The importance of STEM education is in no doubt. Science, technology (including coding), engineering and math skills are vital for our future workforce and any child who excels in one or more of these areas has a bright future.

If your child has a particular interest in STEM subjects or shows signs of special abilities or talents in them, you may be looking for additional activities outside of school to help nurture their skills. You may also be looking for classes if you are concerned about your child’s progress in any of the STEM areas.

What are your options? There are summer camps and after school programs offered by specialist providers for a start. Your child’s school may offer extracurricular programs, too. A further option is one that your child can do from home whenever it is convenient. It’s the use of a STEM e-learning platform.

This option offers your child a flexible, personalized course and access to specialist teaching without needing to leave your home.

How a good e-learning platform should work

A child’s experience of e-learning should begin with diagnostic testing. Capturing where a child’s strengths and weaknesses lie means that all online lessons can be pitched to best maximize progress from the get-go.

Diagnostic testing will follow the same format as ongoing assessments throughout the course. It will be fun, interactive and engaging. Data from regular assessments throughout your child’s e-learning course can demonstrate how much and where they are making progress from beginning to end.

This data-driven approach improves the instruction your child will receive because it helps your child’s teacher choose the correct pathway through the learning content for your child. On a good e-learning platform, your child’s assessment data should be easily visible to you, meaning you can keep an eye on their progress, too.

As for the activities your child will engage in, these will include learning videos, presentations and multiple styles of interactive activities for your child to build and strengthen new skills.

Your child will learn from completing online worksheets that give immediate feedback, and through games and quizzes. Your child can also meet their teacher online and have the opportunity for direct teaching and discussion with them.

The whole system of instruction, activity and assessment should appear on a friendly, attractive interface that’s appealing to children.

The advantages of an e-learning platform

Here are four of the most significant advantages of this style of learning.

Engagement

All parents know that children are naturally drawn to screens. They love almost any kind of online game and would happily spend hours immersed in technology. Why not put this to good use?

E-learning platforms leverage the enjoyment that children get from electronic games and activities by combining it with powerful teaching and learning opportunities. Engaging video content and gamification of learning are common features of good learning platforms. Your child is guaranteed to enjoy learning this way.

Personalization

You can pick exactly what you would like your child to learn. You’ll find many of the course options on a good platform are relatively specific.

So instead of ‘computing’, you’ll find courses on app development or coding, for example. It means your child can follow a particular interest or work on something they need special help in. It could also mean that they get more experience of something they’ve only touched on briefly at school.

The other way these are tailored to the individual child is through the exact course content. As mentioned earlier, a robust system of regular micro assessment means that your child’s learning can be personalized to suit their progress throughout the course. Two children on the same course won’t necessarily follow the same program of study for this reason.

Accessibility and flexibility

Your child can access their additional STEM learning whenever it is a good time. All they will need is an appropriate electronic device and a stable internet connection. Many students choose to access their e-learning platforms regularly after school or on weekends. However, the possibilities are endless. They could use a long journey or time spent waiting for an appointment to get stuck into some bitesize learning.

The great thing about e-learning is that it is far easier to fit into a busy schedule than any in-person class or activity. You can easily add extra-curricular STEM learning to your child’s other out-of-school interests like sports and music.

Success

Good e-learning platforms have proven track records of success. This comes from all the points above: personalization, high levels of student engagement and the flexibility of the courses are a winning formula.

e-Learning Industry cited a study by Brandon Hall Group Research that showed students retain up to 5 times more knowledge from an e-learning course compared to in-person teaching. They attribute this to the bitesize nature of the content on e-learning platforms.

5 exciting STEM courses your child can take on an e-learning platform

Coding

Your child can learn C#, HTML/CSS, Java, Python and Scratch. They could be a beginner or learn at an advanced level. Their course would be suited to their grade level and tweaked using diagnostic and regular assessment. Children are encouraged to use their preferred system to solve challenging real-world problems.

