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Online Marketing

Google Brings Machine Learning to Online Marketing Assessment

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

google-attribution-online-marketing-assessment

Google earlier this week unveiled Google Attribution, a tool that uses machine learning to measure the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns across a variety of devices and channels.

Part of a series of new measurement tools introduced at Google Marketing Next, Google Attribution aims to help marketers determine what is driving consumers to make their online purchasing decisions.

Google is at an “inflection point,” noted Sridhar Ramaswamy, senior vice president of ads and commerce, when it comes to the use of technology to measure online marketing effectiveness.

“What’s exciting is that things that were really hard we’re going to be able to make easy, because technology is doing the heavy lifting,” he told conference attendees.

Seconds Matter

Page-loading time is an important factor in terms of how long advertisers have to hook a consumer online, Ramaswamy said.

As load time increased from one to seven seconds, the probability of a consumer bouncing more than doubled, found a recent study that analyzed 900,000 mobile landing pages in more than 100 countries. That translates to conversions falling by up to 20 percent for every one second delay in page-load time.

Most existing attribution measurement tools have three main shortcomings, according to Ramaswamy. First, they lose track of the customer journey when they move between tools; second, they are hard to set up; and third, they are not integrated with ad tools.

Because of those shortcomings, marketers typically are stuck with using last-click attribution, which misses the impact of most marketing touchpoints.

The new Google Attribution tool incorporates data from AdWords, Google Analytics and DoubleClick Search, which provides a more comprehensive picture of data from all marketing channels, according to Google.

Google Attribution also makes it easy to switch over to data-driven attribution, which uses ads, keywords and campaigns that have the greatest impact on a company’s goals, Google said. Using the data-driven attribution model typically requires a minimum set of data, which is 15,000 clicks, and at least 600 conversions within a 30-day period.

Google will offer an enterprise version, Google Attribution 360, to meet the needs of larger advertisers, noted Bill Kee, group product manager at the company.

Google Attribution currently is in beta and will roll out to additional customers over the next few months.

Not Quite Ready

Google Attribution is an “aspirational sell” for advertisers, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses, suggested Paul Teich, principal analyst at Tirias Research.

“Google intends to make it free, so it will see a lot of uptake, but many users will have zero comparative experience to judge how much better they are doing with Attribution,” he told the E-Commerce Times.

The major benefit will be providing more-accessible feedback for designing online user experiences, Teich said, noting that it’s not clear how artificial intelligence can make a contribution — at least until Attribution has been able to analyze millions of Web pages.

Google is ahead of the curve compared to other Internet companies, which are only average at measuring the efficacy of online marketing, observed Michael Jude, a program manager at Stratecast/Frost & Sullivan.

“Machine learning does give it an edge in making sense of the relationship between key clicks and online purchases,” he told the E-Commerce Times.

“While simple algorithms can provide some insight, especially as applied to last click models, machine learning can understand such things as click back, where the last key click is not the purchase, but rather an artifact of comparison shopping,” Jude explained.

Data Points

Google made several other announcements related to providing additional marketing data.

It launched a new AdWords beta to let advertisers use fast-loading AMP pages as landing pages for search ads and to speed up ads across the Google Display Network. This follows Google’s introduction about 18 months ago of the Accelerated Mobile Pages project to speed up the Web with faster browsing.

Google also announced a new tool to bring in-market audiences to Search, in order to help advertisers reach users who are ready to buy their products. Using machine learning, the tool analyzes trillions of search queries and millions of websites to determine when searchers are close to making a buying decision on a product.

The company unveiled plans to roll out store-sales measurement at the device and campaign levels, which will allow advertisers to measure in-store revenue and store visits delivered by search and shopping ads.

If advertisers collect email information at the point of sale through loyalty programs, Google said, store transactions can be imported directly into Adwords by the advertiser or through a third-party data partner.

[“Source-ndtv”]

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Online Marketing

AI. Machine Learning. What’s the Impact on Digital Marketing Today? [PODCAST]

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

AI. Machine Learning. What’s the Impact on Digital Marketing Today? [PODCAST]

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Artificial intelligence and machine learning have been highly predicted trends in marketing and SEO. But how are they changing the industry now? Read on to find out more about the influence of AI on the marketing world in this Search Engine Nerds episode.

