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.
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.”
Sean Gallagher is founder and executive director of Northeastern University’s Center for the Future of Higher Education and Talent Strategy, and executive professor of educational policy.
a new national survey of C-suite executives that we recently conducted, 70 percent said that U.S. workers should be worried about their skills becoming outdated over the next few years.
Online education services companies – or “OPMs” as many refer to them, have continued to play a major role in the scaling of online higher education, within, and now increasingly beyond the U.S.
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
Each of the new certificate programs is available on the online course platform Coursera, which works with universities and organizations like Google to offer courses, certifications, and degrees in various subjects. Students will need to enroll with Coursera to take the new certificate programs.
Katie Kelly, Program Owner at AltspaceVR. “I did a rough estimate and factoring in the travel time and CO2e estimates that would have been spent. This summit took about 9 thousand cars off the road for the week of the summit and saved attendees around 5 million miles of travel. So whether we’re combating a global outbreak, climate change or remote work – there’s a lot that AltspaceVR and other VR platforms can do to help.”
HTC is moving its annual Vive Ecosystem Conference (VEC) in China to a virtual world built by Engage, a product of Immersive VR Education.
The crisis has put new wind in the sails of the first virtual world, Second Life, which continues to thrive. “We are seeing increased interest in Second Life as it is a safe place for people and organizations to socialize and work during this time of great anxiety and social distancing,” said Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab, which created and operates Second Life.
VictoryXR is an AR & VR school curriculum provider that also uses the Engage platform. They are now in the process of becoming accredited in Iowa and California to become an online virtual reality school (as opposed to a virtual school on a platform like Second Life, which is PC based).
Exp Realty is a virtual, cloud-based real estate brokerage founded nearly a decade ago, similar to Second Life. It is also optimized for PCs and laptops. The virtual real estate company has more than 27,000 agents who they log on to “eXp World.” The technology is provided by VirBELA, which also builds virtual tools for universities and virtual classes like Coursera.
Glue, based in Helsinki, Finland, today introduced significant upgrades to its virtual world platform, Glue Team Space. Team Space is immersive 3D environments optimized for teams of up to twenty people.
Spatial.io, a new remote conferencing system that works with every device and creates convincing avatars who can collaborate in the virtual space where participants can share whiteboards, post-its, videos and 3D models.
Universiteit Leiden
Coursera De-Mystifying Mindfulness
Sept. 16th 4 Week
I completed this course, now updated
For beginners or even advanced practitioners.https://t.co/x271WU6x34
Neck and neck for the top spot in the LMS academic vendor race are Blackboard—the early entry and once-dominant player—and coming-up quickly from behind, the relatively new contender, Canvas, each serving about 6.5 million students . The LMS market today is valued at $9.2 billion.
Digital Authoring Systems
Faced with increasingly complex communication technologies—voice, video, multimedia, animation—university faculty, expert in their own disciplines, find themselves technically perplexed, largely unprepared to build digital courses.
instructional designers, long employed by industry, joined online academic teams, working closely with faculty to upload and integrate interactive and engaging content.
nstructional designers, as part of their skillset, turned to digital authoring systems, software introduced to stimulate engagement, encouraging virtual students to interface actively with digital materials, often by tapping at a keyboard or touching the screen as in a video game. Most authoring software also integrates assessment tools, testing learning outcomes.
With authoring software, instructional designers can steer online students through a mixtape of digital content—videos, graphs, weblinks, PDFs, drag-and-drop activities, PowerPoint slides, quizzes, survey tools and so on. Some of the systems also offer video editing, recording and screen downloading options
Adaptive Learning
As with a pinwheel set in motion, insights from many disciplines—artificial intelligence, cognitive science, linguistics, educational psychology and data analytics—have come together to form a relatively new field known as learning science, propelling advances in a new personalized practice—adaptive learning.
