutoring services

Flexible Classrooms: Research is scarce, but promising [Merrill]

On 09/08/2018, in active learning, K-12 related, learning, learning ecosystem, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, learning spaces, smart classrooms, UK, by Daniel Christian

Flexible Classrooms: Research Is Scarce, But Promising — from amp.edutopia.org by Stephen Merrill
An ambitious study of 153 classrooms in the United Kingdom provides the best evidence that flexible spaces can boost academic performance.

Excerpt:

Despite the challenges, an ambitious effort to study the design of lived-in classrooms, including looking at hard-to-define factors like flexibility, was completed in 2015 by the University of Salford, in the United Kingdom. Researchers put in the legwork, visiting 153 classrooms in 27 schools across the country—from small, remote village schools to much larger suburban buildings on the outskirts of metropolitan London. In the end, the effect of classroom design on academic performance was studied across 3,766 British children aged 5 to 11.

“We were trying to take a holistic perspective,” explained Peter Barrett, the lead researcher and now an honorary research fellow at the University of Oxford. “In other words, we were trying to look at spaces as experienced by people. So this isn’t just air quality, this isn’t just temperature, or an effort to measure the factors separately. This is the whole lot together.”

THE FINDINGS

The study looked at three dimensions of classroom design: naturalness (factors like light and temperature), stimulation (factors like color and visual complexity), and individualization (factors like flexibility and student ownership).

The big insight? Optimizing all of these physical characteristics of primary classrooms improved academic performance in reading, writing, and mathematics by 16 percent. The personalization of classrooms—including flexibility, which Barrett defined as “student choice within the space”—accounted for a full quarter of that improvement.

The takeaway: Flexibility, combined with characteristics like acoustics and air quality, has a real impact on student achievement. If used properly, flexible classrooms produce better academic outcomes among primary school children than more traditional, static classroom designs.

Also see the work of:

What is a learning ecosystem? And how does it support corporate strategy? [Eudy]

On 07/24/2018, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, active learning, adjunct faculty, blended learning, business, career development, change, colleges, communities of practice, community colleges, competency-based learning/education, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, Daniel S. Christian, digital learning, distance education, education, education technology, elearning, face-to-face, faculty/staff, flipping -- inverted learning, heutagogy, higher education, homeschooling/homeschoolers, hybrid learning, ideas, instructional design, K-12 related, law schools, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, learning spaces, library / librarians, lifelong learning, microlearning, MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses, online learning, personalized/customized learning, platforms, play, professional development, project-based learning, relationships, RSS, simulations, smart classrooms, social learning / networks, social media, staying relevant, streams of content, student-related, surviving, teachers, teaching & learning, technology (general), tools, training / L&D, universities, virtual tutoring, web-based collaboration, workplace, youth, by Daniel Christian

What is a learning ecosystem? And how does it support corporate strategy? — from ej4.com by Ryan Eudy

Excerpt:

A learning ecosystem is a system of people, content, technology, culture, and strategy, existing both within and outside of an organization, all of which has an impact on both the formal and informal learning that goes on in that organization.

The word “ecosystem” is worth paying attention to here. It’s not just there to make the term sound fancy or scientific. A learning ecosystem is the L&D equivalent of an ecosystem out in the wild. Just as a living ecosystem has many interacting species, environments, and the complex relationships among them, a learning ecosystem has many people and pieces of content, in different roles and learning contexts, and complex relationships.

Just like a living ecosystem, a learning ecosystem can be healthy or sick, nurtured or threatened, self-sustaining or endangered. Achieving your development goals, then, requires an organization to be aware of its own ecosystem, including its parts and the internal and external forces that shape them.

From DSC:
Yes, to me, the concept/idea of a learning ecosystem IS important. Very important. So much so, I named this blog after it.

Each of us as individuals have a learning ecosystem, whether we officially recognize it or not. So do the organizations that we work for. And, like an ecosystem out in nature, a learning ecosystem is constantly morphing, constantly changing.

We each have people in our lives that help us learn and grow, and the people that were in our learning ecosystems 10 years ago may or may not still be in our current learning ecosystems. Many of us use technologies and tools to help us learn and grow. Then there are the spaces where we learn — both physical and virtual spaces. Then there are the processes and procedures we follow, formally and/or informally. Any content that helps us learn and grow is a part of that ecosystem. Where we get that content can change, but obtaining up-to-date content is a part of our learning ecosystems. I really appreciate streams of content in this regard — and tapping into blogs/websites, especially via RSS feeds and Feedly (an RSS aggregator that took off when Google Reader left the scene).

