As higher ed professionals, this is a good time to re-think our social platforms.

As of this writing, the future of Twitter is unclear. Elon Musk has taken over the helm with policies and practices that are prompting massive layoffs and resignations that have threatened the regular operation of the social media tool. Some experts are even predicting the demise of Twitter. This has caused concern among a wide range of users from the casual news and entertainment fans to government agencies. Public agencies had come to rely on Twitter for information dissemination and exchange in the case of emergencies. The takeover of Twitter has left them seeking other, more credible, stable and secure, outlets for emergency communication. 

I have lost only a few dozen of several thousand followers on Twitter; presumably they have dropped off the platform because of the recent changes. I have found at the same time that my network on LinkedIn has expanded. I have not investigated whether there is a direct cause and effect, but I suspect that Twitter flight is some of the cause. The changes have prompted me to include my LinkedIn and Mastodon addresses in my Twitter profile so that followers who are preparing to leave can find my daily UPCEA curated reading postings on other social media.

I have found that higher education professionals seek opportunities to inform themselves about news, information and engage their community through social media. This is necessary in order to respond to the firehose of changes that are triggered daily by technology advancements, as well as the economy and policy changes in impacting higher education. For our professional purposes, we are less interested in memes, animal tricks and music videos. We seek to build vibrant and customized Personal Learning Networks (PLN) of trusted sources who provide information and engage in discussions that are on relevant topics as they apply to us individually, our institution and our circumstances. These individualized PLN networks are also the venues through which we learn about opportunities for career advancement and new career paths.

The most relevant platform for UPCEA, the assocation for professional, continuing, and online education leaders (at which I am a Senior Fellow), and its members is CORe (Collaborative Online Relationships) that is open to those professionals at the hundreds of UPCEA member institutions. Members raise questions, make announcements, consider collaborations, and engage one another on timely topics in many aspects related to professional, continuing, and online higher education. Other associations in our field similarly maintain open and/or closed listservs designed to facilitate dissemination of information and platforms for discussion around their own niches of higher education field. Yet, there still is a need for broader based discussion on the emerging technologies, developing strategic options, and the changing policy and related changes that we face with the public at large.

As we look at our social media PLN options, it would seem that our needs cannot be satisfied by the short video formats that are the stock-in-trade of TikTok and Instagram. In part, we are looking to build and maintain professional networks; share updates; and stimulate creative discussion on ways to better serve learners and reach new audiences.

What are the alternatives? Fortunately, a number of platforms are available online to meet these needs. A couple of decades ago, I launched curated reading lists with online discussions for students enrolled in my graduate seminars on emerging technologies. I used Blogger, which was originated by Pyra Labs and later taken over by Google (Alphabet). Out of that experience evolved the flagship curated reading list at UPCEA, the Professional, Continuing and Online Education Update. The blogger tool remains an icon for sharing stimulating ideas intended to foster deeper discussions among professionals. WordPress, Tumbler, and Reddit followed, with other similar blogging sites. You can easily search for blogs online to find ones that are active and relevant to your needs. Blogger remains, for me, the anchor of my social media where my curations are held in long-term, searchable format, and from which I feed the microblogging sites of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and (now) Mastodon. Each of these sites has its own strengths and shortcomings, so I find that using all of them help to reach a wide-ranging audience across the continents.

Facebook (Meta) has served as an informal network platform for many. Traditionally, Facebook has been a more casual, than professional, network. It remains to be seen just how the platform will evolve with the advent of a promised metaverse. Perhaps the new environment will give us a wide variety of new tools that can enable academic collaboration and information dissemination.

Mastodon offers the most similar look and feel to Twitter. However, behind the scenes it is a very different enterprise. It is comprised of a federation of open-source, non-profit servers interconnecting with each other to enable worldwide access. While it has been around since 2016, the number of users had reached one million by the end of October. That number doubled in the past month, and continues to grow rapidly. 

LinkedIn is more than a site for job seekers. Serious professional discussion and networking takes place across the platform. There are numerous relevant groups on LinkedIn which serve specialized interests. For example these range from different topics including the Quality, Innovation and Sustainability in Higher Education Group with some 12,000 members is aimed at all profiles of a broad spectrum of participants all the way up to large groups like the Higher Education Management group with nearly 130,000 members is designed to discuss administrative and leadership topics. These are just a few of the thousands of different groups communicating via LinkedIn.

Take time to consider your PLN in light of the disruption in Twitter. Are there other social sites that might do a better job of addressing your needs? Now is the time to re-assess as Twitter re-organizes and other social networks enhance their offerings.

This article was originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s Transforming Teaching and Learning blog. 

