Educational Technology

Future of College Will Involve Fewer Professors

At a large private university in Northern California, a business professor uses an avatar to lecture on a virtual stage. Meanwhile, at a Southern university, graduate students in an artificial intelligence course discover that one of their nine teaching assistants is a virtual avatar, Jill Watson, also known as Watson, IBM’s question-answering computer system. Of the 10,000 messages posted to an online message board in one semester, Jill participated in student conversations and responded to all inquiries with 97% accuracy.

At a private college on the East Coast, students interact with an AI chat agent in a virtual restaurant set in China to learn the Mandarin language. These examples provide a glimpse into the future of teaching and learning in college. It is a future that will involve a drastically reduced role for full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty who teach face to face.

I forecast this future scenario and other trends in my 2021 book “Human Specialization in Design and Technology: The Current Wave for Learning, Culture, Industry and Beyond.” As a researcher who specializes in educational technology, I see three trends that will further shrink the role of traditional college professors.

1. The rise of artificial intelligence

According to a 2021 Educause Quick Poll report on AI, many institutions of higher education find themselves more focused on the present limited use of AI – for tasks such as detecting plagiarism or proctoring – and not so much the future of AI.

AI’s use in higher education has largely been concerned with digital assistants and chat agents. These technologies focus on the teaching and learning of students.

In my view, universities should broaden their use of AI and conduct experiments to improve upon its usefulness to individual learners. For example, how can colleges use AI to improve student learning of calculus or help students become stronger writers?

However, most universities are slow to innovate. According to a 2021 poll, some of the challenges to acquiring AI included lack of technical expertise, financial concerns, insufficient leadership and biased algorithms.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are leading the way with new uses of AI. In an immersion lab staged as a food market in China, Rensselaer virtually transports students learning Mandarin Chinese into this market to interact with AI avatars. MIT has devoted millions of dollars to faculty research in AI. One of MIT’s projects – called RAISE, for Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education – will support how people from diverse backgrounds learn AI, and human learning in general.

Professors from the baby-boom generation are retiring, and I expect some of their jobs will not be filled. In many cases, these coveted positions will be replaced by part-time and temporary faculty. I believe the rising use of AI will contribute to this trend, with universities relying more on technology than in-person teaching.

2. Erosion of academic tenure

Tenure is a status that grants professors protections against being outright fired without due cause or extraordinary circumstances. However, the pandemic became a means to dismiss, suspend or terminate tenured faculty. For example, the Kansas Board of Regents in January 2021 voted to allow emergency terminations and suspensions – including for tenured faculty – to alleviate financial pressures placed on universities by the pandemic.

News reports continue to show a steady decline in the number of tenured faculty positions. According to an American Association of University Professors report, the proportion of part-time and full-time nontenure-track faculty grew from 55% in 1975 to 70% in 2015. Conversely, the proportion of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty fell from 45% to 30% in that period.

Universities used the pandemic as a reason to override and diminish the power of shared leadership with faculty. That included voiding faculty handbooks, regulations and employment contracts.

Ultimately, the pandemic was an opportunity for universities to downsize unproductive faculty and keep “active practitioners.”

3. The flipped classroom

The flipped classroom provides students with opportunities to view, listen and learn at their own pace through video instruction outside the classroom. It has been around since at least 2007.

This teaching approach is similar to the way people learn from one another by watching videos on YouTube or TikTok. However, in college the flipped classroom involves prerecorded faculty lectures of course content, whether that be on the causes and effects of the Civil War or the origins of white rice. In class, students build on the professor’s prerecorded lecture and work on activities to assist discussions and expand knowledge.

The classroom becomes a place for social interaction and understanding course content. The flipped classroom maximizes instructional time for the professor and students because the lecture comes before the course’s in-class session.

As an example of the operation of a flipped classroom, a professor records a video on a subject area. This allows the same video to be viewed by one student or thousands of students. A human teaching assistant, avatar or chat agent conducts all in-class activities, tests and group work. No additional professors are needed to teach multiple sections of the same course. Professors, in this example, serve a limited role and ultimately will be needed less.