Game development

Game development e-learning courses are naturally popular with children and young people. They can use their creativity to build and test exciting gameplay.

3D designing

This practical e-learning course will also appeal to your child’s creative side. They can learn how to design meaningful 3D objects using relevant software.

Arduino

Arduino is a program that helps students develop skills in electronics. They can create circuits, from beginner level to advanced. They can go on to create exciting things like home automation and wearable devices. This will demonstrate the real-world value of their new skills.

AI-aware app development

Students can learn app development alongside AI and create fully-fledged, downloadable apps with a real-life purpose.

The rise of e-learning has opened some doors into the exciting world of STEM. These subjects are more accessible and more engaging than ever before for students of all ages. You can ignite a lifelong love of STEM in your child and help them develop skills for their future career.

Why not explore the many exciting e-learning options available further?

Maloy Burman is the Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Premier Genie FZ LLC. He is responsible for driving Premier Genie into a leadership position in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Education space in Asia, Middle East and Africa and building a solid brand value. Premier Genie is currently running 5 centers in Dubai and 5 centers in India with a goal to multiply that over the next 5 years.

Featured Image: Tima Miroshnichenko, Pexels. 

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BENGALURU, INDIA – The world’s largest education technology unicorn, BJYU’s, has launched its new innovation hub, BJYU’s Lab. The company, known best for its online learning platform BJYU’s Future School, launched the product on November 9th, in its continued effort for global market expansion. This innovation hub, based out of the UK, the US, and India, makes use of EdTech’s newest and most sought-after technologies, from augmented reality and artificial intelligence (AI), to computer vision capabilities and gamification.

Dev Roy, Chief Innovation and Learning Officer of BYJU’S said, “The role of online learning is not just to replicate offline classes in digital space but to make it more interactive, engaging, and personalized.

Roy continues: “By combining the ability of computing, technology, and data, we at BYJU’S Lab, want to explore the power of information and technology to create more personalized, enhanced, and democratized learning. As a global company, we are looking to harness a global talent pool to build innovative tools and leverage new technologies to positively impact the learning experiences of children across the world. As we continue to grow and experiment, we will operate at the intersection of business and technology to make innovation real and relevant for our end customers. We are looking at strengthening our team and look forward to working with bright and curious minds to transform the way children learn,” he added.

BJYU has amassed over 100 million online students, 6.5 million of which are paid subscribers, across its learning products.

It’s most popular of which, BJYU’s Future School and BJUY’s Exam Prep have found users from Indonesia to Mexico. BJYU’s products cover a range of educational topics and modes of learning, from classes in coding and maths to vocational exam preparation in banking and law. With an already strong education base, the launch of BJYU’s LAB will see the company incorporate the use of new technology into its learning products.

BJYU’s is currently valued at $18 billion, recently securing $1.2 billion via a term loan from the overseas market, raising much more than its projected $700 million. The company’s buying portfolio has attributed to much of its growing success. BJYU’s acquired AR-focused EdTech company Osmo for $120 million in 2019, as well as the online reading platform Epic for $500 million. From partnering with European and US investors, and securing the $1.2 billion in funding, BJYU’s is looking to expand through further acquisitions. The innovation lab is an effort to cement its reach in the overseas EdTech market.

BJYU’s is also shifting its focus to tech engineers and industry professionals. For BJYU’s Lab, the company is looking to hire machine learning and AI experts from the UK, US, and India. This ensemble of new professionals will work, according to BJYU’s, “to make technology transparent for the user and harness it in a way that tech-enabled education can reach the largest number of people.”

Featured Image: Julia M Cameron, Pexels. 

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Most folks are familiar with people of authority urging as many people as possible to learn to code. It can lead to a significant salary increase, and will likely ensure job security as many tasks become automated or irrelevant in the near future.

