阅读材料英文学习，主要取自www.forbes.com
‘MicroMasters’ Surge As MOOCs Go From Education To Qualification
The future shape of graduate and executive education is coming into focus with the surge of “MicroMasters” certificate programs on edX, to which 1.7 million students have registered in a year. The number of programs on offer has exploded from one to 46 during this time.
This is the kind of extraordinary exponential growth that rips apart and rebuilds industries.
MicroMasters certificates (MMs) are online, examined and graded, credit-eligible graduate-level courses that involve about a quarter of the coursework of a traditional Masters degree. At edX they cost about $1,000.
A Harvard-MIT MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) collaboration since 2012, edX has along the way also amalgamated Stanford and UC Berkeley’s homegrown MOOC options, all now rolled into a not-for-profit 501c3 that co-develops online programs in association with 25 universities and academic providers worldwide, most of which are top-brand institutions.
For now, there’s a strong focus on new technology skills areas—data science, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, robotics—these being current hot-spots for recruitment. But edX also offers MicroMasters in more standard business areas such as project management, supply chain management, marketing analytics, and hospitality, and there’s no reason not to expect a quick spread across the sciences, medicine, arts and beyond, as well as into other languages. edX already has two MMs in Spanish.
In an interview with forbes.com, edX CEO and MIT professor Anant Agarwal speaks of the vision to widen and democratize the education funnel. Anyone can access it, almost everyone can buy it, and MMs convert to full Master’s degree credits (a requirement that academic-partner providers must be able to offer.)
But, as important as expanding educational access is, what’s at stake here is even more radical and future-disruptive. Because, it’s apparent most students won’t pursue the full degree. They’ll walk with the MM.
The reason they can easily do this is because of the third player in the edX MM system, the employer. Each MicroMasters is sponsored by at least one industry partner, currently a list of 40 which includes GE, MicroSoft, IBM, Hootsuite, Fidelty, Bloomberg, Boeing, WalMart, PWC, Booz-Allen Hamilton, and Ford.
Employers are not an afterthought, hopefully persuadable by the university’s Careers Office to mop up students after graduation. Here companies are baked into the setup. An MM is a three-way arrangement between educator, student and employer.
For example, in Massachusetts GE guarantees at least a full-time job or internship interview at the company’s Boston headquarters for residents who complete MMs in AI, cyber security, cloud computing or supply chain management. Microsoft has committed to contribute toward the cost for any Community College student to complete the entry level Computer Science Professional Certificate program on edX.
With this nod from hiring companies, MMs become sufficient credential for a career step. This is a huge reframe for what counts as a valid qualification, therein a real shakeup at the pillars of graduate schools.
MOOCs have successfully entered the game not just of education, but of qualification.
In the world of MOOC qualification, the front-loaded learning of a traditional Masters fragments into iterative stepping stones of credentialing. These are smaller, faster, units of study that span a person’s working life. As one MM provides the skills to get a job, so the next one will up-skill her to maintain and evolve the position, or get a promotion, or transition to a new job.
Mindful of a fast-changing world, iterative learning suits both employee and the firm. Neither expects sufficient ongoing capability to come from early career one-shot learning.
Says Agarwal: “Learning once and working for the next 30 years is obsolete; we need to move to an world where re-skilling becomes part of the culture. The MicroMasters as a standalone modular credential serves as academic currency in a continuous, lifelong-learning world.”
In certain fields (medicine, law, architecture etc.) a new entrant will no doubt still need a large upfront chunk of knowledge. But in many other areas, two or more years of front-loaded professional education is starting to look a little quaint.
If this is right, MM qualifications are going to take a huge bite out of the market for traditional-length Masters programs and will also jostle traditional Open and Custom executive education business models.
Schools such as MIT and others involved on the edX platform are laudably taking the long view, part-cannibalizing their traditional model now so as to create a foothold in education industry markets of the future.
This foothold includes embracing the logic of the platform, the digital-enabled connector that seeks to add value or cut costs by creating connections where these were previously weak or non-existent.
