Institutions of higher education have a chance to play a role in transforming the outdated perception of what college is–via strategies including upskilling
There is a greater need than ever before to provide increasingly specialized disciplinary knowledge, coupled with advanced workforce skills, without diminishing the role and importance of a broad-based education that ensures critical thinking and analytical reasoning along with social and communications skills and understanding. Simultaneously, in the context of millions of employees with some or no college and no degree, there is a need for academia to play an increased role in facilitating the continued employability of people already in the workforce through short-term credentials and certifications, enabling an updating of their knowledge and skills base.
Coskilling: The integration of knowledge (broad based and specialized) and relevant job skills into degree programs so that both facets are mastered simultaneously requires that institutions of higher ed focus on four key aspects simultaneously: (a) Increase opportunities for students to gain a well-rounded education intertwined with professional skills; (b) Respond at a significantly faster pace to the needs of the job market and be better aligned with advances in technology and information; (c) Create more flexible and personalized pathways for students to convert knowledge and learning to skills that result in earnings capacity; and (d) Change the “stove pipe” structure between academe and the workplace to enable greater alignment between the curriculum and new areas of workforce need.
Coding and “skills-building” bootcamps, enhanced career development services, and credentials and certificates are increasingly being offered by community colleges and universities either by themselves, or in conjunction with, external entities. Some are forming partnerships with corporate giants such as Boeing, Amazon Web Services, Cisco, and Google,
Upskilling
a greater need for employees to be “upskilled–mastering new skills, developing an understanding of a higher level of use of technology, and operating in a highly data-driven world. While a portion of upskilling can be undertaken “on the job,” institutions of higher education have the responsibility and opportunity to develop new certificates and courses, both self-standing and stackable, towards post-baccalaureate degrees that will build on existing levels of knowledge and skill sets.
231 student participants to watch two YouTube videos (one on real estate appraisals and the other on the Roman Empire) at normal speed, 1.5x speed, 2x speed or 2.5x speed. They were told to watch the videos in full screen mode and not to pause them or take any notes. After each video, the students took comprehension tests, which were repeated a week later. The results were clear: the 1.5x and 2x groups did just as well on the tests as those who’d watched the videos at normal speed, both immediately afterwards and one week on. Only at 2.5x was learning impaired.
When the team surveyed a separate group of UCLA students, they found that a massive 85% usually watched pre-recorded lectures at faster than normal speed. However, 91% said they thought that normal speed or slightly faster (1.5x) would be better for learning than 2x or 2.5x. These new results certainly suggest that this isn’t right: double-time viewing was just as good as normal viewing.
While 2x viewing was fine for learning about the material in their studies — real estate appraisals and the Roman Empire — perhaps it might not work for more complex subject matter; again, only more research will tell.
The red flag went up on page five, when Stephen M Gavazzi and E Gordon Gee wrote that their research was underwritten by a grant from the Charles Koch Foundation. Founded by oil man Charles Koch, the foundation is famous for its libertarian views and for supporting the Law and Economics Center at George Mason University in Virginia, which hosts corporate-backed ‘free market’ educational workshops for federal and state judges and attorneys general.
the Morrill Land Grant College Act
Both Gavazzi and Gee know that Republicans and others made the same complaint about university students in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Yet, as soon as they’d handed in their last essays replete with approving references to Karl Marx, Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida, these cohorts applied en masse for jobs on Wall Street or later to the companies that grew wealthy during the dot-com boom.
An NFT is a digital asset that represents real-world objects like art, music, in-game items and videos. They are bought and sold online, frequently with cryptocurrency, and they are generally encoded with the same underlying software as many cryptos. are “fungible,” meaning they can be traded or exchanged for one another. They’re also equal in value—one dollar is always worth another dollar; one Bitcoin is always equal to another Bitcoin. Crypto’s fungibility makes it a trusted means of conducting transactions on the #blockchain. NFT has a digital signature that makes it impossible for NFTs to be exchanged for or equal to one another (hence, non-fungible). An NFT is created, or “minted” from digital objects that represent both tangible and intangible items, including:
Art
GIFs
Videos and sports highlights
Collectibles
Virtual avatars and video game skins
Designer sneakers
Music
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sold his first ever tweet as an NFT for more than $2.9 million. NFTs can have only one owner at a time. Blockchain technology and NFTs afford artists and content creators a unique opportunity to monetize their wares. celebrities like Snoop Dogg and Lindsay Lohan are jumping on the NFT bandwagon, releasing unique memories, artwork and moments as securitized NFTs.
