Online: Trending Now

Unique biweekly insights and news review from Ray Schroeder, Senior Fellow at UPCEA.

Are You Selling Day-Old Doughnuts?

January 31, 2019

Every year our degrees “expire” in relevancy and timeliness if we don’t refresh each class with an eye to the future, Ray Schroeder argues. We all know the tech expectations of new hires have changed rapidly this century. While many of the soft skills of communication, leadership, critical thinking and social sense remain relevant today,…

Disrupting the Disrupters

January 17, 2019

The advent of online education was a classic Clayton Christensen disrupter. That was a quarter of a century ago. Now the disrupter is becoming disrupted. Harvard professor Clayton Christensen described disruptive innovation as “a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves…

The Forgotten Middle-Skilled

January 4, 2019

Nearly half of all college graduates are reported to be underemployed in their first job and a third in non-STEM fields remain underemployed after five years. There are more college graduates available than college-requisite jobs in the marketplace at this time. But, there are many more openings than qualified applicants among middle-skill job positions. Burning…

Hey, Google, Alexa, Siri and Higher Ed

December 18, 2018

The growing use of voice search and virtual digital assistants will have an increasing impact on how we deliver, search for and market higher education. I watch the many ways in which my 7-year-old grandson engages with Google Home when he drops by the house. Whenever a question of history or fact arises, I pull…

Jobs, Education and the Learner/Worker

December 6, 2018

Much is written about strengthening the link between education and employment. Jobs are changing and likely to continue to evolve over the coming decades. Education must evolve, too. How do we make sense of all that is being written and said about the linkage between education and employment? Certainly, we are seeing effects of a…

Search in the Post-Truth Era

November 15, 2018

Google has dominated search for 20 years. But results today are far too often tainted with information that is incomplete, misleading or false. MIT aims to address that problem with the knowledge graph Underlay. I recall the very early days of Google’s search engine — just after it changed its name from BackRub (really!). It was renamed…

A man (Ray Schroeder) is dressed in a suit with a blue tie and wearing glasses.

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.