Video's Impact on Higher Ed

Video technology is being used in 99% of higher-ed classrooms, which is leading to an increase in student achievement and engagement, according to a new survey of more than 1,000 educators, administrators, students, IT and media staff, and instructional designers.

The State of Video in Education 2017 found that 99% of institutions reported their instructors regularly incorporated video into their curriculum. More than 70% of the responding institutions said they used video technologies for remote learning and teaching.

The report also noted that 93% of respondents said they believed video increased student satisfaction and 85% reported an increase in student achievement. Another 70% said video increases a sense of affiliation with alumni and 78% added it makes onboarding new employees smoother.

Nearly half of the respondents said a video solution was integrated into their school’s learning management system and 15% use video tools built into the LMS. Ten percent said they had no video solution inside the LMS but that the institution was considering it.

Faculty Envision EdTech’s Future Reality

 More than 80% of respondents in Campus Technology’s second annual Teaching with Technology Survey of higher-ed faculty said that virtual-, augmented-, and mixed-reality technologies will have the most impact on education over the next decade, ahead of video, adaptive learning, and even mobile devices.

That impact is already being felt. A report on the online higher-ed market by technology research and advisory firm Technavio noted that the growing popularity of augmented and virtual reality is spilling over into online education, with instructors incorporating these emerging visual technologies to boost the interactivity of the online learning experience.

Of course, awareness and enthusiasm may play out differently. In the Campus Technology survey, faculty ranked mobile devices and apps No. 2 on their list of the top 10 technologies for the next 10 years, but also listed mobile devices in second place in their tally of tech they wish they didn’t have to deal with in the classroom.

K-12 Teachers Still Divided on Edtech Use

While more k-12 instructors are employing education technology on a daily basis in their classrooms—63% this year, a bump up from 55% last year—a quarter of them still report being intimidated by their students’ use and knowledge of edtech, according to an annual survey from the College of Education at the University of Phoenix.

Just over a third of the more than 1,000 respondents blamed inadequate funding for not making greater use of edtech, with 23% citing concerns that technology is too distracting. Even though two-thirds acknowledged that using classroom tech helps their students remain more engaged, more than 70% said that use of personal devices is a distraction in group settings, a rise from 65% in the 2016 survey.

When it comes to their own edtech skills, 40% of K-12 teachers said they'd give themselves a grade of "C" or failing, while only 16% gave themselves an "A."

Questions to Ponder for Online Courses

A recent article from the digital news outlet Quartz detailed efforts by a pair of Texas A&M economics professors to update their mandatory introductory microeconomics class. The class has been moved online, a first for the university.

Students taking the class no longer have to sit through lectures because the professors have already created prerecorded lessons, an interactive video platform, and prepared all the homework and reading material. The lecturer uses a transparent whiteboard to explain concepts and discussion boards to engage students.

“Do I think [this new course] is better than 30 students and the Socratic Method, Dead Poets Society-style? Probably not,” Jon Meers, one of the professors of the course, told Quartz. “It’s still vastly superior to delivering a lecture to 300 students at 8 a.m. on a Friday morning.”

The article claimed the course will increase the quality of learning by allowing professors to interact directly with students, while also saving money for the university. However, Joshua Kim, director of digital learning initiatives at the Dartmouth Center for Advancement of Learning and technology blogger for Inside Higher Education, questions that conclusion.

He pointed out that creating high-quality digital materials and video lectures is hard work, requiring time and plenty of collaboration between the professor and instructional designers and media educators. He added that while the Texas A&M approach may be more effective than traditional lectures, it’s also a lot more expensive.

“Everything that I know about flipped courses tells me that they are more expensive, not less, to develop and run than traditional lecture courses,” Kim wrote.

Most Faculty Upbeat about EdTech

The majority of college and university faculty members feel positive about the impact of technology on education, with nearly three quarters saying it’s made their job “easier” or “much easier,” according to the results of Campus Technology’s second-annual Teaching with Technology Survey.

