Indiana University is sharing lessons learned from its eTexts program in a free e-book titled eTexts 101: A Practical Guide. The book tells the story of I.U.'s own e-text experience, the economics of e-texts and campus bookstores, accessibility issues, communication strategies and more. It also includes perspectives from publishers and other universities that have worked through similar initiatives.
According to a recent report from cybersecurity training provider Wombat Security, end users in the education sector are more knowledgeable about building safe passwords than people in other industries. The 2018 Beyond the Phish Report analyzed user responses to nearly 85 million questions related to phishing and data security. Respondents came from 16 industries, including education, government, technology and manufacturing.
Unizin, the consortium of 25 colleges and universities focused on improving teaching and learning with technology, is turning to the Google Cloud as the foundation for an "interoperable, standards-driven ecosystem for teaching and learning data." The Unizin Data Platform will allow member universities to securely store, integrate and analyze student data and leverage those insights to improve student outcomes.
Two-year institutions consider learning analytics more important than institutional analytics (those that improve operational efficiency), while four-year institutions believe the opposite. In a survey of 200 college and university leaders, 52 percent of two-year leaders favored learning analytics over institutional analytics, while just 35 percent of four-year schools did the same. The survey was sponsored by Ellucian, a major technology company serving higher education, and managed by Ovum, which contacted survey participants by phone. Respondents included presidents, provosts, chief financial officers and CIOs or CTOs.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently held the M.I.T. Policy Hackathon, an event that brought together data science, engineering and policy students to come up with solutions to real problems brought by the event's organizers. Participants were given access to datasets from government, education and nonprofit institutes and asked to tackle problems in fields such as transportation, the future of work, cybersecurity, energy and climate and health.
Four research teams at the University of Michigan will explore the intersection of music and data science thanks to the support of the Michigan Institute for Data Science's Data Science for Music Challenge Initiative. The challenge asked participants to propose research projects that applied data science tools such as data mining or machine learning to the study of areas such as music theory, the connection between music and words, performance and more.
While most admissions officers consider checking out the social media profiles of college applicants "fair game," few actually do so. In a recent set of surveys, Kaplan Test Prep queried 388 admissions leaders from top U.S. colleges and universities as well as 914 high school students who have attended a Kaplan course. Among the first group, 68 percent reported having no qualms about checking out student social media profiles on sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Just 29 percent said they have actually done it.
The Statistics and Data Science Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is launching a new online micromasters in statistics and data science. Currently under development by M.I.T. faculty, the program will be available through edX in the fall and will feature a curriculum covering foundational knowledge of data science's methods and tools, in-depth coverage of probability and statistics and opportunities to experiment with data analysis techniques and machine learning algorithms.
McGraw-Hill Education has added more than 50 game-based learning activities to its digital course materials. The company worked with Muzzy Lane Software to develop simulations that "provide opportunities for students to apply their learning in experiential situations that mimic real-life work scenarios," according to a news announcement. Students access the content via the McGraw-Hill Connect digital learning platform.
Campus Management has announced CampusNexus Occupation Insight, a cloud-based "workforce analytics" tool that links coursework and skills development with career outcomes. By providing an up-to-date view of national and regional workforce data, the system allows institutions to shape their academic programs to meet industry needs — and ultimately give graduates a better chance at career placement, according to a news release.