Michigan

Learning ecosystems across the globe are going through massive changes! [Christian]

On 03/25/2020, in adjunct faculty, adult learning, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, Asia, Australia, business side of he, Canada, change, CMS/LMS, collaboration, colleges, communities of practice, community colleges, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, Daniel S. Christian, digital audio, digital learning, digital storytelling, digital textbooks, digital video, disruption, distance education, education, education technology, elearning, Europe, face-to-face, faculty/staff, flipping -- inverted learning, game-changing environment, higher education, homeschooling/homeschoolers, ideas, India, instructional design, internet, IT in HE, K-12 related, law schools, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning spaces, Michigan, mobile learning, multimedia, online learning, online media, online tutoring, parents/guardians, pedagogy, personalized/customized learning, platforms, reinvent, remote teaching and learning, society, staying relevant, student-related, surviving, teachers, teaching & learning, teaching online, technologies for your home, telecommunications, telepresence, television, tools, training / L&D, TVs, UK, United States, universities, user experience (UX), videoconferencing, virtual field trips, virtual K-12 schools, Virtual Reality (VR) / worlds / learning, virtual tutoring, vision/possibilities, web-based collaboration, webinars, workplace, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
Due to the impacts of the Coronavirus, learning ecosystems across the globe are going through massive changes!

Each of us has our own learning ecosystem, and the organizations that we work for have their own learning ecosystems as well. Numerous teachers, professors, and trainers around the world are now teaching online. Their toolboxes are expanding with the addition of several new tools and some new knowledge. I believe that will be one of the silver linings from the very tough situations/times that we find ourselves in.

Expanding our teaching toolboxes

At the WMU-Cooley Law School, our learning ecosystem is also fluid and continues to morph. This blog posting speaks to those changes.

Learning from the Living [Class] Room: Due to the impacts from the Coronavirus, this is happening today across many countries. But this vision is just beginning to develop. We haven’t seen anything yet.

From DSC:
Normally I don’t advertise or “plug” where I work, but as our society is in serious need of increasing Access to Justice (#A2J) & promoting diversity w/in the legal realm, I need to post this video.

Getting Campuses Ready for the Coronavirus — from insidehighered.com by Chuck Staben
What should leaders be doing to prepare their colleges if the situation worsens? Chuck Staben offers suggestions.

Colleges Prepare for Coronavirus Outbreaks on Campus — from wsj-com by Melissa Korn
Task forces map out prospects for quarantines, class cancellations as schools brace for virus spread

Teaching during a campus closure…— from linkedin.com by Bill Knapp
Here are some suggestions on preparing your on-campus students in the event of an unexpected campus closure (#COVID-19).

Coronavirus Forces Universities Online — from .insidehighered.com by Lindsay McKenzie
Compelled to close their campuses to limit the spread of coronavirus, U.S. universities with Chinese branches move at lightning speed to take teaching online.

NYU Response to Coronavirus Accelerates Digital Tool Adoption — from campustechnology.com by Dian Schaffhauser

Excerpt:

Instructors conducted some 700-plus sessions during the first week, using a multitude of tools to enable live feedback and interaction in both synchronous and asynchronous ways, including learning management system NYU Classes, media sharing service NYU Stream, web and audio conference tool NYU Zoom and commenting utility VoiceThread.

Keith Ross, dean of Engineering and Computer Science at NYU Shanghai, suggested that the health crisis has one silver lining: It’s bringing the faculty up to speed with online teaching tools in quick order. In a university article about the efforts, he mused that once the crisis has passed, faculty may choose to integrate the use of some of the tools into their traditional face-to-face courses.
…
NYU Stream and VoiceThread are letting students interact asynchronously. They can watch pre-recorded videos uploaded by instructors and then take quizzes, ask questions, make annotations and communicate with classmates using text, audio and video. Also available for use: NYU Web Publishing to publish and manage blogs; Slido and Piazza to conduct community voting and quizzes; Slack to support office hours; and Examity to proctor exams remotely.

How to Respond to Coronavirus: 6 Steps for Schools — from edweek.org by Mark Lieberman

From DSC:
By not listening/taking action nearly enough through the last several decades, the backlash continues to build against colleges and universities — institutions of traditional higher education who didn’t take the rise in tuition seriously. Students graduated and left campus, and the invisible gorillas of debt being placed on students’ backs weren’t acknowledged — nor were they fought against — nearly enough. Instead, the gorillas just kept getting bigger and bigger.

