61% of businesses migrated their workloads to the cloud in 2020, and this trend is likely to rise in the next decade. One of the main areas the cloud is universally leveraged in is education, with schools and colleges using different resources to share and distribute educational material.

Some exclusively use educational cloud resources, like Microsoft Live for Education, while others are looking at more indie sources, like Centre Stack, for their file-sharing servers. If you’re looking to add a share file server to your academic institution, consider the following.

What are the Challenges with Sharing Files in a School?

Most students operate out of their laptops, which creates the assumption that sharing files within school grounds would be easy. However, problems start to appear anytime a teacher or student has to share documents that may or may not include private information, like an SSN.

Here are just a few problems that come with sharing files on an unsecured server:

• To protect their privacy, students have to use USB sticks to hand over files.
• Emails get lost easily. Professors or teachers may not realize a student needs their help.
• Emails are also easily hackable if both users aren’t encrypting their data.
• Students may lose new versions of a file through frequent uploading and sharing.

To solve these problems, adopting a shared file server would be a great solution for schools.

How Does a Share File Server Work?

A shared file server makes it easy to share folders and files internally with students, educators, and staff members. You can share files by uploading them to an online cloud storage server before sending them out, or you can share them directly over the Internet.

Most efficient share file servers will use a hybrid solution, meaning they use both a cloud and on-premise server to function. With an integrated system, no one has to learn how to reuse the program, which is great for busy students and educators who want to start sharing right away.

Benefits for Educators with Share File Servers

Educators who use shared file servers receive a whole host of benefits, including the following:

• Increased security, control, and visibility of the servers internal systems;
• Helps you maintain compliance during year-end audits;
• Offers increased productivity, as educators can work from anywhere;
• Reduces overall costs if you were using a VPN or on-premise server;
• Simplifies file share access by utilizing file locking and version controls;
• Provides integrated technology and technical support;
• Allows schools to operate smoothly, thanks to the reliability of the server;
• Makes it possible for their educational facility to scale.

Keep in mind that most of these benefits come from hybrid shared file servers. The public cloud can be restrictive for most educational institutions, so always opt for a self-hosted infrastructure.

What Are Some Good Uses of Share Files in Education?

Educational institutions need to track each student’s performance and overall progress, meaning they must implement crucial metrics within the system.

For example, educators could assess student preparedness for exams based on average pages read, the number of research documents downloaded, and the types of books shared amongst peers. Share file servers have the flexibility to accommodate these metrics.

Southern Connecticut State University is using data centers collected from shared file servers to conduct longitudinal studies that span a student’s freshman orientation to graduation. With this information, they may be able to create a tailored learning experience for individual students.

The adoption of devices, like E-learning tools and apps, has made it possible for students to connect with each other, share ideas, and study for tests. However, data breaches are common.

The server and network you’re using can make a major difference between whether your private information is hacked and shared or kept secret. Schools can leverage 24/7 surveillance, IT professionals, and redundancies in power outages to make their servers secure.

Featured Image: Pixabay, Pexels. 

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We use one word—eLearning—to describe a wide swath of education technology currently in use. Examples might include a massive online open course (MOOC), a learning management system (LMS), a platform that connects learners with instructors via video streaming, or anything in between.

In every instance, one of eLearning’s greatest strengths is that it can easily combine multimedia instructional material. In one setting, an instructor may compile text-based articles, videos, games, virtual reality components, and/or their own recorded lectures.

But, as with any technological innovation, just because something can be used effectively in a certain matter, that doesn’t mean it will come to pass. Many MOOCs or online courses consist primarily of a professor’s recorded lectures. Many LMSs, furthermore, heavily employ text in their learning modules while ignoring video and voice.

According to education researchers Richard Mayer and Roxana Moreno, we learn best, generally, when we mix sight, sound, image, and text in a learning environment.

People generally undergo employ both visual and linguistic cognitive processes while learning. In other words, we learn by seeing, and we also learn by people instructing us. Both visual and linguistic content can come in various forms.

The authors call this multimedia learning and identify several principles to consider when designing any kind of eLearning initiative:

1. Mix image with language

Most have heard of students who excel as visual vs. auditory learners, but the fact of the matter is that almost everyone uses both in the learning process. Way back in 1992, researchers Richard Mayer and Richard Anderson conducted a study that continues to inform cognitive learning theory today. They set out to teach students how a bicycle pump works. To do this, they provided information variously in the form of text, animation, and auditory instruction.

Students who listened to a narration of bicycle pump mechanics while watching a corresponding animation came up with twice as many creative solutions to fixing a broken pump compared to those who just listened to the narration.

“Similarly,” the authors write, “students who read a text containing captioned illustrations placed near the corresponding words generated about 65% more useful solutions on a subsequent problem-solving transfer test than did students who simply read the text.”

2. Mix image with language at the same time

The authors found that merely combining image with linguistic information also requires its own strategy. Specifically, language and image must correspond in the same place and at the same time. Students who studied the bicycle pump with image and narration simultaneously came up with 50% more solutions to potential problems compared to a group that first listened and then watched the instructional material. Combining image with a caption in a text-format also improved learning significantly.

3. Speak before you write

In a multimedia setting, learners respond better to speech compared to writing. In a study that sought to teach people about lightning, one group of learners was instructed via animation and a corresponding narration, while another group viewed the same animation with on-screen text. The first group outperformed the second by a degree of 50%.

According to Moreno and Mayer, “on-screen text and animation can overload the visual information processing system whereas narration is processed in the verbal information processing system and animation is processed in the visual information processing system.”

4. Keep things as short as possible

On the one hand, it seems counter-intuitive to argue that less information allows for more effective learning. But in the lightning study, learners who were presented a condensed, step-by-step guide to how lightning forms again outperformed the other group—who were presented with a more detailed text—by 50%.

Takeaways:

When designing an eLearning program of any kind, it’s crucial to remember that people use both a visual learning process and a verbal, or language-based learning process. These two can be targeted independently, but everyone learns best when they can combine the two in one setting.

These learning processes also have a capacity to them. Combining many media helps, but it also presents the danger of sensory overload. Making sure to package information in short, balanced modules will greatly improve any eLearning program.

The post Multimedia in eLearning: Four Tips to Boost Retention and Avoid Overload 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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