Games Help Make Learning Fun

Playful design, the blending of serious educational games (SEGs) with immersive technologies such as virtual and augmented reality, is becoming the next big thing in higher education. Playful design works because people like to play games and games make learning fun, according to David Chandross, professor of education, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada.

“Serious games work by practicing skills and tracking achievement, but also by giving learning an addictive quality,” he wrote in an article for The Conversation. “The ‘one more move’ thinking that keeps video gamers up all night is harnessed for learning.”

Chandross noted peer-reviewed studies show SEGs encourage students to use what they learn while playing, engage them better than most lectures, and reward learners for their achievements. It’s a form of active learning that helps students succeed.

“We learn a lot when we love what we are learning,” Chandross said. “It’s a basic trademark of achievement in higher education. Human beings love doing certain things, and learning to become a master of their own world, however fantastical it might be, is one of them.”

U.S. Not Prepping Students for the AI Future

As the world heads toward a more automated economy rooted in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), the United States ranks behind other wealthy nations in how well it’s preparing students for that future.

A new study by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the research and analysis division of The Economist Group, rated the U.S. ninth in its “automation readiness” index—behind South Korea, Germany, Singapore, Japan, Canada, Estonia, France, and the U.K. The study looked at policies to promote technological progress, creation of new businesses, and the development of policies and skills to help manage a transitioning labor market.

“If countries need a long-term strategy to deal with the challenges of automation, education must be at the center of it,” stated the report, which ranked the U.S. ninth in terms of its education policies. Students will need human-centered soft skills, such as critical thinking and communication, as well as grounding in certain hard skills that will need constant upgrading throughout their working lives as technology continues to advance. Adequately preparing those students will require changes to both curricula and to how educators themselves are trained.

“Very few countries are taking the bull by the horns when it comes to adapting education systems for the age of automation,” said Saadia Zahidi, head of education, gender, and employment initiatives for the World Economic Forum. “Those that are have long had a clear focus on human capital development.”

“We’re in a stage of experimentation,” noted James Bessen, executive director of the Technology & Policy Initiative at Boston University School of Law, “and I think it’s going to take us a couple of decades to figure out which policies and approaches work and which don’t.”

Considering it’s starting out behind among developed nations, those decades may be a luxury the U.S. can’t afford. The five highest-performing countries have already begun reshaping teacher education for the needs of the automated future.

Many, Not All, Able to Survive Hi-Ed Change

Most higher education institutions will adapt to change, but some won’t and may be forced to close, in the view of two economics professors at the College of William & Mary.

In an interview with Inside Higher Ed, Robert B. Archibald and David H. Feldman discussed how four-year colleges and universities are under pressure to provide value to students at an affordable cost. Feldman and Archibald are the authors of The Road Ahead for America’s Colleges & Universities and Why Does College Cost So Much?

Both said they believe there will be enough students to fill classrooms, due to greater enrollment by students who are older, lower-income, and from more diverse populations than the traditional student. However, institutions with a high percentage of low-income students may have a tough time finding the resources to adapt.

Flagship public schools and other selective institutions will be able to shift to a tuition-driven model that depends less on state support, according to Archibald. Highly selective private institutions with deep endowments will also make the leap.

“The ones that will fare worse are essentially the rest of the state institutions, particularly those in states less willing to support higher education and in states that are losing population,” Archibald said.

Colleges and universities will need to find a competitive edge to attract applicants. “All institutions outside of the most elite need to invest in something that sets them apart from hundreds of other similar institutions and which offers a real distinction among the much smaller set of schools that makes up their most important regional competitors,” Feldman said.

Higher Ed Needs to Keep Up with Tech

Higher education needs to develop new educational and training programs to keep pace with the technological changes that are reshaping the job market. Online learning and artificial intelligence (AI) will be part of those changes, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

The poll of industry experts and higher-education thought leaders noted that online learning is a flexible format that can play an important role in training workers, but added that requires more “on-demand” training focused on lifelong learners.

“Most of what we now call online learning is little more than glorified textbooks, but the future is very promising,” said David Karger, a computer science professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an article for EdTech. “Online teaching will increase the reach of top universities, which will put pressure on lesser universities to demonstrate value.”