Year after year, I tried to fight this trend and raise awareness of it…only to see the majority of institutions of traditional higher education do absolutely nothing. Then, as the backlash started to build, the boards and the administrations across the country began priding themselves on how their percentage increases were amongst the smallest in the area/state/nation. They should have found ways to decrease their tuition, but they didn’t. Instead, they resorted to playing games with discounts while their “retail values” kept going up and up.

The time’s coming when they will pay the piper for having done this. Just like what happened to the oil companies and to the car/truck manufactures who made megabucks (for the time being) when their vehicles kept getting bigger and bigger and when the price of oil was high. What happened? The end result was that they shot themselves in the foot. These days, Tesla — with their electric cars — is now the most valuable car company in America.

Within the realm of education…when effective, cheaper alternatives come along that still get people hired, you better look out traditional institutions of higher education. You didn’t listen. It happened on your watch. And speaking of watches, the next major one could be you watching more of your institutions close while watching your students walk out the door to pursue other, far less expensive alternatives.

Follow up comments:
I realize this is a broad swath and isn’t true for several institutions who have been fighting the fight. For example, my current employer — the WMU-Cooley Law School is reducing their tuition by 21% this fall and other institutions have reduced their tuition as well or found ways to honor “Promise” types of programs. Other institutions have done the market research and are offering more relevant, up-to-date curricula. (Don’t worry those of you who work within the liberal arts, I still support and believe in you. But we didn’t do a good enough balancing act between offering liberal arts programs and developing the needed skillsets to help students pay off those ever-growing gorillas of debt.)

The fact was that too often, those invisible gorillas of debt went unnoticed by many within higher education. And it wasn’t just the boards, administrators, presidents, and provosts out there. In fact, the full-time, tenured faculty members taught what they wanted to teach and were furious at those who dared assert that higher education was a business. (Watch a college football game on the major networks last fall? Have you seen the size of research institutions’ intellectual property-based revenues? We could go on and on.)

Anyway, what tenured faculty members offered didn’t align with what the market needed and was calling for. They offered what was in their best interests, not the students’ best interests.

Ohio, Illinois, & Michigan courts using technology to bring their services to the people [Houlberg]

On 01/24/2020, in law schools, legal technologies, legislatures / government / legal, Michigan, policy, technology (general), by Daniel Christian

Ohio, Illinois, & Michigan courts using technology to bring their services to the people — from iaals.du.edu by Michael Houlberg

Excerpt:

Each of these three technological expansions within the courts align with IAALS’ Eighteen Ways Courts Should Use Technology to Better Serve Their Customers, in which we examine ways that existing technologies can be leveraged to improve court users’ experiences.

Everyday Media Literacy — from routledge.com by Sue Ellen Christian
An Analog Guide for Your Digital Life, 1st Edition

Description:

In this graphic guide to media literacy, award-winning educator Sue Ellen Christian offers students an accessible, informed and lively look at how they can consume and create media intentionally and critically.

The straight-talking textbook offers timely examples and relevant activities to equip students with the skills and knowledge they need to assess all media, including news and information. Through discussion prompts, writing exercises, key terms, online links and even origami, readers are provided with a framework from which to critically consume and create media in their everyday lives. Chapters examine news literacy, online activism, digital inequality, privacy, social media and identity, global media corporations and beyond, giving readers a nuanced understanding of the key concepts and concerns at the core of media literacy.

Concise, creative and curated, this book highlights the cultural, political and economic dynamics of media in our contemporary society, and how consumers can mindfully navigate their daily media use. Everyday Media Literacy is perfect for students (and educators) of media literacy, journalism, education and media effects looking to build their understanding in an engaging way.

In case you missed it, WMU-Cooley’s President and Board of Directors took a look at our tuition rates and made the decision to reduce them by 21 percent starting Fall 2020! https://t.co/FjC6hk4vnE pic.twitter.com/NkCMAzoomE

— WMU-Cooley Law School (@WMUcooleylaw) October 16, 2019

From DSC:
Regular readers of this blog will know that for years, I’ve made it one of my goals to try and raise awareness of the need for institutions of higher education to lower their tuitions! For example, Yohan Na and I designed the graphic below way back in 2009.

