Learning lightboards bring a human element to online learning - HERBERT TSANG, eCampus News

 Students build learning lightboards--a kind of glass "chalkboard"--to promote the human face of remote learning. Trinity Western University (TWU) students bring more human faces to online learning by building lightboards that allow professors to look directly into the camera while drawing and illustrating on lighted glass.... Pettigrew hopes to help other students succeed in their studies this fall. “I am excited about building the lightboards because I believe that the transition to online school in the fall will be difficult for many people, and the use of lightboards can make this transition easier,” he said.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2020/09/16/learning-lightboards-bring-a-human-element-to-online-learning/

The effects of online learning - Ella Craig, the Forge Today

Speaking to BBC Worklife, Associate Professor Gianpiero Petriglieri said that video calls require more attention than in person gatherings and this added effort to engage in the conversation causes what became to be known during lockdown as Zoom fatigue. During face to face interactions we can read body language and facial expressions to better engage and understand the conversation taking place, but during video calls this personal aspect is taken away. Zoom fatigue can leave you feeling drained for the rest of the day, reducing your ability to study or focus under the new, online, delivery method. As well as this, video calls and online lectures can impact mental health, says Professor Petriglieri.

http://forgetoday.com/2020/09/15/the-effects-of-online-learning/

Rethinking online education with virtual event platforms - NISHCHAL DUA, eCampus News

Virtual event platforms provide an important outlet for educators who are looking to re-engage their students.  The escalation and global impact of COVID-19 catalyzed a sudden shift to the university experience as we know it. By March 2020, 14 million students pivoted to online education. College enrollment in the United States is now down 20 percent going into the fall 2020 semester, and typical activities such as sports and on-campus events have been canceled. This new reality has pushed educators across the United States to rethink how they’re delivering online education and implement new ways to engage students during this crossroads.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2020/09/15/rethinking-online-education-with-virtual-event-platforms/

Sustaining Emotional Connections with Your Students in an Age of COVID19 (Part 2 of 2) - Howard Aldrich, Tomorrow's Professor

 The COVID 19 pandemic has transformed the teaching and learning environment. We are still discovering the many ways in which student and faculty interactions are affected by being mediated through facial coverings and spatial distance. Although faculty and students are now moving back into the classroom, they have lost a key piece of information that humans rely on to understand others’ meanings and read their emotions. We are accustomed to encountering masked others mainly in situations that make us anxious or afraid. Now, it is the new normal. Similarly, online teaching and learning can deprive us of the facial expressions and body language that helps us assess whether others understand and agree with us. Online teaching cannot replicate what occurs in a classroom, even when participants are unmasked. So, we have our work cut out for us!

https://tomprof.stanford.edu/posting/1814

Meet the students thriving in remote learning - Luke Winkie, Vox

 But since the country entered its unprecedented distance learning experiment this spring, there’s been a growing contingent of students who’ve found themselves actually enjoying their cyberspace syllabus more than the physical version.  “I’m an introvert who deals with a lot of social anxiety,” said Maude, a 20-year-old special care counseling student in Quebec who has been taking remote classes since March and into the new school year. “In an online classroom, I don’t have to be around people or feel apprehensive about asking the teacher questions. Instead, I’m as calm as I can be, in my safe space at home.”

https://www.vox.com/first-person/21433095/coroanavirus-covid-19-school-reopening-online-learning-remote

Engaging Students Through Asynchronous Video-Based Discussions in Online Courses - Patrick Lowenthal, et al; EDUCAUSE Review

As growing numbers of students take online and hybrid courses, higher education institutions are looking for ways to cultivate and sustain engagement with students remotely. One method is the use of asynchronous video-based discussions, which offers unique opportunities for instructors and students. Asynchronous video has been used in online courses as an instructional tool in many ways. For instance, online educators have created videos to share with students—including recorded lectures (screencasts or lecture capture), how-to videos, and feedback on assignments—for well over a decade.

https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/8/engaging-students-through-asynchronous-video-based-discussions-in-online-courses

Mental Health Needs Rise With Pandemic - Greta Anderson, Inside Higher Ed

A mountain of troubling data about rising mental health problems has health advocates and providers worried about the need for additional support for struggling students and the ability of colleges to provide it.  Several recent surveys of students suggest their mental well-being has been devastated by the pandemic’s social and economic consequences, as well as the continued uncertainty about their college education and postcollege careers. Still reeling from the emergency closures of campuses across the country during the spring semester and the sudden shifts to online instruction, students are now worried about the fall semester and whether campuses that reopened for in-person instruction can remain open as COVID-19 infections spread among students and panicked college administrators quickly shift gears and send students who'd recently arrived back home.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/11/students-great-need-mental-health-support-during-pandemic

5 tips on how unis can do more to design online learning that works for all students - the Conversation

