adult learning

From DSC:
As a follow up to The Chegg situation is worse than you think [Feldstein] (which discussed cheating, buying answers, selling answers, proctoring software, and more), it seems to me that one of the challenges that we face in our teaching and learning efforts has to do with the transformation of our students: Helping them move from a K-16 world to the world of work. The below graphic tries to capture that idea.

Transforming gameplayers into lifelong learners.

DSC: This is a picture I took of the Michigan Hall of Justice, in Lansing, MI.

What I mean to say is that our learners’ future clients don’t care about our learners’ ability to cram and score high on tests and then forget about topic XYZ. They want our learners to know and be able to apply topic XYZ in order to solve their problems/issues/needs. (Not to mention that being able to cram and do well on a high-stakes test is not nearly as helpful as spacing out their retrieval of topic XYZ over a much longer span of time.)

I hope that our students are hearing/experiencing from us: “We’re on your team. We’re here to help you.” And being transparent with our teaching techniques is key (i.e., here’s WHY I’m assigning this item or asking you to do this activity).

A message about learning from the C-suite — from chieflearningofficer.com by Patricia A. McLagan
Executives are increasingly saying they want to create “learning organizations” and support “lifelong learning.” So, what should executives be saying to their workforce about learning today? Consider this sample letter to employees from the C-suite.

Excerpts:

How are you keeping up your skills and knowledge in our increasingly complex and fast-changing world of work? As today’s pandemic turmoil reminds us, it is hard to predict how the future will evolve. But one thing we do know is that continuous learning will be a key survival meta-skill for all of us — learning that each of us consciously guides every day, moment to moment, alone, in teams, with any resource, anywhere and anytime.
…
Consider: More than 50 percent of today’s jobs will probably disappear or change radically within 10 years. There are many reasons for this.
…
Beyond technology, companies like ours need more agility, innovation and self-management from everyone. We used to manage more by job descriptions, and you were best described as a box on the organization chart — probably with little expectation that you could experiment, take risks, and act with discretion and autonomy. But today and into the future, your skills and creative thinking matter more. Your “job” responsibilities shift as you move into and out of teams and as we call on you to support new strategies, customer groups and priorities.

From DSC:
I really appreciated reading this solid article from Patricia McLagan. She captured so many solid points. That said, I was bummed to see the following item included in this article (emphasis DSC):

Of course, our company is committed to supporting your learning and development, to providing formal training and access to learning opportunities for everyone. But even in the best of times, we will only be able to formally support a small part of what you will need and want. This is why I am sending this note to you: to tell you that we care about your learning and development, that we will do our best to support it, but that 95 percent of your learning is in your hands.

Our company is committed to supporting your learning development — yeh…right…all 5% of it.
Whoopie. The other 95% of it belongs to you and me. (Which reminds me that words are so easy to say but much harder to truly back up.) And you and I will likely do it on your/our own time. That seems to be more of the reality…the expectation…especially when job cuts are occurring all over the place and the job plates continue to expand for those who survived the cuts.

My experience over my career has been that corporations used to promote and truly support their employees’ professional development. They sent more people to courses and significantly helped many people obtain their MBA’s as well as other relevant master’s degrees and/or certifications/ and/or just to support some professional interests.

For example, I’m forever indebted to one of my formers bosses, Irvin Charles Coleman III. I worked for Irv at Kraft Foods’ HQ’s and he once let me go to a seminar on Photoshop. Though I used Photoshop in my work, it wasn’t in my formal description. That seminar changed many things for me. It supported my growth and learning and it fed my passion for designing and creating content.

I’m sure this kind of thing still occurs, but from what I can tell, it doesn’t happen at nearly the level that it used to. That said, I don’t blame the corporate world for getting bummed out at their employees that they had invested in — only to see those same employees grab the degrees and credentials and leave for greener pastures. Through the years, it seemed like the corporate world backed off from providing such a level of training/professional development.

These days, it seems like the corporations and the businesses out there have the hiring expectation that you will hit the ground running from day one. Learning and development are up to you and me. Nevermind that the way learning is supposed to go is that you:

introduce the learning objectives to someone
give them the information/content
provide the relevant and aligned learning activities that help them truly engage with the content
provide aligned formative and summative assessments along the way to ascertain whether they learned the material/concepts or not.