Marc Poirier, CEO and co-founder of Acquisio, joins SEJ’s Brent Csutoras to talk about how artificial intelligence and machine learning impacts online marketing.

Poirier also gives us a primer on how AI is affecting local search, and shares his verdict on the battle between AI and humans in search and marketing.

Artificial Intelligence

We’re starting to see AI integrate itself into a lot of marketing campaigns. Is that the direction we’re headed in?

Marc: I think this is the direction most software companies need to start steering towards over the next five years or so. We have all this data we’re looking at; no matter what field of marketing you’re in, there’s just so much data coming at us now. Being able to leverage that data and make good use of it through machine learning and data mining is something that’s happening today, but it’s going to accelerate over the next few years.

How do you see the transition of machine learning and AI really start to interact with marketing over the next five years?

Marc: There are various models of algorithms that are designed to solve specific problems, and they exist out there. So you can just use some of the work that has been done by academics before and apply it to the problem you’re trying to solve to parse through a ton of data and come out with a better answer really rapidly. I think a lot of companies do that today, but it hasn’t necessarily been labeled as such.

The reality is not so much about the data and having tools to visualize it. That’s great, but what are you going to do with it? How do you analyze it? How do you make decisions based on that data, and how do you automate that decision making process? How do you do that in marketing?

Brent: I think we see that even with small data. You can go in and show somebody Google Analytics at a very small scale and show the data.

Marc: Yeah, exactly.

Brent: And people aren’t really willing to implement that data as it is, let alone start getting into large-scale data collection and analysis. I think one of the big things for marketers is this sense of disconnect because it might not be overly new. It might not be overly complicated at the rudimentary level, but when it comes down to it, if I wanted to do AI, if I wanted to incorporate some of this stuff into my marketing campaigns, there’s a disconnect in the path on how I do that.

When you look at an AI solution versus an expert, do you feel that AI provides an equal or better outcome? Or is it still just a time versus money type of scenario?

AI vs expert: man arm wrestling with robot

Marc: No, it’s a better outcome, but it depends on the problem you’re solving. Some of the things we do are just research, so the outcomes are not better.

What we’ve been doing for five or six years is controlling money, and that’s not something humans can do very well, especially at scale. So we build software to help the small business, but we don’t sell it directly to them. We work with large resellers, companies that have tens of thousands of small businesses they need to serve. They need to make sure that the results are on point, that they’re spending the budgets, and they’re maximizing phone calls and clicks and things like that. This is where technology will do a better job than humans 100% of the time.

Brent: Is this similar to the stock market where you really have no chance if you’re not utilizing these tools? Has it gotten to that point, you feel?

Marc: Yeah, it has. We’re making decisions and making changes on budgets and bids every 30 minutes now across tens of millions of ad groups and hundreds of thousands of accounts. So you can’t imagine humans doing that.

First of all, it’s redundant. It’s error-prone and there’s a lot of accurate decision making going on, a lot of machine learning applied that always tries to hone in on the target. We’re trying to spend a $500 budget, or a $200 budget — it’s very little money, so how do we hit it? How do we get really close to it and not go over? How do we learn about that specific business, about their trend? So there are a few levers there that are really important to model.

I mean you could do it if you have just one account to manage and you apply a lot of time and energy. I’m sure humans can do a pretty good job at it, but you can’t do that at scale for small accounts. It just doesn’t make any sense, and it doesn’t work. It’s not possible to make the right decision all the time. That’s what algorithms and AI do.

What would be the steps and tools to start incorporating AI into paid search? What would be the end-point solution for somebody right now?

Marc: We have a product called Promote where any local business can sign up and we’ll create a local presence for them. We’ll create a Google AdWords account for them and all of the keywords they need, the ads, everything. It’s all automated. Then we’ll assign a small budget and control it really well.

