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.
With the combination of T-Mobile’s nationwide 5G network – the largest, fastest, and most reliable – for wireless connectivity and NuEyes line of connected Augmented Reality Smart Glasses, for the first time, consumers can be connected to the metaverse no matter where they are.
What do we know about Google’s enormous book-scanning project? How far are we in the quest for a universal digital library? What does it mean for higher education?
The report forecast China’s growth in ed tech spending to be 15.6 percent over the same period, reaching $34.2 billion by 2026. Japan, Canada and Germany are all expected to see double-digit growht in ed tech spending over the report period as well: Japan at 14.5 percent, Canada at 14 percent and Germany at 11.9 percent CAGR.
Faculty training plays a critical role in HyFlex learning and equity
Online and HyFlex options that started with the pandemic are helping ensure equity
lecture capture get training and to learn from each other
Engagement remains critical, whether in person or in a HyFlex model
how they’re going to teach remote students, but also students in the class, at the same time,
Readiness for teaching online has been defined as the qualities or predispositions of an instructor that exemplify teaching high-quality online courses (Palloff and Pratt, 2011). Mental and physical preparedness (Cutri and Mena, 2020), a willingness to create active, collaborative learning environments that foster a sense community (Palloff and Pratt, 2011), and acceptance of online teaching (Gibson et al., 2008) also demonstrate readiness for the online teaching and learning modality. An inability or unwillingness to adopt student-focused approaches and the perception that online courses provide low quality learning environments (Gibson et al., 2008) and are not worthwhile (Allen and Seaman, 2015) can be important barriers to the successful transition to teaching online.
In a business context, upskilling refers to how we teach employees new skills. When we talk about upskilling at All Campus, we’re thinking about the bigger picture. On a large scale, upskilling refers to students and employees putting heightened emphasis on rapid career and practical skill development.
Just as online learning made it possible to go to school from anywhere, the growing market for graduate, non-credit and professional certificate programs will push flexibility even further.
For students, shorter non-credit courses and certificate programs provide more opportunities to develop skills and advance their knowledge in smaller blocks of time and lower cost.
According to Strada Education, 65% of the U.S. workforce does not have a four-year degree and, as more people question the value of degree programs in general, micro-credentials and other alternative education options are bound to generate long-term momentum.
As soon as the coronavirus was declared a pandemic early last year, 88% of multinational organisations began encouraging remote working. By summer 2020, 83% of businesses surveyed said they will continue to offer remote-work options long after the world returns to complete normalcy.
Additionally, Gallup research conducted before the COVID-19 pandemic, indicated that employees are optimally engaged when they remote work 60% to 80% of the time. That’s three or four days in a workweek.
microlearning – brief training modules – increases information retention by up to 20%. Whether through videos or short quizzes, implementing microlearning can be beneficial without being time-consuming, allowing remote workers to get back to their tasks as soon as they’re done.
