Gen Z Looking at Info on Majors/Minors

Generation Z is often described as pragmatic and cost-conscious. A 2017 study showed just how pragmatic those students are.

EAB Enrollment Services’ The New College Freshman Survey found that 70% of the 4,800 college freshmen surveyed said they visited college websites to find information about majors and minors, up 4% over the results of the 2015 poll. College costs came in a distant second (45%), followed by information on scholarships (25%), financial aid (24%), and general information about the school (21%).

The report also noted that students checking out college ads on social media sites are still very interested in information relating to majors and minors offered at the institutions. Just over 40% of the students said information on majors and minors was the most useful part of their social media search.

Other studies by EAB have found that Generation Z students select majors and minors that will have a stronger impact on their job prospects. That fits with a rise in the number of engineering and business majors that many colleges and universities are reporting. A study by New York University found that 12% of students switched to another field of study when presented data on what majors actually earn once they enter the workforce.

“One ‘so what’ of this New College Freshman Survey finding, and from the return-on-education phenomenon overall for that matter, is that colleges and universities should be thinking more deeply about the enrollment impact of their program portfolio choices,” Anika Olsen, an EAB consultant, wrote in a blog post. “We find that as many schools review their academic programs and make changes, they too seldom and too narrowly factor in market information from enrollment managers.”

Louisiana Finds Way to Deliver Good OER

While open educational resources (OER) are often touted as an important step in keeping the cost of course materials in line, finding quality materials can be a problem, especially for K-12 instruction. Teachers surfing the web for individual lesson plans is not really an ideal way to deliver excellent content.

“There’s more bad OER out there than good; that’s a fact,” Rebecca Kockler, assistant superintendent of academic instruction for Louisiana, said during a panel discussion at the recent SXSWedu conference. “We need to find the quality stuff and elevate it for everyone.”

The Louisiana Department of Education has taken a positive step in the right direction by making integrated curriculum available on its website. The content is aligned with the state’s core standards and adaptable to the needs of individual students, providing teachers with more time to just teach.

The Louisiana approach also couples professional development for teachers with the sharing of best practices and curricula, and it’s paying dividends. A 2017 study found record growth in the high-school graduation rate and the rate of college attendance. In addition, the research noted that state fourth-graders had the highest learning gains in the nation in a national reading assessment test in 2015.

“Using OER wasn’t our goal,” Kockler said. “Quality was our goal.

Fear of Missing Out Is Addicting

Surveys have shown that mobile devices can be addictive, particularly for youngsters. Concern has grown to the point where investors are starting to urge tech firms to take action to address it.

To Ana Homayoun, author of Social Media Wellness, it’s really about the way phone apps are being used.

“When we think about social media, so much of it is created on this feedback loop of notification. They want to promote engagement,” Homayoun said during a CNBC interview. “They create this system where you always want to be online. And it can create this fear of missing out if we’re not online.”

Homayoun recommended that parents give younger children a flip phone for emergency use only. She also suggested that parents establish times when kids aren’t allowed to use the device, such as in the bedroom at night, even as an alarm clock. Parents should consider applications that monitor usage, too.

“Social media isn’t good or bad, it’s a new tool for communications,” she said. “But what is a problem is that we as adults don’t fully speak the language that kids are speaking, and we need to.”

Making MOOCs Massive Again

Over the last five years, massive open online courses (MOOCs) have become on-demand sessions that allow participants to learn at their own pace. Changes were also made that allowed providers to monetize the process by charging for certification.

While a poll from Class Central, a MOOC discovery platform, found that 64% of respondents said they preferred the changes, there was also a cost. MOOCs are no longer attracting large numbers of students, and the learners taking the classes aren’t interacting on discussion forums.

“These days, most MOOC providers let learners start courses whenever they like (or on a biweekly or monthly basis as Coursera does),” Dhawal Shah, founder of Class Central, wrote in a column for EdSurge. “As a result, the forums are far less vibrant and informative than they were in the early days.”

To find a happy medium, Shah is proposing a MOOC semester offering a limited catalog of instructor-led courses with a fixed schedule and soft deadlines. The selected MOOCs would also offer free certificates to students who meet course requirements by a certain time.

“MOOC providers abandoned free certificates because they were looking for a sustainable business model,” he said. “Reintroducing them could reignite some of the enthusiasm MOOCs initially generated. The potential loss in revenue from free certificates would be offset by the marketing benefits of reaching more users.”

