Online: Trending Now
Unique biweekly insights and news review from Ray Schroeder, Senior Fellow at UPCEA.
Our New Digital Colleagues and Friends
There is an intriguing anthropomorphic trend underway to apply human attributes and attitudes to artificial intelligence-driven chat bots and assorted personal assistant tools. This is not unique in the history of humans. We tend to assign human attributes and names to tools and conveyances. We all have known over the years individuals who given their…
Higher Ed’s Future at the Intersection of Learners and Employers
The future of higher education is bridging the gap between the expectations of learners and the needs of employers. Fewer students started or returned to college last fall — numbers were down half a million below 2019. In understanding those numbers, we should remember that enrollments have dropped each of the past 10 years. Prospective students…
Vaccinate Against Cheating With Authentic Assessment
University faculty members are discovering that students are using the internet to cheat on exams. Online sites sell test questions, answer keys, term papers and other assessments to students. There is a cure for this. It’s not news that students cheat to pass classes, though this has recently been in the news with the discovery…
Time for Reinvention, Not Just Replication or Revision
With enrollments falling, college budgets under strain and employers dissatisfied with the relevance of graduates’ learning, now is a time for more than replication or revision — it is time for reinvention. We are at the confluence of massive economic, technologic and social changes that demand higher education do more than small fixes. We will not…
Zoom Fatigue: What We Have Learned
Zoom (and other videoconferencing) fatigue was recognized early in the remote learning efforts of 2020. It is real. We have learned much about the cause and some about how to avoid the symptoms that impair communication and learning. Early in the remote learning efforts of the spring semester last year, we found that many faculty…
Online Learning to the Rescue: Again
During the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic in Asia in late 2002 and 2003 and the devastating Hurricane Katrina in 2005, online learning came to the rescue of scores of colleges and universities and tens of thousands of students. SARS was a serious cousin of the current virus. It spread quickly across Asia and…
Ray Schroeder is Professor Emeritus, Associate Vice Chancellor for Online Learning at the University of Illinois Springfield (UIS) and Senior Fellow at UPCEA. Each year, Ray publishes and presents nationally on emerging topics in online and technology-enhanced learning. Ray’s social media publications daily reach more than 12,000 professionals. He is the inaugural recipient of the A. Frank Mayadas Online Leadership Award, recipient of the University of Illinois Distinguished Service Award, the United States Distance Learning Association Hall of Fame Award, and the American Journal of Distance Education/University of Wisconsin Wedemeyer Excellence in Distance Education Award 2016.