A survey shows that nearly half of said they chose their college on the basis of potential career prospects, only 11% felt prepared to enter the workforce.

Salesforce’s third annual Connected Student Report, released last month, identifies some serious shortcomings perceived by college and university students. While nearly half of the 1,300 students surveyed said they chose their college on the basis of potential career prospects, only 11% felt prepared to enter the workforce. Forty percent of the students suggested their universities offer job-specific workshops to help them build their careers.

This dissatisfaction with the existing bridge from college to the workforce is reinforced by the high costs and low return on investment (ROI) for students and their families. Think tank Third Way identified 5,989 public, private nonprofit and private for-profit college and university programs for which there is no financial return on the investment in tuition based on how long it takes their graduates to earn the money back:

Based on students’ incomes and what they paid for college, it found that while about half will recoup their costs within five years, nearly a quarter will take 20 years or more. Of those, more than half will never make enough to cover what they spent….  Yet another think tank, the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, has used deep data to conclude that more than a quarter of programs — including most of those in art, music, philosophy, religion and psychology — leave students financially worse off than if they’d never enrolled. That analysis looked at earnings not only after two years, but over a graduate’s lifetime, by including additional information collected by the Census Bureau.

We must be careful about ROI assertions, because too often calculations compare only the cost of tuition to the increase in average income of college graduates over time. That fails to capture the opportunity and experience cost of four to five years outside the workforce while the student is college. Also ignored too often is the cost of interest on student loans: “The average student loan accrues $26,000 in interest alone over 20 years (at the rounded average interest rate of 6%). Up to 67.1% of the average borrower’s total cost of repayment is generated interest.”

In response to these concerns, we are seeing a flood of universities offering alternative credentials to document workforce skills and knowledge. Some of these initiatives seem to be based on the individual initiative of an enthusiastic faculty member or an isolated department, rather than as part of a well-considered university-wide review of the whole range of needs, opportunities, costs and benefits. While individual initiative is to be congratulated, to the extent that they are less consistent across the curriculum, the student body as a whole is less well served.

Clearly, we are seeing a popular, but relatively uncoordinated, movement to address the disconnect between the university and the workforce. Finding the best ways to help re-build that bridge may require looking back at the motivating factors of the past. Rovy Branon, Vice Provost of Continuum College at the University of Washington, says leaders should reflect back on their mission and history for guidance:

During a time of very high populism in the country, where people did not see higher ed reflecting the needs of the general population in states like Washington and California, there was a movement to defund universities from public funding,” Branon said. Extension units were founded to serve those who the university does not tend to serve. Looking at higher education in the modern era, Branon said there are still audiences that are unserved and under-served, which should prompt colleges and universities to revisit their execution on their respective missions…. According to Branon, executing on this vision requires colleges and universities to re-evaluate their relationship with technology—and thinking about the learning product through a different lens.

In an expansive report released at the end of last month, the Brookings Institution asks the important question, Whose Learning Counts? The report investigates the value of learning outside the classroom. The report addresses the twin topics of how can those who have accrued learning outside the classroom better communicate their skills and knowledge to employers, and how can states facilitate the granting of credit for that learning in academic institutions?

In some cases, the structures have existed in under-utilized form for decades. University of Louisville Professor Matt Bergman writes in Evolllution that Credit for Prior Learning (CPL), also known as Prior Learning Assessment (PLA), offers an opportunity to bring academic credit to outside-the-classroom at a reduced cost to the learner. Citing a recent study by CAEL and the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, covering more than 465,000 students, he points to the strong links that exist between CPL and student success. The most exciting aspect is that CPL/PLA programs are already on the books at thousands of colleges and universities. Most of these recognize a wide range of documented experiential learning to be applied as college credit.

The federal government is also fostering apprenticeships in a number of ways. Noting that are more than 800,000 apprenticeships across the country, the apprenticeship.gov site claims to be the one-stop source to connect career seekers, employers, and education partners with apprenticeship resources. Noting that the Registered Apprenticeship program has a proven track record of producing strong results for both employers and workers, the site says the average starting salary of those completing approved apprenticeships is $77,000. The National Center for Employment Statistics reports that overal the average starting salary of the holder of a bachelor’s degree is $59,600. 

Internships are also a great way to gain workplace experience while attending college. The federal government also models best practices by offering paid internships at the White House and the State Department among many other opportunities.

Are the CPL/PLA programs at your university thriving? If not, what can be done to make them more attractive to students, employers and faculty members? Does your college encourage paid apprenticeships and internships for credit? These are practice paths to give students the experience, skills and knowledge to confidently make the transition to the workplace.

This article was originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s Transforming Teaching & Learning blog.

Artificial Intelligence has begun impacting education, but the best is yet to come!