Digital Diplomas? There's an App for That

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, launched a pilot program in the summer that gave graduates the option to receive their diplomas on their smartphone through an app, along with the traditional paper version. The Blockcerts Wallet app uses blockchain technology to provide students easy access to their diploma that is verifiable and tamperproof.

“From the beginning, one of our primary motivations has been to empower students to be curators of their own credentials,” said Mary Callahan, MIT registrar and senior associate dean. “This pilot makes it possible for them to have ownership of their records and to be able to share them in a secure way, with whomever they choose.”

Once students download the app, a set of unique numerical identifiers are created that is used in the digital diploma to prove ownership. The technology allows students to share their diploma, which can be immediately verified as authentic, for free with employers or schools.

“It really is transformative. And it could be as big as the web because it affects every sector,” said Chris Jagers, co-founder and CEO of Learning Machine, which worked with MIT on the technology. “It’s not just academic records. It’s being able to passively know that digital things are true. That creates a whole new reality across every sector.”

Amazon Sends Alexa to College

Amazon is working to make its Echo smart speakers part of the educational experience for students, urging colleges and universities to experiment with the device and add it to their curricula.

The company has already given 1,600 Echo Dots to engineering students at Arizona State University, Tempe, to gain experience in voice technology. It created the Amazon Alexa Fund Fellowship to provide students funding to develop courses that utilize the device, plus set up a multimillion-dollar research competition called the Alexa Prize for developing new ways to use conversational artificial intelligence.

“Amazon’s strategy is much more about establishing Alexa and the mechanisms and the way that people interact with the virtual world, almost becoming the front end of the next generation of Internet access,” said Phil Hill, ed-tech consultant and blogger for e-Literate. “They’re looking to say, ‘People won’t be doing this much on the browsers anymore, they’re going to be interacting with natural language and voice, and we want that to go through us.’”

Utah State University, Logan, started using the device without any prompting from Amazon, installing an Echo Dot in a classroom for a visually impaired instructor, who uses it to turn on projectors and lower screens with voice commands. At Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI, an instructor is using Alexa to expand the vocabulary of students in his computing and information systems courses.

Of course, not everyone is impressed. A professor of computer science at Rice University, Houston, views Alexa as more of a gimmick. There are also privacy concerns since the device listens constantly for a trigger word when activated.

“It raises the question, OK, you have to say, ‘Alexa, tell me this,’” Hill said. “That doesn’t mean the device is not listening at all times. It just means it uses the Alexa keyword to trigger a command. Where does that information go? Does Amazon store it? Does it get thrown away?”

MS Plans to Connect Rural America

More than 23 million people in rural America, including college students, have no broadband access. Microsoft plans to change that.

The company announced an initiative to connect two million rural Americans over the next five years by using a cheap technology on the wireless spectrum known as TV white spaces to transmit broadband data. Microsoft also asked the Federal Communications Commission to keep the spectrum available and to collect data on rural broadband coverage to help policymakers and companies provide Internet access.

The initiative probably won’t produce impressive financial results, but it is politically savvy.

“[President] Trump on the campaign trail used rhetoric to speak and resonate with those voters, in these sort of left-behind economies as we talk about them,” Seth McKee, associate professor of political science at Texas Tech University, told National Public Radio. McKee added that building a digital infrastructure should get backing from both parties.

“They would be a first mover,” McKee said of Microsoft. “If they were the first ones to really go in this area and actually show some willingness to put some skin in the game, that could go a long way in terms of politicians taking notice and further bankrolling this sort of thing.”

Colleges Provide More Internet Access

Colleges and universities appear to be doing a good jobmaking bandwidth available, with more than 70% offering 1GB or more per student, according to the 2017State of ResNet Report. The study found that available campus bandwidth has increased threefold in the last five years, with about a quarter of the campuses in the survey offering 7GB or more per student.

The survey of 320 colleges and universities reported that while desktops and laptops consume the most bandwidth, smartphones have moved past tablet computers into second place. Smartphones are now seen as academic tools because they allow a more flexible learning environment for multitasking students.

The ResNet report also noted that video entertainment platforms, such as Netflix, consume the largest percentage of campus Wi-Fi, followed by web-based rich content, music, and video games. Classroom learning tools, such as interactive digital textbooks and e-books, were at the bottom of the bandwidth-consumption list.