But what code should be learned, and why? In answer, Coding Dojo has surveyed the needs of the 25 biggest American companies (as represented on the Fortune 500) in order to fill in the picture with a little more detail. Their list represents where the skills gap is widest in each of these companies in terms of individual coding languages. Their full list is copied below.

JavaScript Is King

To begin, Coding Dojo found that each of the top 25 companies currently use several coding languages for products and services. This is, however, an assumption in part. No coders were needed at Berkshire Hathaway, General Motors, and Kroger when the survey was conducted. Of the companies actively seeking coders, knowledge with an average of four languages was required. Of all languages, JavaScript is the most widely used, followed by Java, Python, Ruby, and Perl in that order.

“Much like any tool or application, companies use different coding languages for different requirements; there’s not a one-size-fits-all option,” noted Coding Dojo Head of Curriculum Speros Misirlakis in a press release. “While specific jobs might focus on a particular language, this research shows that a single language could be a long term dead-end.  Aspiring and existing developers must learn coding’s common building blocks and ultimately become fluent in multiple languages to have the adaptability and flexibility for a successful career.”

While it didn’t rank #1, Java is probably the most popular and useful to learn. All Android apps either use the server-side code or are based on it. The technology analyst firm IDC believes that 9 out of 10 Fortune 500 companies use it.

The Full Report

The following list shows the 25 biggest companies in the U.S. along with which coding languages they use:

To compile this list, Coding Dojo surveyed the job postings on Indeed.com among the top 25 companies of the Fortune 500 during the month of December 2017.

Learn to Code What?

Many people—both you and old—who are currently unsatisfied with their job have probably asked him or herself the same question at some point in the past few years: ‘should I learn to code?” Politicians and industry leaders have certainly pushed computer science and coding language acquisition on their audiences with gusto.

In a trip to France last fall, Apple CEO Tim Cooke put the importance of computer language over human language: “If I were a French student and I were 10 years old, I think it would be more important for me to learn coding than English,” Cook told the French outlet Konbini.

But many of these individuals do not know how to code themselves and may even be operating with their own agendas in mind. Other coding instructors, like Udacity, often partner with companies and tailor their courses for specific jobs.

The information provided by Coding Dojo marks an important step in informing future coders in what is needed and where they have a higher chance in succeeding. Learners are far more likely to find a job in which they thrive if they can choose a course of study that fits their aptitudes and interest, but also has serious demand in the workforce.

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Among MOOC providers and other online programs, disrupters tend to gush about job success rates, filling skills gaps, and the democratization of education.

But one subject is almost always left unspoken: student support.

As 2016, 58 million students were enrolled in a massive online open course (MOOC). Millions of others participated in some other kind of eLearning, non-degree program or bootcamp.

At the vast majority of these institutions, support services come in the form of a Help page, a Contact Us portal, or worse, an FAQ.

At Udemy, which currently is training over 15 million professionals, the support page offers frequently asked questions and topics to search for help, such as “Getting Started” and “Course Taking.”

At Bloc, an online coding bootcamp that accepts 100% of their applicants, students pay as much as $19,500 in tuition. In return, Bloc offers Career Support to help graduating students land a job.

What we know

Whether it’s mental health, financial support, IT troubles, course requirements, or just figuring out how integrate education into daily life, student support services are indispensable in any higher learning institution.

But by and large, most research regarding support services focuses on traditional brick-and-mortar college campuses and targets what has become known as “traditional students.” These are the 18-24-year-olds who may have never held a job or left home for any significant amount of time before coming to study.

Beyond the fact that most students today are non-traditional, little is known about the needs of online learners and how it affects their education.

Studies tend to focus on individual programs, which can vary widely. One exception was conducted by Lin Muilenburg and Zane Berge all the way back in 2005. (Their findings have since been confirmed by several independent research teams.) The authors looked at several different institutions and found that some 52% of students who dropped out of an online program did so because they lacked some kind of administrative support.

