Much has been made for nearly the last two decades about digital natives in the context of education. First described by Marc Plensky in a 2001 landmark essay published in On the Horizon, these are the learners that grew up in the digital age. They spent more hours as young people watching TV or playing video games than they did reading. And, as some continue to complain today, they’re taught by digital immigrants. (“As Digital Immigrants learn – like all immigrants, some better than others – to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their “accent,” that is, their foot in the past,” Plensky writes.)

Today, these terms and lines of thought are dated. A good deal, if not the majority, of teachers today at least grew up with Pacman or early word processors. But as dated as Plensky’s thesis is, it might be grafted onto a new dynamic: digital learners and digital teachers.

In Australia, Teachers Are Taking More Classes Online

This week, some interesting news came out of Australia. According to a recent report by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (titled “The rise of online initial teacher education: what do we know?”), an increasing number of teachers in the country are getting their degrees online.

“In 2016,” the report reads, “25 per cent of [initial teacher education] ITE students studied all of their units off campus. This was an increase of 12 per cent over the past decade, from 13 per cent in 2007. This means the total number of ITE students enrolled off campus has more than doubled from under 10,000 in 2007 to over 22,000 in 2016.”

Yet the report also highlights how little is known about online teacher education in the country. The same could be said about the U.S. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, education stands as the second most popular field for a Master’s degree, following business.

Here’s why this matters: two thirds of college professors (as of last fall) either disagree or remain neutral with the belief that online education can be at least as good as in-person instruction. That number has come down significantly since 2016, when over 50% disagreed alone. But it still remains significant.

A New Kind of Digital Native

Now, there isn’t any data to back this up, but it seems reasonable to believe that the vast majority of these educators surveyed did not receive any of their education online. Those who oppose online education aren’t digital learning natives or even immigrants—they’re jingoists, digital xenophobes who’d prefer to keep things the way they are, thank you very much. 

But as the report from Australia indicates, there will soon be a large percentage of teachers who have received their degrees wholly online. Again, this isn’t science, but it seems unlikely that these teachers will advocate against digital instruction or pen articles about how they’ll never teach online.

As dated as Plensky’s essay proves to be, some things still ring true:

“[T]he single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.”

“Digital Immigrant teachers assume that learners are the same as they have always been, and that the same methods that worked for the teachers when they were students will work for their students now. But that assumption is no longer valid.”

And, as time marches forward, digital immigrants won’t simply be replaced by digital natives. Soon digital learning natives will take the helm. And there’s good reason to believe that will do wonders for the public perception of online degrees.

The post Soon, Both Students and Teachers Will Be (Online Learning) Digital Natives appeared first on eLearningInside News.

In 2006, the state of Michigan passed a controversial piece of education legislation known as the Michigan Merit Curriculum. The revamp required students to complete upper level STEM subjects and, among other things, take at least one online class. Known as the online learning requirement, it was intended to onboard students for a future of lifelong learning and a workplace that will exist largely online. But recent data suggest that the program hasn’t had the results lawmakers were hoping for.

A report by Michigan Virtual, a leading non-profit dedicated to online learning in the state, describes a varied eLearning landscape replete with some mountains, valleys, and plateaus, so to speak.

The Online Learning Requirement, 12 Years On

According to the report, roughly 101,000 students took an online course in the 2016-2017 school year. The pass rate for these students was 55%. Roughly one quarter of these students did not pass any online classes at all. The report also found that students living in poverty made up the majority of the online enrollment at 62%. For these students, the pass rate was 48%.

But there were also several other significantly more optimistic takeaways. Over a quarter of schools with a student virtually enrolled—27%—had a pass rate of 90%-100%. Nearly half of Michigan’s virtual students took and passed all over their online courses.

It’s also difficult to quantify online learning generally in the state because students can choose from so many different course providers. Michigan Virtual—which also creates numerous online courses—exhibited a total pass rate of 81%. Still, they only accounted for 4% of the state’s virtual enrollment in the previous school year.

A Law that Sidestepped Expectation

When the online learning requirement became law in 2006, many lawmakers were very optimistic.

According to Michael Flanagan, State Superintendent of Public Instruction and member of the Michigan Virtual University (MVU) Board of Directors in a release at the time, “The importance of requiring all students to take an online course today can be compared to the efforts to teach young people how to use print resources in a public library 50 years ago.”

In response, Ars Tecnica’s Ken Fisher mused, “[F]ew kids have to be dragged online in the way that they have to be dragged to the library. Indeed, whereas librarians often have the upper hand on their patron’s library kung-fu (as expressed to me by a friend in Library Science), the reverse is true when it comes to teenagers and the online world: more often than not, they outclass their older taskmasters.”

It seems almost quaint to think that, just over ten years ago, the debate over K-12 online learning would center around whether and how kids use the internet. Based on Michigan’s data, one might argue instead that the education medium truly does not matter as much as the learner’s socioeconomic background.

