IBL News

Author: IBL News

  • Most Higher Ed CIOs Are Ready to Invest More in Analytics, Says Gartner

    Most Higher Ed CIOs Are Ready to Invest More in Analytics, Says Gartner

    IBL News | Denver, Colorado

    Experts agree that data and analytics are critical for running today’s educational institutions. In fact, 60% of CIOs in higher education say that they are essential, according to Gartner.

    But these implementations are not taking place. There are several inhibitors, according to Marlena Brown, a Senior Research Analyst at Garner Inc.: Ineffective technology, misalignment of needs, and lack of understanding and trust.

    In an opening talk on the main stage during the 2022 Educause in Denver, Colorado, last Thursday, Marlena Brown [in the pictures above and below], revealed that 42% of higher ed CIOs indicated that they want to increase investment in business intelligence and data analytics, while 16% would grow their expenditure in AI/ML (Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning).

    In order to put analytics capabilities to work, Garner Associated examined cases ranging from simple descriptive and diagnostic analysis through predictive and prescriptive analyses that enable institutions to identify and bend trend curves.

    Analytics, with the help of AI and Machine Learning, will determine scenarios impacting student success, as several experts indicated to IBL News during the Educause event. Prescriptive analytics will help to increase the retention of students at risk and avoid the high number of dropping learners.

    According to Gartner, these are the four needed stages of analytics:

    • Descriptive — What happened?
    • Diagnostic — Why did it happen?
    • Predictive — What will happen?
    • Prescriptive — What should I do?

    Technologies involved include regression analytics, forecasting, simulation, predictive models, complex event processing, neural networks, recommendation engines, data hub, and data lake, and analytic sandbox.

    Marlena Brown highlighted the importance of establishing a clear vision, outlining what every institution is trying to achieve. “I’d suggest creating an environment for exploration of advanced analytics as well,” she added.

     

  • “We Need More From Technology,” Says Educause While Presenting the 2022 Top 10 Issues

    “We Need More From Technology,” Says Educause While Presenting the 2022 Top 10 Issues

    IBL News | Denver, Colorado

    The higher ed professional association Educause presented the 2023 Top 10 IT issues during its annual conference yesterday in Denver, Colorado.

    “Today’s times demand more from technology,” said Susan Grajek, Vice President for Partnership, Communities, and Research at Educause, during the opening keynote address [In the picture above]. “We need new foundation models,” she added.

    Susan Grajek highlighted the idea that “data leads to better decisions.” “The AI (Artificial Intelligence) foundational models can be applied to higher” as “potential value of AI is emerging.”

    Another idea that Educause insisted on in front of thousands of educators and industry leaders gathered for three days (October 25 – 28, 2022) in Denver was the extension of stress and anxiety among students.

    In an exclusive interview with IBL News, John O’Brien, president of Educause, said that 70% of them show or have shown mental health issues in the last post-pandemic months.

    The top 10 IT issues research was divided into three themes: leading with wisdom, ultra-intelligent institutions, and everything is anywhere.

    1. Leadership – Leading with WisdomIssue #1 – A Seat at the Table: ensuring IT leadership is a full partner in institutional strategic planningIssue #3 – Evolve, Adapt, or Lose Talent: creating a workplace that allows for and supports movement up, down, and sideways to accommodate shifts in personal and professional goals and to foster healthier work/life balanceIssue #5 – Enriching the Leadership Playbook: leading with humility and candor to engage, empower, and retain the IT workforce
    2. Data – The Ultra-Intelligent InstitutionIssue #2 – Privacy and Security 101: embedding privacy and security education and awareness in the curriculum and workplaceIssue #4 – Smooth Sailing for the Student Experience: using technology, data, insight, and agility to create a frictionless student experienceIssue #6 – Expanding Enrollments and the Bottom Line: focusing on data and analytics initiatives on identifying academic programs with high potential for recruitment ROI