Just as Uber sells taxi rides without owning cars or booking.com sells hotel rooms without owning any buildings (while also mercilessly sharpening the cost-benefit equation) so edX is a platform play. It owns no universities and no courses. Its business is being the stage on which educators, students, and employers connect.
Not surprising then, that edX’s new president and COO, Adam Medros, was previously Senior Vice President, Global Product at the travel platform TripAdvisor. He’s hired precisely for his platform expertise, and says a big part of what the edX platform builds itself around, as other platforms do, is “access.”
For Medros, access is not just global availability or affordability, but access in the sense of education being there and possible in a way it is otherwise not for over-worked professionals, dual-working parents and others in the time-crunch category.
Such people can access the learning they need, and juggle it into their schedule. In this market “we’ve crossed from early-adopters to a tipping point,” he says.
“Delivering for consumers at scale will be the next revolution that happens in this industry.
“In the early days (of the travel industry transition, as viewed from TripAdvisor management) there were lots of different solutions, some of which had a good fit with consumer needs and some of which were experimental.
“You’re changing not just consumer habits but also industry incumbent habits: how they run their business and how they configure their product. There is not one given model.
“But we will see the industry coalesce around principles that edX represents,” says Medros.
Education Micro-Credentials 101: Why Do We Need Badges？
Micro-credentials are one of the hot rising ideas in the education space. To understand the basics, go look at your child’s Xbox or PlayStation.
For most of the major games, there is an accompanying set of achievements, or badges. Every time a player achieves a particular task (kill 50 zombies without reloading, drive over every tree in the enchanted forest, smash every Lego fire hydrant, etc.) they get a small digital badge on their big page of achievements.
Micro-credentials take a similar approach to education. The root of the idea is simple–you demonstrate a very specific skill, and a badge certifying that micro-credential becomes part of your personal digital file. Some of the earliest micro-credentialing involved computer programming skills, but it has grown far beyond that. To see just how many types of micro-credentials are out there, take a look at Digital Promise.
Digital Promise was authorized by Congress in 2008 as the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies. It offers micro-credentials of its own, but it also provides a platform for other entities to offer their own sets of micro-credentials. Right now over thirty-five other organizations offer micro-credentials through Digital Promise, including Arizona State University, Teaching Matters, and National Geographic. In 2017, Digital Promise hosted a Symposium on the Currency of Micro-credentials that attracted over 100 people, representing school systems, state departments of education, and the Institute for Personalized Learning. Funders for the organization include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Google, Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, and Laurene Jobs’ XQ Institute.
Digital Promise is a big player, but certainly not the only one. Bloomboard is another example of a platform offering a variety of micro-credentials. Like many such badge programs, Bloomboard is aimed primarily at teacher training. The dream was that micro-credentials would change the face of professional development for teachers; instead of boring sit-and-listen sessions, teachers would log on to their provider and sign up for a micro-credential that they cared about via a sort of on-line mini-course.
Of course, this method of content delivery can be just as deadly dull as any lecture. Anyone who has had to get an on-line certification for handling blood in the workplace or proper proctoring of exams knows the process–do some work at your desk while the slides play out on your screen, then take a short multiple choice quiz using common sense (and multiple attempts) to get your certification. One of the problems of micro-credentials is coming up with a valid and reliable measure of the competency that someone has supposedly acquired.
Another part of the challenge of micro-credentials is just how micro to make them. At one point, Relay Graduate School of Education offered a micro-credential in “Checking for Understanding Using Gestures,” which was literally the competency of teaching students how to raise their hands to signal understanding in class. Relay seems to have backed away from the micro-credentialing business, and now a teacher might pursue a micro-competency in “Planning for Success: Helping Your Students Set Their Goals.”
Of course, teacher PD is not the end game for micro-credentials; instead, the dream is for micro-credentials to become an element of the computerized personalized learning K-12 classroom that dovetails with competency based education. Digital Learning has started working on its ideas for a micro-credential classroom, as have many others in this field. There is an additional challenge here–how do you break the many competencies involved in a K-12 class into a series of micro-competencies. And there’s the challenge that teachers already face–how do you turn the objective of knowing something into the demonstrated skill of doing something?