Even though that total remains high, it’s down four percentage points from the inaugural survey last year. The number of educators claiming tech has made their job more difficult remained consistent, but those who say it hasn’t affected them either way grew from 6% in 2016 to 10% this year.

Whatever its effect on their own work, more than 80% of faculty say they see technology having a positive impact on student learning, and about the same percentage view it having a “mostly positive” or “extremely positive” influence on higher education overall.

Individual respondents did point out that any classroom tech is only as good as the instructor using it and that faculty need to be provided the time to properly understand and adapt technology to their courses.

The complete results of the survey, which polled more than 230 faculty from across the country, are available in the July digital edition of Campus Technology.

National U. Rethinking Personalized Learning

National University, a California-based nonprofit that primarily enrolls adults students, has launched a $20 million, four-year project to create a personalized learning platform that combines adaptive learning, competency-based education learning (CBE), and predictive analytics. The goal is to use the new platform in 20 general-education courses by next year.

The three elements would combine in courseware that would adjust to each student’s abilities and progress, while providing data to track that progress for faculty, advisors, and the students. Incorporating CBE will make it possible to drop conventional grading and divide the course and its credits into skills the students have mastered.

As part of the project, National has also established a research-and-development department to support faculty members and will make its research available to the public.

“How do we create a university that truly tries to adapt to the needs of its students?” asked National’s president, David Andrews. “We have to have a better model for serving adults.”

Fitting all the pieces into one cohesive platform won’t be easy. Getting the CBE portion right could be the biggest challenge because it requires approval from accreditors. Providing financial aid may also prove troublesome, in the view of some industry observers.

“There’s a huge risk that you don’t understand the problem. Will they truly learn and adjust as they go along?” said Phil Hill, co-publisher of the e-Literate blog, about designing academic programs around adult learners. But he also added, “It’s definitely interesting. It’s a relatively large university that appears to be going all in on personalized learning.”

Clickers Can Impair Deeper Thinking

A new study in the journal Computers & Education claims that while classroom response clickers are effective for helping students with rote learning, the devices can actually impair their ability to understand more conceptual information.

The results were most striking when fact-based questions answered with clickers were followed by big-picture conceptual questions. Lead author Amy M. Shapiro, interim associate dean of graduate studies and research, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, said that the factual questions appeared to shift students into a “hyperfocus” on factual knowledge that made grasping the deeper concepts that followed more difficult.

“While many published reports indicate the technology can substantially benefit learners, we found that clicker effects are somewhat more complicated than previously reported,” the study said. “The technology’s use appears to interact strongly with overall pedagogy, resulting in different outcomes for students enrolled in large, lecture-based courses than for those in smaller, problem-oriented courses.”

The study, whose results are so far unique, doesn’t recommend that educators delete clickers from their toolbox, but it does suggest limits to the devices’ efficacy in certain types of courses and that instructors may need to consider changes in how they’re used.

Traditional Computer Labs on the Way Out?

With more students bringing their own devices to campus, there’s a growing trend of moving away from the traditional computer lab in favor of comfortable areas that encourage students to connect to the Internet to study.

“The whole dynamic is changing inside computer labs,” said Casey Gordon, director of IT for College of St. Benedict, St. Joseph, MN, and St. John’s University, Collegeville, MN. “By virtualizing IT resources, we can revolutionize the way students do their work, give them spaces that foster greater collaboration, and expand how they use their own devices.”

However, making the transition requires planning, a commitment to training and support, and a willingness to discuss the change with all stakeholders because eliminating a bunch of desktop computers doesn’t automatically mean the move will cost less. Available campus bandwidth has increased threefold over the last five years, requiring more investment into the technology necessary to support it.

“I shy away from discussing cost savings and focus instead on deciding what’s the best use of our dollars to meet the changing needs of students,” Gordon said.

Faculty must also be part of the conversation. The University of Nebraska, Lincoln, found that some faculty members saw the labs as a way to attract students into their department.