      Issue #7 – Moving from Data Insight to Data Action: converting data analytics into action plans to power institutional performance, enhance operational efficiency, and improve student success

    3. Work and Learning – Everything is AnywhereIssue #8 – A New Era of IT Support: updating IT services to support remote and hybrid workIssue #9 – Online, In Person, or Hybrid? Yes: developing a learning-first, technology-enabled strategyIssue #10 – SaaS, ERP, and CRM: an alphabet soup of opportunity: managing cost, risk, and value of investments in new ERP solutions

  • CUNY Unveils a $1.6B Plan to Build a Science Park and Research Campus in Manhattan

    CUNY Unveils a $1.6B Plan to Build a Science Park and Research Campus in Manhattan

    IBL News | New York

    CUNY (City University of New York) will launch, in partnership with New York City and the State leadership, the Science Park and Research Campus (SPARC) Kips Bay, a $1.6 billion, first-of-its-kind, innovation hub for the life sciences industry in Manhattan in 2031.

    It will include new modern facilities for 4,5000 students from the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy (CUNY SPH), the Hunter College School of Nursing and School of Health Sciences, and the Borough of Manhattan Community College’s multiple healthcare programs.

    This project, spanning 1.5 million square feet in Kips Bay [see maps below], will transform the Brookdale Campus on East 25th Street into new, state-of-the-art teaching and commercial facilities. The initiative will further a career pipeline in life science for local students, in addition to rebuilding a pedestrian bridge that will connect East 25th St. to Manhattan Waterfront Greenway.

    SPARC Kips Bay will be funded jointly by the city and state with additional investment from the private sector in life sciences.

    The project, expected to break ground in 2026 and be completed by the end of 2031, will include additional lab and research space for CUNY SPH and house the school’s library and study centers. The new campus will also include additional classrooms for the school’s planned undergraduate program in public health.

    The project, announced this month, is expected to generate approximately $25 billion in economic impact to the City of New York over the next 30 years, create 10,000 jobs, and create a pipeline from local public schools to careers in the growing and essential fields of life sciences, health care, and public health.

    At a press event on October 19, Governor Kathy Hochul, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and CUNY Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez unveiled the plans for the new campus.

    “COVID-19 proved how important New York’s public hospitals, research institutions, and universities are to the survival and the well-being of our beloved city,” said Chancellor Matos Rodríguez. “So it is fitting that the mayor and the governor have teamed up with CUNY to transform this Brookdale Campus into a public health and education hub to better meet the needs of our students’ faculty and of all Yew Yorkers,” he added.

     

  • Pandemic-Disrupted Teaching and Learning Effects Will Continue for Decades, Stanford Says

    Pandemic-Disrupted Teaching and Learning Effects Will Continue for Decades, Stanford Says

    IBL News | New York

    Reverberations of pandemic-disrupted teaching and learning will likely continue for decades. The seismic changes of the health outbreak in 2020 and 2021 will result in a no return to “normal”.

    This is the main conclusion of a report elaborated by Stanford University Digital Education unit, released this month. This Pandemic Education Report — as it has been titled — gathered stories about how the campus supported academic continuity during the period of emergency remote instruction. Stanford leaders, faculty, staff, and students provided diverse perspectives on the challenges they faced.

    This extensive review will serve as the foundation on which Stanford can design its future digital education strategy, said the institution. “The disruption to teaching and learning, as devastating as it was, also contains gems of opportunity,” stated the authors of the report, as shown in the video below.

    The 87-page report, comprised of interviews with 59 administrators and faculty, as well as a survey of 6,000 students, follows similar reviews elaborated by Harvard University, MIT, and other institutions.

