Nonprofit Spotlight: WGU | A new type of U: WGU Nevada makes its mark in the Silver State | Northern Nevada Business Weekly

"For some, education has many hurdles, two big ones being time and money. WGU Nevada tackles these obstacles as a new type of university for a new you."

Robert Ostrea
Community Relations Manager – Nevada

WGU Nevada is an online, competency-based university designed to expand access to higher education for Nevada residents. Established by the state of Nevada in partnership with Western Governors University (WGU), WGU Nevada offers more than 50 accredited bachelor’s and master’s degrees in high-demand career fields such as business, K–12 teacher education, information technology and health professions, including nursing.

“WGU Nevada is a practical higher ed option for today’s professional workforce,” said Spencer Stewart, chancellor of WGU Nevada. “Because our online platform is more readily available and affordable than traditional universities, students are able to achieve their education success on their own time and often for less money.”

By relying on the flexibility and speed of online coursework, students can complete their education at their own discretion. At WGU Nevada, students leverage the power of online learning to make their program as flexible as they need it to be. This means being able to balance work, family and community obligations while completing their studies.

WGU Nevada turned today’s traditional education model on its head by creating a competency-based system where students are not stuck in minimum credits or a minimum amount of seat time. Instead, students can gauge their educational success by working on competencies and completing evaluations to show they have mastered the idea or skill rather than complete a course or a module in a specific time constraint.

At WGU Nevada, students are celebrated for what they know, expediting the learning process and helping those students enter the workforce or advance in their current positions.

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Source: Northern Nevada Business Weekly

WGU Indiana scholarships available | Batesville Herald Tribune

"WGU Indiana is offering an added incentive for Hoosiers making resolutions to earn a bachelor’s or master’s degree in the new year, making available $500,000 in scholarships through Western Governors University." continues Batesville Herald Tribune.
 

Photo: Western Governors University – WGU Indiana

Students who apply to WGU Indiana by March 31 are eligible to apply for the New Kind of You Scholarship, which provides up to $2,000 per student for up to 250 students.

“The start of a new year can mark the start of a new educational journey for many Hoosiers,” said WGU Indiana chancellor Allison Barber. “With enrollment continuing to grow, it is clear that thousands of Hoosiers from around the state want to advance their careers by going back to school. 
The New Kind of You Scholarship provides additional opportunities for prospective students to do just that.”

The scholarship will be applied at the rate of $500 per six-month term, renewable for up to four terms, toward the university's already low tuition of about $3,000 per term for most programs. Students enrolling in any of the online universities 60 bachelor’s and master’s degree programs are eligible to apply for the scholarship.

For more information, visit indiana.wgu.edu/scholarships.
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Source: Batesville Herald Tribune

Instructional Design Strategies with the Spotlight on the Learner | CommLab India

"Know all About Designing Learner-centric Online Courses" summarizes CommLab India.
 

Photo: CommLab India

As you know, e-learning courses are devoid of a physical presence, so a boring e-learning course might take a sledgehammer to the cognitive capacities of the learners.

Here is a kit titled, "Instructional Design Strategies with the Spotlight on the Learner" that helps you understand more about these guidelines and formulate the right instructional design strategy for your e-learning course. It talks about:

• What is an instructional design strategy?
• What are the different instructional design strategies and how to zero-in on the right strategy for your e-learning course?
• What are the essential elements of a good instructional design strategy?
• How to use the various components of an ID strategy?

More specifically, this kit consists of:

• An eBook titled "Instructional Design Strategies : Design Learner-centric E-learning Courses"
• The webinar "5 Instructional Design Strategies for Creating Better E-learning"
• A Presentation titled "All About Instructional Design Strategies"

Download the kit now!

Source: CommLab India

Competency-Based Education: Saving Students Time and Money | EDUCAUSE Review

Key Takeaways

• Competency-based education offers the opportunity to accelerate learning and thus time-to-credential; alternative pricing structures such as all-you-can-take subscription models; and credit for prior learning. 
• The Texas Affordable Baccalaureate Program, a competency-based BAAS in Organizational Leadership at Texas A&M University–Commerce, illustrates how these time and cost savings can benefit students.  
• The TAMU-C Institute for Competency-Based Education will assist additional higher education institutions across Texas in developing their own TAB programs.
  

