Serendipity35

Though they get lumped together, there is a difference between emergency remote teaching (ERT) and online learning. Prior to the COVID pandemic, I knew of some isolated examples of emergency remote learning (ERL). It might have happened because of a natural disaster, such as when Hurricane Katrina hit the New Orleans area in 2005. Tulane University was forced to send students to other schools. Going online wasn't an option. In 2009, the H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic hit and few schools used online learning as one way to compensate. In that pandemic, schools often kept students isolated on campus and used more traditional learning options. It was the rare school that was able to go online for all or a large percentage of classes. 

I co-wrote two journal articles in 2021 (AJES, 80:1) about the COVID pandemic and higher education. The first article, "Online Education in a Pandemic: Stress Test or Fortuitous Disruption?" examined some of that history. One observation is that there were few lessons learned between the prior event and the COVID pandemic despite gains in using online learning in normal situations. The COVID-19  pandemic brought on more emergency remote learning than a switch to online learning. Switching from face-to-face (F2F) education to a virtual environment was forced and unplanned in the vast majority of cases. The second article, "Choosing Transformation Over Tradition" considers how advancements in online education did not have the effect of preparing all teachers and all courses to move online easily and asked whether lessons learned in 2020 and 2021 would be temporary or transformative. At that time, there were teachers, students and courses that were online - and there were those that were not. (both articles are available via academia.com).

Well-planned online learning experiences are significantly different from courses offered online in response to a crisis or disaster. I believe that most of the criticisms of K-12 and high education schools trying to maintain instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic stem from emergency remote teaching. Unfortunately, in the public perception and for some in academia, the experience of ERL is their perception of online learning overall.

Emergency remote teaching is defined as "a temporary shift of instructional delivery to an alternate delivery mode due to crisis circumstances." Though the teaching solutions used will certainly overlap those used for online instruction, ERT or ERL should not be considered the same as what we know to be planned and designed "online learning." 

An EDUCAUSE article considers how we might cautiously evaluate emergency online learning and though some criteria for evaluating online learning would certainly be in that rubric, it would be invalid to use the same criteria.

It reminds me of my earliest experiences teaching online 20 years ago. Not only did I need to change how I designed lessons and how I presented them pedagogically, but I also needed to reevaluate how I would evaluate student work. For example, could I use the same rubric for a student who did a presentation or demonstration in my physical classroom as I did for a student submitting a slide presentation with audio that had been carefully designed, revised and edited?

When I ran a university department that was the campus support of online courses, we worked with a small percentage of faculty and courses that were fully online. In emergency situations when all classes needed to be online and faculty and students needed support, my department and I believe most school's support teams will not be able to offer the same level of support to all faculty who need it.

If you are in a teaching position, are you, your students, and your institution in a better place now to move quickly online than you were in January of 2020?

In writing that second journal article, I and my co-author were somewhat pessimistic about where we would be in 2022 based on the lesson not learned in past instances of emergency shifts to online. However, since those articles were published in early 2021, we feel some optimism. We have seen positive changes in preparedness. Anecdotally, I know of K-12 schools that have smoothly moved to online modes because of snowstorms or other short-term situations because of what they experienced in 2020-21. I know higher education faculty who are now more comfortable taking on an online course section (though they still prefer to teach in a physical classroom). At all levels, there is more use of online delivery platforms and more hybrid teaching than before. 

Like other emergency situations, we often hear that it is not if we will ever have to go fully online again; it is when we will have to do it.

You know VR (virtual reality) and probably know AR (augmented reality) but XR (extended reality) may be new to you. Extended reality is an umbrella term that refers to all real-and-virtual environments generated by computer graphics and wearables. Besides VR and AR this umbrella term also includes MR (mixed reality). 

It seems that AR is already a kind of mixed reality since it has digital content and real-world content which sounds like mixed reality. But MR has even more, for example, it might include holographic meetings.

When the term XR is used it means that the human-to-tech moves from a screen to an immersive virtual environment or augments the user’s surroundings or both things. I thought the XR term was new but it actually appeared in the 1960s when Charles Wyckoff filed a patent for his silver-halide “XR” film. It is very different in its usage today.

To further add to the abbreviation confusion, this field also uses BCI to mean brain-computer interfaces which may be the next computing platform.

Confused?  Read on

weforum.org/agenda/2022/02/future-of-the-metaverse-vr-ar-and-brain-computer/

xrtoday.com/mixed-reality/what-is-extended-reality/

hp.com/us-en/shop/tech-takes/what-is-xr-changing-world
 

When I first think of federated learning, what comes to mind is something like a college federated department. For example, the history faculty at NJIT and Rutgers University-Newark are joined in a single federated department offering an integrated curriculum and joint undergraduate and graduate degree programs.

