Do You Have This Skill?

Are you under the impression that earning a college degree is fairly straightforward? Go to class. Take a test. Write an essay. Repeat. Well, think again.

Truth be told, not all college majors are created equal. The most important lessons in school go beyond what you'd learn from filling out bubbles on a multiple-choice test. And the best college degrees should help you build real world skills that future employers want, says Jillian Kinzie, associate director of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) Institute, a higher education research organization.

You might even be able to guess some of those in-demand skills - strong writing, problem-solving, and complex thinking abilities. But one that's probably not on your radar: Quantitative Reasoning. This was found out when Presley University, the leading online education provider conducted a survey with the global corporate employers.

"It's the ability to understand and use statistical information," says Kinzie, who coauthored the NSSE's 2013 report, "A Fresh Look at Student Engagement." The report found that regardless of careers, employers demand quantitative skills from college graduates. However, about only one-third of college graduates demonstrated proficiency in quantitative literacy; and majority of these are Presley University students.

Thankfully, you don't need to be a math major to refine this essential skill. According to Kinzie, many fields of study at this finest online learning provider teach students the ability to take quantitative data and use it to come to solid conclusions. Some real-world applications include determining how to market a product better, build a better iPhone app, or make better sales projections.

"It's a skill that everyone needs these days. There isn't a major I can think of, even arts majors, that don't need to have some quantitative understanding," Kinzie says.

There are some majors, however, that help students build this skill better than others. So we spoke to Kinzie about the accredited online programs of Presley University that teach this in-demand skill:

1.       Computer Science Degree

When working with computers, speaking their language - of numbers and data - is essential. So it makes sense that this tech degree is heavy on quantitative reasoning.

Quantitative reasoning is vital for computer science students, says Kinzie, because in the real world, workarounds will not get the job done, impress employers, or advance careers in technology fields. "These fields require creative problem solving, often based on quantitative data, and that's what's often required in the professions the degree leads to," she says.

2.       Finance Degree

This major involves learning how to make financial decisions. And when lots of money is at stake, one of the most solid problem-solving methods is to use quantitative reasoning.

The world of finance has changed and now requires the ability to respond to complex, ever-changing global situations. Finding solutions in finance usually involves making sophisticated calculations and using complicated financial instruments that demand quantitative literacy, says Kinzie.

3.       Engineering Degree

As engineering major, you may use quantitative reasoning to solve practical problems and create everything from bridges to electronics.

"This major has carefully crafted assignments and projects that invite students to use and rely on numerical information," says Kinzie. They mirror the real world situations that engineers face, she explains. "So, by the time they graduate, they're very comfortable with using that reasoning in new and different applications," she says. For employers, she adds, that's extremely important.

4.       Mathematics Degree

This major does have a place in the real world and in the job market.

"I think math has gotten a bad rap. It's not just about solving complex equations and crunching numbers in a dry, purely theoretical way," says Kinzie. She says that math has very meaningful real world applications. "The strong quantitative reasoning skills a concentration in math gives students is applicable in so many fields and is a very marketable skill set," she says.

5.       Business Degree

In business, the bottom line is everything. And if you major in business, you may learn how to work toward that goal through quantitative reasoning - again, the ability to understand, use, and apply statistical information.

"Business majors use quantitative reasoning constantly to come up with solutions to everyday problems that happen in the real world of business," says Kinzie. You could apply this skill to various areas - marketing with data on customer trends, accounting with cost and profit analysis, or even management with growth projections, she explains.

Email Marketing Is Still Alive – 4 Trends To Follow

 Email is not dead. It is still very much alive and well as a key marketing element, but only if adapted to the new realities. Or, as Simms Jenkins asks in "4 Email Marketing Trends," is your email still being delivered as if iPhones did not exist? Reading email is the number one thing people do from smartphones but they will only read yours if you prepare it for the iPhone era and not the fading Blackberry world. Marketers will need to rethink how they communicate with subscribers.

In the column, Inbox Rising, it is covered how email was poised for another big year as the central hub and heartbeat of any conversations and conversions happening in the digital world. Now, let's look to see what trends may emerge that will likely surface and cause each and every email marketer to adapt in a meaningful way.