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Photo: Judith A Sebesta

Photo: Carlos Rivers

"Competency-based education offers the opportunity to accelerate learning and thus time-to-credential; alternative pricing structures such as all-you-can-take subscription models; and credit for prior learning. Together, these can support cost savings for students. The Texas Affordable Baccalaureate Program illustrates how this might work." according to Carlos Rivers, MBA, operations research analyst in the Institute for Competency-Based Education, Texas A&M University–Commerce and Judith Sebesta, PhD, executive director of the Institute for Competency-Based Education, Texas A&M University–Commerce. 

Photo: GraphicStock.com

Affordability is one of many potential advantages for students engaging in competency-based education (CBE). The opportunity to accelerate learning and thus time-to-credential; alternative pricing structures such as all-you-can-take subscription models; and credit for prior learning may all afford cost savings for students. However, we still see a relative dearth of hard evidence to substantiate CBE's potential. In his 2015 report "The Landscape of Competency-Based Education: Enrollment, Demographics, and Affordability", Robert Kelchen pointed out:

Although the list prices of competency-based models appear very cost effective in relation to traditional higher education models, no one has comprehensively examined the true affordability of CBE programs and whether they actually deliver credentials to their students at a lower price.¹

Preliminary research on the Texas Affordable Baccalaureate (TAB) Program, a competency-based BAAS in Organizational Leadership at Texas A&M University-Commerce (TAMU-C), suggests significant cost savings for students. Tuition and fees have remained fixed at $750 for Texas residents and $2,500 for non-residents for each seven-week term since January 2014, when the first class of students was admitted. This pricing model allows students to accelerate and complete as many courses as they can manage for no additional cost during each term of enrollment, an all-you-can-take buffet of courses for the same flat rate. In addition, since many students come to the program with an associate's degree or prior learning from the workplace or military, they also have options to satisfy some degree requirements through transfer credit or prior learning assessment (PLA), which can propel them to finish their degree even faster.

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) and TAB Program staff members have built estimated cost scenarios for students in the program. A TAB student is not the typical "traditional" college student most people imagine. Of the current 305 students enrolled in the TAB Program, 88 percent are ages 25 and up, and 53 percent of all enrolled students receive some type of financial assistance, including but not limited to outside scholarships and employer reimbursements.²   

Since its inception, the TAB Program at TAMU-C has yielded crucial data to track its programmatic and student performance, providing a model for other Texas public institutions of higher education to follow. Currently, the Institute for Competency-Based Education , also based at TAMU-C, is charged with developing appropriate, targeted metrics with which to track outcomes and to continuously collect data on the program and its students. Here we focus on student efficiency/affordability scenarios based on the 122 students who have graduated from the TAB Program. We hope these cost scenarios — which mirror a national trend toward using CBE to support affordability — help clarify how students can save both time and money through CBE models.
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Source: EDUCAUSE Review

Vico and the Modern Idea of History: Part II | Modern Diplomacy

Photo: Emanuel L. Paparella

"It is intriguing that within modern times (from Galileo and Bacon onward) the idea of global history was born in the European philosophical mind at the same time when European imperialism was at its apex, well supported by science and technology, (the st world of logical positivism) considered the definitive modern answer to all social, political and economic problems." notes Professor Paparella, a scholar interested in current relevant philosophical, political and cultural issues. 
 

Photo: Modern Diplomacy

Specifically, historicism is born with the publication of Giambattista Vico’s New Science (1725) in the 18th century. Until then history was not considered universal but a rather tribal enterprise, not worthy even to be called a science since it was not concerned with universal problems. The ancient Greek certainly did not consider it a primary pathway to truth, neither did Descartes. History was considered as a teacher of sort who taught man about his past (as Cicero had pointed out, Machiavelli concurring) but the fact that it was man who made history and, at the same time and almost paradoxically, history made man, was yet unknown philosophically.
 