The article brings up a good point when it states that a learning ecosystem can be “healthy or sick, nurtured or threatened, self-sustaining or endangered.” That’s why I urge folks to be intentional about maintaining and, better yet, consistently enhancing their learning ecosystems. In this day and age where lifelong learning is now a requirement to remain in the workforce, each of us needs to be intentional in this regard.

10 steps to achieving active learning on a budget [Schaffhauser]

On 07/21/2018, in A/V -- audio/visual, active learning, education, education technology, ideas, instructional design, K-12 related, learning, learning ecosystem, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, learning spaces, pedagogy, smart classrooms, teachers, tools, trends, by Daniel Christian

10 steps to achieving active learning on a budget — from campustechnology.com by Dian Schaffhauser
Active learning often means revamping classrooms to enable more collaborative, hands-on student work — and that can be costly. Here’s how to achieve the pedagogical change without the high expense.

Excerpt:

Active learning is a great way to increase student excitement and participation, facilitate different kinds of learning activities, help people develop skills in small group work, promote discussion, boost attendance and give an outlet for technology usage that stays on track. It also requires remaking classrooms to enable that hands-on, collaborative student work — and that can often mean a six-figure price tag. But at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, NH, a $12,000 experiment proved successful enough that the institution now sports two permanent active learning classrooms as well as a brand-new active learning lab. Here are the 10 steps this school with just under 2,000 students followed on its road to active learning victory.

Also see:

3 Strategies for Overcoming Faculty Resistance to Active Learning Techniques — from er.educause.edu by Kathy Jackson and Dena Novak

Reimagining the Higher Education Ecosystem

On 06/20/2018, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, adult learning, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, business, career development, change, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, collaboration, colleges, communities of practice, community colleges, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, credentialing, curriculum, dangers of the status quo, Daniel S. Christian, digital learning, distance education, education, education reform, education technology, emerging technologies, engagement / engaging students, experimentation, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, heutagogy, higher education, homeschooling/homeschoolers, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, lifelong learning, passions, platforms, professional development, reinvent, society, staying relevant, strategy, streams of content, student-related, surviving, teaching & learning, tools, training / L&D, United States, universities, vision/possibilities, web-based collaboration, workplace, youth, by Daniel Christian

Reimagining the Higher Education Ecosystem — from edu2030.agorize.com
How might we empower people to design their own learning journeys so they can lead purposeful and economically stable lives?

Excerpts:

The problem
Technology is rapidly transforming the way we live, learn, and work. Entirely new jobs are emerging as others are lost to automation. People are living longer, yet switching jobs more often. These dramatic shifts call for a reimagining of the way we prepare for work and life—specifically, how we learn new skills and adapt to a changing economic landscape.

The changes ahead are likely to hurt most those who can least afford to manage them: low-income and first generation learners already ill-served by our existing postsecondary education system. Our current system stifles economic mobility and widens income and achievement gaps; we must act now to ensure that we have an educational ecosystem flexible and fair enough to help all people live purposeful and economically stable lives. And if we are to design solutions proportionate to this problem, new technologies must be called on to scale approaches that reach the millions of vulnerable people across the country.

The challenge
How might we empower people to design their own learning journeys so they can lead purposeful and economically stable lives?

The Challenge—Reimagining the Higher Education Ecosystem—seeks bold ideas for how our postsecondary education system could be reimagined to foster equity and encourage learner agency and resilience. We seek specific pilots to move us toward a future in which all learners can achieve economic stability and lead purposeful lives. This Challenge invites participants to articulate a vision and then design pilot projects for a future ecosystem that has the following characteristics:

Expands access: The educational system must ensure that all people—including low-income learners who are disproportionately underserved by the current higher education system—can leverage education to live meaningful and economically stable lives.

Draws on a broad postsecondary ecosystem: While college and universities play a vital role in educating students, there is a much larger ecosystem in which students learn. This ecosystem includes non-traditional “classes” or alternative learning providers, such as MOOCs, bootcamps, and online courses as well as on-the-job training and informal learning. Our future learning system must value the learning that happens in many different environments and enable seamless transitions between learning, work, and life.

From DSC:
This is where I could see a vision similar to Learning from the Living [Class] Room come into play. It would provide a highly affordable, accessible platform, that would offer more choice, and more control to learners of all ages. It would be available 24×7 and would be a platform that supports lifelong learning. It would combine a variety of AI-enabled functionalities with human expertise, teaching, training, motivation, and creativity.