The COVID-19 pandemic has driven a rapid shift to online learning at all Australian universities. This presents unique opportunities for both educators and students, but also new challenges. Recent media reports suggest online learning might not be meeting the needs of all students. In particular, university students with disabilities report they are struggling with online learning that lacks the features they need to fully participate.
https://theconversation.com/5-tips-on-how-unis-can-do-more-to-design-online-learning-that-works-for-all-students-144803

Howard Gardner on His Theory of Multiple Intelligences and Lessons for COVID-19 Era - Jeffrey R. Young, EdSurge

This month Gardner came out with a different kind of book, one where he looks inward. It’s a memoir called “A Synthesizing Mind.” In it, he reflects on the interdisciplinary work he did that led to his theory of multiple intelligences. And he has suggestions for how to encourage that kind of broad thinking so that others can make new insights across whatever fields they’re working in. He argues that we need more of these kinds of thinkers in this challenging moment of polarization and pandemic.
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2020-09-01-howard-gardner-on-his-theory-of-multiple-intelligences-and-lessons-for-covid-19-era

Ransomware: Huge rise in attacks this year as cyber criminals hunt bigger pay days - Danny Palmer, ZD Net

Not only has the number of ransomware attacks increased, but ransomware has continued evolving, with some of the most popular forms of ransomware last year having disappeared while new forms of ransomware have emerged. In some cases, these are even more disruptive and damaging. "Looking into the evolution of last year's ransomware families and how they've changed this year, most of them have actually gone down in numbers. This year's popular ransomware families are not last year's popular ransomware families," Liviu Arsene, global cybersecurity researcher at Bitdefender told ZDNet.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/ransomware-huge-rise-in-attacks-this-year-as-cyber-criminals-hunt-bigger-pay-days/

Distance learning sans the screen - Salil S, Deccan Herald

If you have ever used an exercise app, you know how a screen-based app prompts you to do non-screen physical activity. Similarly, the design of learning activities shall prompt the student to do non-screen activities too. The screen becomes only an instruction point, touch point, and reporting point of each activity. The way is to ensure sufficient interaction, appropriate activities, and appropriately curated content leading to the desired learning outcome. Let us step-out and witness the departure from the misunderstanding of teaching as talking.
https://www.deccanherald.com/supplements/dh-education/distance-learning-sans-the-screen-883963.html

Creating Emotional Engagement in Online Learning - Melissa Fanshawe, et al; EDUCAUSE Review

With the increasing use of online course delivery in higher education, it is important to identify aspects of the online course that students consider essential to engage in learning. Typically, a student's engagement within a course is measured by their performance, their access to the course content, or the time and effort they invest in the course.1 While these things are important, a framework for online student engagement developed in 2018 by Petrea Redmond and colleagues suggests that students engage in learning via five dimensions: cognitive, behavioral, social, collaborative, and emotional.3 This means that rather than focusing only on student access to the content and the course design, educators also need to facilitate social and collaborative interaction to ensure students are emotionally connected within the course.
https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2020/8/creating-emotional-engagement-in-online-learning

Effective Teaching Is Anti-Racist Teaching - Mary Wright, Tomorrow's Professor

Here, we outline five key starting points of anti-racist classrooms, designed to magnify the transformative impact of education but also to mitigate the negative harm. Borrowing from Kendi’s (2019, p. 18) definition of anti-racist policy, we define “anti-racist teaching” as intentional syllabus design, class content, or pedagogy that creates or develops racial equity, with applications for face-to-face and remote/hybrid teaching environments. We also commit to incorporating these principles into our own practice, in our work to support teaching and learning at Brown.
https://tomprof.stanford.edu/posting/1812

Blockchain Can Disrupt Higher Education Today, Global Labor Market Tomorrow - Andrew Singer, CoinTelegraph

Blockchain can play its part in the education sector — record-keeping in 2–3 years and then adoption by the labor market? In the post-pandemic world, individuals will need to seize ownership and control of their educational credentials — documents like degrees and transcripts — from schools, universities and governments. That notion received key support last week from the American Council on Education in a study funded by the United States Department of Education focusing on the use of blockchain in higher education.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/blockchain-can-disrupt-higher-education-today-global-labor-market-tomorrow

The Comeback Story: How Adults Return to School to Complete their Degrees Hadass Sheffer, Iris Palmer, Annette B. Mattei; New America

The new majority of college students have adult responsibilities, such as parenting, earning a living, and paying for college. Unfortunately, adult students are often treated as an afterthought by colleges and policymakers. Over the last 20 years, more than 37 million students have left without receiving a degree that would greatly improve their economic prospects. This joint report from the Graduate! Network and New America examines the journeys of determined individuals who get back on track, persevere, and earn their degree—known as comebackers—to show how policy makers and postsecondary institutions can design systems that support success for this new majority and better serve all students.
https://www.newamerica.org/education-policy/reports/comeback-story/

