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.
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.
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?
Other than gross number analysis, many colleges previously did not take a deep dive into demographics of students every semester to detect and adapt to subtle changes in other than the broadest terms. This is especially the case for comparison to competitors that are not degree-granting, such as code academies, Google, Amazon, LinkedIn and others. Curriculum and degree/certificate offerings had not been reviewed every semester to determine how directly they serve the dual customer base of employers and students.
the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center show that the number of undergraduate students will likely drop 3.2 percent in the current academic year. All this after losing 3.4 percent last year. Over all, accounting for 6.6 percent fewer undergraduates than prior to the COVID pandemic, online institutions saw a similar dip of 5.5 percent. However, those online institutions are faring better, after seeing an increase of 8.6 percent enrollment in the fall 2020 semester. With the recent dip in enrollment, it is clear young adults increasingly are choosing work over college. fewer than half of all high schoolers want to go to a four-year college
Not only are the numbers of male students enrolled on the decline, but the numbers of male dropouts exceed those of female students. (my note: this issue has been raised by me several times in the last decade, without any response whatsoever).
There is reason to believe that shorter, competency-based programs will play an important role in the university landscape in the coming years.
Australian commentator Stephen Matchett expands: “MCs are the wild west of post-compulsory education and training, with neither law on what they actually are or order as to how they interact with formal providers. … Until (or if) this is sorted by regulators there needs to be a sheriff providing workable rules that stop the cowboys running riot.”
The lack of standards is also an issue in Canada. While degree standards have been agreed upon – the Canadian Degree Qualification framework, contained in the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC)’s 2007 Ministerial Statement on Quality Assurance of Degree Education in Canada, outlines expectations for bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees – the CMEC has yet to issue a pan-Canadian framework for microcredentials.
In the absence of a pan-Canadian model or definition, for the purposes of this column I will use the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO)’s definition, put forward in its May 2021 report, Making Sense of Microcredentials:
“A microcredential is a representation of learning, awarded for completion of a short program that is focused on a discrete set of competencies (i.e., skills, knowledge, attributes), and is sometimes related to other credentials.”
Developing and running effective microcredential programs is not simply a matter of bundling a group of existing classes into a new sub-degree level program (although there will certainly be some who try that approach). Effective microcredential programming needs to be an institution-wide effort, with appropriate resourcing and guidelines, along with effective recruiting and student support.
department chairs and other unit leaders to lead collegial discussions about the following questions:
Gaps: who is not being served by our current degree offerings? Is there potential demand for our disciplinary knowledge and skills from people who don’t want a full degree program? Are there ways people could upgrade their skills by taking certain types of our courses? Can we identify potential short programs to meet new, distinct learning outcomes?
Student diversity: are there opportunities to develop short programs that could introduce a new demographic of students to our discipline? How might microcredentials be developed that meet the needs and interests of Indigenous students, first-generation students, or international students?
Connection: how might we create partnerships with external organizations to inform our understanding of skill-training needs? Can these partnerships be leveraged to create new career pathways for students, and/or new research opportunities for faculty, postdocs, and graduate students?
Impact: in what ways do our discipline’s insights relate to Canada’s current and future public needs? How might our disciplinary knowledge be combined with knowledge from other disciplines to train students to help address particular challenges? In what ways could our discipline contribute to student competency development that we consider meaningful and impactful?
Augmented reality experiences and ambient digital overlays are becoming increasingly more central to the retail industry’s future hopes, as well as the next-generation consumer journey. Companies like Google, Pinterest and Snap are focusing on the technology and producing immersive marketing solutions and features for consumers and brands around AR offerings.