So I’m amazed that corporations are putting recent grads through their own tests on things that many of these students have never actually studied. (Yeh, I can hear the push backs now…and while I agree with some of them, it’s not fair to the students. They just followed what the colleges and universities offered for$100,000-$400,000+).

I could go on, but I need to go do my taxes. Gotta run. I hope to pick this line of thought up later.

2U, Guild Education Partner to Expand Online Education for Adult Workers — from edsurge.com by Tony Wan

Excerpt:

But the current crisis is anything but, and an increasingly remote workforce will only accelerate the need for new skills and habits to keep companies running.
…
2U, a publicly traded company, will make its degree programs, short courses and online coding “bootcamps” available to Guild Education’s network of employers. That’s over 500 programs, spanning more than 30 disciplines, that they will have access to. It’s largely up to the employer to choose which ones they want to subsidize for their workers, Freedman says.

“Businesses are eliminating some roles, yet are desperate to hire for others. But you cannot hire away to solve what is fundamentally a training problem.” In other words, it makes more sense to invest in training internal talent, rather than firing people and hiring replacements.

Look at the choice and control possibilities mentioned in the following except from Immersive Reader in Canvas: Improve Reading Comprehension for All Students

When building courses and creating course content in Canvas, Immersive Reader lets users:

Change font size, text spacing, and background color
Split up words into syllables
Highlight verbs, nouns, adjectives, and sub-clauses
Choose between two fonts optimised to help with reading
Read text aloud
Change the speed of reading
Highlight sets of one, three, or five lines for greater focus
Select a word to see a related picture and hear the word read aloud as many times as necessary

Also see:

All about the Immersive Reader — from education.microsoft.com

Teacher, Are You There? Being “Present” in Online Learning — from er.educause.edu by Richard West

Excerpt:

Video technologies are part of that shift in helping online learners feel connected to teachers and peers. This connection comes from people developing the sense that they are “present” in the class, even if they are not physically in the same room. How is it possible to be present when you are physically separated?

Interplay Raises $18M to Build a Lynda.com for Essential Skilled Trades [Wan]

On 02/20/2021, in 21st century, adult learning, Alternatives, business, career development, vendors, Virtual Reality (VR) / worlds / learning, workplace, by Daniel Christian

Interplay Raises $18M to Build a Lynda.com for Essential Skilled Trades — from edsurge.com by Tony Wan

Excerpt:

Plumbing is just one of many good-paying skilled trades that remain in high demand but which have largely been glossed over by the education technology industry, says Doug Donovan, co-founder and CEO of Interplay Learning. “There’s been a lot of great edtech serving the knowledge worker, such as tools like Pluralsight. But there’s a vacuum in the digital marketplace for skills for hands-on workers.”

Time for Reinvention, Not Just Replication or Revision — from insidehighered.com by Ray Schroeder
With enrollments falling, college budgets under strain and employers dissatisfied with the relevance of graduates’ learning, now is a time for more than replication or revision — it is time for reinvention.

Excerpt:

We are at the confluence of massive economic, technologic and social changes that demand higher education do more than small fixes. We will not thrive if we merely tweak the system to replicate practices of the lecture hall in an online delivery system. This is not an empty warning — universities across the country are closing programs, laying off staff and faculty, and teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. I have personally been tracking these economic disadvantages for some time now.

Here are the key factors we must consider…(see rest of article)

Our centuries-old model of admitting 18-year-old high school graduates for a four-, five- or six-year baccalaureate, then sending them out for lifelong careers in business and industry is no longer relevant.

Public Colleges Are Going After Adult Students Online. Are They Already Too Late? — from chronicle.com by Lee Gardner

Excerpts:

But competing with the established national players in online education presents a tall order. The so-called mega –universities have a huge head start and deep pockets, two advantages public universities are unlikely to overcome easily, if at all.
…
Mega-universities have spent more than a decade building and honing well-funded and sophisticated operations that function on a scale few start-ups can hope to match. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year marketing themselves nationwide to students.

Mega-universities have also developed recruitment and admissions operations designed to make things as easy as possible for working adults to enroll.