Daniel S. Christian: My concerns with just maintaining the status quo

Through those years, I cringed when I kept hearing various Boards say, “We only increased our tuition by ___ % — the lowest percentage increase in our state.” The direction was completely wrong! It needed to go down, not up. If you work in higher ed, I encourage you to find a way for that to happen at your own institution.

So I’m very pleased to report that the WMU-Thomas M. Cooley Law School — where I work — was able to reduce tuition by 21%!!!

Don’t get me wrong, some tough decisions were made to pave the way for that to occur. But this will be the case no matter which institution of higher education that you look at. An institution will have to make some tough choices to reduce their tuition. But it HAS to occur. We can’t keep this upward trajectory going.

If we don’t change this trajectory, we will continue to put enormous gorillas (of debt) on our graduates’ backs! Such debt will take our graduates decades to pay off.

We need to be aware of these invisible gorillas of debt. That is, our students move on…and we don’t see them. But their gorillas remain.

Addendum on 10/18/19:

The 2019 Law School Experience — from info.cooley.edu

Victoria Vuletich, the assistant dean at the Grand Rapids, Michigan campus of Western Michigan University Cooley Law School, was interviewed by the State Bar of Michigan’s Legal Talk Network to discuss what the law school experience is like for the current generation of students.

Opening at WMU-Cooley Law School: Director of Human Resources

On 09/23/2019, in career development, law schools, legislatures / government / legal, Michigan, workplace, by Daniel Christian

Western Michigan’s Law School Cuts Tuition [Fain]

On 09/01/2019, in cost of getting a degree, Cost of legal services - including access, law schools, legislatures / government / legal, Michigan, United States, universities, by Daniel Christian

Western Michigan’s Law School Cuts Tuition — from insidehighered.com by Paul Fain

Excerpt:

While several highly selective law schools for the first time are charging more than $100,000 per year in total cost of attendance, Western Michigan University‘s Cooley Law School this week announcedthat it was reducing tuition rates beginning next year from $1,750 per credit hour to $1,375, a decline of 21 percent.

Cooley Law School to lower tuition by 21%, close Auburn Hills campus — from mlive.com by Julie Mack

Excerpt:

Western Michigan University Cooley Law School plans to cut its tuition by 21% in fall 2020, close its campus in Auburn Hills in December 2020 and “reduce the footprint” of its Lansing campus.

No staff reductions are planned, a press release said.

The school’s Board of Directors approved the “bold plan” this week to “sustain and strengthen the law school’s access mission” and “current and future campus efficiencies,” the press release said.

Disclosure from DSC:
The WMU-Cooley Law School is where I’ve worked since March 2018. I’m very happy to see this reduction in tuition! I’d like to see this type of price reduction occur throughout higher education.

I have learned a lot in my time at Cooley, and I have a lot more to learn. But I just wanted to say that I’m so impressed with the people who work at Cooley! They are a very welcoming, classy, caring, extremely knowledgeable, talented, mission-driven group of people. They have developed an organization that works to positively change the world and provide greater access to justice.

New Michigan court program could let you resolve legal disputes for free online [Keith]

On 08/16/2019, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, Cost of legal services - including access, ideas, internet, law schools, legislatures / government / legal, Michigan, society, by Daniel Christian

New Michigan court program could let you resolve legal disputes for free online — from freep.com by Emma Keith

Excerpts:

If you’ve got an issue with your landlord, a friend who owes you money or a serious problem with your neighbors, you may not have to take it to court.

Thanks to a new tool from the Michigan court system, some Michiganders can now solve civil disputes and small claims cases online.

MI Resolve offers users in certain Michigan counties a chance to go through an online resolution and mediation process whether or not their case has gotten to court.

The program is meant to increase equitable access to legal resources and respond to Michigan residents’ goals for their state courts, said Bridget McCormack, chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court.
…
The program is meant to resolve small claims, contract disputes, neighborhood disputes, and small landlord/tenant matters. It won’t handle an eviction but will handle rent or maintenance issues.

Also see:

Why law faculty need to learn about legal tech and what they need to know [Sanders Reach & Robak]

On 07/17/2019, in Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, Cost of legal services - including access, law schools, legislatures / government / legal, Michigan, society, student-related, technology (general), tools, by Daniel Christian

Why law faculty need to learn about legal tech and what they need to know — from aals.org by Catherine Sanders Reach and Michael Robak — with special thanks to Kim O’Leary, Tenured Professor at WMU-Cooley Law School for this resource

Excerpts:

Technology is playing an ever-increasing role in the profession of law and the delivery of legal services. Legal educators must give real consideration to the role of technology in the legal profession if legal educators are going to sufficiently prepare law students to practice law in the 21st century. In this webinar, the presenters will explain why law faculty need to learn about legal tech and what they need to know.