But by the 18th century, the so called age of enlightenment, the whole world could be envisioned as one stage wherein a single global drama could be played out. It was almost natural that Europe would arrive at the idea of universal history and see itself at the very center of its processes. Natural too that it should have put its meaning and interpretation in terms of Western Civilization. In fact, had there not been those early Greek thinkers who initiated philosophy as we know it, there would not be any science, no technology, and no atomic bombs either; which is to say, without its origins in ancient Greece there would not have been any modern culmination of science and technology either, what goes by the name of positivism.
 
Vico has taught us that to understand the nature of any cultural historical phenomenon one must study its origins. To even begin to grasp the advent of our modern technical civilization and the entrepreneur’s mind-set we ought not begin with the scientific mind-set of the 17th century but with its origins, as Vico has well taught us, and situate the emergence of the new modern science within the larger background of Western history. We need to begin at the beginning of thought among the early Greek.
 
When we focus on such origins we notice the strange fact that no such eruption of thought occurred in the ancient Oriental world. While it is true that the Chinese were (and still are) a highly intelligent people, that there is no indication that they were in any way at a lower intellectual level than the Greeks, they did not produce science, not even the beginning of science. There is little indication that, left on their own, they would have arrived at science. The contrary can be asserted: that the harmonious and well balanced patterns of Chinese civilization were against the reckless and dangerous adventure of the mind what we in the west call reason; a reason that needs to be followed and adhered to no matter where it leads.
 
While it is true that with Galileo the earth is no longer the center of the universe we have to keep in mind the bigger picture: that Greek science maintained that there an immediate bond between ourselves and nature. The motto for this nexus was Sozein ta Phainomena (to preserve things as they show themselves to be) which simply meant that the Greek scientist would preserve the nexus between natural objects and our direct perception of them. Objectivity in that observation is all important. No capricious gods there.
 
The question arises: why did philosophy which prepares the way for modern science originate among the Greeks? Why did it take place there? Why did it take place at all? To begin to answer this question we have to grasp the fact that human creation is not deterministic, human acts are unpredictable; that a new vision can go beyond any existing previous framework. That is to say, the outburst of light in ancient Greece need not have happened at all. Parallel universe are possible.
 
The birth of philosophy cannot be reckoned as the effect of a cause. The birth of philosophy, its origins, so important to determine its essence for Vico, is the point at which Being comes into its own and claims mortal minds. There is no more split between subject and object, between thought and Being. As Parmenides first perceived, they belong together in unity. Being is the whole, the All calling to thought. There is intellectual awe at the thought that the human mind is capable of raising itself above all that is, that it is, that it exists. Hence the famous question: why is there something rather than nothing?, a question which begins Heidegger’s Being and Time.
 
A century and a half after Parmenides Aristotle brings to completion the great age of Greek philosophy. This century and a half from Parmenides to Aristotle is the most revolutionary and speedy acceleration of all of history. This may seem preposterous to us moderns but consider this: the period opens with Parmenides’ vision of Being as an intelligible whole within which human thought is to find its elements. It is like the sun at sunrise: its light is still perceived as one of the things of the phenomena. It closes with Aristotle mapping out various and distinct realms of beings mapped out into the territories of different disciplines, not changed that much since then: logic, mathematics as a deductive system, physics or natural science, biology, psychology, ethics, politics, economics. Science is born, albeit to be intelligible to itself it has to cling to the maternal apron strings of philosophy. Now we are at high noon; the light of the sun pervades everything and yet, just because it is so pervasive it is no longer consciously perceived; it is just there taken for granted and needs to be rediscovered and disclosed again
 
For Aristotle to be is to be an individual entity of some kind, to exist is to be an individual instance of a species. So when the Greeks created philosophy proper they ceased to be aware of the light of Being itself in which they saw what they saw. The history of Being for Western thought begins therefore with the forgetting of Being. But the schematized world of Aristotle still has an inner unity which we moderns have lost without even being aware of it. That unity is the Greek sense of Physis which we translate as nature. Stones, plants, animals, stars, and planets still belong to the one cosmos within which man lives and has its being as a natural being. The cosmic alienation, the nihilism of us moderns, had not yet entered the Greek spirit.
 
