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. 

 

Are you marking the boundaries between remote and online learning? — from linkedin.com by Amrit Ahluwalia

Excerpt:

As we shift from a three-stage life model to a 100-Year Life model, ongoing and continuing education is going to become a standard part of the lives of every student currently pursuing a degree, and for almost every adult currently in the workforce.

It’s really important that this experience doesn’t taint their perspective of online learning, because it’s more than likely that they’ll need to leverage online learning to maintain their career progression later in life.

In the early stages of the transition, however, it looks like both learners and faculty might be really embracing the possibilities offered by remote learning technologies.

 

It’s the dawning of a new day in the job market. Here’s what that means for higher ed — from edsurge.com by Sean Gallagher

Excerpts:

As we enter a recession, many experts believe that the unemployment rate will spike well into the double digits—to 15 percent according to Goldman Sachs, or as high as 32 percent according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Whatever the exact figure, we’ve gone quickly from nearly full employment to tens of millions of Americans being out of work in a transformative “100-year flood.” Hopefully, this economic disruption will be as short as possible —but a shift of this magnitude will have both immediate and long-lasting implications for the higher education ecosystem in addition to the world of work itself.

According to past opinion polls we’ve conducted at Northeastern University, American workers recognize that lifelong learning is critical to staying prepared for these ongoing technology-related changes in the job market. Upskilling workers to compete in a more technology-driven job market—and developing human skills to augment or work alongside smart machines—is now even more of an imperative.

What jobs employers will be hiring for—and what professional programs learners will be interested in pursuing—will also inevitably be reshaped.

 

Growth-Minded Pivot to Online Teaching— from scholarlyteacher.com by Kathryn Smith and Todd Zakrajsek

Excerpt:

What is essential when one starts to teach in an unfamiliar arena is to keep an open mind, be open to change, and expect some mistakes.

Now is the perfect time to embrace a growth mindset regarding teaching online. Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, states, “… growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments, everyone can change and grow through application and experience.”

Having this growth mindset allows for a different definition of success, and that definition can change daily. Right now, you are likely in a position that requires you to reassess your educational practices, your teaching, and your content delivery method. You are facing challenges in learning a new skill set and an opportunity to model for your students how to grow as well.

Discussion Question:
When a pandemic arrives, few people are asked how they would like to proceed. Online learning was a global health decision. When you first started to think about moving your courses online, did your first inclination feel more growth minded or fix minded? Explain.

 

Future Today Institute's 2020 tech trends report

Key takeaways of this report:

  • Welcome to the Synthetic Decade.
  • You’ll soon have augmented hearing and sight.
  • A.I.-as-a-Service and Data-as-a-Service will reshape business.
  • China has created a new world order.
  • Home and office automation is nearing the mainstream.
  • Everyone alive today is being scored.
  • We’ve traded FOMO for abject fear.
  • It’s the end of forgetting.
  • Our new trust economy is being formed.

 

My wife sent me this video from John Bennett, a math teacher. This was posted to YouTube back on 11/8/11.

In fact, if it were up to me, I’d would no longer require math to be taught…in middle school and high school.

NOTES:

  • 300 million people in the U.S. (as John mentioned back in October 2011)
    • 1.5 million engineers
    • 1/2 of a percent; and you can add another 1/2 of a percent for other kinds of jobs that require that kind of math
    • That leaves 99% of us in the United States who don’t use what we learned about in middle school and high school math classes. But the problem is, math has caused major stress for people in the last 40 years.
  • John Bennett had some major cognitive dissonance to the reasons WHY he was suggesting his students know the math concepts that he was trying to relay.
  • He came to ask, “When do most of us use math in real life?”
    • Money. Financial stuff. Balancing checkbook. Tipping. Cooking and carpentry.
  • Why are we still teaching algebra? Because it teaches us about inductive and deductive reasoning. Math helps us develop that kind of reasoning.
  • So a better plan would be to:
    • Let people who want to take math in middle school and high school take it.
    • For the rest of the students, provide strategy games and logic puzzles that help develop those cognitive reasoning skills.