Click here to watch this webinar on-demand. You will be asked for your contact information before viewing.

Presentation Slides

Also see:

Tech Competence That Solo and Small Firm Lawyers Really Need: Resources Here

Excerpt:

DIGITAL ASSETS AND ESTATE PLANNING
Many estate planning lawyers are hopelessly behind on assisting clients in making provisions for digital assets. In so doing, they expose themselves to malpractice. Without proper provision for digital assets, beneficiaries can lose out on substantial sums of money that they cannot locate or access. Many lawyers I’ve spoken with have dismissed digital assets figuring that most older clients aren’t using the Internet. But that’s not necessarily the case. To the contrary, older clients may indeed be using the Internet but not be aware of the need to make provisions for disposing of assets. At some point, lawyers will be sued for failing to advise on digital assets- and deservedly so.

Also see:

What Law Faculty Need to Know About Artificial Intelligence – 6/12/19
(watch on-demand video)
Ideas for Using Legal Tech to Address Access to Justice Issues – 6/19/19
(watch on-demand video)

Has Technology Made State Regional Universities Obsolete? — from campustechnology.com by Richard Rose
While SRUs do some things well, the current model is not sustainable, with students taking on enormous debt and receiving relatively little income benefit in return. Here’s how technology can help change the equation.

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

What if the State Board of Higher Education assembled a team to create one exceptionally fine Official Texas Version of the sophomore Western Civilization course? The team would include brilliant subject-matter experts, the best graphic artists, senior instructional designers, professional film editors and sharp-eyed text editors, who could produce a 48-clock-hour video course of previously unimaginable quality.
…
When technology is fully embraced because the need for a better and cheaper product finally trumps the political protection of the status quo, the state regional university will be replaced as part of new state university systems in which local institutions will play a very different role. These new local institutions could be called Learning Satellite Centers (LSCs).
…
Much content will take the form of high-budget, high-quality multimedia productions with delivery available to all popular devices, from desktop computers to cell phones. Access to learning materials, from course movies and podcasts to reading materials, will be through an expanded electronic distribution system that will eliminate the need for paper-based academic libraries.
…
The goal of the University Center plus Learning Satellite Center model is to transfer agency back into the hands of the students, where it belongs. No longer will a self-appointed privileged group of professional academics with their arcane degrees and funny ceremonial robes be dictating to the rest of society what we all need to learn and how we need to learn it. Technology will be the great leveler and the marketplace will help individual students decide what choices are best.

Of course, a brief sketch like this one will raise many questions that cannot be explored in a single article, but the conversation must begin. The current State Regional University is not sustainable and can only be propped up by politics and sentiment for so long. Too many students are piling up huge debt to earn dubious degrees that don’t lead to marketable skills or significant economic benefits. Technology has made more effective models of higher education attainable and at a lower price. We need to fearlessly explore such models before our charming old regional campuses drift into irrelevance.

From DSC:
While the article has a bit of a bite to it (which I suppose readers of this blog would say they might see in my writings/comments as well from time to time), THIS is the kind of innovative, creative thinking that will get us somewhere. I really appreciate Richard’s article and the deep thought he was put into this topic.

In fact, as readers of this blog will know, I have long been a supporter of a TEAM-BASED approach. And listed below are some graphics that prove it — as well as this article I wrote for evolllution.com (where the “lll” stands for lifelong learning) back from 2016.

This page* lists those graphics plus the list of team members that I thought of in December 2008:

Subject Matter Experts
Instructional Designers
Project Managers
Recruiters
Legal Counsel
Researchers / Mind Experts
Digital Audio Specialists
Digital Video Specialists
Streaming Media Experts
Mobile Learning Consultants
Writers and Editors
Programmers and Database Specialists
Web Design and Production Specialists
Interactivity Designers
Multimedia Specialists including Multi-Touch Experts/Programmers
3D / 2D Graphic Designers and/or Animators
MindMappers / Visual Learning Experts
Personalized Learning Consultants
Security Experts
The students themselves
Other

*BTW, I renamed this idea from the Forthcoming Walmart of Education
to the Forthcoming Amazon.com of Higher Education

.