    Regarding the extensive use of Zoom and Canvas, the report points out ideas such as:

    • “The suddenly more prominent role of Zoom and Canvas when emergency remote education began did raise concerns among some faculty and staff. It meant that Stanford’s teaching, learning, and work were conducted in platforms developed by private, for-profit companies whose products were designed to accommodate a wide range of customer needs. Zoom, in particular, is a business meeting tool not designed with education in mind.”
    • “Instructors quickly increased their skill in using Zoom for teaching and thoughtfully reworked their instruction, with help from newly developed resources and training programs rapidly spun up by teams across campus. These innovations, explored in this review, improved student engagement in remote teaching and learning.”
    • “What’s more, because of Stanford’s location in Silicon Valley, it had a strong connection with the company based in nearby San Jose before the pandemic began.” (…) “We already had this highly scalable infrastructure with Zoom and, furthermore, a very tight relationship with their CEO and founder.”
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  • The 2023 Open edX Conference Will Take Place March 28 – 31 at MIT

    The 2023 Open edX Conference Will Take Place March 28 – 31 at MIT

    IBL News | New York

    The 2023 Open edX Conference will be celebrated between March 28th and Friday, March 31st, 2023, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, according to Harvard’s and MIT’s owned tCRIL (The Center for Reimagining Learning) non-profit organization.

    The event will be focusing on innovative uses and methods of extending the Open edX Platform along with the latest advancements in instructional design.

    In parallel to the announcement, tCRIL — which stewards the Open edX software and community — called for proposals, being the deadline open until January 23rd, 2023.

    The names of keynote speakers and conference presenters have not been determined yet.

    The 2022 conference in Lisbon, Portugal, attracted over two hundred experts on the Open edX platform.
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  • Higher Ed Experts Craft Their Vision to Evolve into a Hybrid Learning Scenario

    Higher Ed Experts Craft Their Vision to Evolve into a Hybrid Learning Scenario

    IBL News | New York

    A panel of higher education experts gathered by the non-profit professional association Educause generated a list of actions to evolve and grow into an optimized hybrid learning scenario within ten years.

    Their action plan was described in the 2022 Horizon Report: Teaching and Learning Edition, available in PDF.

    “Everything is hybrid,” asserted the panel. “Instructors think strategically about learning modalities, optimizing in-person instruction for activities that are pedagogically better in a shared physical location. Learners’ needs are met through flexible and efficient pedagogy, often through modular, remote course offerings.” 

    These teaching and learning experts from eight institutions and five from Educause provided sixteen practical action items the industry can employ to make this future a reality, such as:

    • Use research-based methodologies and frameworks for the design of hybrid programs and courses.
    • Make professional development a foundational part of instructors’ jobs. Compensate instructors with time, money, and recognition for participating in professional development.
    • Support international hybrid learning: recruit and train instructors from all over the world.
    • Learn more about students’ comprehensive needs.
    • Include experiential learning in all academic programs. Provide opportunities for all students to engage in experiences such as internships, volunteer work, and study-abroad programs across the continuum of instructional modalities.
    • Expand instructional design capacity. As part of The Great Resignation, higher education institutions are competing with industry for the the best instructional designers.
    • Establish best practices for sustainable technology-enhanced learning spaces.
    • Develop and share best practices for equitable teaching and learning.
    • Define privacy standards for higher education.
    • Develop funding models for expanding technology access across institutions.
    • Develop a nonacademic credit pipeline. Learning can happen anywhere.
    • Establish cross-institutional programs and credentials.
    • Reimagine tenure.
    • Reevaluate the role of the higher education institution in a consumer-driven world.
    • Define state and national standards for hybrid learning. Work with partner institutions, industry, and professional associations.
    • Change federal government funding models. Modify funding models to support what is best for students.

    The expert panel roaster included: Julian Allen (Chief Learning Innovations Officer at Georgia State University), Sean Brown Director (Campus Reimagined at Florida State University), Melody Buckner Associate (Vice Provost of Digital Learning Initiatives and Online Education at University of Arizona), Maddy Kadish (Director, Instructional Design at The George Washington University), Jackie Lamoureux (Faculty Fellow Central at New Mexico Community College), Reba-Anna Lee (Assistant Dean of Distance Learning at Northwestern University), Matt Mooney (Director of Digital Learning Experience at University of Utah), and Paula Roberson (Director, Center for Teaching, Learning, and Innovation Hudson County Community College).