The money to be made is not just tied up in the competencies themselves–there must also be a place to store the badges. This brings us to companies like Learning Machine, who promise to anchor the business of digital identities (where else) on blockchain. At this stage, we start to encounter some companies blowing some serious smoke. Here, for instance, is PTB Ventures. What do they do?
PTB Ventures is a thesis driven venture capital firm investing in early-stage companies in the digital identity ecosystem.
That is some high grade baloney.
Once we get to blockchain, we start talking about the big dreams. Just as bitcoins don’t need any central authority to issue and support them, your blockchain-anchored digital identity does not need a special authority to update or oversee it. You could earn new badges anywhere–in particular, from the work you’re doing, so that instead of taking courses to earn micro-credentials, you can earn them while making money. As one group’s slogan puts it, “Learning is earning.” Schools and colleges? No longer necessary. Resumes or CV? Stored digitally; your digital identity is now a collection of badges, and someone who wants to hire can simply plug in a list of the badges they want and pull out a list of worker bees whose badge list matches.
This, it should be noted, would also include social and emotional traits, as SEL is another hot new item in digitized education. The digital unit about dealing well with conflict that you flubbed when you were eight will follow you for the rest of your life.
The ways in which this brave new future can go wrong are too numerous to count. Educational goals set and measured by computer programmers. The problem of innovation–a system like this can only certify skills that are already known. The flattening and simplification of learning to training in easily-measured job skills. Micro-credentials that may or may not actually be valid and reliable measures of what they claim to measure. The privacy nightmare of having your life reduced to a digital file that is beyond your reach and control. What would an untrustworthy government do with this kind of data? And what, one wonders, happens if the company responsible for storing your digital identity goes out of business?
But every element of this system already exists. We may want to pay attention in the next few years.
Google shuts down Daydream VR’s Play Movies & TV app
Google has pulled Daydream VR’s version of the Google Play Movies & TV app. You can still view your rentals or purchases through the YouTube VR app, a Google spokesperson confirmed to Variety, while there aren’t any current plans to remove other Google apps from the Daydream platform.
It’ll mean there’s one fewer, prominent option to watch movies and TV on Daydream, though there’s still support for the likes of Netflix, Hulu, Plex and, of course, YouTube. The shift from Play Movies & TV to YouTube VR might cause some annoyance, as you can’t rent or buy directly through the latter app, and there’s no dedicated section there for your purchases.
The shutdown reflects a couple of trends in Google strategy. For one thing, it seems to be winding down entertainment options under the Google Play branding. Google Play Music is going away, with subscribers being moved to YouTube Music. Google is also shifting its focus away from VR to augmented reality, having closed down its Spotlight Stories VR studio and announced the end of the Jump VR platform in recent months.
2019: The Year Virtual Reality Gets Real
Virtual reality has come a long way in a short time, and it’s still advancing at a rapid rate.
Yes, 2018 was a challenging year—growth slowed substantially compared to 2017—but a new report from Futuresource Consulting confirms that the future of VR is bright. Worldwide, VR market volume is expected to reach 98.4 million sales by 2023, generating an installed base of 168 million units with a worldwide population penetration of 2%. Growth is forecast across all regions and countries, with China leading the way.
2019 is already turning out to be a strong year for VR, providing a solid base for growth. Oculus Quest, Facebook’s standalone headset, is creating a lot of interest and momentum. The headset launched in May and sold out across multiple stores a week after launch. Facebook’s VP of AR/VR, Andrew Bosworth, says that in the first two weeks of Oculus Quest headset sales, there were $5 million worth of content sales. Despite a lack of official sales stats, some estimate that Facebook could sell more than 1 million units in 2019—this would be huge if it happened.
The shift from tethered to standalone VR headsets represents a paradigm shift within the immersive ecosystem. Now, we have a truly mobile platform that is good enough to facilitate compelling user experiences.
It’s not just the standalone category that is making good progress.