Need varies by demographic

When it comes to brick-and-mortar institutions, many studies have found that student support services, especially for certain populations, is tantamount to the quality of education itself in terms of teaching effectively.

Another study, which focused on demographic breakdowns, found that 40% of white students on campus felt overwhelmed most or all of the time. That number was over 50% among blacks and Hispanic students.

These findings are especially concerning for online education because, among accredited online degrees, U.S. minority populations by far make up the majority of the student body.

There is no typical online learner. People tend to choose online programs because they can improve their knowledge or employment outlook on their own time. They can continue their role as parent or breadwinner or caregiver, all while studying. It seems likely that online learners could benefit from support services to a greater degree than “traditional” students.

It doesn’t have to be like this

There is no reason that online learners shouldn’t have similar access to student support services. While they may be separated from their instructors by thousands of miles, myriad options exist to bridge the gap. Email, live chat, and especially live interactive video streaming can allow counselors to reach students.

But in online learning programs across the board, live interactive video streaming is shockingly rare. Support services aside, even most lectures have been recorded in advance and foster little social interaction among students.

According to Professor Scott Martin, who cofounded Scriyb, a live video streaming platform, there are two reasons for this.

“One, education institutions are trapped in their legacy LMS (learning management system) license deals, as many vendors control so much institutional, student, and assessment data, schools and colleges are terrified of the heavy lift [to adopt new technology].”

“Two, many LMS vendors are just now moving to the cloud, truly required for streaming.”

But even with the availability of platforms like Scriyb, it seems unlikely that the most successful for-profit online educators will incorporate student services any time soon. Their model is working. If nothing’s broken, why would anyone fix it?

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On Monday, WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann announced in a blog post that his company had acquired the Flatiron School, a coding bootcamp and education platform that offers both remote and in-person courses.

The deal was private, and financial details were not disclosed.

The $20 bn communal workspace startup that has begun to defy definition plans to put their new acquisition to good use.

Both employees and WeWork members will now have access to Flatiron’s curriculum. The company also plans to enlarge Flatiron’s in-person course offerings at their numerous locations around the world.

“WeWork’s global community will be able to meet Flatiron graduates and explore new opportunities,” Neumann wrote. “By bringing our communities together we are creating a new way for even more people to make a life, not just a living.”

Wait, what?

The news comes, by and large, from out of left field. For one, the Flatiron School just settled for $375,000 with New York State for misrepresenting their graduates’ job success and operating without a license.

Flatiron’s reason for settling with the State of New York may be the tip of a regulatory iceberg. The coding boot camp was considered to have the some of the highest integrity among its peers. Cooked books and false reporting is practically a pandemic among boot camp advertising teams.

But on a bigger scale, nobody is currently translating their eLearning initiatives into in-person programs. Actually, the opposite is happening.

For-profit college campuses across the country are closing. MOOC providers and their successful for-profit analogs are growing like crazy.

Besides industry trends, the Flatiron School used to operate on a tuition model. In-person students pay an astonishing $15,000 for 15 weeks. Online students pay an even more astonishing $1,500 per month, which tops off at $12,000. Remote students have the option to complete the course faster and pay less.

The Flatiron School does not publish their enrollment numbers, but their 2017 reports (for both in-person and online courses) looked at fewer than 700 students.

Switching to WeWork, therefore, will include pivoting to a new business model and scaling by several powers of ten.

On top of all of this, there has been a lot of doubt for years about both the integrity of coding boot camps and their efficacy. Some have gone so far as to describe boot camps as “scams” with “a reputation among hiring managers for churning out developers who have the professional maturity of a teenager at a One Direction concert.”

Coding boot camps also don’t seem to be the smartest investment at the moment. Several have closed recently, such as Dev Bootcamp, previously owned by Kaplan Inc. along with The Iron Yard, which had been a distressed asset of the notorious Twinky flipper Apollo Global Management.

Again, the deal was private. We have a lot of questions.