“So if you remove them, that’s a major concern,” said Heath Tuttle, assistant vice chancellor for IT services at UNL. “We discuss the benefits of collaborative learning spaces where students can sit down with their laptop or a device they check out, have a coffee, and do their work.”

Digital Use Trails Awareness

The vast majority of students, faculty, and administrators say they believe digital course materials will play an important role in meeting systemic challenges faced by higher education, according to the report Digital appetite vs. what’s on the table: Student attitudes toward digital course materials in 2016, derived from a recent Pearson Education survey.

More than 80% of both students and faculty view digital materials and courseware as the future of education. In addition, 78% of faculty realize that digital courseware benefits students and 70% see the migration from print to digital content as important to themselves personally. However, implementation and use has some catching up to do, as only 56% of students and instructors said half or more of their courses had used digital materials in the past six months.

“Educators’ appetites for digital course materials and courseware are growing, the capabilities are available, but the stark reality is that they—and their students—just aren’t biting,” the report said.

Forty-four percent of students said they still prefer to have all their learning materials available in a print format. Almost 60% declared that it’s the learning institution’s responsibility to help them shift from a reliance on print to greater use of digital content.

Time to Rethink the Lecture

The lecture remains a basic element of many college courses, but research continues to show it’s time for a change. Researchers from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, recently found that students taking traditional lecture classes displayed little or no improvement in their problem-solving skills after the first semester of their freshman year.

The results were similar to a 2011 UBC study which showed that student engagement and learning doubled when interactive teaching methods were utilized. Researchers from the University of Washington also released a report in 2014 that found students in lecture classes were 1.5 times more likely to fail than students who took classes with more stimulating instruction.

“There is strong evidence that different methods of teaching can heavily influence the development of problem-solving skills,” Andis Klegeris, associate professor of biology at UBC, told eCampus News. “It does not appear that the traditional, lecture-style of information delivery is well suited to helping students build those skills.”

The latest UBC research involved a test that measured problem-solving skills throughout an undergrad’s educational career. One test was given at the start of the first semester and another at the end.

“As problem-solving is becoming an increasingly sought-after skill, it is likely postsecondary institutions will need to adapt their teaching styles to ensure students are able to better participate in a skill-based economy,” said Heather Hurren, a UBC researcher and manager of academic development at the UBC Centre for Teaching and Learning. “If they haven’t already, professors will need to move from traditional lectures and expectations of memorization to approaches that see small groups of students actively discover knowledge on their own.”

Online Cheating Changes Teaching

Tutoring services, online study guides, and digital forums where students can request help on their homework abound, with some students posting copyrighted homework assignments on the sites, and some “tutors” supplying entire finished papers for users. In response, some faculty members are changing how they conduct their courses.

Some instructors expend added time to craft a fresh set of homework questions for each new semester of a course, or only allow students a quick look at their graded assignments before having them turn the work back in so it can’t be posted online. Others are altering their grading scales to give more weight to in-class exams rather than written papers, which leaves them fewer measurements for calculating a final grade.

While many student-support sites have policies and honor codes in place regarding copyrighted content and completion of students’ work for them, actual self-policing appears to be minimal or nonexistent. It’s up to faculty themselves to search out whether their copyrighted intellectual property has been posted illegally and then file a takedown request via the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Benefits of Digital Course Materials

A survey by publisher Pearson found that most faculty members view digital course materials as beneficial for their students. Nearly 80% of educators reported that students were helped by using more digital in the classroom, while 70% said the switch from print to digital was important or very important to them personally.

The report also noted that 87% of instructors and 86% of administrators said they believe digital learning is “important in resolving challenges facing the education system.” In the survey, 56% of educators said that more than half of the course materials they now use are digital and 82% have used at least one digital learning product in the past six months.

The majority of students (57%) continue to report they prefer using printed materials to study, but nearly the same amount said they would like to be able to access learning materials online. Most students (57%) said it’s the responsibility of the institution to help them make the shift to digital.