Working from home: The 12 new rules for getting it right - Daphne Leprince-Ringuet, ZDNet

From video-conference etiquette to triple-checking your emails, here are some do's and dont's to help you navigate the new digital workplace.  And while most organizations switched their staff to remote working almost overnight, the new codes that are emerging are here to stay. Three quarters of CFOs, according to Gartner, intend to shift some of their employees to remote work permanently. While there might be hundreds of best-selling business etiquette handbooks out there, not many have anticipated such a radical turn of events. But experts are already thinking about the digital etiquette of the future – and here are some of the do's and don'ts of the remote business space that they have already identified.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/working-from-home-the-12-new-rules-for-getting-it-right/

No, Running Online Classes Isn't Cheaper - Matt Reed, Inside Higher Ed

This weekend Kim Weeden tweeted that the most common myth about higher ed that she runs into is that teaching online is cheaper. It isn’t. Most of a college’s budget is labor. When a physical campus moves to online teaching, it doesn’t save much labor at all. Grading an online student’s paper takes the same amount of time as grading an on-site student’s paper.  Yes, technology allows a single presentation to be shared with many more people at once, but viewing a presentation isn’t education. Actual learning occurs in the engagement with the material, and that still requires human interaction.
https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/no-running-online-classes-isnt-cheaper

Creating Emotional Engagement in Online Learning - Melissa Fanshawe, et al; EDUCAUSE Review

With the increasing use of online course delivery in higher education, it is important to identify aspects of the online course that students consider essential to engage in learning. Typically, a student's engagement within a course is measured by their performance, their access to the course content, or the time and effort they invest in the course.1 While these things are important, a framework for online student engagement developed in 2018 by Petrea Redmond and colleagues suggests that students engage in learning via five dimensions: cognitive, behavioral, social, collaborative, and emotional.3 This means that rather than focusing only on student access to the content and the course design, educators also need to facilitate social and collaborative interaction to ensure students are emotionally connected within the course.
https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2020/8/creating-emotional-engagement-in-online-learning

7 Things You Should Know about Virtual Labs - EDUCAUSE ELI

Virtual labs are interactive, digital simulations of activities that typically take place in physical laboratory settings. Virtual labs simulate the tools, equipment, tests, and procedures used in chemistry, biochemistry, physics, biology, and other disciplines that include a laboratory component in the  curriculum. A key characteristic of virtual labs is their interactivity—video recordings or renderings of lab activities that cannot be manipulated by users fall outside this discussion. Similarly, physical equipment such as radio telescopes orelectron microscopes that can be controlled by distant users is considered remote instrumentation rather than a virtual lab.
https://library.educause.edu/-/media/files/library/2020/8/eli7174.pdf

Interface University and Other Scenarios for the AI Economy - David Staley, EDUCAUSE Review

As artificial intelligence moves us to a world without work, what does that mean for higher education institutions and their mission in the new economy? But if predictions of a world without work come to pass, the link between higher education and job preparation will be torn apart.  As a result, higher education will become unnecessary for many. A small number of institutions of higher learning might remain, as places where students go to engage their minds, but many colleges and universities will be shuttered if a central core of their mission has been eliminated. Higher education would return to its pre–Morrill Act status as a leisure activity for the few.
https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/8/interface-university-and-other-scenarios-for-the-ai-economy

Hands-on Classes at a Distance and the Emerging Virtual Future - Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed

Even if the essential content remained the same, the shift to online provided the opportunity to optimize use of video, audio, animation, simulation and other online technologies to promote engagement and interaction by the students, resulting in deeper understanding and retention. In each of the instances where there seems to be no substitute for actual hands-on, we would do well to begin with a deep dive into current professional practice and emerging trends in that field. Where is current practice and how will it be changing in the near future? We must not only follow those trends, but also anticipate where our associated fields are going. Hands-on is becoming “goggles-on” and face-to-face is becoming “face-to-screen” in many fields.
https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online-trending-now/hands-classes-distance-and-emerging-virtual-future

COVID-19 pandemic – Years of potential intellectual life lost - John Richard Schrock, University World News

During the coronavirus pandemic, teachers, professors and parents worldwide have realised that we are falling behind in education, research and intellectual progress. How much will the pandemic slow the academic progress of each country and of the world? We could borrow and modify a parallel measurement from the medical field to measure the slowdown. ‘Years of potential life lost’ or YPLL is an important calculation in medical epidemiology. Save the life of a baby in a developed country today and you have potentially saved 60 or more years of life. Save the life of an elderly person and you have perhaps given them a few more years to live.
https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20200807090836187

The competitive edge virtual learning provides during a downturn - AYTEKIN TANK, Fast Company