It could be that what comes out of this challenge will lay the groundwork for a future, massive new learning platform.

Also see:

Office of Edtech Wants Help Making Sense of All Those Higher Ed Providers — from edsurge.com by Sydney Johnson

“The scary amount that college will cost in the future” DC: This line of thinking — and trend — needs to come to an end.

On 05/18/2018, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, business side of he, change, changing business models, colleges, community colleges, cost of getting a degree, dangers of the status quo, Daniel S. Christian, future of higher education, higher education, ideas, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, learning spaces, liberal arts, library / librarians, lifelong learning, microlearning, more voice more choice more control, online learning, parents/guardians, personalized/customized learning, platforms, reinvent, smart classrooms, society, streams of content, student-related, technologies for your home, technology (general), tools, trends, United States, universities, youth, by Daniel Christian

The scary amount that college will cost in the future — from cnbc.com by Annie Nova

Excerpt:

Think college is expensive now? Then new parents will probably want to take a seat for this news.

In 2036, just 18 years from now, four years at a private university will be around $303,000, up from $167,000 today.

To get a degree at a public university you’ll need about $184,000, compared with $101,000 now.

These forecasts were provided by Wealthfront, an automated investment platform that offers college saving options. It uses Department of Education data on the current cost of schools along with expected annual inflation to come up with its projections.

Excerpted graphic:

From DSC:
We had better be at the end of the line of thinking that says these tuition hikes can continue. It’s not ok. More and more people will be shut out by this kind of societal gatekeeper. The ever-increasing cost of obtaining a degree has become a matter of social justice for me. Other solutions are needed. The 800 pound gorilla of debt that’s already being loaded onto more and more of our graduates will impact them for years…even for decades in many of our graduates’ cases.

It’s my hope that a variety of technologies will make learning more affordable, yet still provide a high quality of education. In fact, I’m hopeful that the personalization/customization of learning will take some major steps forward in the very near future. We will still need and want solid teachers, professors, and trainers, but I’m hopeful that those folks will be aided by the heavy lifting that will be done by some powerful tools/technologies that will be aimed at helping people learn and grow…providing lifelong learners with more choice, more control.

I love the physical campus as much as anyone, and I hope that all students can have that experience if they want it. But I’ve seen and worked with the high costs of building and maintaining physical spaces — maintaining our learning spaces, dorms, libraries, gyms, etc. is very expensive.

I see streams of content becoming more prevalent in the future — especially for lifelong learners who need to reinvent themselves in order to stay marketable. We will be able to subscribe and unsubscribe to curated streams of content that we want to learn more about. For example, today, that could involve RSS feeds and Feedly (to aggregate those feeds). I see us using micro-learning to help us encode information and then practice recalling it (i.e., spaced practice), to help us stop or lessen the forgetting curves we all experience, to help us sort information into things we know and things that we need more assistance on (while providing links to resources that will help us obtain better mastery of the subject(s)).

DC: How soon before we can do this with learning-related spaces/scenes/ALCs & more?

On 05/02/2018, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, A/V -- audio/visual, attention, business side of he, change, changing business models, colleges, communications, communities of practice, community colleges, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate universities / corporate training, Daniel S. Christian, digital learning, digital storytelling, disruption, drama/theater, education technology, emerging technologies, engagement / engaging students, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, learning spaces, lifelong learning, love of learning, more voice more choice more control, multimedia, music, personalized/customized learning, platforms, play, professional development, society, tools, training / L&D, trends, vendors, virtual field trips, virtual K-12 schools, Virtual Reality (VR) / worlds / learning, virtual tutoring, vision/possibilities, web-based collaboration, webinars, by Daniel Christian

From DSC regarding Virtual Reality-based apps:
If one can remotely select/change their seat at a game or change seats/views at a concert…how soon before we can do this with learning-related spaces/scenes/lectures/seminars/Active Learning Classrooms (ALCs)/stage productions (drama) and more?

Talk about getting someone’s attention and engaging them!

Excerpt:

(MAY 2, 2018) MelodyVR, the world’s first dedicated virtual reality music platform that enables fans to experience music performances in a revolutionary new way, is now available.

The revolutionary MelodyVR app offers music fans an incredible selection of immersive performances from today’s biggest artists. Fans are transported all over the world to sold-out stadium shows, far-flung festivals and exclusive VIP sessions, and experience the music they love.

