A discussion thread in the Higher Ed Learning Collective:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/onlinelearningcollective/permalink/853609748603058/
“Has anyone ever used Discord to communicate with their students and to deliver short lectures or have office hours? We don’t use Zoom and MS Teams only covers one section. I have four sections of the same course. I found one article in favor of it, but figured I’d check with the general community.”
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more on Discord in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=discord
https://www.ecampusnews.com/2021/07/29/how-stackable-credentials-let-students-customize-their-learning/
As a prelude to earning degrees, students are completing stackable credentials they can use to demonstrate mastery of a particular area of knowledge to potential employers.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, a stackable credential is “part of a sequence of credentials that can be accumulated over time to build up an individual’s qualifications and help them to move along a career pathway or up a career ladder to different and potentially higher-paying jobs.” In general, stackable credentials are shorter-term programs that can lead to higher-level credentials.
The traditional system of higher education puts students’ focus on earning, at minimum, a four-year degree. The traditional student is fresh out of high school and entering college or university with the intent of completing those four years consecutively and graduating with a degree in hand. That traditional student, however, is no longer typical. Statistics show that more than 47 percent of people entering college are over 25 years old, and 40 percent of those are over 35.
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more on stackable credentials in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=stackable
Virtual Events: The Ultimate Checklist
https://www-forbes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.forbes.com/sites/adriandearnell/2021/07/29/virtual-events-the-ultimate-checklist/amp/
If your answer is yes to the following, then your next virtual event should go off without a hitch.
- You offer a balance of topics.
- You keep things as concise as possible.
- You have someone to keep the pace—perhaps a moderator.
- You’ve planned for transitions.
- You use graphics and other visuals.
- You’ve included time for interaction.
- You have a closing segment—and say your thank you’s!
While the above should guide your overall structure, don’t be afraid to play with the format. Virtual events are still in their infancy, making them a great opportunity to innovate storytelling and audience engagement.
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more on online edu in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=online+education
more on storytelling in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=storytelling
In New Push to Grow Online Degree Offerings, Coursera Changes Revenue-Sharing Options
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2021-08-09-in-new-push-to-grow-online-degree-offerings-coursera-changes-revenue-sharing-options
Ten years ago when two Stanford professors started Coursera, many of the big-name colleges the company partnered with offered few online courses.
rising acceptance of such programs and changing demographics that could mean fewer high-school graduates looking for traditional programs.
today Coursera is announcing what it has called a “new economic model” in how it splits revenue with the colleges it works with, which for some colleges will mean getting a bigger cut.
“It’s a marginal rate that the share that goes to the university gets bigger as the tuition collected across all degrees on Coursera goes up.”
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more on coursera in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=coursera
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/08/zoom-to-pay-85m-for-lying-about-encryption-and-sending-data-to-facebook-and-google/
With the pandemic boosting its videoconferencing business, Zoom more than quadrupled its annual revenue from $622.7 million to $2.7 billion in the 12 months ending January 31, 2021.
Zoombombings
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more on Zoom in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=zoom
What is AI? Here’s everything you need to know about artificial intelligence
An executive guide to artificial intelligence, from machine learning and general AI to neural networks.
https://www-zdnet-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/what-is-ai-heres-everything-you-need-to-know-about-artificial-intelligence/
What is artificial intelligence (AI)?
It depends who you ask.
What are the uses for AI?
What are the different types of AI?
Narrow AI is what we see all around us in computers today — intelligent systems that have been taught or have learned how to carry out specific tasks without being explicitly programmed how to do so.
General AI
General AI is very different and is the type of adaptable intellect found in humans, a flexible form of intelligence capable of learning how to carry out vastly different tasks, anything from haircutting to building spreadsheets or reasoning about a wide variety of topics based on its accumulated experience.
What can Narrow AI do?
There are a vast number of emerging applications for narrow AI:
- Interpreting video feeds from drones carrying out visual inspections of infrastructure such as oil pipelines.
- Organizing personal and business calendars.
- Responding to simple customer-service queries.
- Coordinating with other intelligent systems to carry out tasks like booking a hotel at a suitable time and location.
- Helping radiologists to spot potential tumors in X-rays.
- Flagging inappropriate content online, detecting wear and tear in elevators from data gathered by IoT devices.
- Generating a 3D model of the world from satellite imagery… the list goes on and on.
What can General AI do?
A survey conducted among four groups of experts in 2012/13 by AI researchers Vincent C Müller and philosopher Nick Bostrom reported a 50% chance that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) would be developed between 2040 and 2050, rising to 90% by 2075.
What is machine learning?
What are neural networks?
What are other types of AI?
Another area of AI research is evolutionary computation.
What is fueling the resurgence in AI?
What are the elements of machine learning?
As mentioned, machine learning is a subset of AI and is generally split into two main categories: supervised and unsupervised learning.
Supervised learning
Unsupervised learning
Which are the leading firms in AI?
Which AI services are available?
All of the major cloud platforms — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform — provide access to GPU arrays for training and running machine-learning models, with Google also gearing up to let users use its Tensor Processing Units — custom chips whose design is optimized for training and running machine-learning models.
Which countries are leading the way in AI?
It’d be a big mistake to think the US tech giants have the field of AI sewn up. Chinese firms Alibaba, Baidu, and Lenovo, invest heavily in AI in fields ranging from e-commerce to autonomous driving. As a country, China is pursuing a three-step plan to turn AI into a core industry for the country, one that will be worth 150 billion yuan ($22bn) by the end of 2020 to become the world’s leading AI power by 2030.
How can I get started with AI?
While you could buy a moderately powerful Nvidia GPU for your PC — somewhere around the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 or faster — and start training a machine-learning model, probably the easiest way to experiment with AI-related services is via the cloud.
How will AI change the world?
Robots and driverless cars
Fake news
Facial recognition and surveillance
Healthcare
Reinforcing discrimination and bias
AI and global warming (climate change)
Will AI kill us all?
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more on AI in this iMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=artificial+intelligence+education