If you look at what Google’s doing, or Marin Software, Kenshoo, Adobe, Ignition One, SearchForce, all the companies in this space, all the bid management solutions have some kind of algorithms or rule engines. So there is technology there to help make the right decisions on large data sets, and they do very well for different situations.

There are products out there in the search world that do that, but they’re limited, typically, to bid management. I think the areas of focus for us are how do we go beyond that in the future and automate more and do a better job at writing ad copy, for example, or testing ad copy.

What is it about AI or machine learning that’s really impacting local search? How does it affect what people are doing locally?

Marc: It revolves a lot around delivering value for small budgets, so it’s very difficult to control. If you have a lot of money to spend on AdWords, you’ll be able to see results, and there’s going to be a lot of waste. But you can’t afford any waste when you have a $200 budget for the month, right? You want to get some clicks. You want to get some calls, so it’s really important that we go out there and get those clicks that will cost the least amount of money. They need to be valid clicks and they need to be relevant.

It’s understanding the auction, understanding the profile for each business — the peaks and valleys, time of day, day of week — to see how the data has flowed historically when we have that. This is something the software will pick up, not only per vertical but also by business. You just gain more certainty if you can have many layers.

So you can say, “Okay, I’m looking at the law services category in general, all of the different attorneys and legal services that are available. Do I see patterns on a day of week basis? Yes. I see some kind of trend where Monday seems to be maybe 20% busier than all the other days.”

Then let’s look at by city for example, or by DMA. Do we see trends there as well? Yeah, larger cities seem to have more of that. Then per business, like for this specific business, if I look back three months, do I see a pattern? Do all these things come together? And does that help me make a better decision? How sure am I that this decision of changing that bid, lowering it by five cents will have an impact in the next 30 minutes?

In a nutshell, it’s a lot of complexities, a lot of data points to look at, but it’s to make that small decision. They’re always small changes that we make, and then validate the next 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 90 minutes. Did I see pick up on impressions? Because when there’s not a lot of click-flow, do I at least see more impression flow hour per hour? Those decisions will be tweaked as the function of the results we observe.

How do you feel about where people spend their money on paid ads right now? Do you feel that Google AdWords is still a major place to spend budget? Are you seeing certain social areas better than others?

Marc: Facebook ads is the place where small businesses are going to start because Facebook is making it easy for anyone to start and they’re making it part of your everyday experience. If you have a business page and you wrote a post, we’ll suggest you boost it for 10 bucks or something. Facebook’s been really good at garnering small span from small advertisers, small SMBs. Most SMBs today have realized that before they graduate to do some paid search investments, they’ll go to Facebook first then introduce Google AdWords.

Brent: Is that just because of the ease of use? It’s just something they can easily engage with, and then once they see some kind of traction, they start looking at other areas to run ads?

Marc: Well, yes, it’s easy and there are many ad products on Facebook. It’s a Swiss army knife of advertising. And there are different ways to build your audience as well, so it’s not only the ad products, it’s how you target. It’s quite complex, despite how easy they make it for a small advertiser to start. They have products like local awareness ads that are that simple. But local awareness helps retailers, restaurants and bars, the food industry in general.

But maybe it’s not that helpful for an emergency plumbing service or the landscaper. When you need a roofer, you’re going to look for it. It’s not going to be an awareness play so it may not be the first place you go for those. Depending on the type of business you are, it may be best to start on Facebook when you’re building local awareness. When it’s something that’s more search-driven intent, search ads would be more appropriate to start with.

Do you feel that you can take learnings from one platform to the other? Or do you feel that they really are individual and need to be viewed as individual?

Marc: We’re not finding any learnings from Facebook can apply to search or vice versa. However, the one thing we’re doing there in terms of bringing things together is budget allocation. How do we devise or change the way our product works to automatically allocate the money correctly across search — AdWords, Bing Ads, Facebook? We didn’t crack that nut yet. This is something that’s really interesting to a lot of companies.

But we’re in the middle of exploring if it does make sense, if it adds value. We’re hearing a lot of “yes”. So we’ll continue that investigation, but the idea of having a marketing budget for advertising online, like a digital advertising budget, and to have one place where you can just sort of put your money in there and trust that the algorithm will do the right thing, seems to be appealing to marketers today.