Modern science has been around for some three hundred years now. However we ought not forget that it is built upon the foundations of Greek science. Without Euclid and Archimedes, Newton would have been impossible. Yet most of us would agree that our science is not exactly that of the Greeks, or why would we call it “modern science”? More often than not we couple it with technology. In his Science and the Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead brilliantly deals with this conundrum. There he upsets one of the taken for granted assumptions of conventional history which seems to take for granted that the modern period begins when men turn from the faith of the Middle Ages to a reliance on reason culminating with the age of Enlightenment (18th century). What is overlooked is that the Middle Ages were characterized by the sweeping rationalism of the scholastics (among whom Thomas Aquinas) and in reality the modern period begins with a revolt against such a rationalism and a turning to the stubborn empirical facts of experience. It is that, according to Whitehead that is at the origins of the modern era.
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Source: Modern Diplomacy

What’s Inside the “Black Box” of Machine Learning? | RTInsights

Machine learning can optimize business decisions, but the decision reached by an algorithm often isn’t transparent.

"How far can machine learning take us? The list of possibilities is endless.  Machine learning applications “can provide customer service, manage logistics, analyze medical records, or even write news stories,” a recent report by McKinsey Global Institute explains." according to Joe McKendrick, RTINsights' Industry Insights Editor in charge of contributed case studies.

Photo: RTInsights (press release) (blog)

The McKinsey report identified 120 potential use cases and interviewed 600 industry experts on the potential impact of machine learning. As machines take on routinized decision-making processes, “the value potential is everywhere, even in industries that have been slow to digitize,” the report’s authors explain. At the same time, machine learning faces challenges as it gains traction across enterprises.

The report’s authors, led by Nicolaus Henke, global leader of McKinsey Analytics, observe that “recent advances in machine learning can be used to solve a tremendous variety of problems — and deep learning is pushing the boundaries even further.”

Traditional software is programmed to do one single task repetitively. Machine learning, however, is based on “algorithms that ‘learn’ from data without being explicitly programmed,” Henke and his team explain. “The concept underpinning machine learning is to give the algorithm a massive number of ‘experiences’ — training data — and a generalized strategy for learning, then let it identify patterns, associations, and insights from the data. In short, these systems are trained rather than programmed.”...

Machine learning applications 
Problems machine learning can address problems from “keeping race cars running at peak performance to ferreting out fraud.” For example, Formula One teams “recently turned to machine learning to hold down costs in their aerodynamics operations divisions, which typically eat up more than 80 percent of development resources. Building on years of diverse project data—including CAD logs, human resources data, and employee communications—they looked for patterns that influenced the efficiency of an individual project. They discovered, for example, that too many engineers or long stoppages typically increased labor hours on a given project by five to six percent, while team use of the documentation system improved productivity by more than four percent. Overall, this application reduced the budget by 12 to 18 percent, saving millions of dollars.”

Challenges with machine learning 
As with everything that seems too good to be true, there are gotchas. The McKinsey report addressed the challenges machine learning still faces:

Deep learning models are opaque. 
Call it the black box effect. “As of today, it is difficult to decipher how deep neural networks reach insights and conclusions, making their use challenging in cases where transparency of decision making may be needed for regulatory purposes,” the report observes.

Machine intelligence has ethical issues. 
Whoever programs or feeds data into machine learning algorithms may have undue influence on results delivered. “One set of ethical concerns relates to real-world biases that might be embedded into training data,” Henke explains. “Another question involves deciding whose ethical guidelines will be encoded in the decision making of intelligence and who is responsible for the algorithm’s conclusions. Leading artificial intelligence experts, through OpenAI, the Foundation for Responsible Robotics, and other efforts, have begun tackling these questions.”
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Source: RTInsights (press release) (blog)

Artificial Intelligence: Silicon Valley's Next Frontier | Sci-Tech Today

"Virtually everywhere you look, Bay Area tech businesses are running into walls. Smartphones were revolutionary and lucrative, but the U.S. market is saturated, and Apple's iPhone sales have fallen for three quarters." continues Sci-Tech Today.