More than 80% of the institutions reported using bandwidth-management tools, but only 18% cap usage. In addition, 61% of the schools charge a general tech fee to pay for the services.

While bandwidth numbers have improved, a third of the students responding to a 2016 multinational survey said they felt their institutions could still do more. Students claimed that current campus technology was cumbersome and should be more like the apps many use each day on their devices.

Getting in Front of Tech Needs

The technology research firm Gartner predicts there will be 20 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2020. That bandwidth demand will make it difficult for colleges and universities to find ways to expand their use of technology.

To meet anticipated needs, institutions should be able to provide at least 1GB for each residential student, according to a 2016 study from the Association of College and University Technology Advancement. The study also found that nearly 70% of the universities surveyed were already providing that much bandwidth for their students.

Schools must also accept that students have to be connected in the classroom, which means campuses must be expanding their technology capabilities while setting up guidelines to maintain control of the network. To accomplish this, universities may have to collaborate with local partners to make faster networks available for students and the surrounding community.

“The digital transformation is here to stay,” Ivo Pascucci, an expert on the American telecommunications market, wrote in an article for eCampus News. “It is now up to universities to invest in network infrastructure that scales for the future. IT administrators will need to develop a plan that expects to handle cloud storage, millions of devices, virtual reality, 4K and 8K video, and research initiatives.”

A Different Look at Online Learning

There are plenty of consultants and management providers willing to advise institutions on the best ways to start an online learning program. Those experts are probably wrong, according to Joshua Kim, director of digital learning initiatives at the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning.

Kim offered some unconventional advice in his recent Insider Higher Ed blog, starting with the notion that online programs should not be considered a revenue source, but that the classes should be able to cover their costs.

He also suggested that online programs need to be created in areas that differentiate the institution from others rather than simply offering courses that are in demand. Small classes featuring personal attention and quality are the best way to begin.

“The reasons that small online programs have a good chance of achieving economic sustainability have to do with the cost structure of online learning,” Kim wrote. “Colleges and universities can add more (tuition-paying) students without large fixed-cost investments. No need to build new classrooms or dorms. Almost all the costs will be variable costs—and therefore can rise with enrollment.”

Finally, Kim said online courses should be about learning for everyone involved.

“Thinking of a new online learning program as a disciplined experiment will open everyone up to a growth and learning mindset,” he wrote. “Failures (and there will be many) will be opportunities to learn and improve.”

Faculty Not Sold on Ed-Tech

College instructors still aren’t that impressed with technology in the classroom. In fact, faculty responding to the 2016 Inside Higher Ed Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology said they thought the quality of teaching and learning hasn’t been helped by data-driven assessments and accountability efforts, other than to keep politicians off their backs.

Just 27% of faculty members said technology has improved the quality of instruction at their institutions, while the percentage of respondents who said using ed-tech helped to improve degree-completion rates was about the same. On the other hand, 65% agreed that efforts in ed-tech were meant to pacify outside groups.

The survey found that fewer administrators and faculty members said that technology led to significantly improved student outcomes, making it hard to justify the investment. Both groups think institutions are taking the right steps to protect personal information from cyberattacks.

“Faculty members are still worried that online education can’t deliver outcomes equivalent to face-to-face instruction,” wrote Carl Straumsheim in an article for Inside Higher Ed. “They are split on whether investments in ed-tech have improved student outcomes. And they overwhelmingly believe textbooks and academic journals are becoming too expensive.”

Pulling Higher Ed Out of the Middle Ages

Higher education has fallen woefully behind in the race to keep up with technological change, according to a former dean for graduate education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.

In an effort to close that gap, Dr. Christine Ortiz is planning a new kind of residential research institution to keep up with advances while preparing students for life in the 21st century. The yet-to-be named institution would allow students to design their own learning paths and work with faculty to build an individual curriculum. Ortiz’s team has already developed software for computer-guided intelligent curriculum design that integrates science, technology, and humanistic fields.

By the end of 2016, she hopes to have started several pilot programs and to incorporate as a nonprofit in Massachusetts. The plan calls for her institution to be open to students by 2020.

“Technology is accelerating, and modernization and expansion of the higher-education system is desperately needed,” Ortiz said in an article for TechRepbulic. “Our higher-education system is still stuck in the Middle Ages.”

Apple Teaching Coding with an App

Teaching students how to write computer code is almost as common at the three R’s. Coding camps have become big business and the Florida Senate approved a bill that would declare computer coding a requirement for graduation.