These trends illustrate a profession that I see as being on the cusp of radical transformation.

By: Patricia A. Young

Source: Future of college will involve fewer professors

Related Contents:

UNESCO (2019). “Futures of Education: learning to become” (PDF).
UNESCO (2019). #CommitToEducation. UNESCO. ISBN 978-92-3-100336-3.
UNESCO (2020). Humanistic futures of learning: perspectives from UNESCO Chairs and UNITWIN Networks. UNESCO. ISBN 978-92-3-100369-1.
Gazzaniga, Michael S. (2009, 2008). Human : the science behind what makes your brain unique (1st Harper Perennial ed.). New York: Harper Perennial. ISBN 978-0-06-089289-0. OCLC 262884955. Check date values in: |date= (help)
Humanistic futures of learning: perspectives from UNESCO Chairs and UNITWIN Networks, UNESCO. To learn how to add open license text to Wikipedia articles, please see this how-to page. For information on reusing text from Wikipedia, please see the terms of use.
This article incorporates text from a free content work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO Text taken from #CommitToEducation
Hadot, Pierre, 1922– (2002). Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique. Davidson, Arnold I., 19.- (Nouv. éd. rev. et augm ed.). Paris: Albin Michel. ISBN 2-226-13485-9. OCLC 401647613.
Authier, Michel, 1949- (1999, 1998). Les Arbres de connaissances. Lévy, Pierre, 1956-, Serre, Michel, 1930-. Paris: La Découverte. ISBN 2-7071-3044-3. OCLC 144691852. Check date values in: |date= (help)
Rovelli, Carlo, 1956– (2014). La realtà non è come ci appare : la struttura elementare delle cose. R. Cortina. ISBN 978-88-6030-641-8. OCLC 869809336.
Pert, Candace. (2012). Molecules of Emotion : Why You Feel the Way You Feel. Simon & Schuster, Limited. ISBN 978-1-4711-0970-6. OCLC 1090987991.
Paoletti, P.; Ben Soussan, T. Dotan (20 July 2019). “The Sphere Model of Consciousness: From Geometrical to Neuro-Psycho-Educational Perspectives”. Logica Universalis. 13 (3): 395–415. doi:10.1007/s11787-019-00226-0. ISSN 1661-8297.
“Gender Transformative Approaches | The Evidence Project”. evidenceproject.popcouncil.org. Retrieved 19 March 2020.“Fake Obama created using AI video”. BBC News. 19 July 2017.

Future Graduates Will Need Creativity and Empathy – Not Just Technical Skills

Rapidly advancing technology, including automation and AI and its impact on education, skills and learning in the UK, is a subject of much debate for universities. How can institutions equip students with the skills they need to succeed in a changing jobs market? It’s a valid question, though often the answers are the problem.

Since technology is driving these changes, there’s an assumption that the government should keep focusing on Stem subjects. These are often referred to as “hard skills”, which are prioritised in primary school and right through to university level. In the meantime, “soft skills” – which are already disadvantaged by the term’s connotations – are being relegated even further down the pecking order in terms of curriculum must-haves.

This is a mistake. Much evidence suggests that soft skills are far more beneficial to graduates than is currently acknowledged. Research from Harvard University on the global jobs market has shown that Stem-related careers grew strongly between 1989 and 2000, but have stalled since. In contrast, jobs in the creative industries – the sector probably most associated with the need for soft skills – in the UK rose nearly 20% to 1.9m in the five years to June 2016.

Soft skills are in fact increasingly in demand in the workplace: Google cites creativity, leadership potential and communication skills as top prerequisites for both potential and current employees.

So why, in an age cited as the “fourth industrial revolution”, are soft skills so highly sought after? With the rapid evolution of technology, a focus on hard skills leaves students vulnerable to change, as these often have a shorter shelf life.

According to research by the World Economic Forum, more than one in four adults reported a mismatch between their skills and those needed for their job role. Although technical skills, such as learning to code, can be taught and assessed more easily and soft skills take time to develop and are more complex in nature, the latter can turn out to be more beneficial in the long term.

If taught well, these skills should enable students to adapt to change more easily, gain a greater understanding of people and the world around them, and ultimately progress further in their chosen career.