MOOCs
Of the top providers, Coursera, the Wall Street-financed company that grew out of the Stanford breakthrough, is the champion with 37 million learners, followed by edX, an MIT-Harvard joint venture, with 18 million. Launched in 2013, XuetangX, the Chinese platform in third place, claims 18 million.
Former Yale President Rick Levin, who served as Coursera’s CEO for a few years, speaking by phone last week, was optimistic about the role MOOCs will play in the digital economy. “The biggest surprise,” Levin argued, “is how strongly MOOCs have been accepted in the corporate world to up-skill employees, especially as the workforce is being transformed by job displacement. It’s the right time for MOOCs to play a major role.”
In virtual education, pedagogy, not technology, drives the metamorphosis from absence to presence, illusion into reality. Skilled online instruction that introduces peer-to-peer learning, virtual teamwork and other pedagogical innovations stimulate active learning. Online learning is not just another edtech product, but an innovative teaching practice. It’s a mistake to think of digital education merely as a device you switch on and off like a garage door.
Emerging Technologies for Lifelong Learning: Intro to #EmTechMOOC and EmTechWIKI from SUNY
“… open-access resource… to identify the value and implications of using established and emerging technology tools for personal and professional growth…strategies to … keep pace with technology change.
“… #EmTechMOOC, – Coursera Massive Open Online Course
“…EmTechWIKI …socially-curated discovery engine to discover tools, tutorials, and resources. The WIKI can be used as a stand-alone resource, or it can be used together with #EmTechMOOC. Anyone is welcome to add or edit WIKI resources.”
1. Using a blockchain for automatic recognition and transfer of credits
The decline in first-time, first-year student enrollments is having a real financial impact on a number of institutions across the United States and focusing on transfer students (a pool of prospects twice as large) has become an important strategy for many. But credit articulation presents a real challenge for institutions bringing in students from community colleges. While setting standardized articulation requirements across the nation presents a high hurdle, blockchain-supported initiatives may hold great promise for university and city education systems looking to streamline educational mobility in their communities.
2. Blockchains for tracking intellectual property and rewarding use and re-use of that property
If researchers were able to publish openly and accurately assess the use of their resources, the access-prohibitive costs of academic book and journal publications could be circumvented, whether for research- or teaching-oriented outputs. Accurately tracking the sharing of knowledge without restrictions has transformative potential for open-education models.
3. Using verified sovereign identities for student identification within educational organizations
The data footprint of higher education institutions is enormous. With FERPA regulations as well as local and international requirements for the storage and distribution of Personally Identifiable Information (PII), maintaining this data in various institutional silos magnifies the risk associated with a data breach. Using sovereign identities to limit the proliferation of personal data promotes better data hygiene and data lifecycle management and could realize significant efficiency gains at the institutional level.
4. Using a blockchain as a lifelong learning passport
Educational institutions and private businesses partner with online course delivery giants to extend the reach of their educational services and priorities. Traditional educational routes are increasingly less normal and in this expanding world of providers, the need for verifiable credentials from a number of sources is growing. Producing a form of digitally “verifiable CVs” would limit credential fraud, and significantly reduce organizational workload in credential verification.
5. Using blockchains to permanently secure certificates
The open source solution Blockcerts already enables signed certificates to be posted to a blockchain and supports the verification of those certificates by third parties.
When an institution issues official transcripts, obtaining copies can be expensive and burdensome for graduates. But student-owned digital transcripts put the power of secure verification in the hands of learners, eliminating the need for lengthy and costly transcripts to further their professional or educational pursuits. An early mover, Central New Mexico Community College, debuted digital diplomas on the blockchain in December of 2017.
6. Using blockchains to verify multi-step accreditation
As different accreditors recognize different forms of credentials and a growing diversity of educational providers issue credentials, checking the ‘pedigree’ of a qualification can be laborious. Turning a certification verification process from a multi-stage research effort into a single-click process will automate many thousands of labor hours for organizations and institutions