“There is growing recognition of the broad-range benefits—for students, faculty, and institutions—provided by digital learning,” Tom Malek, senior vice president of partnerships at Pearson, said in a news release. “Institutional leaders have an opportunity to further explore how digital can provide a rich, more personalized learning experience for students, while lowering the cost of course materials and providing new insights and data for faculty.”

Rutgers Launches OER Initiative

Rutgers University, Camden, NJ, has joined the growing list of institutions turning to open educational resources (OER) to address the issue of rising costs for course materials. The Open and Affordable Textbook (OAT) project is offering grants to faculty and department groups as an incentive to replace traditional textbooks with free or low-cost alternatives.

The project, funded by the Office of Information Technology and administered by Rutgers University Libraries, will award grants of $1,000 to 12 groups from across the entire system. The university estimates the program will save its students as much as $500,000 in the first year.

A class in aggregate economics has already started putting together an open textbook. The required printed textbook has a new list price of $89.99, with the e-book version available for $69.99. Using the library’s Springer e-book collection, a PDF version of the book can be accessed for free and the paperback copy can be purchased for $24.99.

“We are committed to helping our students succeed, and one of the barriers to their success is the 1,000% increase in textbooks over the last 40 years,” Krisellen Maloney, vice president of information services and university librarian, said in a release. “We look forward to working with grant recipients to help them identify free or low-cost alternatives for their courses.”

Use of OER Could Rise Dramatically

The use of open education resources (OER) could triple over the next five years, according to a new report from Cengage Learning, while use of OER as supplemental learning materials might quadruple over the same period.

Cengage surveyed more the 500 faculty members, industry experts, and OER adopters for the report, Open Educational Resources and the Evolving Higher Education Landscape. Of faculty not already using OER, 77% said they either expect to use it or would consider using it in the next three years.

The main problem for OER adoption continues to be a lack of understanding by educators. The study found the most significant barrier to OER is “faculty perception of the time and effort required to find and evaluate it.” More than half of the respondents said the lack of a comprehensive catalog was an issue, while 42% cited challenges in finding what they needed as the biggest obstacle.

“If OER is to become truly mainstream, it will need to be integrated with personalized and adaptive learning technologies—including assessment and analytics—that help to improve student performance by mapping objectives to outcomes,” wrote the report’s authors. “Quality content can only go so far; it must be ‘wrapped’ in an instructionally designed framework that creates a cohesive and effective learning experience.”

Grading Is Part of MIT Philosophy MOOC

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is offering a new certificate option for a popular online philosophy course through its MITx platform. It’s the first massive open online course (MOOC) to provide students with the opportunity to have written assignments graded by professional philosophers.

“Listening to lectures and reading books is great, but philosophy is all about taking complex ideas and organizing them in a simple way,” Caspar Hare, the MIT professor running the course, said in an article for eCampus News. “You learn by writing, specifically writing to someone.”

Philosophy: God Knowledge and Consciousness introduces students to the basic topics considered by philosophers and the development of critical reasoning and argumentative skills. Writing helps combine those skills and feedback from trained philosophers lets students know how well they actually understood the material.

“Writing is essential to developing these skills,” Hare continued. “Just answering multiple-choice questions isn’t enough. You need to interact and bounce ideas off of other people. And from MIT’s perspective, the new feature helps bring to light different ideas from people with different cultural backgrounds. Writing enables these insights to pass through the community, which benefits everyone.”

Technology Is No Substitute for a Teacher

A quality education is more about the relationship between an instructor and motivated students than the technology used in the classroom. That, according to a post from Insider Higher Ed tech blogger Joshua Kim, is why technology will never really lower the costs of education.

Technology can complement the relationship-based method of learning by providing tools the instructor can use to help students achieve their goals. What technology can’t do is become a substitute for the teacher.

“The idea that technology can lower the cost of education while improving quality—or improve quality while keeping costs steady, or lower costs while keeping quality steady—is anchored in a basic misconception about how technology behaves,” Kim wrote. “This misconception is that new technologies substitute for existing actions or for existing technologies. The reality is that new technologies most often end up complementing existing practices and technologies. New and old technologies exist side by side.”