Of course technical, practical and more easily quantifiable skills are important but without the curriculum placing equal, if not greater, importance on soft skills, our governments and education systems are missing a huge trick. Hard skills may help a student get a job in a particular industry, but soft skills will help them disrupt it, creating change for the better and achieving a wider impact in their chosen field.

To return to the Google example, many of the company’s top “characteristics of success” are soft skills: being a good coach, communicating and listening well, possessing insights into other points of view, being supportive of one’s colleagues, critical thinking and problem solving, and being able to make connections across complex ideas. It’s these fundamentally human emotional and social skills which should be nurtured, developed and celebrated as the key to future success for students and society in general.

Many universities have embraced this, teaching students soft skills such as critical thinking, idea generation and interdisciplinary ways of working alongside hard skills. But the issue goes much deeper: it needs to be tackled across the entire education system, so that by the time students reach university level they are already familiar with the importance of, and the qualities needed to develop, these essential skills.

With enrolment in arts and humanities degrees in decline and the government’s continued focus on technical Stem subjects, the value of soft skills may be in danger of being lost along the way. Perhaps a good place to start would be a reframing of the language we use to describe these skills as, if the evidence is correct, they’re not so “soft” after all.

By: Natalie Brett

Natalie Brett is the head of London College of Communication and pro vice-chancellor of the University of the Arts, London

Source: Future graduates will need creativity and empathy – not just technical skills | Natalie Brett | The Guardian

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5 Permanent Skills We Didn’t Learn at School

We spend a lot of time in school learning things we rarely use in life. And then, a massive chunk of our lives after formal education, gathering practical knowledge to build a good life. The irony of learning in school is that we don’t apply much of what we learn in our lives.

The practical skills to build a great life is learned through experimentation, imitation and deliberate self-learning.

Success is built on permanent skills, but society values hard skills more. Therefore, people are encouraged to learn hard skills to be “successful” in life. Traditional skills (engineering, programming, accounting, expertise, etc.) are easy to measure and job-specific. The problem is, not all skills are permanent. Some skills are valuable for a while, and then they become obsolete as technology evolves and gets better at doing specific tasks.

Many people have lost their jobs because employers found a faster way to save money. If your skills are indispensable, you are among the lucky few who can rely on their skills for as long as possible. Permanent skills have been around for centuries. They help people navigate life and do their jobs effectively.

Successful people learn both hard skills (through formal education) and permanent skills (via self-learning) to become efficient or effective humans. Their permanent skills complement their hard skills. Sheryl Sandberg once said, “Build your skills, not your resume.” A few permanent skills that can help you thrive in the next decade.

Dealing with uncertainties and change — In the wake of the pandemic, your ability to rise above things you cannot control is now more important than ever. How you react when most things are out of your control changes determines your level of stress and anxiety.

“Knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security,” says mathematician John Allen Paulos. Of course, there are no guarantees in life, but knowing what you can and can’t control can help you plan for inevitable change.

When you are worried about the future, focus on the outcomes you can control and be proactive about them. And always remember, don’t believe everything you think, live in the present but be proactive about the future.

The ability to spend and invest time wisely — Time is all we have to do more great work, change, improve, learn or make money. How are you spending your time? If you are bad at using time, you won’t get anywhere in life. Time management skill is what separates successful people from everyone else.

“Time is what we want most, but what we use worst,” is one of my favourite quotes. William Penn said that. It’s a powerful statement that reminds us of the shortness of life. You can achieve almost anything if you learn how to invest, spend or save time.

The willingness to change your mind — If you can’t change your mind, you can’t improve, can’t adapt, and can’t work with people. You are not right all the time. Your reality is only the only truth. So it’s vital to maintain an open mind. “Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” George Bernard Shaw said.

Your perceptions, assumptions, beliefs, and mental models inform your life choices — improving them can help you make better judgements. When the facts change, I change my mind.” John Maynard Keynes said.

The ability to understand emotional language — Humans are social beings. We communicate through language, emotions and body language. If you want to get far, influence people, change minds or make friends, develop a better understanding of your emotions to respond better to how other’s feel.