Writing in the Lansing State Journal, Michigan Virtual’s VP, Dr. Joe Friedhof, confirms that districts without adequate resources tend to push students into cheaper virtual environments. “Part of the poorer performance is due to the fact that students struggling in their face-to-face courses are disproportionately being provided with online learning opportunities, and these struggling students are all too often being placed in virtual options that lack the student supports necessary for improving student learning.”

Professor Noliwe Rooks also documented this phenomenon in the Pennsylvania public school system with her 2017 publication, Cutting School. A long form article adaptation of the publication can be found here.   

If there’s a takeaway from the Michigan experiment, as one might call it, it’s this: virtual classes (can) teach students to much the same degree as in-person versions. When resources are scarce, and there’s little to no safety net to support a student, they’re more likely to fail. When their needs are met, however, they tend to succeed.

The post Michigan Has Required Online Classes for K-12 Students for Over a Decade. Is it Working? appeared first on eLearningInside News.

In the last few months of 2017, the rising value of bitcoin triggered the salivary glands of day traders across the world. Cryptocurrency dominated news cycles and many disinterested members of the public heard about it for the first time.

But while it made several investors rich, many also struggled to understand it. The terms ‘blockchain,’ ‘cryptocurrency,’ and the ‘mining’ of bitcoin aren’t exactly found in everyday parlance. For the more pragmatic types, the idea that an abstract algorithm could hold value and pay for real, tangible things was enough to turn them off completely.

Even to an interested enthusiast, the world of bitcoin is oblique and hazy. If cryptocurrency is ever to catch on it earnest, the general public will need to get better educated on the subject.

To meet this knowledge gap, Extra Credit, a company that doubles as a cryptocurrency and online learning platform that teaches people everything they need to know about it, will launch in the coming months. According to the company, “Extra Credit was created with the average working-class person in-mind. People who have no or very little knowledge of Cryptocurrency or the blockchain. Our vision is to empower everyone with the knowledge required to invest and manage their Cryptocurrencies with ease. This means that anyone can participate in ExtraCredit, with or without past Cryptocurrency experience.”

The company has teamed up with Bitcoin Homework to offer this service, a site that already hosts online classes about cryptocurrency.

To enroll in these courses, users will need to take their first foray into cryptocurrency: the company will not accept payment via anything minted by any country. They require cryptocurrency instead.

Initial Coin Offering

At the moment, Extra Credit is in the midst of its presale ICO (Initial Coin Offering).

While an IPO brings a private company into the public sphere, allowing the general public to invest in their stock and reap the rewards, an ICO works a little differently. Instead of stock, investors pay for an entity’s cryptocurrency. This certainly supports a company looking to expand, but if they manage to generate enough interest in their currency, the value of investment hikes merely based on the surging value and stability of their digital money and does not depend solely on the financial success and failures of the company in question.

Another Alternative to Bitcoin

To both enroll and invest in the Extra Credit, learners will need to buy into the company’s own cryptocurrency, dubbed Extra Credits, or XTRA. In compensation, Extra Credit will accept other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum, Bitcoin, Litecoin, and many others.  Learners who demonstrate their interest in enrollment with hard XTRA can save on tuition by paying early. The public sale begins next month.

For those who grok everything so far, XTRA relies on the Ethereum Blockchain and conforms to ERC-20 standards.

There’s another incentive Extra Credit is offering as well: learners who excel in the courses will be rewarded with some XTRA bonuses.

Many people who already regularly exchange bitcoin might be interested in this venture for other reasons. Beginning in the second quarter of 2018, learners will receive detailed reports on the current values and trends of various cryptocurrencies.

Looking Forward

As 2018 progresses, Extra Credit hopes to expand significantly with a store in which one can exchange XTRA for other courses and learning tools, along with company swag. In the third quarter of the coming year, the company will create a weekly honor roll and leaderboard populated by those who excel in weekly quizzes. They also hope to launch a mobile app at this point as well. A podcast is expected to arrive by the fourth quarter of the year and, by 2019, the company hopes to share their open-source platform with universities and other institutions.

Entrepreneurs, economists, and computer scientists have grown incredibly creative with different ways in which to implement cryptocurrency into their business model. Extra Credit, however, might be the most innovative to date.

By paying learners who perform well, they may not win any teacher of the year awards. But they will likely drum up some extra support for their business, their currency, and the trading of cryptocurrency in general.

The post Confused about Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency? Extra Credit Has Its Own Coin and an Online Learning Platform to Help You Use It appeared first on eLearningInside News.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak hasn’t been in the headlines much in recent years, but that may be changing depending on what happens with his newest venture: WOZ U, a brand-new online learning platform aimed squarely at transforming the way tech education happens in order to address a widely perceived skills gap in the 21^st century.

Will WOZ U put Wozniak back on the map?

Wozniak played a critical role in getting tech juggernaut Apple off the ground. He single-handedly developed Apple’s very first product in 1976, the Apple I, which Wozniak priced at $666.66 because he liked repeating digits (not because it is the “mark of the beast,” something of which he was unaware at the time). One of the first Apple I computers ever produced sold for $815,000 in a 2016 online auction (source).