Nearly 30% of respondents to the survey said that AI and machine learning will be disruptive forces, killing more jobs through automation than they create. While automation eliminates many jobs, online learning could be the format to provide training for more sophisticated job skills.

“People will create the jobs of the future, not simply train for them, and technology is already central,” Jonathan Grudin, principal researcher at Microsoft, said in the Pew report. “It will undoubtedly play a greater role in the years ahead.”

New Models Challenge Traditional Higher Ed

Adam Braun, CEO and co-founder of MissionU, says he believes traditional higher education is “broken.” While employers may not stretch that far in their assessment, the fact is some high-profile companies see a college education as less necessary or relevant today. Some, such as Google, have removed a college diploma as a requirement for hiring.

Braun’s MissionU doesn’t require a high school diploma for admission and charges no upfront tuition for its nondegree program in business intelligence and data analytics. Instead, through a profit-sharing agreement, students only pay MissionU 15% of their salary for three years once they make $50,000 or more per year; if a student fails to reach that salary threshold within seven years they’re absolved of any debt to the company.

During the one-year program, MissionU students take online classes and work on project assignments for employer partners such as Uber, Lyft, Spotify, Chegg, and Bonobos. Six weeks of the program are devoted to training for the job-interview process and salary negotiation.

Available undergraduate majors are business, arts and humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and computational sciences. There is also a graduate track to earn a master of science degree in applied analyses and decision-making. MissionU began accepting applications for its first sessions in March.

Launched in 2014, Minerva Schools at KGI is a nonprofit, accredited four-year university founded as a partnership between the Minerva Project and Keck Graduate Institute, a member of the Claremont University Consortium. Courses are online, but students also move around the world as they study, undertaking assignments at companies and organizations in Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, India, Argentina, and Britain, as well as in the U.S.

Some critics question whether science can be taught online-only, without labs, or whether employers will seriously consider job candidates coming from programs that don’t yet have an established brand or proven track record. However, if more companies drop the sheepskin from their hiring requirements, that may become less of an issue.

AI to Take Higher Ed Out of ‘the Dark Ages’

The artificial-intelligence (AI) wave isn’t on the horizon; it’s already here, according to Joseph Qualls, a clinical assistant professor at the Coeur d’Alene branch of the University of Idaho’s College of Engineering. “You are either going to surf that wave or it’s going to crash on you,” he told EdTech Magazine: Focus on Higher Education in a recent Q&A.

Qualls is also CEO and president of RenderMatrix Inc., a research-and-development engineering company, and co-founder of Avid Intelligence, which researches and prototypes AI-focused products for the defense and private sectors.

He predicts AI applications will cause “massive change” from K-12 to higher ed, creating a highly personalized, interactive, and faster path forward for each student. The notion of massive lecture courses and having students all learning the same material may someday be viewed as “education out of the Dark Ages,” Qualls said.

In the long term, “having large universities and large faculties teaching students is probably going to go away,” he added. Until then—for the next 20 years in Qualls’ estimation—instructors will continue to step in when the AI isn’t ready for the task at hand. After that, he noted, professors’ roles might change “from educating a student to educating an AI.”

Med Students Rely on Web, Not Textbooks

When students attending the American Medical Student Association Annual Convention & Exposition in February 2017 were asked to rank their preferred sources of medical information, textbooks was not the first choice for most. Or even the second choice.

About 47% of med students said they turn to Google for answers to their questions, while 32% named medical websites. Only 7% indicated they would look in their medical textbooks first before resorting to other sources.

The survey, conducted by Merck Manuals, a reference publisher for physicians and pharmacists, did involve a fairly small sample of 180 students, which included some in premedical programs as well as med-school enrollees. However, nearly all of the students agreed that growing up with access to digital technologies has shaped how they learn and gather information.

Being able to look something up quickly on a mobile device made a big difference to them as medical students, although 83% admitted they sometimes had difficulty determining whether an online source was legitimate or credible. On the other hand, 45% of students said they had found useful medical videos on YouTube, something a traditional print textbook can’t duplicate.

10 Years of Change: What Publishers Think

What surprises higher education publishers about the past decade of rapidly changing course materials and academic technologies?