From DSC:
When this math teacher meets people out in society, people confess how much stress math brought to them in school….and they’re aren’t joking.

Given that we are all required to be lifelong learners these days, I love what John Bennett is saying here…because we really aren’t serving society at large by requiring math be taught in middle school and high school.

  • It causes stress and very negative learning experiences for many people.
  • We don’t use it. (By the way, I could plug and chug ok, but I had no idea what I was doing. No real understanding. I haven’t used algebra and/or calculus since my youth.)

What does it take to change our curricula like that?! Is it possible? I sure hope so.

 

An analysis of the value of the ways of learning at work — from modernworkplacelearning.com by Jane Hart

An analysis of the value of the ways of learning at work

However, I think the most interesting profile of them all is for those who are in non-salaried/freelance positions in the workplace (8%). These people still highly value learning from the daily work, but for them learning from professional networking and access to external resources and blogs and feeds is much more important to them than through internal resources and courses. Interestingly, though conferences are valued less than the average profile – which is probably due to cost and the more significant fact that they can learn more efficiently in other ways.

I believe this is the profile that is going to become more and more relevant and important as the work environment changes, where there are no jobs for life and everyone needs to take responsibility for their own learning and development.

 

Strategy Matters | Elliott Masie on where we’re headed — from performancematters.podbean.com by Bob Mosher and Elliott Masie
Listen as Bob Mosher and Elliott Masie discuss how learning is changing and what suggestions Elliott gave to two different airlines.

#corporatelearning #training #L&D
#strategy #learning #everydaylearning

 

How online education went from teaching reform to economic necessity for colleges — from edsurge.com by Robert Ubell

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

When online was first introduced as a pedagogical advance, faculty members often rose up against it—or more often, just ignored it, the most devastating form of resistance. If it weren’t for economic necessity, online might not have grown to the force it has today—these days a third of the nation’s higher ed students take courses online.

Millions of working adults must turn to digital degrees to improve their employability in a post-industrial economy that demands higher-level skills than on the assembly line. Corporations are being pressed to find agile, high-tech workers for their digital processes and products. Powerful new digital-recruitment techniques now make massive global markets open to any college with deep enough pockets.

From DSC:
The market will decide how colleges and universities will change — and which ones will survive. Presidents, provosts, members of administration, board members, and faculty members do not control this anymore (if they ever did).

 

How higher education can adapt to the future of work — from weforum.org by Farnam Jahanian, President, Carnegie Mellon University; with thanks to Evan Kirstel for sharing this here

Excerpts:

Embrace the T-shaped approach to knowledge
The broad set of skills needed by tomorrow’s workforce also affects our approach to educational structure. At Carnegie Mellon University—like many other institutions—we have been making disciplinary boundaries much more porous and have launched programmes at the edges and intersections of traditional fields, such as behavioral economics, computational biology, and the nexus of design, arts, and technology. We believe this approach prepares our students for a future where thinking and working across boundaries will be vital. The value of combining both breadth and depth in higher education has also led to many universities embracing “T-shaped” teaching and learning philosophies, in which vertical (deep disciplinary) expertise is combined with horizontal (cross-cutting) knowledge.

Invest in personalised, technology-enhanced learning
The demand for more highly skilled workers continues to grow. Recent analysis of U.S. data by The Wall Street Journal found that more than 40% of manufacturing workers now have a college degree. By 2022, manufacturers are projected to employ more college graduates than workers with a high-school education or less. Technology-enhanced learning can help us keep up with demand and offer pathways for the existing workforce to gain new skills. AI-based learning tools developed in the past decade have incredible potential to personalise education, enhance college readiness and access, and improve educational outcomes. And perhaps most importantly, technology-enhanced learning has the compelling potential to narrow socioeconomic and racial achievement gaps among students.

The rapid pace of today’s advances requires a more comprehensive workforce and education strategy across a spectrum of measures, including policy, access, programmes and outreach. The private sector, government, educators and policy-makers must work together to deliver multiple pathways to opportunity for young people looking for their first foothold in the job market, as well as to re-skill and up-skill workers striving to maintain their place in the workforce. 