This month, Road to VR reported that the monthly-connected VR headsets on Steam have surpassed 1 million for the first time. Ben Lang commented, “After correcting for Steam’s changing population, we find that May 2019 was the first month on record to see more than 1 million monthly-connected headsets on the platform. Year over year, monthly-connected headsets on Steam are up 80%.”
In March, Sony announced it had sold 4.2 million PlayStation VR (PSVR) headsets. Earlier this month, Playstation lead Jim Ryan told CNet, “The current generation of VR has exceeded our expectations. When you step back and look at it—and this is the way I like to look at it - one in 20 of the people who found the money to go out and buy a PlayStation 4, and all the games and peripherals that they enjoyed with that, have also found the money to then go buy the PlayStation VR and all the games and peripherals that go on top of that.” AR Insider commented, “Extrapolating from the nearly 100 million PS4s sold, PSVR is approaching five million units in the market.”
Major companies are still jumping into VR. Nintendo entered the race with the Labo: VR kit for Nintendo Switch on April 12 this year. This low-tech, playful VR is for all the family, and it gives you VR compatibility with two of the Switch’s biggest titles: Super Mario Odyssey and Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild .
In March, it was announced that a VR title had become the first to sell over 1 million copies in under a year—Beat Saber. Meanwhile, companies like Superhot have announced they have made more revenue from their VR than non-VR titles—further validation of the opportunity for developers.
These successes give a clear indication that VR is relevant and established. It’s real and it’s here to stay.
As I look to the future, and the arrival of 5G, my hopes for VR become even brighter. Some of VR’s outstanding obstacles to growth will be overcome. The low latency, super-fast speeds and stable connections that 5G brings will herald in a new era of VR. Experiences will be more accessible, more reliable and ultimately more immersive.
5 Important Augmented And Virtual Reality Trends For 2019 Everyone Should Read
Alongside AI and automation, virtual reality (VR) and its closely related cousin augmented reality (AR) have been touted for several years now as technologies likely to have a profoundly transformative effect on the way we live and work.
Solutions which allowing humans to explore fully immersive computer-generated worlds (in VR), and overlay computer graphics onto our view of our immediate environment (AR) are both increasingly being adopted in both entertainment and industry.
Over the next year, both VR and AR applications will become increasingly sophisticated, as devices get more powerful and capable of creating higher quality visuals. Our understanding of how humans can usefully navigate and interact within virtual or augmented environments will also evolve, leading to the creation of more “natural” methods of interacting and exploring virtual space.
Here are the 5 key trends I see for 2019:
1.AR and VR increasingly enhanced with AI
In a collision of two-letter abbreviations unlike anything that has come before it, AR and VR developers will increasingly build smart, cognitive functionality into their apps.
Computer vision – an AI (artificial intelligence) technology which allows computers to understand what they are “seeing” through cameras, is essential to the operation of AR, allowing objects in the user’s field of vision to be identified and labeled. We can expect the machine learning algorithms that enable these features to become increasingly sophisticated and capable.
The Snapchat and Instagram filters we are used to, to, e.g. overlay bunny ears and cat whiskers on selfies, are a very consumer-facing application of AI tech combined with AR. Their popularity in these and various other applications of image enhancement functionality isn’t likely to dwindle in 2019.
For more scientific use cases, there’s Google’s machine learning-enabled microscope to look forward to, which can highlight tissue which it suspects could be a cancerous tumor growth as a pathologist is looking at samples through the viewfinder.
VR is about putting people inside virtual environments and those environments – and their inhabitants – are likely to become increasingly intelligent over the next year. This is likely to include more voice control stemming from AI natural language processing, increasing immersion by reducing the reliance on icons and menus intruding into the virtual world. Gamers in VR will also face more challenging opponents as computer-controlled players will more effectively react and adapt to individual play styles.
2.VR and AR will increasingly be used in training and teaching
Both technologies have obvious use cases in education. Virtual environments allow students to practice anything from construction to flight to surgery without the risks associated with real-world training. While augmented environments mean, information can be passed to the student in real time on objectives, hazards or best-practice.