Big money

WeWork is already massive. Their total office space around the world comprises over 10 million square feet. The company’s 150,000+ members can access social events, workshops, an annual summer retreat, an internal social network, and even get discounts on health care.

The company has recently launched WeLive, which offers furnished apartments for monthly rent, and Rise, a fitness space collective.

At the WeWork Services Store, members can use products and services from companies like Adobe, UpWork, and Lyft from their WeWork account.

Fast Company compared their latest acquisition to LinkedIn’s purchase of Lynda in 2015. “The idea was to make LinkedIn the one-stop shop for networking, job listings, and skilling up,” the authors write.

“[W]ith its acquisition of Flatiron School, WeWork hopes to become a physical manifestation of the same ideals: a physical space where people can work, live, snack, network, and learn.”

That seems like solid rationale, but at the same time, WeWork faces a lot of challenges in making that vision a reality.

The post WeWork’s Acquisition of the Flatiron School Makes No Sense appeared first on eLearningInside News.

For years, coding boot camps have drawn ire regarding their success rates. Many have inflated their job placement numbers or cooked their books using other recipes to misrepresent their success.

Earlier this month, the Flatiron School, a Manhattan coding boot camp, reached a settlement deal with the state Attorney General’s office.

Attorney General Eric Shcneiderman announced that the institution had agreed to pay $375,000 to the state for “improperly” marketing and advertising their job success rate and operating without a license.

As Edsurge and others reported, the news is ironic. The Flatiron School had, before the settlement, prided themselves in their accountability and unbiased reporting of their graduates’ success. They were the first coding boot camp to release a credible report back in 2014. In 2015, they collaborated with “Coder-in-Chief” former President Barack Obama to agree on a metric to assess their efficacy.

“With our 2017 online and NYC reports,” the company announced before the settlement, “we continue to be the only school to fully abide by these standards for transparency.”

Based on this history, it seems strange that New York State would target the Flatiron School. But here’s the thing that nobody is talking about: they also operated for years without a license.

Rules and regulations

“[F]or-profit coding schools must comply with state requirements, including obtaining a license before operating,” said Attorney General Schneiderman. For-profit education licenses in New York are distributed by the State Education Department (SED).

According to Shneiderman’s press release, “In order to obtain a SED license, a non-degree granting career school must meet a number of criteria, including using an approved curriculum and employing a licensed director and teachers. The school must also demonstrate financial viability.”

New York residents, at least, can rest assured that their elected officials are keeping half an eye on the online for-profit.

Coding boot camps and the state of the union

But there’s little indication that the same could be said for other states.

Regulation of the for-profit education industry has traditionally been carried out at the state level. The 10^th Amendment states that “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution … are reserved to the States.” The federal government did begin to regulate somewhat in the ‘60s under President Johnson, but compared to other industries, measures are significantly light.

The for-profit education industry has undergone turbulence lately with a downturn in traditional colleges like the University of Phoenix and the explosion of online non-accredited degree providers.

Some sources expect the global eLearning market to grow at a CAGR of 17.81% between 2017-2020 into a mutli-trillion dollar industry. It’s true, coding boot camps only make up a portion of the market, but many other entities provide a similar product.

Online educators like Udacity and Coursera are both valued at around $1 bn. Many MOOC providers and their analogues are also for-profit entities and need to obtain a license.

Despite this success in the industry, regulation is still left up to states.

Policy trends

The Obama administration made several efforts to protect students from dubious for-profit institutions. The U.S. Department of Education recently imposed sanctions on two chains—Corinthian Colleges and ITT Tech—both of which folded soon after.

But the former administration never switched their focus to entities like coding boot camps or other types of online educators.

The settlement with the Flatiron School marks the first stab in the attempt to oversee the operations of the multitudes of for-profit educators that have sprung up in recent years.

In terms of regulation on a national level, it isn’t hard to see which way the wind is blowing. The Trump administration has made their commitment to deregulation clear time and time again.