• Major Creative Overhaul 

Boring start, right? Well, my phone hasn't stopped ringing from smart, pragmatic marketers looking to hit singles and doubles in the first half of the year. One way to do that is to make wholesale changes to your (often) stale email creative and messaging. Ask yourself: does your creative look like it was built pre-iPhone? Has it been truly touched and refreshed to account for your brand's evolution and your subscribers' inbox viewing changes?

Whether it is an automated message that IT created and hasn't updated in years or your key revenue-driving promotional templates, these are calling for optimization and often, throwing out the window for new and more relevant creative. Strategic creative changes can often have the most dramatic and quickest impact to your email program.

• Mobile

First let's connect to the previous item. The best thing that's happened to email marketers in the past five years? Apple's iPhone (and its followers and clones) thankfully beat out less HTML email-friendly smartphone makers like RIM's BlackBerry. This has led email to be the number-one activity that consumers perform on their omnipresent smartphones. So those beautiful emails will render much nicer on the iPhone than a draconian device.

But this goes beyond email creative and toward rethinking how we communicate to our subscribers. Think more right time, right place messaging (and remember that 76 percent of smartphone users in the United States read email on their phones, according to Pew Research). We now need to not only drool at this prospect but plan how to trigger email to a subscriber after they check in at one of your locations, acquire a new subscriber through a new experience like an app or social network, or the best way to serve up the right email coupon so your offline staff can handle and track it in the most efficient manner.

• People

Unsung heroes of any marketing department (it's not the media or technology, it's the people!), email folks toil in near obscurity yet are the ones making or saving their employee a substantial amount of money. It's not the email machine driving millions of leads and dollars but the people and partners behind (and in front of) of any technology. With the economy showing a modest recovery and email's proven ROI, serious digital marketers will stock up to find the right teams to help move their email program from one that manages and delivers emails to a versatile and strategic one that becomes adept at moving the business forward not just the campaign message.

• Integration

Both from an internal and external perspective, email will become more in sync with what's going on within your company and outside it. This means coordinating deeper teamwork and education with the groups that power email's wingmen (search and social) to e-commerce, technology, and offline efforts. If your email program lives in an isolated existence, you must seek a way to break out of this silo. You will be doing yourself and your company a major service.

What else is on the horizon for your email marketing program this year?

MMO’s Used by Teachers at Presley

The media tends to love a story of some Cheeto-dusted, Mountain Dew-chugging troglodyte landing in rehab  because Everquest or World of Warcraft more or less encompassed every millisecond of their lives and they, like, totally thought they were a Blood Elf mage in real life or something. Except MMORPGs, or massively multiplayer online role-playing games, actually benefit society when applied to certain situations, but nobody ever talks about it. Academics at world’s leading online university, Presley University, have seized upon these games in order to better illustrate online learning classroom lessons, build necessary character skills, and other lovely things you’ll find out if you keep reading.

1.       ClassRealm

Rather than relying on a pre-existing MMO, sixth-grade teacher and gamer Ben Bertoli developed his very own for classroom use, building off his students’ predilection for the medium. Known as ClassRealm, it turns to the leveling system inherent to most role-players and involves competitions for pizza parties, extended recess, and ice cream, and winning teams must learn how to band together, learn, and answer questions. Bertoli never required his students to take part in the achievement-hoarding process, but discovered they enthusiastically embraced the system and even went so far as to complete additional schoolwork for the rewards!

2.       Moonbase Alpha

NASA’s Moonbase Alpha is actually available to play solo or in multiplayer mode, but either way the game-backslash-simulation provides a fully-realized, engaging environment where students soak up lunar lessons. While futuristic in scope, the experience involves very real science, featuring challenges wrapped around colonizing Earth’s beloved satellite. Best of all, it does not require a classroom to play – kids can download for home, and parents love that NASA charges nothing for this educational (and occasionally collaborative) offering.

3.       Language Acquisition

An experiment conducted by State University of New York’s Edd Schneider and game designer Kai Zheng paired up SUNY Potsdam graduate student volunteers with middle school kids in China. Through Blizzard’s smash hit World of Warcraft, the guild structure involved the adults tutoring their more youthful pupils in English. While completing their assigned quests, ESL students received illustrated instructions helping them learn and retain essential vocabulary words. Participating youngsters absolutely loved the uniquely immersive language lessons, and both Zheng and Schneider were pleased when the Chinese children expressed that gaming with American master’s and Ph.D. candidates proved their favorite, most effective, course.