“In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels.”Daniel Goleman said. Nurture your emotional brain. You can do a lot better in life if you understand the emotions of others deeply.

The art of persuasion is an emotional job. Emotional skills improve our relationship with ourselves, which helps us build healthy relationships with the people we love and those we work with.

The ability to think through problems and situations — The decisions we make (small and big) in life have long-term consequences on ourselves and the people we care about.

Learning to think could mean the difference between good decisions and bad ones. “He who thinks little errs much.” Leonardo Da Vinci said.

In almost every decision-making process, we have multiple options to consider. Knowing the consequences of every course of action, their short-term effects and long-term implications can help you make better judgements.

Permanent skills don’t get old. They won’t become obsolete. You will continue to rely on them over and over again to build a good life. And the good news is, these permanent skills can be learned. “All skills are learnable.” Brian Tracy said. You can improve yourself every day to become a skilful and better human.

Thomas Oppong

By: Thomas Oppong

Source: 5 Permanent Skills We Didn’t Learn at School | by Thomas Oppong | Personal Growth | Jun, 2021 | Medium

Critics:

Education is the process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, morals, beliefs, and habits. Educational methods include teaching, training, storytelling, discussion and directed research. Education frequently takes place under the guidance of educators, however learners can also educate themselves.

Education can take place in formal or informal settings and any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts may be considered educational. The methodology of teaching is called pedagogy.

Formal education is commonly divided formally into such stages as preschool or kindergarten, primary school, secondary school and then college, university, or apprenticeship.

There are movements for education reforms, such as for improving quality and efficiency of education towards applicable relevance in the students’ lives and efficient problem solving in modern or future society at large or for evidence-based education methodologies.

A right to education has been recognized by some governments and the United Nations. Global initiatives aim at achieving the Sustainable Development Goal 4, which promotes quality education for all. In most regions, education is compulsory up to a certain age.

As Pandemic Upends Teaching, Fewer Students Want to Pursue It

Kianna Ameni-Melvin’s parents used to tell her that there wasn’t much money to be made in education. But it was easy enough for her to tune them out as she enrolled in an education studies program, with her mind set on teaching high school special education.

Then the coronavirus shut down her campus at Towson University in Maryland, and she sat home watching her twin brother, who has autism, as he struggled through online classes. She began to question how the profession’s low pay could impact the challenges of pandemic teaching.

She asked her classmates whether they, too, were considering other fields. Some of them were. Then she began researching roles with transferable skills, like human resources. “I didn’t want to start despising a career I had a passion for because of the salary,” Ms. Ameni-Melvin, 21, said.

Few professions have been more upended by the pandemic than teaching, as school districts have vacillated between in-person, remote and hybrid models of learning, leaving teachers concerned for their health and scrambling to do their jobs effectively.

For students considering a profession in turmoil, the disruptions have seeded doubts, which can be seen in declining enrollment numbers.

A survey by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education found that 19 percent of undergraduate-level and 11 percent of graduate-level teaching programs saw a significant drop in enrollment this year. And Teach for America, which recruits recent college graduates to teach in low-income schools across the country, said it had received fewer applications for its fall 2021 corps compared with this period last year.

Credit…Rosem Morton for The New York Times

Many program leaders believe enrollment fell because of the perceived hazards posed by in-person teaching and the difficulties of remote learning, combined with longstanding frustrations over low pay compared with professions that require similar levels of education. (The national average for a public-school teacher’s salary is roughly $61,000.) Some are hopeful that enrollment will return to its prepandemic level as vaccines roll out and schools resume in-person learning.

But the challenges in teacher recruitment and retention run deeper: The number of education degrees conferred by American colleges and universities dropped by 22 percent between 2006 and 2019, despite an overall increase in U.S. university graduates, stoking concerns about a future teacher shortage.

For some young people, doubts about entering the teaching work force amid the pandemic are straightforward: They fear that the job now entails increased risk.

Nicole Blagsvedt, an education major at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, felt a jolt of anxiety when she began her classroom training in a local public school that recently brought its students back for full in-person learning. After months of seeing only her roommates, moving around a classroom brimming with fourth and fifth graders was nerve-racking.

