eCornell Blog

Relative Advantages of Associate Degrees and Certificates

A new in-depth study of the educational and employment outcomes of low-income students suggests that low-income students who struggle in high school get more of an earnings boost by earning a certificate than they do achieving an associate degree at a two-year college. The study, “Pathways to Boosting the Earnings of Low-Income Students by Increasing Their Educational Attainment,” is based on data produced by the State of Florida’s unusual system for linking its citizens’ education and employment records. Among its findings:

• Access to college depends heavily on students’ financial backgrounds. Only 55 percent of students who qualified for free and reduced lunch (a federal proxy for low family income) attended college, compared to 62 percent of other students. Twenty-five percent of free and reduced lunch students attended college within two years (compared to 39 percent of other students) and 17 percent completed a year’s worth of college, compared to 30 percent. Non-free and reduced lunch students were also more than twice as likely as their less-wealthy peers to earn a college credential within six years.
• Students who achieved a higher credential earned more money. Those who earned a certificate had median earnings that were 27 percent higher than than those with no college credential; those with a bachelor’s degree earned about 35 percent more than those with no credential; and those with graduate degrees made about 62 percent more. Interestingly, though, students with just an A.A. degree did only 8 percent better than those with no credential at all—quite a bit less well than those with certificates. "... These results suggest that it is feasible for students who attend two-year colleges and do not go on to complete four-year programs to increase their earnings substantially by completing the courses needed to obtain a certificate,” the study’s authors wrote.

Valuing Human Capital

By now the incident involving the crash landing of USAirways flight 1549 is well documented.  There is no doubt that Captain Chesley Sullenberger  is a genuine American hero for his skills and even-tempered approach in landing his aircraft on the Hudson River and ensuring that all his passengers and crew were safely evacuated from the aircraft.  Indeed, he has trained and prepared for this event his entire life.

What you made not of heard is that on Friday, the day following the crash landing, USAirways stock price was up 13%, on a day when the overall market was up less than 1%.   Historically, airlines see significant drops in their stock value when they experience an incident as fears of lawsuits, reductions in passengers, and loss of goodwill impact the market’s perception of the company’s value.

I see the stock’s rise on Friday as the market’s valuation of the human capital at USAirways.  Those of us in the learning and human capital development industry have long argued that a company’s greatest asset is its people, but that it is perhaps the most underestimated asset by traditional company valuation tools.

On Friday, the market was not just assessing the heroism of the captain, but the training, skills, competencies, and judgment of the captain and his crew.  From this experience, the market was drawing a broader conclusion about the value of USAirways’ human capital.

In many organizations, the moment of truth for its human capital may not be life and death moments, but it does not dilute the value that is created when a company invests in developing its people.   In this economic environment where the financial assets of most companies has evaporated before our eyes, human capital remains as an enduring, dynamic, and productive asset in which investments can be made. By choosing to train, develop, and engage the people in your organization, you are choosing to prepare your people to react, respond, and lead when your company most needs them, and in doing so, you are creating value for your shareholders in the process.

Predictions for 2009

Every year at this time, eLearn Magazine asks experts in the field of e-learning to share their predictions about what lies ahead for the e-learning community. Following is a summary of their predictions for 2009.

• Cellphones will emerge as the dominant learning platform for the developing world.

• As organizations try to stretch their learning budgets in hard times, e-learning will become an attractive option.

• Processes like ADDIE and classic ID will be used selectively or fragmented due to time and cost pressures. As the recession bites and training budgets are slashed, organizations will no longer be able to afford the production of sophisticated courseware. Instead they will become more reliant on employee-generated content and increasingly appreciate the potential of Web 2.0 approaches for informal, social, and collaborative learning, and knowledge sharing throughout the enterprise. E-learning will finally break free of the courses-online model as more people realize the business benefits of networked informal learning. Whether tethered to distinct courses or as ongoing communities of practice, the challenge is to create structures and activities that generate informal content—such as stories from the field—in support of learning, training, or performance goals. Learning professionals' fears of obsolescence, expectations of connected employees, and demands for quicker solutions will drive the rest of us to increasingly abandon traditional instructional design in favor of experimentation—creating messy, loosely structured courses supplemented with low-cost social software and old-school support tools like job aids.