What MelodyVR delivers is a unique and world-class set of original experiences, created with multiple vantage points, to give fans complete control over what they see and where they stand at a performance. By selecting different Jump Spots, MelodyVR users can choose to be in the front row, deep in the crowd, or up-close-and-personal with the band on stage.

See their How it Works page.

With standalone VR headsets like the Oculus Go now available at an extremely accessible price point ($199), the already vibrant VR market is set to grow exponentially over the coming years. Current market forecasts suggest over 350 million users by 2021 and last year saw $3 billion invested in virtual and alternative reality.

Home Voice Control — See Josh Micro in Action!

From DSC:
Along these lines, will faculty use their voices to control their room setups (i.e., the projection, shades, room lighting, what’s shown on the LMS, etc.)?

Or will machine-to-machine communications, the Internet of Things, sensors, mobile/cloud-based apps, and the like take care of those items automatically when a faculty member walks into the room?

What if more of our learning spaces featured this level of creativity, colors, passion, & energy? [Christian]

On 03/30/2018, in art, creativity, Daniel S. Christian, design, higher education, K-12 related, learning ecosystem, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, learning spaces, passions, play, society, teachers, teaching & learning, by Daniel Christian

Very clever designs! Some serious creativity here!

From DSC:
NOTE: I’ve never been to this site before, but I saw the clever QWERTY image on Pinterest, which lead me to this page. What if more of our learning spaces — and/or perhaps our playgrounds — featured this level of creativity, color, innovative design, passion, beauty, and energy?

Some examples:

Reflections on “Michelle Weise: We Need to Design the Learning Ecosystem of the Future”

On 02/23/2018, in colleges, community colleges, digital learning, disruption, education reform, education technology, experimentation, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, generational differences, higher education, ideas, innovation, leadership, learner profiles, learning, learning agents, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, lifelong learning, marketplaces, microlearning, mobile learning, more voice more choice more control, new business models, online learning, online tutoring, open courseware and systems, pace of change, personalized/customized learning, platforms, reinvent, robotics, society, staying relevant, streams of content, student-related, surviving, technologies for your home, training / L&D, trends, United States, universities, vendors, virtual tutoring, web-based collaboration, by Daniel Christian

Michelle Weise: ‘We Need to Design the Learning Ecosystem of the Future’ — from edsurge.com by Michelle Weise

Excerpts:

These days, education reformers, evangelists and foundations pay a lot of lip service to the notion of lifelong learning, but we do little to invest in the systems, architecture and infrastructure needed to facilitate seamless movements in and out of learning and work.

Talk of lifelong learning doesn’t translate into action. In fact, resources and funding are often geared toward the traditional 17- to 22-year-old college-going population and less often to working adults, our growing new-traditional student population.

We’ll need a different investment thesis: For most adults, taking time off work to attend classes at a local, brick-and-mortar community college or a four-year institution will not be the answer. The opportunity costs will be too high. Our current system of traditional higher education is ill-suited to facilitate flexible, seamless cost-effective learning pathways for these students to keep up with the emergent demands of the workforce.

…

Many adults may have no interest in coming back to college. Out of the 37 million Americans with some college and no degree, many have already failed one or twice before and will be wholly uninterested in experiencing more educational trauma.We can’t just say, “Here’s a MOOC, or here’s an online degree, or a 6- to 12-week immersive bootcamp.”

We have to do better. Let’s begin seeding the foundational elements of a learning ecosystem of the future—flexible enough for adults to move consistently in and out of learning and work. Enough talk about lifelong learning: Let’s build the foundations of that learning ecosystem of the future.

From DSC:
I couldn’t agree more with Michelle that we need a new learning ecosystem of the future. In fact, I have been calling such an effort “Learning from the Living [Class] Room — and it outlines a next generation learning platform that aims to deliver everything Michelle talks about in her solid article out at edsurge.com.

Along these lines…I just saw that Amazon is building out more cashierless stores (and Walmart is also at work on introducing more cashierless stores.) Now, let’s say that you are currently a cashier. 2-5 years from now (depending upon where you’re currently working and which stores are in your community), what are you going to do? The opportunities for such a position will be fewer and fewer. Who can help you do what Michelle mentioned here:

Working learners will also need help articulating their learning goals and envisioning a future for themselves. People don’t know how to translate their skills from one industry to another. How does a student begin to understand that 30% of what they already know could be channeled into a totally different and potentially promising pathway they never even knew was within reach?