Now, Apple has is making a splash with its Everyone Can Code curriculum, a free coding app it introduced during the launch of the iPhone 7 in early September. The program, aimed at middle-school students, uses Swift Playgrounds software that allows students to write code to guide characters through a graphical world, solve puzzles, and master challenges using the Swift programming language.

“When you learn to code with Swift Playgrounds, you are learning the same language used by professional developers,” Brian Croll, Apple vice president of product marketing, said in an article for The New York Times. “It’s easy to take the next step and learn to write a real app.”

The Apple coding app requires an iPad tablet to operate but is free to download. The app is so simple anyone could use it to teach themselves to code at home, according to Croll.

App Keeps Students Organized

An app is now being offered in the United States that provides college students one-stop access to all of their educational content and resources. The digital academic organizer Myday collects information from across a university and makes it available to all student devices.

The app, developed by the U.K.-tech firm Collabco, gathers content from an institution’s learning- and student-management systems and even provides students with information on bus routes, social media updates, and homework assignments. The app uses a single login and can be customized by each student.

In addition, the mobile app can be branded for each university that uses it, has multiple-language support, and can be integrated with other tools such as Moodle, Blackboard, Canvas, and Office 365. Collabco also provides a support team to guide colleges through the setup procedure.

“Colleges and universities are always looking for new ways to attract and retain students in an increasingly digital world,” Collabco CEO Mark Francis said in a report for Campus Technology. “The key to this is to make education a highly personalized, engaging experience for each individual.”

Video Playing Bigger Role in Higher Ed

A new study found that the use of video may have reached a tipping point in higher education. The third annual State of Video in Education report noted that 75% of all students now use video in their assignments and the share of institutions using flipped classrooms has increased to 58%.

More than half of administrators, instructors, and students reported that their institution now uses a video solution integrated into its learning management system (LMS). In addition, video feedback on assignments has grown from 26% in the 2015 survey to 32% this year.

The survey also found that 93% of the respondents said they believe video has a positive impact on student satisfaction and 85% said having video as part of their resource toolkit increases teacher satisfaction. Nearly 90% agreed that it boosts student achievement levels, while 76% said they believe it increases student retention rates.

“For the first time, over 50% of higher-education respondents report that their institution has now integrated a video solution into the LMS,” said Ron Yekutiel, chairman and CEO of Kaltura, the video technology provider that conducted the survey. “If proof were needed that video is now mainstream in education, then this is it. Those institutions that do not yet have a comprehensive video strategy in place for the new academic year risk being left behind.”

Higher Ed Keeping an Eye on VR

The release of two consumer virtual-reality headsets has more people thinking about buying the product, particularly those in the world of immersive games and interactive videos. That has caught the attention of higher education, according to Carl Straumsheim in a column for Inside Higher Education.

“The technology still has a way to go, but early adopters of virtual reality imagine a future in which students go on field trips around the world from the comfort of the VR lab, joined by tour guides who connect to the class remotely,” Straumsheim wrote. “Students in online programs, instead of only interacting with their classmates through discussion forums, meet in virtual classrooms, where they can lean over and talk to their neighbors or work together on a problem on a blackboard.”

Despite the excitement over VR, there are still some concerns that must be addressed, starting with cost. The two commercial headsets released earlier this year cost at least $600 each, and that doesn’t include the gaming computers needed to use them.

Headsets are clunky and wireless technology remains years away. In addition, some users have experienced eyestrain and a type of motion sickness caused by the difference between what the eye sees and the ear senses.

“Costs will come down, the software might be easier to develop, and the technology will continue to advance,” Nitocris Perez, an emerging-technology specialist at Indiana University, Bloomington, told Straumsheim. “I don’t think it’s going to be tomorrow, but three years from now things will be radically different.”

Finding a Way Around E-Textbooks

Some tout digital media as the answer to reducing the cost of print textbooks, but students aren’t all that thrilled with the available e-book alternatives. Joanna Cabot, a senior writer for TeleRead, has an idea.

In a recent column, she suggested that the current textbook models should be replaced with a pay-for-access model where students are charged a fee to use digital content from the college’s or university’s library database.

“It’s almost like Kindle Unlimited for academic articles, in a way,” she wrote. “In the Kindle Unlimited model, I can access every byte of the available library, as much as I want to, while I am paying.” Cabot is currently taking a course which uses library materials instead of a textbook.