Education Secretary Betsy Devos has begun work to dismantle many Obama-era regulations. The examples are numerous. For one, Devos appointed Julian Schmoke Jr. to lead the watchdog team that checks for evidence of fraud in higher education. Schmoke is an industry insider and former dean of DeVry University, whose parent company reached a $100 m settlement with the government over allegations that the company overstated their own job success rates.

If regulation of the industry is left up to the states, then online for-profits should have little difficulty getting around them. They will be able to found their businesses in the state with the most lax regulations and reach anyone around the world.

Until the federal government steps in, nobody will be able to ensure education quality or successfully implement certain standards.

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This week, Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson took the stage at Norfork High School to deliver a familiar message: learn to code.

“If you have broadband internet and know coding, you can run the world from right here in Norfork,” Hutchinson told students, according to the Baxter Bulletin.

One million tech jobs, the governor said without a reputable citation, are currently vacant. “The tech world needs those guys, they need them,” he said.

Earlier this month, Apple CEO Tim Cook traveled to France to meet with French President Emmanuel Macron about developing the European tech industry. He issued a similar pronouncement to French children: “If I were a French student and I were 10 years old, I think it would be more important for me to learn coding than English,” Cook told the French outlet Konbini.

“I’m not telling people not to learn English in some form—but … this is a language that you can [use to] express yourself to 7 billion people in the world. I think that coding should be required in every public school in the world.”

In September, Ray Dalio, head of Bridgewater, the world’s biggest hedge fund, appeared on Fox Business. He stressed to host Maria Bartiromo, “Everybody has to learn to code. It’s like not knowing how to read and write in the new age.”

“By in large, the world is going to largely consist of people who can take language and put it into code, which then allows the computer to operate like a brain or people who are going to be displaced by that,” said Dalio.

Sage advice from non-coders

Dalio, Cook, and Hutchinson all have a few things in common. First, they all occupy powerful positions. Second, they recently said something incorrect to the press. And third, they either don’t know how to code themselves, or haven’t held a coding job in years.

If someone could run the world with a broadband connection and a knowledge of coding from Norfork, Ark., as Gov. Hutchinson says, then they would also probably get around in their flying car.

Back in the real world, you shouldn’t necessarily learn to code before you learn English. As Quartz’s Nikhil Sonnad points out, you need to speak a human language to learn, write, and implement code. And more often than not, that language isn’t Mandarin. “The codebases for nearly every major programming language, library and API are written with variable names, comments and documentation in English,” Sonnad writes.

Cook probably would have known that if he had done any coding work recently. It’s possible that he did some developing for IBM or Compaq in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but his role at Apple has always been business operations. In 2008, he likened his job to the dairy industry. (“If [inventory] gets past its freshness date, you have a problem.”)

Dalio, typical of Fox News guests, is even less coherent.

 Why do so many leaders and managers want other people to learn to code?

For one, paying coders is expensive. Glassdoor currently puts the average software engineer at $109,087 in the U.S.

If more people knew how to code, there would be more competition, and companies like Apple would be able to pay their coders less.

Many companies have already begun to make strides in this direction. Several successful tech companies have partnered with online educators—Coursera, edX, Udacity, and many others—to create computer science vocational programs to funnel talent.

When students complete these courses, they are trained for a specific job and usually have zero industry experience, allowing the companies that trained them to hire them for a much lower salary.

Tech companies have also been driving efforts to incorporate computer science education into K-12 school systems. Often employing Hutchinson-, Cook-, or Dalio-esque language, industry leaders rationalize their efforts by arguing that it will better-equip students for a changing workforce and help them succeed in their professional lives.

But the Guardian’s Ben Tarnoff says this rationale is based on a false premise. “[T]eaching millions of kids to code won’t make them all middle-class,” Tarnoff writes. “Rather, it will proletarianize the profession by flooding the market and forcing wages down—and that’s precisely the point.”

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