That was among the questions posed to panelists in the Thought Leader presentation Course Materials Today and Tomorrow: Views from Publishing Executives held March 4 at CAMEX 2017 (Campus Market Expo) in Salt Lake City, UT. Here are some of their responses:

Tim Stookesberry, senior vice president education, Wiley: “Being in product development for a long time, I did think about what digital was going to mean. I’m surprised most by how digital has changed the distribution network and we’ve had to change accordingly. Students have a lot of choices: the way people buy materials, what they’re looking for. It’s very dynamic.”

Scott Smith, president, Elsevier Education: “Technology simultaneously changes the way the market actually works and how people acquire materials. It’s a completely different environment in which we have to work. There are more links in the chain.”

Kevin Stone, chief sales and marketing officer, Cengage Learning: “In this day and age to be sending cardboard printed access cards with numbers students have to put in is crazy. We need to fix this. I think we can fix it. It’s about access … all about getting materials on day one.”

Peter Cohen, executive vice president, McGraw-Hill Education: “There’s serious empirical data that using adaptive technology improves student achievement, literally hundreds of data. What surprises me is students love print books. There’s a resounding cry to continue to have print resources.”

Tom Malek, vice president and head of channel partnerships, Pearson Education: “Why does it take so long to change? Uber has come and gone in terms of figuring it out. We all serve the industry of higher education. That tends to go quite slowly … tends to put things in the conceptual rather than the real.”

Apple Joins Partnership on AI

Apple has joined the Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society as a founding member, taking its place alongside Amazon, Facebook, Google/DeepMind, IBM, and Microsoft. The nonprofit organization, established last fall, is working to advance public understanding of artificial intelligence (AI), develop best practices to deal with the challenges and opportunities presented by the technology, and conduct and openly publish research on it.

Education is one of the major sectors that will feel the impact of advances in artificial intelligence, according to a report released by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy last October. “An AI-enabled world demands a data-literate citizenry that is able to read, use, interpret, and communicate about data, and participate in policy debates about matters affected by AI,” it said.

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.

Watson Tries Tutoring

Educational publisher Pearson is partnering with IBM to have the latter’s Watson computer system tutor students via Pearson’s courseware. Watson will translate questions students ask through their learning programs and provide explanations, feedback, and guidance to get past misconceptions.

Instructors will be able to use data gathered from that process to see what parts of their courses are generating confusion for students and also identify which students require additional assistance.

The partnership between IBM and Pearson will try to replicate and expand upon an experiment IBM conducted at the Georgia Institute of Technology last year, where students in a computer-science course on artificial intelligence had online access to tutoring from a teaching assistant named “Jill Watson.” Researchers had input all the questions ever asked in that course’s online discussion forum into the Watson platform. They wanted to find out if students would discern a difference between human tutors and a virtual counterpart.

At first, Jill Watson’s answers were “odd and irrelevant,” but by the end of the experiment her answers were delivered with ”97% certainty,” according to the research team. Student response was “uniformly positive” when they were eventually told the nature of their tutor.

Higher Ed's Dual Role: Jobs and Mental Prep

Some say colleges and universities should do more to prepare students for specific jobs. Others feel higher education should continue its traditional role in developing intellectual, analytical, and critical thinking.

There are still others, such as the new president of Robert Morris University in Pennsylvania, who believe both functions are important. In an opinion piece for The Washington Post, Christopher B. Howard stressed that institutions need to ensure “students graduate with skills relevant for today’s workforce and an education that prepares them for an increasingly complex and unpredictable world.”

Howard doesn’t see universities morphing into trade schools, but does acknowledge that more need to partner with corporations to make sure classroom instruction remains relevant to current business needs and also to provide real-world experience to students.

A panel of speakers at the International Seminar on Innovation in Higher Education, held in Mexico in September, concurred with Howard’s view. “We do both,” agreed Richard Legon, president of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges in the U.S., in a report for University World News. “We prepare citizens for the future, and we prepare folks who have the capacity to think and learn and add value on the job.”

Legon said it’s the responsibility of college and university governing boards, because their members are not part of academia, to promote the value of higher education and also to encourage more innovation on higher-ed campuses.

Job Are Top Priority for College Students

Most college students agree that a job after graduation is the most important outcome of a college education. The problem is, too many believe their college and university isn’t doing a very good job of preparing them for that job.