With so much time being spent at home, many of us are taking advantage of the benefits of e-learning. And why not? It’s a convenient, cost-effective way of burnishing our skills or developing new ones, all while safely quarantined at home. Even before the pandemic, e-learning was on the rise. Marketing research reports predicted that the online education market would hit $350 billion by 2025—and that was before COVID-19 forced everyone indoors.  Now, the many learning platforms spawned in recent years are seeing massive upticks in users: Coursera, which focuses on academic offerings, added 10 million new users between mid-March and mid-May.https://www.fastcompany.com/90544546/the-competitive-edge-virtual-learning-provides-during-a-downturn

Blockchain Training: How and Where to Start - Nate Swanner, Dice

As companies consider how blockchain fits into their overall tech stack, the common belief is that blockchain will become the next frontier for managing data. This alone drives interest in blockchain, and encourages many seasoned technologists to begin a quest towards adding blockchain to their repertoire. But how should you go about learning blockchain? Can you teach yourself, or should you pay for a course? We queried experts to find out the best ways to learn blockchain.
https://insights.dice.com/2020/08/25/blockchain-training-how-where-start/

The Impact of OER Initiatives on Faculty Selection of Classroom Materials - Tanya Spilovoy, Jeff Seaman, and Nate Ralph, WCET and Bay View Analytics

The adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) is on the rise, driven in part by increasing awareness of OER. But while faculty and institutions have shown increasing awareness and acceptance of OER, many remain unfamiliar with what they are, or how to utilize them.
http://onlinelearningsurvey.com/reports/impactofoerinitiatives.pdf

7 Things You Should Know About Virtual Labs - EDUCAUSE ELI

Virtual labs are interactive, digital simulations of activities that typically take place in physical laboratory settings. Virtual labs simulate the tools, equipment, tests, and procedures used in chemistry, biochemistry, physics, biology, and other disciplines. Virtual labs allow students to participate in lab-based learning exercises without the costs and limitations of a physical lab. Virtual labs can be an important element in institutional efforts to expand access to lab-based courses to more and different groups of students, as well as efforts to establish contingency plans for natural disasters or other interruptions of campus activities.
https://library.educause.edu/resources/2020/8/7-things-you-should-know-about-virtual-labs

5 ways COVID-19 made me a better instructor - JEANNE CAREY INGLE, eCampus News

These tips for remote teaching during COVID-19 are relevant for teachers at the elementary level straight on up through higher education.  Over the past 3 months I have taken my fully on-ground, in-person classes and put them completely online, done all my advising and research mentoring virtually, and I think I might be doing the work a little better. Don’t get me wrong–I miss teaching my students in person and I can’t wait until we get back to some semblance of normal. But normal won’t be this fall, and possibly not even in the spring of 2021, so I decided, as I prep for the fall, to look at my teaching and see what went right this past semester.
https://www.ecampusnews.com/2020/08/20/5-ways-covid-19-made-me-a-better-instructor/

Making The Best Of Virtual Learning: Some Advice From The Founder Of Khan Academy - Scott Simon, NPR

"I'll be the first to say that for most students, distance learning can't replace a great in-person experience," wrote Khan in a New York Times op-ed earlier this month. "Pure distance-learning is suboptimal, but we have to do it out of necessity because of the pandemic." The problem, Khan says, is that with virtual learning, students are missing out on the vital social and emotional benefits that come from in-person classes. For that reason, Khan presses the importance of placing one-on-one interaction at the center of virtual lessons.
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/22/904652858/making-the-best-of-virtual-learning-some-advice-from-the-founder-of-khan-academy

Survey: Majority of Learners Believe the Pandemic Will Fundamentally Change Higher Education - Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology

In a recent survey of learners of all ages around the globe, 79 percent of respondents agreed that colleges and universities will fundamentally change because of the COVID-19 pandemic. And 88 percent said that online learning will be part of the higher education experience moving forward. The survey, conducted by The Harris Poll on behalf of Pearson, polled 7,038 people aged between 16-70 years old in seven countries about key trends in education and work.
https://campustechnology.com/articles/2020/08/13/survey-majority-of-learners-believe-the-pandemic-will-fundamentally-change-higher-education.aspx

How to align SLOs with employability - TROY MARKOWITZ, Campus Technology

Today’s universities measure student learning outcomes (SLOs) through in-class assessments targeting the micro and macro level of a learner’s knowledge acquisition. At the micro level, these assessments take the form of quizzes, mid-term and final exams, and evaluations of assignments submitted by students. At the macro level, SLOs feed into what administrators expect every student, regardless of specific curriculum, program, or major, to master in order to graduate. When SLOs align with skills that employers seek from new-hire candidates, recent graduates can achieve the ultimate outcome: employability.
https://www.ecampusnews.com/2020/08/19/how-to-align-slos-with-employability/