     

  • A Duke Administrator and Cell Biologist Researcher Named MIT’s 18th President

    A Duke Administrator and Cell Biologist Researcher Named MIT’s 18th President

    IBL News | New York

    Sally A. Kornbluth, 61, a cell biologist on her eight-year tenure as Duke University’s provost, was named MIT’s 18th President. She will assume the MIT presidency on January 1st, 2023, succeeding L. Rafael Reif, who last February announced his intention to step down after ten years leading the Institute.

    Kornbluth’s election came after an eight-month process in which a 20-member presidential search committee generated a list of approximately 250 possible candidates for the presidency.

    This Thursday, October 20th, the MIT Corporation voted for Sally A. Kornbluth after valuing her reputation as a distinguished researcher, brilliant administrator, creative problem-solver, and leading advocate of academic excellence, wrote MIT News.

    Kornbluth is currently the Jo Rae Wright University Professor of Biology at Duke. She has served on the Duke faculty since 1994, first as a member of the Department of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology in the Duke University School of Medicine and then as a member of the Department of Biology in the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences.

    “As Duke’s provost since 2014, Kornbluth has served as the Chief Academic Officer of one of the nation’s leading research universities, with broad responsibility for carrying out Duke’s teaching and research missions; developing its intellectual priorities; and partnering with others to achieve wide-ranging gains for the university’s faculty and students,” said MIT.

    She oversaw Duke’s ten schools and six institutes and held ultimate responsibility for admissions, financial aid, libraries, and all other facets of academic and student life.

    “My greatest joy as a leader has always been in facilitating and amplifying the work of others,” Kornbluth said. “I am eager to meet all the brilliant, entrepreneurial people of MIT, and to champion their research, teaching, and learning.”

    • MIT News: On campus, a warm welcome for MIT’s next president, Sally Kornbluth

  • EdTech Will Expand from K–12 and Higher Ed to Lifelong Learning Economy

    EdTech Will Expand from K–12 and Higher Ed to Lifelong Learning Economy

    IBL News | New York

    As we enter the third school year of the Covid era, the EdTech industry will shift beyond K-12 schools and colleges into a broader sector, to what we can the Learning Economy. The pandemic will catalyze big shifts at all levels of education — a $1.8 trillion-dollar industry in the U.S., in some cases upending what were previously slow, decade-long trends.

    This is the view of leading VC Andreessen Horowitz, shown in an article written by analyst Lee Skates.

    “The Learning Economy doesn’t just refer to academic tools and student/teacher-facing technologies; rather, it encompasses all the different ways we develop as human beings, be it picking up a hobby or learning to be a better boss, parent, or friend,” states the company.

    These are the four macro changes powering the Learning Economy:

    • “It’s easier than ever to start a Learning Economy company. Given the current environment, record numbers of domain experts in education (disillusioned teachers, etc.) are available to team up with record numbers of product builders trained to build modern consumer experiences.”
    • “The pandemic has created a once-in-a-lifetime economic opportunity for early-stage companies to reach an eager customer base. The U.S. government’s Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds (ESSER funds) are the largest one-time infusion of funds in education from the federal government with almost no strings attached.”“In total, the government has allocated ~$190B to schools across three packages. The first tranche of funds must be allocated by this month and the second by September 2023. Most critically, ESSER III, which focuses on academic support and is the largest of the three packages, must be allocated by September 2024. This is a huge amount of money that schools must spend (or lose!) over the next few years, and startups stand to benefit.”
    • Americans across all generations are seeking alternate educational routes. In K–12, teacher shortages are forcing schools to outsource curriculum and lesson development, as well as actual teaching, to third-party vendors. School choice, fueled by ESA governmental funding, is on the rise. In dozens of states, parents can apply for government funding and send their kids to private schools and other educational institutions of their choosing.
    • Finally, the past two years have brought huge advances in technological adoption, which has traditionally lagged in education, creating new opportunities. This trend will only continue to accelerate. Lifelong learning is now a must-have in the workplace. Startups can also take advantage of the fact that VR has gone mass market, with education as one of its prime use cases. 2021 in particular was a banner year for VR. Oculus sold more VR headsets — 8.7 million —than Microsoft did Xboxes, roughly doubling sales from the previous year. Globally, VR users surpassed 171 million users. Prisms are already leveraging VR to teach STEM, serving hundreds of K–12 school districts.