The era of AI management of big data is upon us. Even in the slow-moving field of education, big data is making a difference. Identifying trends that never before had been uncovered and using predictive analytics to generate models of the future are commonplace in all aspects of higher ed including tracking and predicting enrollment demographics. Much more of the text generated in our field than many realize is actually written by – or inspired by – AI! Sports reports, press releases, and annual reports use AI in a variety of ways. GPT-3, the third generation Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is a neural network machine learning model trained using internet data to generate any type of text. Developed by OpenAI, it requires only a small amount of input text to generate sophisticated machine-generated text.

AI research assistants are as prevalent as Siri and Google Assistant. More sophisticated assistants such as Elicit, Leo, and Wizdom offer specialized assistance in academic research. In time, digital assistants will modify the way we set expectations for research reports in our classes. Already, Walden University’s “Julian” is an AI powered tutor that is available to assist students round the clock. 

Of course, the Jill Watson teaching assistant pioneered by Professor Ashok K. Goel of Georgia Tech has evolved into an adaptable AI anthropomorphic tool that has the potential to take on many of the common tasks of professors such as grading, providing feedback, and answering student questions. The original version took some 1,500 person hours to program. Now Professor Goel reports he and his team can create a new “Jill” in ten hours, creating the potential to make an AI teaching assistant available at all levels of teaching and learning:

That reduction in build time is thanks to Agent Smith, a new creation by Goel and his team. All the Agent Smith system needs to create a personalized Jill Watson is a course syllabus and a one-on-one Q&A session with the person teaching it. Named after the self-replicating character in The Matrix, the Agent Smith program clones Jill Watson, but makes her a specialist in the area of need. Teachers from any grade level or subject domain can have a deployable, AI-powered teaching assistant for their class with minimal set-up. “In a sense, it’s using AI to create AI,” Goel says, “which is what you want in the long term, because if humans keep on creating AI, it’s going to take a long time.” 

In a more global context, AI has the potential to re-make our class-based teaching and learning paradigm. For hundreds, even thousands, of years, formal education has been based on teaching in classes of students. The economy of going beyond private tutoring to teach a group rather than one individual is obvious. The opportunity for group exchange and engagement is also clear. However, there is ineffectiveness inherent in having to spread the teaching across a range of students with varying knowledge, skills, interest, and desired outcomes. We will be better served by personalized learning opportunities.

I taught my first college course half a century ago in 1972. Many years, thousands of students and hundreds of courses later, the challenge remained the same throughout my teaching career: how to meet the needs of all of the students, not just the best-prepared, not just the middle-of-the-pack, not just the less-prepared, but rather all of the students in the class. It has always struck me as ill-conceived that we teach twenty or thirty students at a time. I understand the economy of doing so, but not the pedagogical sense.

It is as if we had 30 students of approximately the same age, and we gave them all size 7 ¾ hats and size 10 ½ shoes. That fits my rather mellon-sized head and average-sized feet pretty well. However, I doubt that they would fit more than 10% of any 30-student class taken at random. The other 90% would not be comfortable in either the hat or shoes. It just wouldn’t be a good fit for most of the learners. So, why then do we teach our 30 students in the same way with the same content and teaching methods no matter how well or poorly prepared they are for the class? Can we expect that approach to make everyone come out of the class with mastery of the subject?

Sure, we do a nip and tuck in the delivery, tailoring the message just a bit for those who are lagging behind or who are accelerating ahead. Yet, these are ad hoc measures done on the fly for the most part. We suggest review sites; we give opportunities to re-do assignments; we encourage advanced problems for those we believe can handle them. These are, at best, making do to correct mistaken assumptions.  

An AI powered adaptive model of teaching includes frequent probing assessments throughout the learning term, analyzed by AI to determine the depth and breadth of knowledge of the learner in the topical area and adapt the syllabus to achieve mastery of the outcomes at the end of the term. Gaps in learning can be identified in these assessments and adjustments can be built into the flexible, personalized syllabus for the student. Areas of prior learning mastery within the subject area can also modify the syllabus for a more efficient, brief review of that topical area. Options can be offered to either shorten the class term, or to fill those spaces with discussion leadership and engagement opportunities with others in the class.  

There are a whole host of ways in which AI can improve learning outcomes, lessen the workload on faculty and staff, and ensure that our learners are getting the best, most-relevant education possible. These outcomes do not happen without intention or pro-active preparation. Who is leading the effort to apply the best AI technology in the most useful way at your university? Are you committed to continuous improvement and efficiency through new technology? How can you help ensure that your institution is on the forefront of using technology to support your students?

This article was originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s Transforming Teaching & Learning blog.