eLearning, EdTech, Talent Development

In late September, the United Arab Emirates-based Sharjah’s NAMA Women Advancement Establishment launched a new series of MOOCs with a mandate to empower women and promote life-long learning. The MOOCs will be offered by Badiri E-Academy, NAMA’s education.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Education put out a curious press release. The headline read “National Student Loan Cohort Default Rate Falls.” In other words, graduates who took out federal loans to pay for college are defaulting—as a group—at lower rates than previous years.

While American families remain seriously divided over where they choose to to send their kids to school, their ability to make that choice is a popular issue. That’s the conclusion of a recent poll from the Hornstein Center for Policy, Polling and Analysis at Long Island University. The study details how thorny and complicated the topic of school choice can be.

The Empowered Brain, a suite of apps for Google Glass intended to aid and intervene in educating learners with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), continues to be tested in the classroom. Earlier this month, a team of researchers led by the Empowered Brain founder Ned Sahin published a case study of the technology in use at a public school in Massachusetts.

The University of Pennsylvania has already made it into headlines once this month with the announcement of an online Bachelor’s degree offering. Last week, however, a blog post described a very different eLearning initiative. Penn Medicine runs one of the preeminent medical programs in the U.S. their hospitals are routinely ranked among the top 135010 in the country. One reason might be that their transplant patients get a healthy dose of education before even getting on to a list.

On Wednesday, The Century Foundation convened their event Higher Ed 2020: College Affordability Ideas for the Next Generation and Beyond at New York University. The opening panel brought together a series of experts who easily reached a general consensus on how to solve issues of sky-high college tuition: increase state funding and establish federal-state partnerships. The question of how was less one-sided.

Over the past year, eLearning Inside has interviewed dozens of founders, investors, and researchers in the edtech sector. As we look forward to 2019, we decided to reach out to some of the people we talked to in 2018 along with a few new voices to gather predictions on edtech for the coming year. In this two-part feature, we share five experts’ predictions for edtech in 2019. Today’s post includes perspectives from Ukraine and the United States.

If you’re contemplating your New Year’s resolutions and don’t want to give something up in 2019, consider learning something new instead. If you’re wondering what new skills to acquire, a great place to start is with Jeff Maggioncalda recently published list of skills you’ll need in 2019. Not surprisingly, Maggioncalda, Coursera’s CEO, suggests learning more about artificial intelligence (AI) and data science, but he also highlights a few other key skills for 2019.

For any new technology, an evolutionary process occurs. Like the tadpole that eventually takes to land as a frog, tech is invented, brought to market, and with any luck, scaled. The companies that build these technologies go through similar changes. To discuss new edtech in 2018, therefore, doesn’t involve a quick scan down the list of patents filed. Our rundown of new edtech this year spans technology that has been in development for decades to that which has not yet been widely adopted or even brought to market in a viable way. Many of these products and services have hundreds of millions in venture capital backing them; others have been entirely bootstrapped by their developers.

Digital distraction isn’t just a problem facing the young. Adults in business meetings and even elected officials also have a difficult time avoiding digital distraction. In schools, however, the problem is rampant. One 2017 study carried out at Michigan State University discovered that students in an introductory psychology course spent up to a third of their time surfing nonacademic sites, even though they were well aware of the fact that researchers were tracking their computer use during class time. Now, NetRef wants to provide educators with a solution to the growing problem of digital distraction.