Canada has reflected that global interest, with major government investment over the last two years: $59.5 million announced by the Ontario government in late 2020 to fund microcredential development and related student loans; $9 million announced by British Columbia’s government since 2020, with federal support; and $5.6 million announced by Alberta’s government last August for microcredential pilot projects after the Business Council of Alberta (BCA) issued a report in 2020 urging the provincial and federal governments to expand microcredential opportunities. Ontario’s government-backed digital learning organization, eCampus Ontario, has been working in this area since 2017. Microcredential development is included in the strategic plans of the University of New Brunswick and Dalhousie University. As far back as 2015, the University of British Columbia promoted the use of “open badges” to recognize discrete skills that students had acquired within for-credit courses. It started running several non-credit microcredentials in 2021, thanks to provincial funding.
our faculty will discover that effectively teaching in a hyflex environment without adequate support is extremely difficult and truly exhausting.
Adapt Hyflex — and Be Ready for Anything (security)
Move Beyond Zoom into the Metaverse
Reap the Rewards of 2 Years of Strategic Decision-Making
campus leaders who have intentionally put students at the center of organization and system design will reap a great reward.
Expect More Disruption and More Innovation
look for movement in the augmented and virtual reality space.
Online Ed Becomes the Norm
online education will become the norm rather than the step-sister of “traditional” education
Build Off the Threads that Are Here to Stay
Alternatives Will Continue Gaining Ground
The cultures within institutions may prevent these significant changes from occurring. If that occurs, alternatives will continue to build momentum.
Emphasize Choice and Support
Alumni will be looking for upskilling opportunities via microcredentials, to navigate growth and career change during the “Great Resignation.” Recent high school grads will expect a variety of online, hybrid and in-person courses to choose from, many bringing with them years of experience with virtual learning.
Students Need Faster Routes to Completion
Climate Change Ed Gets Embedded
Hybrid Learning Tech Will Step Up
many lecture theaters might come to look like professional TV studios, to meet growing quality and usability expectations. Also, technologies will likely be expected to make classrooms environments more “peer-learning friendly” and inclusive
Blockchain Will Gain Ed Pickup
The (Arizon State) university announced that in 2022 it would release Pocket, a digital wallet for students as a comprehensive learner record.
Institutions of higher education have a chance to play a role in transforming the outdated perception of what college is–via strategies including upskilling
There is a greater need than ever before to provide increasingly specialized disciplinary knowledge, coupled with advanced workforce skills, without diminishing the role and importance of a broad-based education that ensures critical thinking and analytical reasoning along with social and communications skills and understanding. Simultaneously, in the context of millions of employees with some or no college and no degree, there is a need for academia to play an increased role in facilitating the continued employability of people already in the workforce through short-term credentials and certifications, enabling an updating of their knowledge and skills base.
Coskilling: The integration of knowledge (broad based and specialized) and relevant job skills into degree programs so that both facets are mastered simultaneously requires that institutions of higher ed focus on four key aspects simultaneously: (a) Increase opportunities for students to gain a well-rounded education intertwined with professional skills; (b) Respond at a significantly faster pace to the needs of the job market and be better aligned with advances in technology and information; (c) Create more flexible and personalized pathways for students to convert knowledge and learning to skills that result in earnings capacity; and (d) Change the “stove pipe” structure between academe and the workplace to enable greater alignment between the curriculum and new areas of workforce need.
Coding and “skills-building” bootcamps, enhanced career development services, and credentials and certificates are increasingly being offered by community colleges and universities either by themselves, or in conjunction with, external entities. Some are forming partnerships with corporate giants such as Boeing, Amazon Web Services, Cisco, and Google,
Upskilling
a greater need for employees to be “upskilled–mastering new skills, developing an understanding of a higher level of use of technology, and operating in a highly data-driven world. While a portion of upskilling can be undertaken “on the job,” institutions of higher education have the responsibility and opportunity to develop new certificates and courses, both self-standing and stackable, towards post-baccalaureate degrees that will build on existing levels of knowledge and skill sets.
“Our line is very clear: until we have clear responses from the other side on how these aspects will be treated, we are not going to support our companies through our supporting programmes (such as Horizon) in innovation with Chinese counterparts – whether these are companies or universities or research organisations
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.
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).
Marks, B., & Thomas, J. (2021). Adoption of virtual reality technology in higher education: An evaluation of five teaching semesters in a purpose-designed laboratory. Education and Information Technologies. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-021-10653-6
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.