The future of higher education is being led by a publicly traded company in California that is growing like gangbusters. Its online platform has a portfolio of thousands of courses from the world’s leading universities, corporations, and nonprofits.
Coursera, which since the spring has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange, is valued at 7 billion dollars and seems to be making all the right moves.
While college and university enrollments have been declining during the pandemic, Coursera’s enrollment rose from 53 million to 78 million students this spring—an increase greater than total U.S. higher education enrollment.
Coursera is only the tip of the iceberg of an explosion of non-collegiate higher education providers. They range from libraries and museums to media companies and software makers, not to mention a burgeoning number of online providers just like Coursera. Microsoft and Google are both offering more than 75 certificate programs.
As our society becomes more fragmented and divided, we have reason to worry that higher education’s transformation will further fragment us.
Equally important, we need to reintroduce a common curriculum to strengthen social bonds. General education should focus on the shared human experience—linking our past with our present and future, our heritage with the realities that will confront us today and tomorrow.
In the new Coursera world that will be increasingly corporatized, we need to ensure that we don’t lose our core values, our ethics, and our ability to tell fact from fiction.
You are able to track time spent on the app across your organization and compare it directly with past methods. Getting an insight into both the amount of time training and the retention it’s causing is how you’ll balance the perfect VR Training Solution, and we’re here to make that a reality.
By reflecting-in-action, the practitioner is able to gain metacognitive awareness and perceive his/her intuitions and biases, test hypotheses, and take on new perspectives. The approach of having students learn by designing their own games combines design thinking and game-based learning (Kafai, 1995, 2006; Li, Lemieuz, Vandermeiden, & Nathoo, 2013). Design thinking also supports new forms of literacies brought on by new media technologies as well as game-based learning.
It is likely that the effects of gamification cannot easily be measured satisfactorily through surveys of motivation, engagement, attendance, or grades because there are too many variables that could affect how students respond. Critics of gamification argue that it over
simplifies complex problems (Bogost, 2015; Robertson, 2010). However, both gamification and design thinking are approaches to problem-solving. With design thinking, gamification may be used in more meaningful ways because design thinking offers a different lens through which to conceptualize the problem.
In 1972, when the U.S. government passed the landmark Title IX laws to promote gender equality in education, there was a 12 percentage-point gap in the proportion of bachelor’s degrees going to men compared to women. By 1982, the gap had closed. Nobody predicted what happened next: the gap started to widen rapidly in the opposite direction. By 2019, the gender gap in bachelor awards was wider, at 14 points, than it had been in 1972 — but the other way round. (We are not claiming here that Title IX had much impact, however).
To Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men, it is “the strangest and most profound change of the century, even more so because it is unfolding in a similar way pretty much all over the world.”
Importantly, there is a gender gap not only in rates of college enrollment, as we described earlier in the year, and recently highlighted in the Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic, but also in rates of completion among those who do enroll.
College enrollment has steadily declined following the Great Recession, with total enrollment among both men and women decreasing each year from 2012 to 2020. But many more women than men were enrolling in college when rates began to fall in 2012 (11.6 million women were enrolled at the time, compared to 8.6 million men). If the relative decline among men and women had been similar, we would expect the gender gap in enrollment rates to remain constant. Instead, the fall 2020 decline in male enrollment eclipsed the decline in female enrollment for the fifth year in a row and the gender gap in enrollment is widening. COVID-19 accelerated this trend.
Women graduate high school and college at higher rates
Education gaps across the lifecycle
Men born from 1955 to 1974 (ages 45-64 in 2019) who likely wrapped up their postsecondary education decades ago, attained bachelor’s and graduate degrees at a similar rate to women in their age group. By contrast, older men born before 1955 had higher educational attainment than women, and younger men born after 1974 seem to be consistently outpaced by women their age.