Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eCampus News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

Game-changing technology reveals student job prospects

Everything can be quantified, measured, and analyzed, and a college student’s job prospects are no different.

job-students-technology

Around 8.5 percent of recent college graduates are unemployed. Perhaps more troubling, 16.8 percent of new graduates are considered “underemployed” by the Economic Policy Institute, which tracks unemployment figures among various demographics. That underemployment percentage has almost doubled since 2005.

There were startling reports in early 2012 that more than half of recent graduates were either unemployed or underemployed.…Read More

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Student creating app for safe walking and texting

Researchers tested college students’ collision avoidance techniques.

There soon could be a smartphone app designed to prevent the text-induced face plant.

Juan-David Hincapié-Ramos, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Manitoba’s human-computer interaction lab, is developing a smartphone app called CrashAlert, which uses a camera that senses depth and identifies oncoming objects — lampposts, for example — before a person runs into them.

The smartphone technology could be valuable — and a great way to avoid embarrassment — for college students with their heads down, reading and sending texts, as they make their way to their next class.…Read More

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Colleges try new tactics in battle against binge drinking

Schools are teaching students the signs of excessive drinking.

An online self-assessment is one of many tactics that colleges and universities are using to combat binge drinking, which remains a serious problem on campuses nationwide.

Catherine Sedun remembers binge drinking among students when she attended college about a decade ago. Despite an influx of programs to combat the problem in recent years, she says it remains a top concern on many campuses.

“These students work so hard to get into these universities, and once they get here, a lot of them spiral out of control with their freedom,” she said. “It’s time to party.”…Read More

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The internet usage patterns of depressed college students

Switching quickly from Spotify to email to Facebook can be a telltale sign of depression. A recent study extensively correlates specific web habits, such as jumping between different applications, with depression, Mashable reports.

The study by Missouri University of Science and Technology associates observed how 216 university undergraduates surfed the web for a month. About 30 percent of the students had depression, according to the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale, an official screening test for the mental condition. These numbers match the national average. Depression affects about 10 percent to 40 percent of the national population of college students at one time. More than 90 percent of U.S. college students use the internet regularly.

So, the opportunity to look at the relationship between Internet activity and depression presented itself. This may be the first study relating depression and Internet use, according to the researchers who looked at a huge range of online activity including downloads, duration, sharing and flow……Read More

Deals with banks stack millions in fees on college students

U.S. student debt tops $1 trillion, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

It took Mario Parker-Milligan less than a semester to decide that he was paying too many fees to Higher One, the company hired by his college to pay out students’ financial aid on debit cards.

Four years after he opted out, his classmates still face more than a dozen fees — for replacement cards, for using the cards as all-purpose debit cards, for using an ATM other than the two on-campus kiosks owned by Higher One.

“They sold it as a faster, cheaper way for the college to get students their money,” said Parker-Milligan, 23, student body president at Lane Community College in Eugene, Ore. “It may be cheaper for the college, but it’s not cheaper for the students.”…Read More

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What are college students talking about on Facebook?

87 percent of comments were recorded in Facebook groups, not pages.

General confusion might be the key ingredient to an engaged crop of incoming freshmen on a college or university’s Facebook page.

An analysis published May 16 on the blog .eduGuru breaks down what college students are discussing on their school’s official Facebook pages and third-party groups, and the most consistently engaged posts were written by “confused students trying to find more information about orientation, registration, and housing.”

An “engaged post” was a comment or question that received five or more responses, according to the analysis of how college freshmen were using their Class of 2016 Facebook pages.…Read More

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Facebook returns to its roots with Groups for Schools

Facebook will alert students when their college joins Student Groups.

Facebook has a peace offering for every college student who resents the social media giant for opening the site to their parents: new pages known as Student Groups that will only be accessible for Facebook members with official “.edu” eMail addresses.

In a throwback to the nascent days of the world’s most popular social networking website, Facebook announced April 11 that its newest feature, Student Groups, would create specific pages that could only be joined by students or faculty members from that campus.

Students will be able to share files—including lecture notes, schedules, assignments, and photos—on their university Facebook page. Students who register on their college or university Student Groups page can communicate with group members without being their friend on Facebook.…Read More

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College students on QR codes: I don’t get it

Three in four students said they were 'very unlikely' to use QR codes.

When faced with Quick Response (QR) codes, college students have been slow to catch on to the technology, a new study suggests.

Do you snap a photo of it? Do you need a smart phone app? How long will this take? These are a few of the questions students asked in a 24-campus survey conducted during the fall 2011 semester by Archrival, a youth marketing company based in Nebraska.

Twenty-one percent of students surveyed at schools including Michigan State University, the University of Tennessee, and Virginia Tech said they were able to successfully scan a QR code, a barcode-like graphic placed in publications and on points of interest that, when scanned, opens a specific web page on a web-enabled smart phone.…Read More

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Non-traditional students key to college completion goal

Roughly 40 percent of America’s college students are non-traditional students. They are workers who’ve gone back to school, former members of the military embarking on new careers and single parents wanting to do better for their families. They could also be one of the most important game-changers in the ongoing national discussion on college completion and the continuing dialogue at College Inc. about how to fix higher education, says Alan Tripp, CEO of InsideTrack, a San Francisco firm that offers personalized academic coaching to boost college retention.  Colleges are struggling with graduation rates and according to a recent analysis of 1,400 colleges and universities by the Chronicle of Higher Education, one third of four-year institutions experienced lower graduation rates over the six-year period ending in 2008. Not surprisingly, that downward turn is also reflected in news that the U.S., once a leader, is losing ground to other nations in the percentage of its citizens who complete college…

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Do today’s college students have less empathy than past generations?

A study from the University of Michigan says college students today show less empathy toward others compared with college students in decades before—and the researchers attribute this partly to the time they spend on social networks, USA Today reports. Sara Konrath, a researcher at the university’s Institute for Social Research, looked at 72 studies that gauged empathy among 14,000 college students in the past 30 years. She found that empathy has been declining, especially since 2000. The research finds that college students today show 40 percent less empathy vs. students in the 1980s and 1990s. The students are less likely to agree with statements such as “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” and “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.” The study did not evaluate why students are less empathetic, but Konrath says one reason may be that people are having fewer face-to-face interactions, communicating instead through social media such as Facebook and Twitter. “Empathy is best activated when you can see another person’s signal for help,” Konrath says. Another cause may be changing expectations about success. Since the 1980s, there has been a steady trend in people feeling more stressed about trying to “get ahead,” Konrath says…

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