Photo: Sci-Tech Today

The "app economy" has matured, with more people using existing apps than downloading new ones. And Facebook, which has filled users' news feeds with so many ads it can barely add more, is predicting its revenue growth will slump next year.

Silicon Valley needs its next big thing, a focus for the concentrated brain power and innovation infrastructure that have made this region the world leader in transformative technology. Just as the valley's mobile era is peaking, the next frontier of growth and innovation has arrived: It's Siri in an Apple iPhone, Alexa in an Amazon Echo, the software brain in Google's self-driving cars, Amazon's product recommendations and, someday, maybe the robot surgeon that saves your life.

It's artificial intelligence, software that can "learn" and "think," the latest revolution in tech.
"It's going to be embedded in everything," said startup guru Steve Blank, an adjunct professor at Stanford. "We've been talking about artificial intelligence for 30 years, maybe longer, in Silicon Valley. It's only in the last five years, or maybe even the last two years, that this stuff has become useful."

Achievements that were "unthinkable only a few years ago" are being made possible by artificial intelligence, Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a blog post. "The last 10 years have been about building a world that is mobile-first, turning our phones into remote controls for our lives," Pichai said. "But in the next 10 years, we will shift to a world that is AI-first."

Experts say AI will play an increasingly large role in our lives, transforming how we work, how we live -- and even, perhaps, whether we work or whether we live. Inclusion of AI into virtually every area of computing -- and life -- will bring both progress and upheaval to the Bay Area tech industry, Blank said.

"The valley has gone through waves of innovation," Blank said. "We were the semiconductor valley, then we were the PC valley, then we were the web 1.0 valley. Each of those waves was built on a new set of technology and created a whole new set of companies."

Already, entire new industries are arising from AI technology, while robot-aided manufacturing surges, opening up opportunities in nearly every area of business, said Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

"It's going to be completely transformative, but at the same time it's going to take time," he said.
Major industry players are betting big on "bots," interactive virtual assistants that learn from user inputs. Among the ever-expanding bot army we find Siri and Alexa, Google's Assistant and the many "chatbots" created by companies to facilitate customer transactions, such as Taco Bell's "TacoBot" which understands spoken language to take customer orders via smartphones.

"People are suckers for a more efficient way to do things," Etzioni said. "We will see rapid advances in the usefulness of bots."

As consumers see AI creep into their devices, the technology is also beginning to play an increasingly expansive role in business. Amazon and Google both offer AI-powered services that can be applied to the data that firms store on those companies' storage clouds. On Wednesday, the Washington Post announced it will use Amazon's AI-based "Polly" text-to-speech software -- which can produce 47 different voices and convert 24 languages -- to create audio versions of articles. And in September, San Francisco's Salesforce unveiled "Einstein," artificially intelligent software that can ingest all of a client company's data and offer solutions for a given problem, such as predicting which sales leads are likely to pan out. 
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Source: Sci-Tech Today

Editorial: Artificial intelligence isn't the scary future. It's the amazing present. | Chicago Tribune

"The year 2017 arrives and we humans are still in charge. Whew! The machines haven't taken over yet, but they are gaining on us." writes Editorial Board.

South Korean Go game fans watch a television screen broadcasting live footage of the Google DeepMind Challenge Match, at the Korea Baduk Association in Seoul on March 9, 2016.
Jung Yeon-Je, AFP/Getty Images

Google's DeepMind AlphaGo computer program recently beat the world champ at Go, a complex board game, while Japanese researchers plan to build the world's fastest supercomputer for use on artificial intelligence projects. It will do 130 quadrillion calculations per second, which is, um, really, really fast. Ask Siri for details. She can explain it better than we can.

The essence of artificial intelligence is massive, intuitive computing power: machines so smart that they can learn and become even smarter. If that sounds creepy, you are overthinking the concept. The machines are becoming quicker and more nimble, not sentient. There is no impending threat to humanity from computers that become bored and plot our doom. HAL, the computer villain from "2001: A Space Odyssey," is fictional.

