Searching for "online education"
a performance- or competency-based approach to education
little evidence that personalized learning improves student learning, in part because so many different approaches are used.
proficiency-based learning
Does the future of schooling look like Candy Land?
Advocates of competency-based education say they believe public opinion is also shifting their way. They point to a recent national poll showing that 74 percent of voters think the lack of personalized learning in schools is “a problem.”
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more on competency based ed in this iMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=competency+based
Coursera and the uncertain future of higher education
Coursera is blurring the lines between itself and institutions. The implications for the future of college education are profound.
https://fortune-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/fortune.com/2021/10/25/coursera-uncertain-future-of-higher-education/amp/
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.
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more on Coursera in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=coursera
Upskilling: The Next Revolution in Higher Education
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.
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more on upskilling in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=upskilling
Extended Reality Tools Can Bring New Life to Higher Education
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2021-03-29-how-extended-reality-tools-can-bring-new-life-to-higher-education
Zoom, Teams, Skype, and FaceTime all became daily fixtures, and many of us quickly became fatigued by seeing our colleagues, students and far-away loved ones almost exclusively in 2D. Most video conferencing solutions were not designed to be online classrooms. what is missing from the current video platforms that could improve online teaching: tools to better facilitate student interactions, including enhanced polling and quizzing features, group work tools, and more.
While universities continue to increase in-person and HyFlex courses, hoping to soon see campuses return to normalcy, there is mounting evidence that the increased interest in digital tools for teaching and learning will persist even after the pandemic.
We should move beyond 2D solutions and take advantage of what extended reality (XR) and virtual reality (VR) have to offer us.
Professor Courtney Cogburn created the 1,000 Cut Journey, an immersive VR research project that allows participants to embody an avatar that experiences various forms of racism. Professor Shantanu Lal has implemented VR headsets for pediatric dentistry patients who become anxious during procedures. At Columbia Engineering, professor Steven Feiner’s Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab explores the design and development of 2D and 3D user interfaces for a broad range of applications and devices. Professor Letty Moss-Salentijn is working with Feiner’s lab to create dental training simulations to guide dental students through the process of nerve block injection. Faculty, students and staff at Columbia’s Media Center for Art History have created hundreds of virtual reality panoramas of archaeology projects and fieldwork that are available on the Art Atlas platform.
In spring 2020, a group of Columbia students began to build “LionCraft,” a recreation of Columbia’s Morningside campus in Minecraft. Even though students were spread out around the world, they still found creative and fun ways to run into each other on campus, in an immersive online format.
A study conducted by WECT before the pandemic found that only about 20 percent of colleges they surveyed charged less tuition and lower fees than they do to those who study in person. Counterintuitively, the study also revealed—to my surprise—that more than half of the colleges charged more tuition and higher fees to their remote students than to those studying on campus. The survey also uncovered another revelation: online fees added to tuition can be so large that they are greater than tuition alone.
A recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that colleges with a greater-than-average share of remote students largely charge lower tuition than their on-campus counterparts. As prices rose at most post-secondary institutions over the last decades, tuition at these colleges fell.
Since then, MOOC degrees have mushroomed, now with more than 70 others available in partnership with about 30 first-class universities worldwide. Coursera, the biggest provider, offers nearly 30 virtual degrees in business, data science and public health, among other fields, most discounted at less than half of comparable on-campus programs
73 Percent of Students Prefer Some Courses Be Fully Online
https://campustechnology.com/articles/2021/05/13/73-percent-of-students-prefer-some-courses-be-fully-online-post-pandemic.aspx
Cengage‘s Digital Learning Pulse Survey, conducted by Bay View Analytics on behalf of the Online Learning Consortium, WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies, University Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA) and Canadian Digital Learning Research Association, polled 1,469 students and 1,286 faculty and administrators across 856 United States institutions
Sixty-eight percent of students were also in favor of some combination of in-person and online courses. On the faculty side, 57 percent said they would prefer teaching hybrid courses post-pandemic — slightly more than those who preferred teaching fully online.
both students and faculty agreed: Roughly two-thirds across the board said they would like to use more tech and digital course materials in the future.
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more on online education in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=%22online+education%22
A great thread on the use of #TikTok for education:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/onlinelearningcollective/permalink/769573510340016/
with several good examples of TikTok use in the classroom:
https://www.tiktok.com/@sutherlandphys
https://www.tiktok.com/@sutherlandphys
https://www.tiktok.com/@leighbeez/
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more on TIk Tok in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=tik+tok
Why online HE should be about learning, not teaching
https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20210126142422302
The gate is now wide open
Teachers used to be the gatekeepers to information, to knowledge. The successive inventions of writing and reading, print, the library, and then the World Wide Web, mean that we teachers are no longer the gatekeepers.
Schools, universities and teachers to some extent remain the gatekeepers to knowledge, the definers of what comprises valid knowledge. We do this, of course, through holding the ultimate educational power – the power to assess.
But it is not clear how long we teachers will, or should, hold this power. Increasingly, students, and employers, nations, cultures, many groups in our societies, rightly want a say in defining what is valid knowledge, a valid curriculum.
Knowledge isn’t enough
Each year, vast amounts of new knowledge are produced. Also, each year, vast amounts of current knowledge become wrong, or redundant, or both. Knowledge dies. In some subjects, a significant proportion of what was taught in the first year will have died by the time the students who learned it graduate. So, what is education for?
Machines are doing more and more of the work
The bad news is, we are getting squeezed out of work. The good news is, we are getting squeezed up, into ever more interesting work. We will be able to stay ahead for a long time; because there are always still more difficult and important and exciting things for us to do, increasingly with the support of our increasingly capable machines.
Employers want graduates to be job-ready. They also want graduates to be fluent in the five Cs: Creativity, Communication, Collaboration and Criticality as well as Competence. Not all university education currently develops the first four Cs. Very little university education currently gives high priority to their development. Rarely are they formally assessed.
Changing outcomes, changing pedagogies
The architecture of a university expresses its views about pedagogy. This remains true with the great leap online. The old pedagogic architecture – of teaching as (mainly) telling, of learning as (mainly) listening and reading, of access in and through the library to specified stored knowledge, and of assessment as (mainly) recalling, repeating back what has been learned, perhaps with some application or interpretation – has for the most part been recreated in digital form, with varying degrees of success
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more on online education in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=online+education