While I’m at it…below are a couple of ideas that I documented back in 2009 that Richard might like…

.

As of today…I would simplify that last graphic to
include a subscription model to streams of content.

Ok…one more graphic from 5/21/09 that describes what I thought would happen if institutions of traditional higher education maintained the status quo through the years. I feel pretty good about how these predictions turned out, but I wish that we would have made even more progress along these lines than we have (since the time I created this graphic).

Council enacts new bar passage standard for law schools [americanbar.org]

On 05/22/2019, in 21st century, law schools, legislatures / government / legal, Michigan, policy, society, United States, universities, by Daniel Christian

[ABA] Council enacts new bar passage standard for law schools — from americanbar.org

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

On May 17, the Council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar approved a major change in the bar passage standard, known as 316, that would require 75 percent of a law school’s graduates who sit for the bar to pass it within two years. The change takes effect immediately although schools falling short of the standard would have at least two years to come into compliance.

Twice since 2017, the ABA policy-making House of Delegates has voted against the change, as some delegates feared it would have an adverse effect on law schools with significant minority enrollment. But under ABA rules and procedures, the Council, which is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as the national accreditor of law schools, has the final say on accreditation matters.

Also see:

ABA’s Tougher Bar Pass Rule for Law Schools Applauded, Derided — from law.com by Karen Sloan
The American Bar Association’s new standard could increase pressure on jurisdictions like California with high cut scores to lower that threshold. It could also add momentum to the burgeoning movement to overhaul the bar exam itself.

“Either the ABA Council simply ignored the clear empirical evidence that the new bar standard will decrease diversity in the bar, or it passed the new standard with the hope that states, like California, that have unreasonably high bar cut scores will lower those metrics in order to ameliorate the council’s action,” Patton said.

Law schools will face tougher sanctions if too many graduates fail bar exam — from azcentral.com

At that January meeting, former ABA President Paulette Brown, the first African-American woman to hold that position, called the proposed change “draconian.”

“I know and understand fully that the [ABA] council has the right to ignore what we say,” she said. “That does not absolve us of our responsibility to give them a very clear and strong message that we will not idly stand by while they decimate the diversity in the legal profession.”

Wouldn’t this be cool if we could do this? Perhaps this is a piece of our future learning ecosystems. [Christian]

On 05/13/2019, in assessment, colleges, community colleges, Daniel S. Christian, digital learning, disruption, education technology, emerging technologies, experimentation, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, law schools, learning agents, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, legislatures / government / legal, lifelong learning, marketplaces, memory, Michigan, Natural Language Processing (NLP), new business models, online learning, platforms, productivity / tips and tricks, second screen apps, smart classrooms, society, streams of content, student-related, teaching & learning, technologies for your home, tools, TVs, United States, voice recognition / voice enabled interfaces, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
Re: the Learning from the Living [Class] Room vision of a next gen learning platform…

…wouldn’t it be cool if you could use your voice to ask your smart/connected “TV” type of device:

“Show me the test questions for Torts I from WMU-Cooley Law School. Cooley could then charge $0.99 for these questions.”

Then, the system knows how you did on answering those questions. The ones you got right, you don’t get asked to review as often as the ones you got wrong. As you get a question right more often, the less you are asked to answer it.

You sign up for such streams of content — and the system assesses you periodically. This helps a person keep certain topics/information fresh in their memory. This type of learning method would be incredibly helpful for students trying to pass the Bar or other types of large/summative tests — especially when a student has to be able to recall information that they learned over the last 3-5 years.

Come to think of it…this method could help all of us in learning new disciplines/topics throughout our lifetimes. Sign up for the streams of content that you want to learn more about…and drop the (no-longer relevant) subscriptions as needed..

We need to tap into streams of content in our next gen learning platform

Learning Ecosystems

Ohio, Illinois, & Michigan courts using technology to bring their services to the people [Houlberg]

The WMU-Cooley Law School reduces tuition by 21% — excellent!

Opening at WMU-Cooley Law School: Director of Human Resources

Western Michigan’s Law School Cuts Tuition [Fain]

New Michigan court program could let you resolve legal disputes for free online [Keith]

Council enacts new bar passage standard for law schools [americanbar.org]

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