A survey of 770 adults, conducted by Stockton University, Galloway Township, NJ, found that just 35% of recent grads said colleges did “extremely well” in getting them ready for the job market. Nearly 80% viewed internships as the most important factor to success in their career and 84% said an internship was very important in developing a career and finding a job, according to a report in eCampus News.

While 73% said college was worth the cost, 31% added that more hands-on, practical experience would have made the value of their higher education even greater. The group identified problem-solving (84%) as most important skill learned in college, followed by communicating orally (83%), understanding and gathering information (79%), writing clearly (79%), and using technology (77%).

Employers listed problem-solving (32%), teamwork (21%), and writing and speaking skills (19%) as the top skills job-seekers learn in college.

Connecting with Online Learners

There’s no debating the fact that online education is different from the traditional college experience. The online experience will never be able to match the personal interaction and development that is such a big part of campus life.

“It’s true that online learners will not have the same types of interaction as their on-campus peers,” Eric Stoller wrote in a post for Inside Higher Education. “However, we need to stop thinking about what’s ‘missing’ or ‘lacking’ and focus on what we can do to increase connection and build community via digital channels.”

For Stoller, the solution to better student engagement may be social media. Social sites are already being utilized to connect students and expand learner networks, but institutions should be working on programs that use the functionality of social media while the class is in session and as a tool students can rely on for further professional development.

“While online learners might not necessarily be able to meet up at the campus coffee shop with their friends, they can meet up with their peers via WhatsApp groups, Google Hangouts, Twitter hashtag conversations, Periscope live-streams, and LinkedIn group discussion,” Stoller wrote.

U.S. Millennials Don't Have the Skills

The Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) released global data in 2013 on how the U.S. population compared to those of other nations in terms of literacy and reading, numeracy, and problem-solving. The results weren’t pretty, especially for millennials.

The data revealed that the American millennial generation had the highest levels of education attainment of any previous generation, but that they demonstrated relatively weak skills in all the categories under consideration when compared to their international peers, according to a report in eCampus News. The research also found that too many millennials graduated without learning the right skills to enter a technology-based global workforce.

“These findings hold true when looking at millennials overall, our best performing and most educated, those who are native born, and those from the highest socioeconomic background,” wrote Irwin Kirsh, director of the Center for Global Assessments at Educational Testing Service. “Equally troubling is that these findings represent a decrease in literacy and numeracy skills for U.S. adults when compared with the result of previous adult surveys.”

PIAAC surveyed 5,000 people aged 16-65 in 22 countries for the study. U.S. millennials scored lower than 15 of the countries in literacy and ranked last in numeracy and problem-solving skills.

“If we expect to have a better-educated population and a more competitive workforce, policy-makers and other stakeholders will need to shift the conversation from one of educational attainment to one that acknowledges the growing importance of skills and examines these more critically,” Kirsch added. “How are skills distributed in the population and how do they relate to important social and economic outcomes? How can we ensure that students earning a high school diploma and a postsecondary degree acquire the necessary skills to fully participate in our society?”

Should Apple Buy a University?

Rumor has it that the next big thing from Apple could be an electric car. Economist Alex Tabarrok would rather see the computer giant sink its cash into a university.

To Tabarrok, an Apple University could serve as the proving ground for educational technologies. He envisions an institution of higher education that could become a leader in online technologies, artificial-intelligence tutors, and virtual-reality experimentation.

In addition, Apple’s worldwide reputation would help attract the best students, which would create a greater demand for Apple educational products. The firm has already started the process with iTunes U and training courses in business and design, according to Tabarrok.

“More than a century ago, Stanford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller used their industrial-age fortunes to build some of our best universities,” Tabarrok wrote in Marginal Revolution. “Isn’t it time for another great university built for the information age?”

Students See Benefits from MOOCs

While the Year of the MOOC didn’t pan out quite like The New York Times envisioned in 2012, there is still good news on the massive open online course front. A new study of 52,000 students who took at least one MOOC offered by Coursera found that 87% said they saw at least some career benefit from the class.

In addition, 33% of that group, which the study identified as “career builders,” said they turned the MOOC into a “tangible career benefit.”