Yet ... advances in the field of artificial intelligence occur at such a breakout pace they are redefining the relationship between man and machine. Computer scientist David Gelernter says the coming of computers with true humanlike reasoning remains decades in the future, but when the moment of "artificial general intelligence" arrives, the pause will be brief. Once artificial minds achieve the equivalence of the average human IQ of 100, the next step will be machines with an IQ of 500, and then 5,000. "We don't have the vaguest idea what an IQ of 5,000 would mean," Gelernter wrote in The Wall Street Journal.

OK, that's a little bit creepy.
A basic test of AI tolerance is your opinion of the self-driving car, which belonged to the sci-fi future a decade ago. Today you can hail one in Pittsburgh. Driverless vehicles rely in part on a form of artificial intelligence known as deep learning — algorithms that can make complex decisions in real-time based on accrued experience. Ford wants to have an autonomous truck on the roads by 2020. The great promise is that robot drivers will never make dumb mistakes at the wheel or fail a Breathalyzer test. But they could render obsolete entire professions: long-distance trucker, for example, or cabbie.
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Source: Chicago Tribune

‘Artificial Intelligence’ was the Fake News of 2016 | The Register

"Putting the 'AI' into FAIL" summarizes Andrew Orlowski.
 

Photo: The Register

“Fake News” vexed the media classes greatly in 2016, but the tech world perfected the art long ago. With “the internet” no longer a credible vehicle for Silicon Valley’s wild fantasies and intellectual bullying of other industries – the internet clearly isn’t working for people – “AI” has taken its place. 

But almost everything you read about AI is Fake News. The AI coverage comes from a media willing itself into a mind of a three year old child, in order to be impressed.

For example, how many human jobs did AI replace in 2016? If you gave professional pundits a multiple choice question listing these three answers: 3 million, 300,000 and none, I suspect very few would choose the correct answer, which is of course “none”.

Similarly, if you asked tech experts which recent theoretical or technical breakthrough could account for the rise in coverage of AI, even fewer would be able to answer correctly that “there hasn’t been one”.

As with the most cynical (or deranged) internet hypesters, the current “AI” hype has a grain of truth underpinning it. Today neural nets can process more data, faster. Researchers no longer habitually tweak their models. Speech recognition is a good example: it has been quietly improving for three decades. But the gains nowhere match the hype: they’re specialised and very limited in use. So not entirely useless, just vastly overhyped. As such, it more closely resembles “IoT”, where boring things happen quietly for years, rather than “Digital Transformation”, which means nothing at all.

The more honest researchers acknowledge as much to me, at least off the record.

"What we have seen lately, is that while systems can learn things they are not explicitly told, this is mostly in virtue of having more data, not more subtlety about the data. So, what seems to be AI, is really vast knowledge, combined with a sophisticated UX," one veteran told me.

But who can blame them for keeping quiet when money is suddenly pouring into their backwater, which has been unfashionable for over two decades, ever since the last AI hype collapsed like a souffle? What’s happened this time is that the definition of “AI” has been stretched so that it generously encompasses pretty much anything with an algorithm. Algorithms don’t sound as sexy, do they? They’re not artificial or intelligent.
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Source: The Register

Japanese white-collar workers are already being replaced by artificial intelligence | Quartz

Follow on Twitter as @davegershgorn

"Most of the attention around automation focuses on how factory robots and self-driving cars may fundamentally change our workforce, potentially eliminating millions of jobs. But AI that can handle knowledge-based, white-collar work are also becoming increasingly competent." reports Dave Gershgorn, artificial intelligence reporter. 

Meet your new underwriter. 
AP Photo/Hermann J. Knippertz

One Japanese insurance company, Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance, is reportedly replacing 34 human insurance claim workers with “IBM Watson Explorer,” starting by January 2017.

The AI will scan hospital records and other documents to determine insurance payouts, according to a company press release, factoring injuries, patient medical histories, and procedures administered. Automation of these research and data gathering tasks will help the remaining human workers process the final payout faster, the release says.

Fukoku Mutual will spend $1.7 million (200 million yen) to install the AI system, and $128,000 per year for maintenance, according to Japan’s The Mainichi. The company saves roughly $1.1 million per year on employee salaries by using the IBM software, meaning it hopes to see a return on the investment in less than two years.
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Source: Quartz