CURATED EDTECH NEWS, TRENDS, & INSIGHTS

With a scheduled launch of Fall 2015, Brandman University joins the growing list of post-secondary institutions launching new competency-based programs focused on non-first-time (NFT) adult learners. As with other competency-based education (CBE) programs, it will allow adult learners to demonstrate the competencies they have already mastered through prior education and work experience while constructing a personalized course of study based on an alignment of their career goals and requisite competency gaps. Unique to Brandman’s CBE program is an intense focus on involving industries and businesses in their region in order to understand existing competency deficiencies in the workforce and to identify emerging competency needs.

The Center for Digital Education’s Digital Community Colleges Survey 2014 – 2015 award winners demonstrate several keys to creating technology empowered learning that results in student readiness for rapidly expanding needs in the job market. These include: 1.) strategic investment in educational technology paired with meaningful professional development for faculty focused on technology integration, 2.) increasingly flexible pathways toward obtaining degrees and other credentials combined with support services designed for increasingly diverse and dispersed student populations, and 3.) mutually beneficial partnerships with regional industries culminating in highly successful job placement programs.

The adult learners at Peirce College will have the flexibility to decide week to week whether to attend class in person or online for the school’s entire curriculum by fall 2016. While faculty already offer all courses online and in person, what additional considerations might be needed in this increasingly fluid learning environment?

In a first of its kind partnership, the University of New Haven and Galvanize, a for-profit code school startup, are launching a data science master’s program. Based on a co-created curriculum, students will earn a UNH degree working directly with Silicon Valley companies.

With only one third of non-first-time college students (adult learners) successfully earning degrees, new questions about the unique needs of these students are being raised. How must programs, services, and content be effectively differentiated for this critical population?

John Carmack, CTO for virtual reality (VR) company Oculus, announced at GDC that mobile VR would release to the mass consumer market this year. He also encouraged thinking beyond gaming to broader applications. I couldn’t agree more – it’s time to start exploring VR learning.

The role of adaptive learning technologies in new knowledge acquisition and mastery may be just the beginning. Professor Anbar’s Habitable Worlds online course is an example of highly customized adaptive learning in the form of experiential problem-solving experiments.

Last year the University of Florida launched UF Online, offering fully online degree programs. While adult and transfer students are target customers, significant first-time-in-college (FTIC) student enrollment is also a goal. Will they succeed and what are the potential trade-offs?

While a majority of states (all but four) have adopted the Common Core, plans for standardized testing are increasingly anything but common. Over the last year, support for PARCC and Smart Balanced has stalled, with more than twenty states now opting for alternatives.

What started out as a project to imagine the future of the book, evolving into Ice-Bound – an iPad game built on a decision-based narrative system which places readers in control. The game’s combinatorial narrative system is being released as an open source Javascript library.

Makerspaces equipped with the latest 3D printing technology and specialized curricula are emerging on postsecondary campuses across the country. At SUNY New Paltz, students in art to engineering are working side by side with local businesses in a public-private partnership.

While this article focuses on personalized professional development for educators, utilizing the Strengths, Needs, Interests, and Constraints model to construct learner profiles could serve as the foundation for the creation of any multidimensional personalized learning experience.

The NMC Horizon Report, 2015 Higher Ed Edition identified six technologies and practices likely to go mainstream over the next five years:  Bring Your Own Device, Flipped Classrooms, Makerspaces, Wearable Technology, Adaptive Learning, and The Internet of Things.

Prior Learning Assessment (PLA) initiatives, which develop criteria for awarding of college credit based on adult learners’ prior work and training experience, continue to gain traction with an announcement of the first statewide program including all Pennsylvania community colleges.

Digital problem solving applications (aka online homework solutions) can provide learners with help and guidance when, where, and how they need it but are we providing each learner the right kind of help and might we have discounted the value of learning from failure?

The credit hour (derived from the Carnegie Unit), which is a measure of student “contact time” with an instructor rather than a meaningful gauge of individual student achievement, is an acknowledged impediment to innovation yet persists largely due to lack of an alternative.

Providing more flexible and affordable pathways to earning degrees for non-first-time (NFT) students continues to be a key theme in emerging research on degree completion. In this latest study, NFT students who mixed full- and part-time enrollment were more likely to graduate.