College Students Worry About Time

Academics are not the only thing keeping college students up at night. A new survey of more than 1,500 undergrads currently enrolled in a two- or four-year institution found that 36% of respondents said time management and 35% identified anxiety as the key factors keeping them from a diploma.

Students also listed being overwhelmed with managing responsibilities (31%) and working too many hours (24%) to pay for school as other factors. The survey results may be the tip of the iceberg since so many nontraditional students are heading to college.

“We have a lot of students with very complicated lives and they have broader issues,” said Mark Milliron, co-founder and chief learning officer of Civitas Learning, which did the study. “Trying to design the right kind of advising support is going to mean a level of diversification and a level of personalization.”

Advising is becoming much more important to students. The study noted that 40% ranked information on career options after graduation and on staying on track to finish a degree as the highest types of advice they should receive. Time management and academic success strategies were listed by 33% of the respondents.

Work the Social Brain Network to Get Ahead

To communicate more effectively and increase your opportunities for advancement, you need to exercise your social brain network—regions of the cortex that are activated when we need to interpret the behavior, intentions, and appearance of other people.

Studying interactions among both humans and primates has revealed that the structure of a person’s social brain network is strongly influenced by the shape of their social network.

In some social networks, all the members know one another independently, while in others, certain people act as hubs indirectly connecting individuals and groups who otherwise wouldn’t know each other. Research has found that their exposure to more diverse perspectives confers a host of benefits to those in the hub position, labeled “information brokers.” They’re not only better at problem-solving but also more likely to accrue faster promotion and higher pay.

In one 2017 study, teenagers’ brains were scanned as they made decisions about whether to recommend various products to friends in their Facebook network. The researchers found that those who were information brokers used their social brain network more in selecting what to recommend to their peers than did teens whose contacts all knew one another independently.

In both humans and monkeys, those who exercise their social brain network more to translate ideas and information between different groups increase the size and connectivity of that neural “muscle,” which further expands their capacity for effective networking. That suggests that providing greater access to broader and more diverse social networks in both educational settings and the workplace could change how people use their brains in day-to-day decision-making.

Since previous research has demonstrated that activity in one person’s social brain network can stimulate similar activity in others during communication, putting both speaker and listener in greater sync and making communication more successful, any effort to widen and diversify social networks could create an ever-expanding ripple effect throughout the community.

Cutting-Edge Hackers Threaten Higher Ed

For IT professionals in higher education, cybercrime has become much more sophisticated than hackers simply sending out email blasts in hopes of finding an unsuspecting recipient. Criminals now create fake online ecosystems that look so real that even the most skeptical individual may be convinced they’re legitimate.

Then there’s the problem of information shared on social media, which is so plentiful that it makes it easy to gather information about an organization and create targeted messages that are even more persuasive.

“No matter how much training we give a faculty or staff member about how to recognize a suspicious message, it’s hard to blame them for failing to recognize a message that is crafted and customized to look as innocuous as possible,” Nicci Fagan, director of Central and Eastern U.S. higher education sales for CDW-G, wrote in an EdTech post.

Technology solutions enable IT pros to stay up-to-date, but communication is the key to security. Users need to understand just how advanced these attacks can be and the serious threat they pose.

“IT staff who develop campus awareness initiatives may find it useful to educate users not only on specific signs to watch out for—for example, characteristics of phishing emails—but also on the broader context of hacking itself,” Fagan said. “Many users may not realize, for example, the extent to which hacking has become a big business, complete with the tools and resources to craft effective deception.”

Twitter Goes to School

Despite all the anxiety over Twitter’s impact on civil discourse and society in general, more and more educators are finding the social platform a valuable tool for sharing assignments, increasing student engagement, and archiving classroom resources.

In intermediate and high-school grades, Twitter can be used to connect with students where they already are. One New Jersey high-school teacher found that students checked her classroom Twitter account more often than they read school emails.

Some school systems or individual instructors may be dubious of Twitter’s value or uncertain about what sorts of content they should tweet. In a blog post, Steve Williams, co-founder of Campus Suite, a provider of cloud-based communications solutions for schools, set out four areas where Twitter can and should be used by educators:

1. Enhancing student engagement—Any additional channel for communicating with students is a plus. In addition to tweeting project due dates and reminders about quizzes and tests, teachers can send links to class notes and even design projects that encourage students to use the platform to connect with each other (such as comparing their interpretations of a reading assignment) or with others (such as professionals in an industry being studied).

2. Community engagement—Twitter is a quick and easy way to share classroom news and student accomplishments with the broader community, including other school systems.

3. Connecting with parents—Almost any parent knows that classroom information isn’t always passed on to them by their offspring, so Twitter provides another path for ensuring everyone is kept in the loop, whether the content is a class reading list, a field-trip reminder, or an emergency alert.

4. Extending the school’s reach—Twitter can also deepen connections with a school system’s wider network of vendors, consultants, boosters, and board members to generate interest in new programs or support for fundraisers or a tax levy.