Remote Learning Isn’t Just for Kids [Hannon]

On 02/10/2021, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, adult learning, Alternatives, digital learning, distance education, education, education technology, emerging technologies, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, generational differences, higher education, homeschooling/homeschoolers, ideas, innovation, K-12 related, law schools, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, learning preferences, lifelong learning, online learning, personalized/customized learning, platforms, remote teaching and learning, trends, United States, universities, vendors, web-based collaboration, by Daniel Christian

Remote Learning Isn’t Just for Kids — from nytimes.com by Kerry Hannon
New online tools and an array of remote classes and programs are ramping up education and training for adults.

Excerpt:

Adult education, however, is “the Wild West” of education technology, according to Mr. Yoquinto. There are many outlets experimenting with ways to get a handle on the online adult education marketplace, including community colleges and universities, for-profit learning platforms, workshop providers and nonprofit organizations.

Above resource per Laurie Burruss out on LinkedIn:

The internet has empowered adult learners by providing new online tools to ramp up education and training. “The need for workers to keep pace with fast-moving economic, cultural and technological changes, combined with longer careers, will add up to great swaths of adults who need to learn more than generations past — and faster than ever,” said Luke Yoquinto, a research associate at the M.I.T. AgeLab and co-author of “Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn

How Much Has Covid Cost Colleges? $183 Billion — from chronicle.com by Paul N. Friga

Excerpt:

How bad is it? To answer that, my colleagues and I sought to go beyond surveys. We conducted an extensive review of publicly announced revenue and budget news from the top 400 universities in U.S. News & World Report, as well as its top 100 liberal-arts colleges, drawing from news released from March through December. We were able to obtain data from 107 of those institutions (21 percent). The results are dire. Our research suggests that we are experiencing the biggest financial losses our sector has ever faced. The institutions we tracked averaged an estimated 14-percent aggregate decline in revenues across fiscal years 2020 and 2021, and further losses loom as drops in enrollment, tuition freezes, and Covid-related expenses continue.

What do these cuts and losses add up to? We estimate the impact as follows: $85 billion in lost revenues, $24 billion for Covid-related expenses, and $74 billion in anticipated future decreases in state funding. That adds up to a whopping $183 billion.

Also see:

65 Percent of Colleges Raised Less in 2020 Than 2019, Survey Finds — from philanthropy.com by Emily Haynes
Donations to colleges stayed flat at $50B in fiscal 2020 — from highereddive.com by Natalie Schwartz

Learning Ecosystem: Past, Present, and Future [Das]

On 02/04/2021, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, adult learning, career development, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, digital learning, elearning, India, learning, learning ecosystem, lifelong learning, online media, training / L&D, trends, vendors, workplace, by Daniel Christian

Learning Ecosystem: Past, Present, and Future — from elearningindustry.com by Satyabrata Das
When we talk of an ecosystem, the first thought that comes to our minds is a biological ecosystem comprising of various species that live in harmony within a particular environmental setup or region.

Learning is no longer a standalone learner-teacher-content interaction, but much more. It has now become an enriched complex mechanism that has the potential to truly maximize the learning outcome—provided it is being nurtured and guided properly. A word of caution must be said here, an ill-nurtured learning ecosystem might equally be detrimental for the organization in shaping the capabilities of its future workforce.

The eLearning industry is surely going to play a big role in shaping the learning ecosystem and making it more fruitful, both for individuals and corporations.

Flipping Virtual Classrooms for More Impact [Bendici]

On 01/30/2021, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, A/V -- audio/visual, adjunct faculty, adult learning, blended learning, communications, communities of practice, community colleges, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate universities / corporate training, digital audio, digital learning, digital video, distance education, education, education technology, flipping -- inverted learning, higher education, hybrid learning, instructional design, K-12 related, law schools, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, liberal arts, lifelong learning, media/film, more voice more choice more control, multimedia, online learning, online media, productivity / tips and tricks, relationships, student teaching/teacher education, student-related, teachers, teaching & learning, teaching online, training / L&D, trends, universities, by Daniel Christian

Flipping Virtual Classrooms for More Impact — from techlearning.com by Ray Bendici
Flipping virtual classrooms can help maximize teaching time and resources

Excerpt:

The mantra of flipped learning is that you can reach every student in every class every day, said Bergman. So if you have less synchronous time, you need to provide more time with your students one-on-one to work on the hard stuff, and flipped mastery learning, in particular, accommodates that.