And that cashier may have had a tough time with K-12 education and/or with higher education. As Michelle writes:

Many adults may have no interest in coming back to college. Out of the 37 million Americans with some college and no degree, many have already failed one or twice before and will be wholly uninterested in experiencing more educational trauma. We can’t just say, “Here’s a MOOC, or here’s an online degree, or a 6- to 12-week immersive bootcamp.”

And like the cashier in this example…we are quickly approaching an era where, I believe, many of us will need to reinvent ourselves in order to:

stay marketable
keep bread and butter on the table
continue to have a sense of purpose and meaning in our lives

Higher ed, if it wants to remain relevant, must pick up the pace of experimentation and increase the willingness to innovate, and to develop new business models — to develop new “learning channels” so to speak. Such channels need to be:

Up-to-date
Serving relevant data and information– especially regarding the job market and which jobs appear to be safe for the next 5-10 years
Inexpensive/affordable
Highly convenient

5 trends poised to shake up higher education in 2018 [Arnett]

On 01/03/2018, in business side of he, change, changing business models, experimentation, future of higher education, game-changing environment, higher education, ideas, learning ecosystem, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, learning spaces, new business models, traditional / tradition, by Daniel Christian

5 trends poised to shake up higher education in 2018 — from educationdive.com by Autumn Arnett

Excerpts:

Blurred lines: nonprofit and for-profit providers will work together toward new business model
U.S. higher education as a top international export
Re-imagining physical campus space
More unbundling and microcredentials
Continued focus on accelerating mobile apps

From DSC:

After looking at the items below, I wondered…

How soon before teachers/professors/trainers can quickly reconfigure their rooms’ settings via their voices? For example, faculty members will likely soon be able to quickly establish lighting, volume levels, blinds, or other types of room setups with their voices. This could be in addition to the use of beacons and smartphones that automatically recognize who just walked into the room and how that person wants the room to be configured on startup.

This functionality is probably already here…I just don’t know about it yet.

Somfy Adds Voice Control for Motorized Window Coverings with Amazon Alexa — form ravepubs.com by Sara Abrons

Also see:

As Pedagogy Changes, Learning Spaces Are Transforming Too — from thejournal.com by Dennis Pierce
The American architect Louis Sullivan coined the phrase “form follows function,” and this is true of classrooms as well.

Excerpt:

In Johnson’s classroom at H.D. Isenberg Elementary School in Salisbury, NC, students can choose from a variety of seating options. There are tables for students to collaborate in groups of four, as well as bar-style seating on taller stools and even a few couches where they can sit comfortably while they work or read independently. The school provided the tables, and Johnson supplied the rest of the furniture himself.

To teach his students about citizenship, Johnson operates his classroom like a community. “I call it the Johnsonville Learning Community,” he said.

His fourth- and fifth-grade students can earn currency by coming to class each day and successfully completing assignments, and they also hold various classroom jobs. “The students who keep the classroom clean are part of our janitorial service,” he explained. “The student who brings things to the office is our delivery service.” Students use part of their currency to pay “rent” each month, and that entitles them to sit where they want.

Johnson’s school system is a 1-to-1 district, and every student is given an iPad to take home. Much of his instruction is project-based, with students working in small groups on tasks using curriculum from sources such as Defined STEM. In one recent project, his students used 3D modeling software on their iPads to create a multi-touch book about the human body systems.

Johnson’s classroom is an example of how changes in both the design of the learning space and the teaching that takes place there have combined to making learning much more engaging and effective for students.

A growing body of research suggests that the design of a learning space can have a significant effect on student success. For instance, a study by researchers at the University of Salford in England found that classroom design can have a 25 percent impact, either positive or negative, on student achievement over the course of an academic year — with factors such as color, complexity, flexibility, lighting and student choice having the most influence.

From DSC:
I saw the word CHOICE (or some variant of it) mentioned several times in this article. That’s a helpful step in developing the kind of mindset that our students will need in the future. Making choices, thinking on their feet, being able to adapt and pivot, NOT looking to be spoon fed by anyone — because that’s likely not going to happen once they graduate.

When redesigning learning spaces, let the type of learning experiences you want to foster be your guide, Jakes advised. “Focus on experiences, not things,” he said. “This is not about furniture; it’s about the learning. What experiences do I want to create for students? Then, what design would support that?”

David Jakes

WE ARE NOT READY FOR THIS! Per Forrester Research: In US, a net loss of 7% of jobs to automation — in 2018!