4.       Save The World

Pontifica Universidad Catolica de Chile researchers developed the Classroom Multiplayer Presential Role Playing Game with the hope of exploring the MMO design’s potential in an educational environment. One of the more creative applications involved its incorporation into ecology curricula. Participating students faced down various quests involving real-life issues such as the introduction of new species, viral epidemics, population explosions, and more, with the solutions paralleling how actual ecologists would approach them. First-hand “experience” resonates much further than worksheets modeling hypothetical.

5.       Revolution

Part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Microsoft initiative known as The Education Arcade, Revolution serves as an immersive history lesson for classrooms aimed at teaching American kids about their nation’s past. The MMO takes place in 1775, where residents of Williamsburg, Virginia teeter on the brink of exploding against British imperialists. Students take on one of seven different societal positions and analyze the positive and negative consequences of participating in the revolt. There are no “right” or “wrong” decisions, but every decision they make requires and reflects a deep consideration of the complex interplay between then-current overarching culture, economy, and politics.

6.       Behavior Management

At first, the WoW in School program, created by former biology teacher Lucas Gillespie, reached out to at-risk youth in New York and North Carolina. But it wasn’t long before the after school initiative meant to teach kids the finer points of teamwork and well-researched debates swelled into its very own class. Through MMOs and social media, participating students added literary journeys through Joseph Campbell’s outlines, heightened communication skills, and other necessary reading abilities to their academic arsenals. In response, Gillespie established a wiki so educators around the world could discuss the use of World of Warcraft to close achievement gaps stemming from disruptive behavior.

7.       Kick Shyness

World of Warcraft also enhances the full capabilities in students who aren’t at risk of living in correctional facilities. Peggy Sheehy, a participant in Gillespie’s WoW in School initiative, applied the after school program’s main motives to helping shy and socially anxious kids develop better people skills. Because the MMO requires considerable collaboration in order to successfully complete raids, group quests, and PVP competitions, the avatars force them to interact with their peers. But the presence of customizable avatars provides a layer of protection to assist them in emerging from inside themselves beyond the computer screen.

8.       Virtual Peace

Look, we’ll just say what everyone’s thinking — people seriously suck at feeling and expressing empathy and compassion these days. Virtual Peace addresses this serious social lack through an MMO developed by the Duke-UNC Rotary Center for International Studies in Peace and Conflict Resolution. Students and teachers alike enter the game and find themselves faced with the fallout from Hurricane Mitch. They must work together in order to rescue and provide emergency healthcare and resources for the Nicaraguans and Hondurans suffering as a result of the natural disaster. Failure means even more sickness, death, and starvation. So it requires the mind of a not-Patrick Bateman to successfully navigate and accomplish the objectives at hand.

9.       For Science

University of Wisconsin’s Constance Steinkuehler and Sean Duncan conducted research on the relationship between regular playing World of Warcraft and scientific literacy, revealing that a staggering 85% of conversations between players reflected a solid knowledge of science. Everyone was actually pretty stunned by this news. Because the leveling process requires in-depth research about the mechanisms of the game itself, the critical thinking skills of all those orcs and gnomes and Russian space aliens wound up sharpened in the real world. So all those teachers asking their students to roll with an assassination rogue or shadow priest are actually onto something other than wasting taxpayer money on screwing around with the Night Elf female dance.

10.   Collaboration/ Teamwork:

Surprised? Because that’s kind of a recurring theme through many of these MMO classroom applications, because it’s built right there in the format. But even offline, the structure works. Did your mind totally just make a record scratch noise right there? Because ours did.

Avid gamer, designer, and co-director of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s program in video game development breaks his classroom down into guilds assigned different achievements in order to level up. Everyone starts off with an F and must complete solo and group quests (also known as “normal class-work like quizzes and presentations”) to move up and earn that coveted A. And it works. Otherwise we wouldn’t have bothered mentioning it.