• As economies worsen and country and state and provincial budgets tighten, free online courses, programs, and universities will increasingly be discussed, debated, and ultimately enrolled in. The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement will strengthen, and will face up to the "cultural" challenges of winning learning providers and teachers to use OER.

• We'll see more use of games (immersive learning simulations) as a powerful learning opportunity, and tools to make it easier to develop.

Read more.

At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard

According to a recent article in the New York Times, the physics department at M.I.T. has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning. Last fall, after years of experimentation and debate and resistance from students, who initially petitioned against it, the department made the change permanent. Already, attendance is up and the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent.

Other universities have implemented similar changes, including Harvard, Rensselaer, North Carolina State, the University of Maryland, and the University of Colorado, Boulder. At these institutions, physicists have been pioneering teaching methods drawn from research showing that most students learn fundamental concepts more successfully, and are better able to apply them, through interactive, collaborative, student-centered learning.

“Just as you can’t become a marathon runner by watching marathons on TV,” observes
Eric Mazur, a physics professor at Harvard, “likewise for science, you have to go through the thought processes of doing science and not just watch your instructor do it.”

Read the entire article.

Cornell is big on entrepreneurship

Cornell has one of the strongest university-wide programs on entrepreneurship in the country.  The program "fosters the entrepreneurial spirit in every Cornell participant - in every college, every field, and every stage of life."

The Cornell Chronicle recently published a great summary of recent activity by Cornell students who start businesses while still in school. 

Entrepreneurship@Cornell is the organizing focal point for all of Cornell's activities.

Typically, an economic downturn leads to a boost in new ventures and entrepreneurial activity because (1) people seek new opportunities after a layoff or in lieu of working for company in trouble, and (2) because the economic downturn often creates openings to new products, services, and "disruptive" technologies.  With many well-established companies in a more conservative position, strong upstarts can often find market share. 

LINGOs and eCornell: taking learning to new places

Eric Berg, the chairman of LINGOS  visited our office last week and provided our staff with a compelling presentation of how the eCornell courses are having an impact in many international NGOs.  Through our partnership with LINGOs, employees of NGOs such as CARE, Habitat for Humanity, the World Wildlife Federation and dozens more have access to courses authored by Cornell faculty where they live and work.  They are using these courses to make significant improvements in how they deliver the critical services provided by their organizations in some of the world's most demanding environments.  And as Eric points out, even a small improvement in how an NGO delivers its services can save thousands or millions of dollars, and in this challenging environment for philanthropy, it may be a life saving difference.

We learned about the refugee camp manager who is completing a Financial Management certificate to be able to be a better financial steward of the resources he has received in order to house and feed hundreds of people.  We also heard of the park ranger for World Wildlife Fund who is using the project leadership skills he learned in his eCornell course to better manage a conservation project aimed at saving gorillas and their habitat.

In our hyper-connected world, it was amazing to hear about people running 150 feet of power cord from their solar panels to their makeshift office in order to power the computer to take online courses.  The demand for new knowledge and skills is incredible, and it is humbling to be able to serve some small component of that knowledge through eCornell.

We look forward to expanding our relationship with LINGOs and will keep you posted on how online learning is making a difference through these professionals.

e-Learning 2.009

By Eva Kaplan-Leiserson

What does technology have in store for learning in the year ahead? This article interviews experts in Web 2.0, mobile learning, and games and simulations about top trends and their forecasts for the near future of e-learning. Following is a summary.

Web 2.0

• The things with the biggest increases are blogs, podcasts, communities of practice, and wikis.
• Huge amount of growth in virtual worlds such as Second Life. The real benefit is the ability to have a sense of presence. In a virtual world, you can see who is talking, and that’s just really powerful.
• Training, formal learning…will still be used for broad audiences with common needs. e-Learning 2.0 is all about more narrow needs where you can’t possibly go into the publish model.

Mobile Learning

• Some courses and training happening in mobile learning, but ... performance support as probably the biggest push.
  
• It’s probably going to catch on when people realize they shouldn’t just do mobile learning, they should design their learning so it can be mobilized too. That way you don’t really have to build mobile learning so much as you have to build good universal design. As you make that transition easy for people—to build it once and deliver it [in] many different formats—that’s going make it prolific.

Simulations and Games

• Expect to see mobile phones used as platform for simulations and games and, later, as client for virtual worlds.