On 11/13/2017, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, active learning, adult learning, Amazon, Apple, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, Asia, Australia, bots, business, Canada, career development, change, collaboration, colleges, community colleges, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, credentialing, dangers of the status quo, Daniel S. Christian, data related items, digital learning, disruption, education reform, education technology, emerging technologies, Europe, Facebook / Meta Platforms, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, global / globalization, Google, heutagogy, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), IBM, ideas, innovation, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, internet, learner profiles, learning, learning agents, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, legislatures / government / legal, lifelong learning, microlearning, Microsoft, more voice more choice more control, online learning, organizational change, pace of change, platforms, professional development, reinvent, research, robotics, second screen apps, society, staying relevant, strategy, streams of content, surviving, technologies for your home, the downsides of how people use tech, training / L&D, trends, UK, United States, universities, vendors, vision/possibilities, web-based collaboration, workplace, by Daniel Christian

Forrester predicts that AI-enabled automation will eliminate 9% of US jobs in 2018 — from forbes.com by Gil Press

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

A new Forrester Research report, Predictions 2018: Automation Alters The Global Workforce, outlines 10 predictions about the impact of AI and automation on jobs, work processes and tasks, business success and failure, and software development, cybersecurity, and regulatory compliance.

We will see a surge in white-collar automation, half a million new digital workers (bots) in the US, and a shift from manual to automated IT and data management. “Companies that master automation will dominate their industries,” Forrester says. Here’s my summary of what Forrester predicts will be the impact of automation in 2018:

Automation will eliminate 9% of US jobs but will create 2% more.
In 2018, 9% of US jobs will be lost to automation, partly offset by a 2% growth in jobs supporting the “automation economy.” Specifically impacted will be back-office and administrative, sales, and call center employees. A wide range of technologies, from robotic process automation and AI to customer self-service and physical robots will impact hiring and staffing strategies as well as create a need for new skills.

Your next entry-level compliance staffer will be a robot.

From DSC:

**Are we ready for a net loss of 7% of jobs in our workforce due to automation — next year? Last I checked, it was November 2017, and 2018 will be here before we know it.**

Are we ready for this?!

AS OF TODAY, can we reinvent ourselves fast enough given our current educational systems, offerings, infrastructures, and methods of learning?

My answer: No, we can’t. But we need to be able to — and very soon!

There are all kinds of major issues and ramifications when people lose their jobs — especially this many people and jobs! The ripple effects will be enormous and very negative unless we introduce new ways for how people can learn new things — and quickly!

That’s why I’m big on trying to establish a next generation learning platform, such as the one that I’ve been tracking and proposing out at Learning from the Living [Class] Room. It’s meant to provide societies around the globe with a powerful, next generation learning platform — one that can help people reinvent themselves quickly, cost-effectively, conveniently, & consistently! It involves providing, relevant, up-to-date streams of content that people can subscribe to — and drop at any time. It involves working in conjunction with subject matter experts who work with teams of specialists, backed up by suites of powerful technologies. It involves learning with others, at any time, from any place, at any pace. It involves more choice, more control. It involves blockchain-based technologies to feed cloud-based learner profiles and more.

But likely, bringing such a vision to fruition will require a significant amount of collaboration. In my mind, some of the organizations that should be at the table here include:

Some of the largest players in the tech world, such as Amazon, Google, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, and/or Facebook
Some of the vendors that already operate within the higher ed space — such as Salesforce.com, Ellucian, and/or Blackboard
Some of the most innovative institutions of higher education — including their faculty members, instructional technologists, instructional designers, members of administration, librarians, A/V specialists, and more
The U.S. Federal Government — for additional funding and the development of policies to make this vision a reality

Learning Ecosystems

DC: How soon before we can do this with learning-related spaces/scenes/ALCs & more?

5 trends poised to shake up higher education in 2018 [Arnett]

DC: How soon before teachers/professors/trainers can quickly reconfigure their rooms’ settings via their voices?

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THE FINDINGS

Are we ready for a net loss of 7% of jobs in our workforce due to automation — *next year*? Last I checked, it was November 2017, and 2018 will be here before we know it.

***Are we ready for this?! ***

AS OF TODAY, can we reinvent ourselves fast enough given our current educational systems, offerings, infrastructures, and methods of learning?

My answer: No, we can’t. But we need to be able to — and very soon!

Categories

Tags

**Are we ready for a net loss of 7% of jobs in our workforce due to automation — next year? Last I checked, it was November 2017, and 2018 will be here before we know it.**

Are we ready for this?!