“Flipped learning teachers have been preparing for the pandemic for the past 10 years,” Bergman said. “It’s really a great way to amplify your reach to teach.”

When the pandemic hit, Bergman and his flipped learning team realized that the most important thing is connections with students and the physical time spent with them. “So what’s the best use of your face-to-face class time?” Bergman said. “I’m going to argue it’s not you standing up and then introducing new content, it’s giving students the new content first and allowing them to apply, analyze, and evaluate it.”

DC: If this chart were to be tackled within a course, it seems to me that the Jigsaw Method could be useful — if not absolutely required.https://t.co/Sx2EFMIIrv https://t.co/ehUq1BL3B2 #legaltech #legal #law #lawyers #legaloperations #lawschool #pedagogy #teaching pic.twitter.com/wVrYZF377O

— Daniel Christian (he/him/his) (@dchristian5) January 29, 2021

Along the lines of technologies’ potential impact on the legal realm — especially Access to Justice (#A2J), see:

Meet the 27 startups pioneering the Justice Tech market — medium.com by Felicity Conrad

Starting with coining the umbrella term “Justice Tech,” we’re developing a common language, a community of folks working in the space, and formalizing the newly-minted Justice Tech market.

Texas Bar and Paladin Partner to Launch Statewide Pro Bono Portal — from lawsitesblog.com by Bob Ambrogi; with thanks to Gabe Teninbaum for this resource as well as the one mentioned in the above Tweet

Excerpt:

A free online portal launched today in Texas is designed to help lawyers find volunteer opportunities and assist residents of the state find help with their legal needs.

The new portal, Pro Bono Texas, was launched as a partnership between The State Bar of Texas and the justice tech company Paladin. The portal provides volunteer lawyers and law students with a centralized location to search and sign up for pro bono opportunities across the state.

A Strategic Roadmap for The Next Decade [Westervelt]

On 01/26/2021, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, adult learning, Alternatives, Amazon, change, changing business models, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, collaboration, colleges, community colleges, corporate / business world, cost of getting a degree, dangers of the status quo, data related items, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, Google, higher education, ideas, innovation, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, lifelong learning, platforms, reinvent, society, staying relevant, strategy, student-related, surviving, technology (general), trends, United States, universities, user experience (UX), vendors, web-based collaboration, workplace, by Daniel Christian

A Strategic Roadmap for The Next Decade — from evolllution.com by Rob Westervelt

Excerpts:

Get obsessed with your learner
Adopt more than one model
Align with partners
Create lifelong learning models
Build the system of the future

MOOC Enrollment Explodes in 2020 — from campustechnology.com by Dian Schaffhauser

Excerpt:

According to a new report by Class Central, a company that tracks massive open online courses, of all learners who have registered for MOOCs throughout their history, a third did so last year. Coursera, the largest MOOC operator, added nearly four times the number of new registered users, exploding from 8 million in 2019 to 31 million in 2020 — a rise of 387 percent. Dhawal Shah, founder of Class Central, estimated that Coursera’s total number of users is currently 76 million.

Whereas topics in technology, business and career development dominated pre-COVID-19, during the pandemic learners focused on wider interests: Art and design, self-improvement, the humanities, communication skills, health & medicine and foreign languages surfaced in the top 10 subjects.

Also see:

Learning Ecosystems

Reflections on “A message about learning from the C-suite” [McLagan]

2U, Guild Education Partner to Expand Online Education for Adult Workers [Wan]

Interplay Raises $18M to Build a Lynda.com for Essential Skilled Trades [Wan]

Time for Reinvention, Not Just Replication or Revision [Schroeder]

Public Colleges Are Going After Adult Students Online. Are They Already Too Late? [Gardner]

How Much Has Covid Cost Colleges? $183 Billion [Friga]

Learning Ecosystem: Past, Present, and Future [Das]

DC: The Jigsaw method would be required here I think. #legaltech #legaloperations #vendors

MOOC Enrollment Explodes in 2020 [Schaffhauser]

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