“The tangible career benefit is a higher bar in some sense,” Gayle Christensen, assistant vice provost at the University of Washington, Seattle, and an author of the report, said in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “A third of people saying that they were able to make these clear next steps is actually something one should be optimistic about.”

The report, which looked at motivations for taking a MOOC and the educational and career results participants achieved, also found that 62% of the respondents in the career-builder category improved their work performance. The survey also identified “education-seekers” as a category and found that 88% gained general educational benefits and 18% said they received tangible educational benefits.

“Going into this, I wasn’t sure what we’d find,” Christensen said. “That those students are actually reporting career and educational benefits in higher numbers is pretty exciting.”

UT Offering First All-Digital Degree Program

The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Edinburg, launched a new degree program that eliminates the need for traditional textbooks. Freshmen enrolled in biomedical sciences were given iPads at orientation and all course materials for the program will be delivered to them on the device.

The program, designed by the UT System’s Institute for Transformational Learning, is the first step in a competency-based education initiative by the institution. Courses will be delivered in a combination of online, classroom, laboratory, or clinical formats, according to a report on the My Harlingen News blog.

“Using elements of the competency-based approach and student services supporting creativity, determination, and drive, UTRGV students are going to be better prepared to take the MCAT, enter medical school, and be successful medical students,” said Francisco Fernandez, dean of the UTRGV College of Medicine. “What this will result in is more qualified doctors coming from the Rio Grande Valley who have the power to transform this community.”

Students will use their iPads to access classroom and online content through a mobile-first application designed by the UT System known as the total education experience or TEx. The TEx app is highly personalized and allows students to speak with classmates and faculty online anytime.

“The most exciting moment for all of us will come in the following years when we see students succeeding by graduating, entering medical school, and becoming knowledgeable and talented biomedical researchers and health-care professionals,” said Marni Baker Stein, chief innovation officer for the UT System.

Students Need Hands-On Experience

Experts expect the demand for employees in professional, scientific, and technical service fields to rise nearly 30% over the next five years. On-the-job training and apprenticeship programs will play an important role in addressing this need, but students must master both theory and application.

It’s up to higher-education administrators and faculty to develop standards to prepare technical workers for the future while ensuring that a technical education is a well-rounded engaging experience, according to Jeff Ylinen, provost of Dunwoody College of Technology, Minneapolis, MN, in a column for eCampus News.

“In more standard educational models, students first build a foundation of theory and then, later in their degree program, apply that theory through specific coursework and internships,” Ylinen wrote. “We’ve found that by flipping this model and immersing our students from day one in real-world environments and workplace situations, they more quickly develop a body of experience and contextual understanding of specialist technical environments that make the learning of theory far more relevant and successful.”

On-campus training centers can provide the hands-on learning students need to prepare for apprenticeships and employment. Such centers do require an investment from the institution, but the return is students who gain valuable experience and meet industry expectations.

“Creating opportunities for students to not only become familiar with emerging materials and new technologies, but also to physically work with them and understand their properties and parameters, creates a far greater degree of knowledge currency and job readiness postgraduation and increases students’ excitement over the direction their chosen fields are pursuing,” Ylinen wrote.

Network Maps Pathway to Careers

Eight states have joined forces to find the best ways to help connect high school students to a postsecondary education that leads to a full-time job. The Pathways to Prosperity Network is trying to develop a “gold-standard model” for states to use, identifying lessons learned and policy recommendations that are useful, according to a report in eCampus News.

The State Progress Report 2012-14, released by Jobs for the Future and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, found that while job availability differs from region to region, the health-care industry, information and computer science, and advanced manufacturing are areas of growth in all eight states and only require two-year degrees.

The report noted that career information should be provided to students in middle school. It also found that important “levers” in each participating state included work-based learning experiences; allowing students to earn college credits in high school; bringing together employers, high school, and community colleges to provide work-based learning opportunities; and creating cross-sector state leadership teams to make work-based learning opportunities possible.

“The states we are working with are committed to destroying once and for all the old notion that some kids need to prepare for college while others are being prepared for careers,” said Robert Schwartz, who helps lead the network. “They understand that, in the 21st century, all young people need to be prepared both for some form of further education and a career.”