In this model, course materials would be replaced by articles available through a library’s subscription service. Instructors list suggested readings on the syllabus with a reference code that is pasted into the search bar to access a PDF of the article. The library database can also be used to research information by subject or keyword, as long as the student paid the subscription fee.

“I think this is a surprisingly elegant model,” Cabot continued. “Now that I’m doing my ‘work’ on a proper computer instead of a tablet, it doesn’t bother me to have multiple browser tabs open. It’s easy to fire up the course message board, open a second tab, and load the library database. I like not having to buy a paper textbook and not having to be ripped off by an overpriced and DRM-hobbled digital effort to copy one. I feel that we are getting more current information by not limiting ourselves to one book source, and since these are not free articles we’re using—the university pays for its various subscriptions—nobody is getting cheated out of their fair due here.”

Campus Blockchain Initiative Underway

Blockchain technology, developed as a digital ledger to record transactions using the digital currency bitcoin, is finding its way onto campus. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab and educational software provider Learning Machine recently launched an open-source initiative that allows institutions to create, share, and verify blockchain-based educational credentials.

The potential uses of blockchain technology on campus include providing credential verification and tracking students’ progress through their coursework. Through the platform, credentials collected by students can be securely shared with anyone, such as an employer, who requires official documents.

The platform ensures the documentation sent is authentic and valid, according to a release on Blockchain News.

“The goal of our collaboration with the MIT Media Lab is to empower individuals with shareable credentials that can be used peer-to-peer and verified as authentic,” said Chris Jagers, co-founder and CEO of Learning Machine. “The current system for sharing official records is slow, complicated, expensive, and broken for everyone in a myriad of ways. The first generation of students to grow up entirely during the Internet age have started applying for college, and many admissions officers can share stories about applicants trying to text photos of their academic records. The expectations, while seemingly humorous, convey an honest impression about the way things should work. It should be that easy for people to share certified records directly with others and have them trusted as authentic.”

Study Finds Classroom Noise Useful

Some teachers see conversations in the classroom as disruptions that need to stop. A professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, is using voice-recognition technology to understand if the noise could help teachers gain a better understanding of what’s going on during class.

“I think one of the things we’re noticing is that even if you are incorporating active learning, it’s very easy to focus on the students at the front of the classroom raising their hands, and this data can let teachers know whether they’ve got an equitable spread of participation across the classroom,” Amy Ogan, assistant professor of human-computer interaction at the CMU School of Computer Science, said in an article for eCampus News.

The technology provides instructors with a dashboard that displays classroom activities in different lights. Sensors analyze sounds in the room, not specific conversations. The colored lights give teachers insight into whether they should change or continue their teaching approach.

The technology suggests classroom literature for teachers on ways to better engage students who aren’t participating by sending messages to their phones between classes. Ogan and her colleagues are also working on ways to use cameras to distinguish patterns in the things students do while they are in the classroom.

“We’re working with a university right now with lots of lecturing,” she said. “When the system detects that students haven’t participated in a while, we flash a big red screen on the instructor’s laptop to notify them to incorporate some student interaction.”

Georgia School Taking Classes to Students

In 2013, Central Georgia Technical College, Warner Robbins, received a grant to test blended-learning methods in its health-care program over an 11-county area of rural Georgia. That led to BlendFlex, an initiative that provides students the option to switch instructional delivery formats.

“In the past, students had to sign up for face-to-face, hybrid, or online courses—they had to make a choice,” Carol Lee, educational technology director at CGTC, said in an article in eCampus News. “We have a lot of students who would sign up for a face-to-face class, but then lifestyle changes, sickness, or family issues would force them to drop out and we would lose those students.”

Even though CGTC has satellite campuses for rural students, before BlendFlex the only choice for many was to drive to one of the institution’s central campuses or take the course online. Once the telepresence option was added, faculty could teach in their classroom as well as to students who joined from the rural centers via the videoconferencing that is part of the program.

CGTC reports that BlendFlex classes have only a 12% dropout rate, compared to a 21% rate among other classes the institution offers. In addition, evaluations indicated that 99% of students said they liked the ability to switch delivery methods, 93% would recommend a BlendFlex class to other students, and 91% would definitely take another BlendFlex course.

“The biggest challenge is getting teachers to [rethink their role] in the classrooms that are now student-centered,” Lee said. “But that’s what it’s going to take to be a successful college these days.”