Having worked at NJIT, it made sense to combine the two departments and collaborate. Each had its own specialties but they were stronger together.

In technology, a federation is a group of computing or network providers agreeing upon standards of operation in a collective fashion, such as two distinct, formally disconnected, telecommunications networks that may have different internal structures.

There is also federated learning which sounds like something those two history departments are doing, but it is not. This federated learning is the decentralized form of machine learning (ML).

In machine learning, data that is aggregated from several edge devices (like mobile phones, laptops, etc.) is brought together to a centralized server.  The main objective is to provide privacy-by-design because, in federated learning, a central server just coordinates with local clients to aggregate the model's updates without requiring the actual data (i.e., zero-touch).

I'm not going to go very deep here about things like the three categories (Horizontal federated learning, vertical federated learning, and federated transfer learning). As an example, consider federated learning at Google where it is used to improve models on devices without sending users' raw data to Google servers.

For people using something like Google Assistant, privacy is a concern. Using federated learning to improve “Hey Google,” your voice and audio data stay private while Google Assistant uses it.

Federated learning trains an algorithm across the multiple decentralized edge devices (such as your phone) or servers that have local data samples, without exchanging them. Compare this to traditional centralized machine learning techniques where all the local datasets are uploaded to one server.

So, though federated learning is about training ML to be efficient, it is also about data privacy, data security, data access rights and access to heterogeneous data.

MORE at analyticsvidhya.com...federated-learning-a-beginners-guide
 

There has been lots of talk about the losses in learning during the pandemic. Much of that talk has been around the shift to online learning and what was perceived as lost by not being in physical classrooms.

My wife, Lynnette Condro Ronkowitz, and I wrote two articles published in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology (Volume 80, Issue 1) in January 2021 about the pandemic and higher education. (both articles are available via academia.com) 

The first article is "Online Education in a Pandemic: Stress Test or Fortuitous Disruption?" We considered the ways in which the shutdown caused by the  COVID-  19  pandemic have accelerated the evolution of online education. This movement from face-to-face (F2F) education to a virtual environment was forced and unplanned. It can be viewed as a stress test for digital teaching and learning in the higher education system. The study addresses course conversions and the progress of online education in response to the current crisis.

The second article, "Choosing Transformation Over Tradition: The Changing Perception of Online Education" was part of the first article's draft but the editors thought it would be expanded into a second article. In this article, we consider that despite advancements in online education, misperceptions persist that create obstacles to the integration of online classes in higher education. We refute misconceptions about online education and highlights key components of a strong online course. For example, as a result of the pandemic, it became apparent that there is a conflation between “school” and “education” that has prompted contradistinction, and so we tried to provide some insight into some of the social and economic implications of the culture of our education system.

We felt that though learning losses occurred during these pandemic years, there were also gains. A post on the Innovative Educator blog also addresses gains in learning that came out of the pandemic. Though we focused on higher education, the blog post looks more at K-12. For example, because of the pivot to online "students and staff were catapulted into the future in many school districts. As a result, our students will now be more prepared than they ever would have been, had education not been disrupted.

Some pandemic learning gains that were cited in the post:

Access to Devices - not that a "digital divide" does not still exist, but it is not as wide

Access to the Internet - the inability of students and some faculty to access broadband connections or possibly any Internet access at home became apparent. Stories of learners working from parking lots outside free wireless sites were shocking to some people.

Access to Content and to New Platforms - K-12 school districts began adopting learning management systems and platforms (Google Classroom was one ) and learning materials became more accessible to students and families.

Access to Each Other & The World - Higher education already had far greater access to learning platforms and tools such as video conferencing pre-pandemic, but it was not being used by a majority of faculty and in courses that were not already online. "Zooming" became a new verb for video conferencing for many people in and out of education - and it continues today. Virtual conferencing may come with some losses from in-person but it also came with gains. Video plus chat and captioning (though imperfect in most cases) helped students with and without disabilities or who spoke other languages access what was being said more easily. Courses could include authors, guests, and experts brought into virtual classrooms.  

I am not a fan of the term "the new normal" but such a thing would include gains that have remained in place and progress that was made. Hopefully, another major pandemic is far in the future but mini-crises from virus variants to natural disasters have occurred and will occur with greater frequency. And hopefully, we are better prepared for them.