Ms. Blagsvedt’s role also encompassed new responsibilities: sanitizing fidget toys, enforcing mask use, coordinating the cleaning of the water bottles that students brought to school because they couldn’t use the water fountains. In her first week, she received a call from an office assistant informing her that one of her students had been exposed to Covid-19, and that she had to help shepherd the students out of the classroom so it could be disinfected.

“This panic crossed my mind,” she said. “I thought: This was what it’s going to be like now.”

Administrators running teacher preparation programs said the new anxieties were most likely scaring away some potential applicants. “People are weighing whether or not it makes sense to go to a classroom when there are alternatives that may seem safer,” said David J. Chard, dean of the Wheelock College of Education and Human Development at Boston University.

But for many students, the challenges posed by remote teaching can be just as steep. Those training in districts with virtual classes have had to adjust their expectations; while they might have pictured themselves holding students’ hands and forming deep relationships, they’re now finding themselves staring at faces on a Zoom grid instead.

“Being online is draining,” said Oscar Nollette-Patulski, who had started an education degree at the University of Michigan but is now considering swapping majors. “You have to like what you’re doing a lot more for it to translate on a computer. I’m wondering, if I don’t like doing this online that much, should I be getting a degree in it?”

In some instances, remote teaching has deprived education students of training opportunities altogether. At Portland State University in Oregon, some students were not able to get classroom placements while schools were operating remotely. Others were given only restricted access to student documents and academic histories because of privacy concerns.

Credit…Benjamin Norman for The New York Times

At the university’s College of Education there was a decline in applications this year, which the dean, Marvin Lynn, attributed to students in the community hearing about the difficulties in training during the pandemic.

Applications may tick back up as schools return to in-person learning, Dr. Lynn said, but the challenges are likely to outlast this year. Educators have struggled with recruitment to the profession since long before the pandemic. In recent years, about 8 percent of public schoolteachers were leaving the work force annually, through retirement or attrition. National surveys of teachers have pointed to low compensation and poor working conditions as the causes of turnover.

The pandemic is likely to exacerbate attrition and burnout. In a recent national study of teachers by the RAND Corporation, one quarter of respondents said that they were likely to leave the profession before the end of the school year. Nearly half of public schoolteachers who stopped teaching after March 2020 but before their scheduled retirements did so because of Covid-19.

This attrition comes even as many schools are trying to add staff to handle reduced class sizes and to ensure compliance with Covid-19 safety protocols. Miguel A. Cardona, the secretary of education, recently called for financial help to reopen schools safely, which will allow them to bring on more employees so they can make their classes smaller. The Covid-19 relief package approved by President Biden includes $129 billion in funding for K-12 schools, which can be used to increase staff.

Not all teacher preparation programs are experiencing a decrease in interest. California State University in Long Beach saw enrollment climb 15 percent this year, according to the system’s preliminary data. Marquita Grenot-Scheyer, the assistant vice chancellor for the university system, attributes this partly to an executive order from Gov. Gavin Newsom, which temporarily allowed candidates to enter preparation programs without meeting basic skill requirements because of the state’s teacher shortage.

Teachers College at Columbia University in New York City also saw an increase in applications this year, according to a spokesman, who noted that teaching has historically been a “recession-proof profession” that sometimes attracts more young people in times of crisis.

Even some of those with doubts have chosen to stick with their plans. Ms. Ameni-Melvin, the Towson student, said she would continue her education program for now because she felt invested after three years there.

Maria Ízunza Barba also decided to put aside her doubts and started an education studies program at the Wheelock College of Education at Boston University last fall. Earlier in the pandemic, as she watched her parents, both teachers, stumble through the difficulties of preparing for remote class, she wondered: Was it too late to choose law school instead?

Ms. Ízunza Barba, 19, had promised to help her mother with any technical difficulties that arose during her first class, so she crawled under the desk, out of the students’ sight, and showed her mother which buttons to press in order to share her screen.

Then she watched her mother, anxious about holding the students’ attention, perform a Spanish song about economics.

