Professional, Continuing and Online Education Update by UPCEA

Professional, Continuing, and Online Education Update by UPCEA

Students Vote for Remote (Employees) - Melissa Ezarik, Inside Higher Ed

When making decisions about whether employees’ jobs could be done remotely or under a hybrid arrangement, college and university officials may not realize that most students don’t expect or feel they need in-person staff. Although many campus departments managed to function fully remotely during the unprecedented medical emergency in spring 2020, “now we’re mainly sort of in this post-COVID period,” Stephens says. An estimated 60 to 70 percent of his unit’s employees are hybrid or fully remote now; “pre-COVID, that was zero. We didn’t even think about it.”

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/09/06/students-largely-dont-mind-remote-work-campus-employees

Gates Foundation pours $100M into college transformation effort - Rick Seltzer, Higher Ed Dive

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will spend $100 million over five years to fund a group of nonprofit organizations working to help colleges “transform themselves” in the face of falling enrollment, increasing demands for educated workers and declining public confidence in higher education, it said Thursday. That means overhauling colleges’ business models, structures and cultures to boost student outcomes, which can be measured by metrics like graduation rates and successful transfers from community colleges to four-year institutions. The foundation also wants the effort to help institutions address stubborn equity gaps so race, ethnicity, family income and other demographics don’t predict whether a student is likely to graduate from college.

https://www.highereddive.com/news/gates-foundation-pours-100m-into-college-transformation-effort/631991/

Ensuring equitable access to AR/VR in higher education - Nicol Turner Lee, Rashawn Ray, Samantha Lai, and Brooke Tanner, Brookings

Augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) technologies are creating new means for education by opening doors for students to learn and teachers to instruct in a more immersive, technological environment. For example, medical school students can engage in experimental surgeries in virtual reality environments and biology pupils are able to engage with plants, mammals, birds, insects, and amphibians via technological simulations. But not all universities have equal access to leverage these and other emerging technologies. This means that some students face disadvantages in their preparation and on the job market because of a lack of economic and network resources to engage with new technologies.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2022/09/06/ensuring-equitable-access-to-ar-vr-in-higher-education/

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