 

How innovations in voice technology are reshaping education — from edsurge.com by Diana Lee
Voice is the most accessible form you can think of when you think about any interface. In education, it’s already started to take off.

It could be basic questions about, “Am I taking a class to become X?” or “How strong are my skills relative to other people?” An assistant can help with that. It could potentially be a coach, something that follows you the rest of your life for education. I’m excited about that. People that can’t normally get access to this kind of information will get access to it. That’s the future.

From DSC:
The use of voice will likely be a piece of a next-generation learning platform.

Voice will likely be a piece of the next generation learning platform

 

Healthy looks different on every body...and learning looks different with every mind.

From DSC:
What I mean by this is this:

While I certainly agree that research has produced excellent, proven, effective pedagogies that work with many students (the majority even), the fact is, learning is messy. When a child walks into a classroom, there isn’t even one other child with the exact same neural situation.

Nor is there even one other student with the exact same experiences, background, passions, motivations, interests, etc. I’ve experienced this with our daughter who isn’t a part of the 80% that the typical education train addresses. Look out if you are part of the 10% of either side of the bell curve! As your learning experiences are too costly to address and likely won’t be addressed in many cases.

All that said, I still agree that the teaching and learning strategies are still highly relevant across the masses. My point is that there is still a lot of diversity out there. They say that learning is messy for a reason. If you doubt that, go sit in on an IEP sometime.

 

Play is disappearing from kindergarten. It’s hurting kids. — from edsurge.com by  Joe Martin

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

In an increasing number of schools, teachers of very young students are pressured to pack every moment of the day with structured, academically rigorous tasks. One recent whitepaper linked the practice to preparing kids for the long road of schooling ahead, in which progress is measured through standardized testing starting in third grade.

Friedrich Froebel, a pedagogue of modern education, coined the term “kindergarten” in 1840 after recognizing the importance of play in the development of young children. Inspired by the idea of a garden, he designed a classroom where the teacher presented children with objects, which they were allowed to play with in any way they could imagine. When they lost interest in one object, they would be presented with a new one to spark curiosity and creativity. Children were encouraged to grow and flourish in this free form, play-based environment.

From DSC:
Given that we are all into a lifelong learning situation now, I vote for more importance being placed on whether someone enjoyed their learning experience. That said, I know there is struggle in learning…and learning in the struggle. But we focus so much on grades and standardized testing. This robs the joy from the teaching and learning environment — for the teachers as well as for the kids.

Also see:

 

Notes from Stewart Hase’s keynote (Feb 2020) — with thanks to Dr. Lisa Marie Blaschke in Germany for her Tweet on this

  • The commodification of education – turns out sausages
    or
  • Are we creating more Greta Thunbergs?

Creating learning experiences where people are not sausages. Policymakers don’t get it. Practitioners do.

~11:00 mark –> Learner agency; have control over what they can learn about (inserted graphic from DSC below)

Heutagogy (self-determined learning)

  • …the learner is a partner (agent) in designing and realizing their own learning (Hase & Kenyon, 2000)

PAH continuum – Pedagogy –> Andragogy –>  Heutagogy

Hobby – learned to do it but didn’t go to school for it. How did you go about learning it?

  • Listened to radio, watched YouTube videos, watched other people, trial and error, repeated activity, conversations/reflections/group learning, read books, break things down into smaller parts, seek out a mentor, exploring, testing hypothesis, fail, get stuck and find a way through

Kids know how to do heutagogy – very natural; self-determined learning.

~21:45 To what extent do we incorporate heutagogy into our classrooms?

  • Context and experience – the neurons you bring to the learning table
  • Competence and capability
  • Negotiated learning; let the learner contextualize stuff for you
  • Experiential learning
  • Flexible assessment
  • Chunking the learning
  • Chunk the assessment
  • Flipped classroom
  • Project-based learning

The learning leader: New skills

  • Happy with ambiguity – have to give up control and power
  • Have to trust people
  • Relationship oriented
  • Process not content oriented
  • Coach and guide
  • Scientist
  • Facilitator
 
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