Wozniak was also the driving force behind the 1977 Apple II, recognized by many as one of the first successful mass-produced personal computers. Wozniak’s work was on

the internal workings of these early computers (the circuit board designs and operating system) while co-founder Steve Jobs, on the other hand, focused on innovative casing for Wozniak’s creation. In those early days of working out of a garage, Jobs was surprisingly stingy in terms of rewarding employees with stock options. Wozniak thought this wrong and handed out $10 million worth of his own Apple stock to many of those employees.

After being severely injured in early 1981 when a plane he was piloting crashed during taking off, Wozniak left Apple and produced two music and culture events to celebrate new technologies and rock music. They were called US Festivals (us being the pronoun, not the country) in 1981 and 1982, but both events lost millions of dollars. In 1983 Wozniak reluctantly returned to Apple, but just wanted to be an engineer in product design as he was not interested in management. He left the company again in 1985, dissatisfied with its direction, but remains on the books as an employee to this day, receiving a modest stipend. Whether or not WOZ U can put Wozniak back on the map remains to be seen.

The promise of WOZ U to transform tech education

As Wozniak himself puts it in a press release (source): “Our goal is to educate and train people in employable digital skills without putting them into years of debt. People often are afraid to choose a technology-based career because they think they can’t do it. I know they can, and I want to show them how.” Although it sounds as if affordability is a primary concern, actual tuition costs have yet to be divulged.

At present, the only offerings are the nine WOZ U Online courses that make up its Full-Stack Software Developer curriculum and the 18 courses that make up the Computer Support Specialist curriculum. The Computer Support Specialist curriculum is meant to give training in all the fundamentals of providing technical assistance to computer users, making use of lots of simulated tasks and scenarios. The program takes 27 weeks to complete and prepares students to take as many as a dozen different certification tests such as Comptia A+, IC3 Digital Literacy, and Test Out PC Pro.

The Software Developer curriculum can be completed in as little as 33 weeks, and it promises to be more than a mere traditional coding boot camp. After all, there is a big difference between gaining raw coding skills and being able to play the role of a professional software developer in an established or emerging technology company. And therein lies a key aspect to what WOZ U is attempting – to get people ready for a real career and even help place them in tech companies.

One way the new learning platform will do this is through its WOZ U Mobile App that helps make matches between students and the technology-based career best suited to them. It achieves this through an aptitude test to reveal in which areas they are most likely to succeed based on their strengths. In addition to this, students will also receive comprehensive career services that include building a resume, interview training, and help identifying relevant positions in related fields. Finally, WOZ U is establishing partnerships with a wide range of tech companies and students will be given access to a digital employment networking platform called WOZ U Connect. In 2018 WOZ U plans to expand curriculum offerings to include Data Science, Mobile Application, and Cyber Security.

Multiple business platforms at WOZ U designed for far-reaching impacts

While the platform is being touted as a largely online learning experience, Wozniak’s vision includes the WOZ U Academy, physical campuses in at least 30 cities around the world featuring one-to-one instruction, which it believes is the most advanced teaching technology for adaptive and progressive learning styles, combined with career advisors who will guide students into their technology career path. Students will be given the option to engage in a full-immersion experience or to learn at their own pace.

The company is also working on the WOZ U Accelerator program, scheduled to launch in 2019, wherein school leaders will identify top students and help get them placed in tech companies along with skills related to raising capital for the startup environment. The Accelerator program is described as fully-immersive, lasting 12-16 month, and will include a fully-paid internship.

Acknowledging Wozniak’s belief in the importance of tech education for children and youth, another aspect of the operation is WOZ U Education – STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) programming for K-12 students and teachers. The idea is to get students ready to successfully enter WOZ U to launch their tech career while at the same time offering a WOZ U Certified Educator program for teachers aimed at developing the teaching knowledge needed to become co-collaborators with students in technology-driven, project-based learning.

Finally, WOZ U Enterprise will work directly with businesses to help them recruit, re-train and retain employees based on greater knowledge of the company’s current systems along with new technologies that address company-specific needs and requirements.

Skeptical reactions to WOZ U

Some are eyeing this new venture from Wozniak with a critical eye, pointing out first that it’s not a university and will result in a “certificate of completion,” not a degree like students can obtain through other platforms such as Coursera. Some are calling the “Software Developer” curriculum designation somewhat misleading. A closer look at the courses in the curriculum look more like a kind of intro to various web developer front-end and back-end frameworks and languages along with cloud disciplines. It’s interesting to note that WOZ U is described as being “part of” the Southern Careers Institute, a for-profit educational institution focused on training workers. One of its offerings is a “Software Developer” curriculum made up of various web technologies that takes 33 weeks to complete, which makes the WOZ U offering seem like a mere re-hashing and branding of the same program. Meanwhile, the Computer Support Specialist curriculum looks to be little more than something to shore up the skills of help-desk staffers – not exactly an earth-shattering offering. And the lack of information about actual tuition costs has only increased the skepticism some have expressed.

It’s too early to say whether WOZ U will be able to deliver on its rather “full stack” of promises to transform tech education, but you can bet it will be something tech industry aficionados will be keeping an eye as the specifics of the venture continues to emerge.

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