Online Learners are More Engaged

The 2008 National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) was just completed for 2008.  They surveyed 22,000 students at 47 institutions of higher education.   This year the survey was expanded to also survey students who had completed online courses, and they compared the results of those students who had an online learning experience with those who hadn't.  The online students reported higher levels of "higher-order thinking," "integrative thinking," and "reflective learning."  Together NSSE refers to these three as "deep learning."  This finding is consistent with other surveys, and anecdotal reports of both faculty and students in higher education who have experienced online learning. 

While we serve a different learning population, it also reflects our experience with the level of engagement of the professionals and managers who enroll in eCornell courses.  We find learners deeply engaged in integrating their real-world experience with the conceptual frameworks in the course, or reflecting on their personal experiences, biases, and approaches when solving the problems presented by a faculty member.

The survey posits several reasons for this differerntial.

 "It may be that students who pursue online
courses—such as older students for whom the flexibility and
convenience of the medium may be particularly important, given
work or family commitments—are those who embrace the spirit
of independent, student-centered, intellectually engaging learning
as captured by the deep learning measures. It may also be the case
that professors who teach online courses make more intentional
use of deep approaches to learning in their lesson plans."

I think that learning online, especially, in a structured yet asynchronous course, such as eCornell's, provides an opportunity to intentionally design in reflection and time for application and integration.  I meet many corporate learning managers who are interested in "on-demand" learning and are concerned that a more structured model just doesn't fit the demands of the modern workplace.  I disagree.  In a dynamic and uncertain environment, and we all find oursleves in that environment right now, we are better served by creating the space to think, to test ideas, to reflect on what has worked and not, and then identifying new solutions that we can implement. An immediate response to a new piece of knowledge if acted upon right away, may be very different than if I have an hour, or a week, to reflect, then respond in a more strategic way.

Also, in a traditional classroom, we ask students to respond now--raise your hand, participate in a small group discussion--and in an isolated location--away from work, life etc.  In an online course that unfolds over days or weeks instead of hours, the learner can begin to integrate the ideas from the course into their work or their life while they are still engaged in the learning experience.  Rather than leaving work to attend class, and learning in isolation, the learning comes to them.  The result is a more integrative, higher-level, and reflective learning experience that has a greater opportunity for significant impact in their worklife, then the traditional experience which may have transferred knowledge but may have been less successful at creating change.

Plant-Based Nutrition Courses Now Accepting Enrollments

 
We are pleased to announce that eCornell is now accepting enrollments for the 100% online Plant-Based Nutrition program based on T. Colin Campbell's book, The China Study.

Course titles include Nutrition Fundamentals, Diseases of Affluence, and Diet & Our World. Each of the courses are two weeks long and are approximately 6 hours of learning.  The material/videos largely cover studies published in a variety of scientific journals.  The program was created by Dr. Campbell and features six guest lecturers. 

Each individual course is $295, or enroll in all three for $795.

For more information about this program, please click here or feel free to contact one of our enrollment counselors at enroll@ecornell.com

Reducing Your Carbon Footprint with eLearning

If you are like most people today, you have probably noticed that more companies and individuals are doing everything in their power to make less of an impact on the environment.  From flex fuel cars to environmentally safe plastic cups, there are plenty of ways we can make a difference. 

One way to make a tremendous difference, and one that may not have crossed your mind is advancing your professional development online, versus a traditional classroom environment.  According to ASTD’s 2007 State of the Industry Report, classroom training makes up the majority of learning hours delivered and has the biggest impact on the environment in the areas of travel, facilities, and materials.

Travel, by far, is the biggest greenhouse gas contributor.  The combination of travel to and from the location of the training, as well as the facilities that house the learners and the printed handouts take their toll on the environment. 

Shifting that cost and impact to an e-learning environment dramatically changes the dynamics, and makes the choice all the more clear, if going green is how you would like to change your impact on the world. 

eCornell’s online learning model offers the solutions to help you make the choice of going GREEN.  By using a 100% online environment, you already contribute to cutting travel impacts, as well as the facility and material footprints a typical classroom setting would affect on the environment.

Every little bit counts, and although you might not consider yourself an environmentally conscious individual all the time, remember that learning online is the way you can make an impact, and go GREEN!