The most successful versions of combined online and in-person instruction will prioritize connectivity and foster community. In recent weeks, colleges and universities have had to radically adapt traditional learning to keep students safe as COVID-19 shows little sign of abating. Now, students and teachers are grappling with how to avoid learning disruptions and maximize engagement in a remote world. Read Full Story

This pandemic shows us that there are times where it makes sense to apply a competitive lens to a situation—and times when that mentality can hurt us. One thing that’s important to keep in mind—especially in a crisis situation—is that succeeding and winning are different. Let me start with a general example: When I was in my mid-30s, I decided to take up the saxophone. I had played the piano as a kid, but career and family pressures kept me from playing much music in my 20s. I had always wanted to learn to play another instrument, and so I eventually found a teacher, bought a sax, and after almost 10 years of lessons and practice, I was able to start playing in a band. Read Full Story

Posted by MiriamEllis “We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.” ― Thích Nhất Hạnh , Buddhist teacher Image credit: Maulvi My warm New Year’s greetings to all local business owners and local SEOs reading my column today. Add to this my sincere sentiments of solidarity for what we went through together in 2020 — we won’t soon forget it, and our stories from the journey contain important teachings for our market and industry. I often find that the best local SEO takeaways sprout from the real-world anecdotes of colleagues and friends, and you’ll find those here today along with my personal predictions for the year ahead. Let’s get learning! Teachings from the real lives of local SEOs In a year when we were physically distant from one another in unprecedented ways, I’ve found memorable lessons in how local business owners broke down barriers to keep communities connected. …

Online courses executed with real mentorship have lasting effects - for both the student and the teacher.

It’s the right time for Google to mediate better apps for kids. Screens may not be the best way for kids, especially young children , to learn. But with 1.5 billion students home from school around the world, e-learning has taken over. Attendance is now taken digitally, and apps and websites have replaced face-to-face teaching as the tool of the era. Read Full Story

The pandemic’s disruption to the 2020-2021 school year provides an opportunity to help remote education reach its fullest potential. Many of the nation’s 57 million K-12 students will spend at least part of the 2020-2021 school year either dealing with distance learning or a hybrid model that keeps them out of classrooms several days a week. They’ll spend lots of time using teleconferencing software, with teachers either convening classes live or prerecording lessons. Read Full Story

From how to be a contact tracer to how to find happiness, here’s what everyone wanted to learn this year. Coursera struck streaming gold with its online iteration of Yale University’s most popular class of all time: The Science of Well-Being . Professor Laurie Santos explores the science-backed origins of happiness, as well as the transformative powers of mindfulness and day-to-day rituals. When the class was reconfigured to serve digital students —for free and with subtitles—for online learning platform Coursera , it quickly became their top performer. Read Full Story

Between online and in-person classes, higher ed may look very different this fall, and that will likely cause headaches for foreign students. One of the biggest unknowns to arise from the COVID-19 pandemic is whether or not students of all ages will be able to return to classrooms come the new academic year. Foreign students hoping to pursue their degrees at U.S. colleges and universities have had some of their questions answered by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) today. The guidance issued by ICE varies depending on whether the school is offering courses online, in person, or in some hybrid of the two. And it gets more complicated from there. Read Full Story

It’s been roughly a month now since the Coronavirus started to flip our lives upside down. From having to practice social distancing and getting used to life without the outdoors to continually washing our hands and wearing masks and seeing loved ones and friends getting sick, the Coronavirus is something none of us expected. Even our businesses our suffering. Just look at the Coronavirus marketing stats I shared a few weeks ago. The results are devastating. It’s why I decided to change Ubersuggest and make it more free to help small businesses out. Since then a lot has changed and there are new opportunities that have come around when it comes to your online business and marketing activities. Opportunity #1: Help others selflessly My ad agency has thousands of clients around the world. We lost a ton, but we still have enough to see trends in what’s happening. When I …

The executive chair of the board of Deloitte says, “I’ve found that the following principles have gotten me and my colleagues through the hardest of times—including the one we’re all living through now.” Call me sentimental, but I’ve always loved graduations: the way they tie up loose ends and signify new beginnings, the chance to reflect on the past, and celebrate the future. In my earliest days of leadership, I even sent out an email to colleagues when I was “graduating” to a new part of our organization. Read Full Story