Ms. Ízunza Barba said she realized then that there was no other career path that could prove as meaningful. “Seeing her make her students laugh made me realize how much a teacher can impact someone’s day,” she said. “I was like, whoa, that’s something I want to do.”

By Emma Goldberg

Source: As Pandemic Upends Teaching, Fewer Students Want to Pursue It – The New York Times

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CDC (11 February 2020). “Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) – FAQs for Administrators”. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Retrieved 3 August 2020.
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“Transitioning from CDC’s Indicators for Dynamic School Decision-Making (released September 15, 2020) to CDC’s Operational Strategy for K-12 Schools through Phased Mitigation (released February 12, 2021) to Reduce COVID-19”. U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 18 February 2021.
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Agrba L (27 March 2020). “How Canadian universities are evaluating students during the coronavirus pandemic”. Maclean’s.

3 Ways Elearning Is Disrupting the Education Industry

Whether in a formal or informal setting, the ability to conduct research and impart knowledge has always been a crucial part of human life. That led to the establishment of colleges that are now centuries-old and have grown to become institutions. Those institutions might have seemed permanent and too dominant to challenge just a year ago, but the events of 2020 have caused a seismic shift in how people live, and how we learn specifically, such that digital education is clearly going to be the dominant force in the years to come.

This represents a lot of change in the sector, from the kinds of tutors who will be able to succeed in the new model to the tools the students and their teachers will need for an efficient learning process. That change also represents an immense opportunity for entrepreneurs — to make a profit while making a real impact on the future of humanity.

1. Interactive media

An important aspect of elearning is the ability to use a variety of media in communicating information. While traditional education models were largely restricted to text, and in some cases, audio and video, new digital learning platforms can leverage advanced technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) to create a more immersive learning experience that will help students understand and retain more of the information which they are taught.

It’s also particularly helpful for training, where students gain experience using complex equipment without the risk of making real-life errors. Flight training for pilots and surgery models for surgeons are two increasingly popular applications.

A recent study by Goldman Sachs showed that education is No. 4 on the list of sectors receiving the largest amount of VR-related investments, shaping the industry to be worth over $700 million by 2025. That would amount to an increase of over 500% in the next five years. As large as those numbers are, they are unsurprising when we consider that up to 97% of surveyed students stated that they would be interested in undergoing a VR educational course. The market will always go where the money is.

2. Flexibility and on-demand education

This is another primary driving factor of the elearning revolution, and it is visible in every aspect of the system. From the fact that students can attend and participate actively in class from anywhere in the world using teleconferencing software, to on-demand classes that allow students to set their own schedules and learn at their own pace, the key is to provide a learning experience that is as tailored to the needs of each student as possible.

This flexibility means that students have full control over their learning process, thus making them more likely to stick to it. Corporate organizations have also been making a push into elearning as part of their training processes. In fact, 41.7% of global Fortune 500 Companies were already using some form of digital training as far back as 2013, and that number has only continued to grow.

This flexibility also reflects in the marketing approach. While traditional institutions are more uptight and reserved, entrepreneurs in the digital learning space can be more engaging by implementing content marketing strategies to attract users, such as the Learn a Course Online course reviews section which helps online learners share their experiences with online courses to help others make the best choices.

3. Artificial intelligence

Education has traditionally been driven by the teacher and student, progressing based on their interactions. Nowadays, advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning/neural networks have resulted in software capable of evaluating how a student is doing based on a variety of criteria and guiding them accordingly to ensure they understand what is being taught fully.

These tools use everything from how students answer quizzes to how long they spend on a page and how many times they look back at certain sections to produce personalized learning plans just for that particular student.

This level of granularity in the education system is unprecedented, giving students the ability to direct their lessons and entire learning experience with the assistance of advanced AI. When combined with the removal of time constraints and a strict curriculum, it is clear why there is such a huge interest in digital learning among teachers and students alike, and why the industry is so ripe for disruption by savvy entrepreneurs.

By: Ademola Alex Adekunbi / Entrepreneur Leadership Network Contributor Founder of Tech Law Info

Source: 3 Ways Elearning Is Disrupting the Education Industry

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