To listen to this Search Engine Nerds Podcast with Marc Poirier:

  • Listen to the full episode at the top of this post
  • Subscribe via iTunes
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  • Listen on Stitcher, Overcast, or Pocket Casts

Think you have what it takes to be a Search Engine Nerd? If so, message Loren Baker on Twitter, or email him at loren [at] searchenginejournal.com. You can also email Brent Csutoras at brent [at] alphabrandmedia.com.

Visit our Search Engine Nerds archive to listen to other Search Engine Nerds podcasts!

[“Source-ndtv”]

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Education

UK lagging behind; learning and skills can tackle poverty and productivity

by Rajdeep
written by Rajdeep

A report released today by Learning & Work Institute, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) shows how tackling skills gaps can help to reduce poverty and improve life chances and calls for urgent action to support millions of adults improve their English and Maths

Some 9 million adults have low literacy, numeracy or both, limiting their chances to find work, build a career, get the best deal online and manage the household finances.

Today’s Learning and Work Institute report outlines three key measures that can tackle these inequalities:

  1. A new Citizens’ Skills Entitlement. By 2030 all adults should have access to the literacy, numeracy, digital, health and financial capability skills they need. This should be funded by refocusing existing budgets and investing an additional £200m per year investment, doubling current investment. (find out more)
  2. Shared responsibility. Personal Learning Accounts for individuals and incentives for employers to invest in those with least skills. The aim is for a system that better aligns public and private investment, puts individuals and employers in the driving seat, and better targets public resources on those with the lowest incomes. (find out more)
  3. A Career Springboard. A Career Advancement Service to help Britain’s 5 million low paid workers to progress, including by working with employers to boost productivity. And an Apprentice Charter to underpin Apprenticeship quality.

Stephen Evans, Chief Executive of Learning and Work Institute commented:

“We’re calling for a new national effort to help adults improve their skills. We need this to boost our economy and make sure everyone gets the best chance in life.

“A weak skills base holds back our future prosperity, but also contributes to poverty – while having skills is not a guarantee of avoiding poverty, lack of skills is almost a guaranteed passport to poverty.

“The UK’s learning and skills system delivers opportunities and second chances every day. But we need to do more so that people get a hand up when they need it. Poverty is not inevitable and improving skills can help to tackle it.

“These are practical and affordable changes, building on what already works and changing what works less well. Taken together, these changes would provide a framework for increasing our overall national prosperity, cutting poverty and increasing opportunity.”

[Source:- learningandwork]

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Internet

Google Aims to Take Machine Learning Mainstream With New Cloud-Based Tools

by Rajdeep
written by Rajdeep

Google Aims to Take Machine Learning Mainstream With New Cloud-Based Tools

At the GCP Next 2016 conference in San Francisco this week, Google announced the launch of Cloud Machine Learning, a suite of cloud-based tools, with which the company hopes to make sophisticated machine learning tools available to developers across the globe.

“Cloud Machine Learning will take machine learning mainstream, giving data scientists and developers a way to build a new class of intelligent applications. It provides access to the same technologies that power Google Now, Google Photos and voice recognition in Google Search as easy to use REST APIs,” Fausto Ibarra, Director, Product Management, Google said in a blog post announcing the launch of the new feature.

Unlike traditional learning techniques that involve programming a machine with certain set of instructions for each scenario, machine learning (typically) involves feeding a computer with a large set of data – called training the machine – and then letting it figure a reaction for different situations, or come up with answers for new scenarios. The likes of Amazon and Microsoft, Google’s main competitors in the public cloud space, offer cloud-based machine learning tools as well.

sundar_pichai_gcp_next_2016_google.jpg

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) features a couple of pre-trained machine learning APIs called Google Translate API and Cloud Vision API that have been available to the public for a while. While the former is self explanatory, the latter identifies the contents of an image with a scarily good level of accuracy.

Given an image of a concert, for example, the Cloud Vision API can not only identify that it has people in it, but it can also say that there’s a stage, and that it’s likely a performance or a concert. The API is also capable of identifying specific landmarks, like the Golden Gate Bridge. Google has trained the Cloud Vision API by feeding it millions of images, and the power of this trained API has been available to all since its launch.

