A startup founded by ed tech veterans has announced a program intended to make Zoom more effective in replicating the classroom experience for instructors and students. Class for Zoom is currently seeking people to beta test the software.
While 40 percent of IT higher education IT leaders and instructional technologists said in June 2020 that their college or university was planning for "mostly in-person" classes for the fall, that share plummeted to less than 5 percent by August, according to a recent study by Educause.
The University of Kentucky has expanded the use of technology in classrooms to accommodate whatever format is appropriate for the course content and faculty and student preference. As the home page for the institution stated, "Work Anywhere. Learn Anywhere. Teach Anywhere."
New York's Colgate University has sought outside help to improve the quality of its hybrid learning experience. The university, which has reopened to students on campus, is also continuing its remote learning programs. Now, some faculty will have access to 2UOS Essential from 2U, a set of services for course production and development, technology and support.
The University of Massachusetts has launched the Inter-campus Course Exchange, an initiative to make courses from all UMass campuses available to students at any institution in the system.
A pilot at the University of Phoenix found that a well-designed interactive textbook can help people stick with their math studies. The university worked with zyBooks from John Wiley & Sons in a two-course undergraduate sequence on quantitative reasoning.
To offer more than pre-recorded lab demonstrations or virtual laboratories to remote students, two chemistry instructors at Missouri S&T have refined their approach, which uses real-time live-streamed demonstrations of experiments.
Now that students are returning to campus at Missouri S&T, with a mix of online and in-person classes, an instructor in electrical engineering is perfecting his approach to lab activities.
Social networking giant Facebook is partnering with Coursera to launch a new Social Media Marketing Professional Certificate, designed to prepare learners of any background for jobs in the social media marketing field in just 20 weeks.
Nathan Mentzer, an associate professor in Purdue University's Polytechnic Institute and College of Education, got an early start with the HyFlex model just as the COVID-19 pandemic was starting to impact higher ed institutions across the country: He started blending both face-to-face and online instruction in his classrooms weeks before Purdue officially shifted to remote learning last spring.