Faculty Need Larger Role in Student Success

A new paper from the Education Advisory Board (EAB) reported that instructors aren’t being asked to help students succeed often enough, according to an article for Inside Higher Education.

The Evolving Role of Faculty in Student Success, with a corresponding infographic, found that while plenty of pedagogical innovations are available to instructors, training and support may still be lacking. For example, 75% of responding schools purchased or developed early-warning systems to identify at-risk students, yet not all were being used.

The report advised that faculty should be able to customize early-warning systems to make sure they’re being used. It also suggested that provosts and academic deans need to make sure faculty are aware that mentoring should reach all students, not just the most and least at-risk students.

“Critical reforms that pertain to curricular requirements, academic policies, advising practices, and transfer articulation all rely on the willingness of faculty to redesign the institutional approach and carry out a new set of procedures, but many academic administrators have neglected to involve faculty from the outset,” wrote the authors of the report.

Mixed Results from Adaptive-Learning Study

The largest study to date of adaptive-learning software found that results have been modest at best. Nearly 20,000 college students and 300 instructors using the most popular learning software on the market participated in the research, conducted by SRI International for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation from 2013-15.

Students were no more likely to pass a course using adaptive-learning tools than in a traditional classroom. Researchers also found that the software by itself isn’t enough and that universities didn’t do a good job of making sure the technology being used actually worked.

The study indicated that the tools functioned better when the instructor used the same language utilized in the software during face-to-face instruction and when student usage was monitored closely. Learning results also improved when the course was redesigned around the software.

“I wouldn’t characterize our report as cynical, just cautious,” Barbara Means, director of the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International, said in an article in The Hechinger Report.  Means was also quick to point out that more and better technology has come to market since the study started in 2013. “It shouldn’t be regarded as though this is the last word. It’s just a very early snapshot.”

Colorado Plans for 3-Year Online Degrees

One possible way to lower the cost of higher education is to create degree programs that take less time to complete than the traditional four years. The University of Colorado, Boulder, has launched a grant program to get the effort started.

The CU system is asking faculty and staff to compete for three grants of $200,000 to develop fully online degree programs that can be completed in three calendar years. The university hopes to announce the grant recipients by the end of September and have the program running by 2018.

The program must be delivered by faculty from at least two of the CU campuses. The degree must also be in high demand and marketable since a key factor for the entries will be the number of new students they bring to the university.

“We’re counting on the innovation of our faculty and staff to be able to develop three-year, fully online programs that are going to meet the needs of students in high-demand areas in Colorado and beyond,” Ken McConnellogue, spokesman for the CU system, said in a report in eCampus News.

Students Go to Court over Online Program

The number of academic leaders who view online learning as on par with face-to-face instruction fell from 71% in 2014 to 63% in 2015, according to the Online Report Card—Tracking Online Education in the United States. Just 29% of the administrators surveyed said faculty members accepted the value of online education, the lowest percentage since 2004.

A group of students is challenging the idea of online education in court, suing George Washington University for the quality of its online master’s degree program in security and safety leadership. The students allege the program failed to provide the same level of instruction and interaction as the traditional classroom version of the program. The suit claims instructors were unresponsive and barely involved in facilitating the student-center coursework.

The suit also refers to a May 2013 letter to the university president signed by 11 students complaining about the quality of the program. The university issued an apology at the time, but has done nothing more about the online course, according to a report from Inside Higher Education.

“The misrepresentations are designed to present the program as something that is not: a credible, longstanding program, with courses and content specifically designed for the online learning environment,” the complaint reads. “In reality, at the time the plaintiffs applied for the online program, there were not graduates to the program and the ‘content’ mostly consisted of scanned-in PDFs of textbooks (with blurry pages and sentences cut off) and PowerPoint slides taken from in-class courses, without any narration or explication.”