Featured Articles on OnlineEducation.com

Educators have been innovative in their response to the massive move to online learning, whether exploring digital theatre arts or blockchain models in education. In particular, the use of games to support education and create a third-place, digital space for students to learn has emerged as an innovative model.

The hottest story in online education right now involves a potential deal in which the University of Arkansas System would acquire the University of Phoenix as a nonprofit affiliate. Such an acquisition would continue a controversial trend in which state universities have recently bought for-profit schools, despite substantial risks to those public institutions’ brands, rankings, and reputations.

Since the outset of the pandemic, educators globally have responded creatively to ensure access to education for students when countries implemented stay-at-home orders in efforts to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus. And while the rapid move to online education options this year by many traditionally brick-and-mortar institutions has been lauded by the broader public, there continues to be somewhat last-minute-planning by institutions grappling to navigate online, offline, and hybrid program offerings.

China’s Ministry of Education announced a ban on recognizing online degrees from overseas colleges, leaving thousands of Chinese students scrambling to make international travel arrangements or seek exemptions. This policy decision has significant implications for the landscape of international education. It raises concerns about the Chinese government’s understanding of online education despite its goals of Chinese Education Modernization by 2035.

Online education is booming, and it’s no secret that China is a massive market for the industry, from established companies to up-and-coming startups. Recently, however, the Chinese government fined online education firms for misleading customers.

While startups in China’s edtech landscape face challenging futures following the government’s crackdown on the companies, the environment for those in the U.S. seems to have taken a positive turn as mobile language learning app Duolingo secured strong IPO pricing at the end of July.

With Covid-19 straining financial budgets, lots of low- and mid-tier universities might be in trouble, especially if they don’t have robust distance-based offerings. What happens in the event of a permanent campus closure? If history is any indication, such campuses can be repurposed and reimagined in several different ways.

Surprising and massive jumps in a group of statistics about the American public’s rapidly changing perceptions of online education quality first appeared in late July 2022. Most Americans—55 percent—now rank the quality of online education equivalent to or better than in-person instruction, a tremendous surge over the 2021 report.

What if earning a degree was a matter of demonstrating mastery and skill rather than attending a set number of classes for a required number of weeks and repeating memorized information? Students could complete degrees faster and often for much less tuition than traditional programs that award grades and set semester schedules.

Just now we’re witnessing new survey data indicating how much more money workers should be able to earn as soon as they can demonstrate “upskilling” through training and experience with artificial intelligence platforms. The new data showed up in November 2023, only a few days before the one-year anniversary of the explosive launch of the ChatGPT artificial intelligence platform back on November 30, 2022.

The Federal Trade Commission appears to be on quite a roll during 2022 and 2023 by launching landmark data security and privacy enforcement actions to help protect online education students. What’s more, the FTC’s new actions seem designed to make clear examples out of two companies—Chegg and Edmodo—in order to encourage firms throughout the online education industry to comply with the agency’s data integrity rules.

Researchers at the EdTech Evidence Exchange recently published an “EdTech Genome” study in collaboration with teachers, policymakers, and other stakeholders in education identifying and quantifying variables that determine the efficacy of edtech in the classroom. We spoke with an expert who managed the research project to learn more about the study’s findings, useability, and implications for students, teachers, schools, and companies engaged in edtech.

Over the past year and a half, learning turned online for most students. Almost overnight, colleges and universities around the world had to shift to distance-based learning methods, as well as online assigning and grading, as efforts to curb the spread of Covid-19 kept people out of classrooms and offices.

In particular, the University of Pittsburgh’s new program presents several innovative and remarkable features. For one thing, Pitt has decided to throw this master’s program wide open to potential students without a data science-related bachelor’s degree, including those with no prior STEM or computer programming experience.

Wait, what? Whoever heard of an Ivy League university that’s offering a 100 percent online degree—and for only about one-third of the price of its on-campus equivalent? Yet this is precisely what Dartmouth College appears to have announced in September 2023, when the school launched a new computer engineering master’s degree for working professionals.

Course building platforms, or CBPs, are software suites that enable instructors to easily and efficiently create content for their online classes. Before the pandemic, university professors and graduate teaching assistants were the main users of course building platforms. But because 66 percent of Americans have been more motivated to seek out online learning since the advent of the pandemic, that’s all changed.

One less discussed benefit of online education programs is how they help students develop virtual work skills. As increasing numbers of companies adopt work-from-home and work-from-anywhere policies, these skills have become increasingly important to career success among managers and professionals in today’s economy.

We spoke with an expert working with schools and institutions to design spaces for education and learning opportunities in the Metaverse and other virtual and extended reality platforms. She shared her thoughts on the development, implementation, risks, and potential of these tools for education.

The Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), a federal subsidy providing discounted high-speed broadband internet service to more than 23 million low-income households and 60 million people across the United States, is set to run out of funds at the end of May 2024.

Surprising new survey results indicate that first-generation college students whose parents never graduated from college prefer online education by a substantial margin over peers with college alumni parents. The polling shows that 76 percent of first-generation students reported that they’re interested in taking future online education courses. That’s almost ten percentage points more than peers who grew up with parents who are college alums.

Open educational resources (OERs) are free online alternatives to commercial textbooks that turned into a hot political issue in California in 2021—and Governor Newsom’s support for OERs is poised to disrupt America’s $3.2 billion university textbook industry.

Proctoring means the supervision of examinations, primarily to prevent cheating. Developed because of the Covid pandemic, online proctoring is a new way of supervising testing in real time through a computer’s webcam, microphone, and software that closely monitors the device’s desktop and running applications.

Just as important as the reasons for the Great Resignation are the questions of when that resigned workforce will return—and in what capacity. Some of the answers could lie in another pandemic-accelerated trend: the rise of online education, which is helping to transform what it means to be a learner and a worker in the 21st century.

The most popular online education class in the world—with 40,000 students enrolled virtually each semester—is Harvard University’s CS50. This introductory computer science course is Harvard’s largest on-campus class, with 1,600 students attending each year in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Moreover, almost five million students have enrolled since the university’s undergraduate division Harvard College first offered this class in 1989.

Some heartening news for educators regarding the brain and online learning is that “if you understand some of the principles about the brain and learning, you can make online instruction as brain-compatible as face-to-face,” Dr. Zadina shared. The reasoning? The same principles generally apply with regard to the brain and learning in both contexts. However, there are three important aspects of how the online environment affects cognition that are important to consider.