This year Walmart announced that it is using 17,000 Oculus Go headsets to train its employees in skills ranging from compliance to customer service. In particular, training in the use of new technology is a focus for the retailer, with staff learning to use the new Pickup Tower automated vending units in virtual environments before they were deployed in stores.
Additionally, the US Army has announced a deal with Microsoft to use its HoloLens technology in military training, meaning soldiers will get real-time readings on their environment. Currently, this includes readouts to provide real-time metrics on soldier performance such as data about heart and breathing rates, but research objectives are to develop pathfinding, target acquisition and mission planning.
As VR and AR both continue to prove their worth at reducing risk and cost associated with training, it is likely we will see an increasingly rapid pace of adoption in industries involving work with expensive tools and equipment, or hazardous conditions, throughout 2019.
3.Consumer Entertainment VR hits the mainstream
Ok, this one has been predicted for a couple of years now. VR adoption in homes has been steady since consumer headsets hit the market a couple of years ago, but hardware and application developers haven’t quite hit the sweet spot yet when it comes to creating the VR “killer app.”
But some significant developments are coming up that could mean 2019 is the year we start to see the real action here. Previous generations of VR headsets have been limited in one of two ways. Either by the user having to be tethered to a big, expensive computer to power the “experience”, hence limiting our mobility and therefore the sense of immersion. Or by relying on relatively low-powered mobile tech to control stand-alone headsets, meaning graphics quality is limited – another immersion-breaker.
This year, stand-alone headsets incorporating powerful, dedicated computer technology will hit the shelves, from both Vive and Oculus. Confident that their users will now be unrestricted by cables or low-powered displays, VR developers will create more realistic and accurate simulations of our real world within their virtual worlds. This will mean more immersive entertainment experiences and an unprecedented level of realism within VR games.
As well as being mobile, the new generation of headsets will improve the technology powering the virtual experience, by including features such as eyeball-tracking and increased field-of-view. Again, this will help users feel they can interact and explore in more natural ways.
Of course, it isn’t just the major players who are innovating – in a market like VR there’s always room for an underdog to shake things up. Amazon lists over 200 different VR headsets available to buy, many of them being created by startups promising new features and functionality that could end up being game-changers.
4.VR and AR environments becoming increasingly collaborative and social
Facebook’s purchase of Oculus in 2016 showed that the social media giant believed virtual reality would become vital to the way we build shared online environments. Whether it’s for virtual “conference calls” where participants can see and interact with each other, or socializing and relaxing with friends.
Pioneers such as Spatial are leading the way with AR tools for the boardroom and office, where users can see virtual whiteboards and pin boards, as well as collaboratively work on design documents overlaid on real-world objects.
This year, I am also expecting to see Facebook’s VR Spaces platform, which allows users to meet and socialize in VR, move out of beta, and Tencent has announced that it is looking into adding VR to its WeChat mobile messaging system – the most widely used messenger app in the world.
Combined with the predicted increase in sales of VR and AR headsets, this could mean that 2019 is the year we experience meeting and interacting with realistic representations of our friends and family in VR, for the first time.
5.AR increasingly finding its way into vehicles
Fully (level 5) autonomous cars may still be a few years away from becoming an everyday reality for most of us, but automobile manufacturers have plenty of other AI tech to dazzle us with in the meantime.
Two of the most significant trends in new vehicles in 2019 will be voice assistants – with most major manufacturers implementing their takes on Alexa and Siri – and in-car AR.
Powered by machine learning, Nvidia’s DriveAR platform uses a dashboard-mounted display overlaying graphics on camera footage from around the car, pointing out everything from hazards to historic landmarks along the way. Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla, Toyota, and Volvo have all signed up to work with the technology.
Alibaba-backed startup WayRay takes the route of projecting the AR data directly onto the car windshield, giving navigation prompts, right-of-way information, lane identification, and hazard detection.
In-car AR has the potential to improve safety – by allowing the driver to keep their eyes on the road as they read feedback that would previously have been given on a sat-nav or phone screen, as well as increase comfort and driver convenience. In a few years, it’s likely we will wonder how we ever lived without it.