    Regarding, opportunities in the Learning Economy, Andreessen Horowitz suggests some areas:

    • Companies leveraging ESSER and Title 1 funding as a wedge for K–12 school sales. Due to increasing teacher shortages, schools are looking to third-party solutions to outsource and supplement their own resources. Several states also announced dedicated budgets and regulations specifically for computer science and mental health programs (California, Illinois).
    • Products that link learning to promotions, new careers, and other direct outcomes. Today, surveys show that 1 in 5 college grads find that college did not adequately prepare them for their first jobs. That’s why supplemental learning to full-time employment has become the new, best “university” for many college students, early and mid-career professionals, and beyond.
    • Smart software that saves parents from reinventing the wheel or admin drudgery to focus on what’s meaningful.
    • Startups taking advantage of increasingly underutilized supply ranging from teachers to homeschooling parents to top students.

    Other trends include college admissions products for the standardized testing-optional era; products for students with learning differences; new-age “YPOs” (Young Presidents’ Organization) that form a community around like-minded peer groups; group-tutoring solutions as effective as 1:1 instruction; edutainment platforms; and language and accent coaching.

     

  • LEGO Purchases Education-Technology Firm BrainPOP for $875 Million

    LEGO Purchases Education-Technology Firm BrainPOP for $875 Million

    IBL News | New York

    The Danish company LEGO — the world’s largest toy maker — made its first acquisition in the digital learning space this month.

    Kirkbi A/S, the family-owned holding and investment company owner of the Lego brand, acquired for $875 million the American BrainPOP firm, which produces short animations used in schools to help children learn everything from math to music.

    Under the terms of the agreement, Kirkbi purchased 100% of the equity of BrainPOP.  BrainPOP will remain operationally independent of Kirkbi and the LEGO Group.

    The New York-headquartered BrainPOP has a presence in over two-thirds of U.S. school districts and an estimated reach of 25 million students annually, as well as an international presence. The company was founded in 1999 by U.S.– based former pediatrician, scientist, and immunologist Avraham Kadar, M.D., who coined its mission to empower kids to shape the world around them and within them.

    Kirkbi A/S has announced its intention to invest in “digital play and learning,” based on Lego’s desire to be a “global force for learning through play.”

    The Danish investment company has materialized 15 minority investments in EdTech firms over the past half-decade, according to The Wall Street Journal.

    Earlier this year, it invested about $1 billion into Epic Games, Inc., the company that created the massively popular video game Fortnite.

     

  • The Biden Administration Launches the Official Application for the Student Debt Relief

    The Biden Administration Launches the Official Application for the Student Debt Relief

    IBL News | New York

    President Biden launched the official application for the student debt relief program on Monday.  It’s one-time debt relief provided by the U.S. Department of Education as part of the Biden-Harris Administration student debt relief plan.

    Eligible borrowers will have until December 31, 2023, to apply and qualify for loan forgiveness. The process is done through this website.

    The Federal Student Loan Debt Relief program provides eligible borrowers with a full or partial discharge of loans up to $20,000 to Federal Pell Grant recipients and up to $10,000 to non-Pell Grant recipients.

    Individuals who made less than $125,000 in 2021 or 2020 qualify, along with families that made less than $250,000 in 2021 or 2020.

    Interestingly, this one-time student loan debt relief won’t be taxed at the federal level. However, some states may be taxing this debt relief.