Joining the Google Translate API and Cloud Vision API this week is the Google Cloud Speech API, which makes the power of Google’s amazing speech-to-text conversion capabilities available to any developer. Anyone who’s used speech-to-text on an Android phone has no doubt been impressed by its accuracy, and now anyone can leverage these capabilities. The API can operate in batch mode – i.e. given a bunch of audio files to transcribe – or in streaming mode, where it can transcribe audio in real time. Google says the API supports over 80 languages.

“Cloud Speech API brings the same advanced neural network technology that powers voice search in the Google app and voice typing in Google Keyboard,” Ibarra explains. “It demonstrates speech-to-text conversion in 80+ languages with unparalleled accuracy, especially in noisy environments, and is blazingly fast. The technology that has already empowered developers to add speech to their Chrome and Android is now available for any application in real-time streaming or batch mode.”

In addition, Google Cloud Platform customers can build their own machine learning models using the open-source TensorFlow machine learning library, which is most popular machine learning project on GitHub. Google said TensorFlow Serving will be able talk to Kubernetes, another one of its open-source projects.

[Source:- NDTV]

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Education

Why bite-sized learning is the new grazing

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Is Bite Sized Learning The Future Of eLearning? - eLearning Industry

Mealtimes used to be full-blown affairs, where you took the time to cook a large meal, sit down with your family, and eat at a leisurely pace. To many, this is considered the norm, and for others it’s something to strive for.

But in today’s busy world, convenience and personalization for the people eating often wins. For example, grazing, or eating small amounts of food here and there as time allows (or as hunger demands!), has increasingly become a way of life for many who prefer it to sitting down for one big meal.

It turns out we can also graze with learning. Traditionally, learning through a structured program at a university has been seen as requiring a major time commitment or intense, singular focus, which doesn’t work for everyone. Even for those who enroll in part-time programs or a single course, individual class sessions typically last at least a half hour to a couple of hours or more.

In contrast, bite-sized learning consists of very short “nuggets” of information taught through various types of media, such as videos, audio files, infographics, or printed text. These nuggets tend to range from a single minute to the 15-minute mark (and even that can be considered long).

Also appealing to today’s time-strapped students? Microlearning. This usually takes the shape of formal but relatively small programs of study where you can earn credits toward individual badges and, in some cases, a traditional degree. While some microlearning options can be as long as a standard course, the overall program is much shorter than a full degree.

While full-time college students may be able to devote hours a day to their education, that’s not always feasible. Working employees make up a large segment of people who also wish to learn, but they are extremely busy. The average employee checks their email 36 times an hour and gets interrupted 56 times throughout the day. They also only have about 20 minutes a week, or 1% of their time, to set aside for learning. It’s only natural, then, that they would prefer to graze for 5 or 10 minutes instead of sitting down to a full meal for an hour.

Obviously, traditional learning isn’t about to disappear anytime soon, as it is still seen as foundational. But with technological disruption, automation, and the growth of lifelong learning, people will need to continually reskill throughout their lives, and earning a degree simply isn’t enough. People must be able to access learning in an online format so they can learn on their own terms and in a way that suits their lifestyle and learning preferences.

There’s no shortage of people who want to learn — if the circumstances are right — and reports show it can help improve employee retention. An overwhelming 94% of employees surveyed in LinkedIn’s 2019 Workforce Learning Report stated they would stay with a company if it simply invested in their continuous learning.

Employees have an easier time taking advantage of such opportunities if they include bite-sized learning options. And for those who wonder if bite-sized learning can be as effective as traditional learning, the good news is that the research so far suggests it’s not only equally effective but even more effective.

This type of learning fulfills the needs of busy adults with highly digital, mobile lifestyles who would welcome chances to learn from short but engaging bursts of educational content during their commute to and from work, on lunches and breaks, or on evenings and weekends.

For working adults who wish to further their learning, this is an exciting time, and there is much to anticipate. Increased market demand will inevitably lead to more bite-sized learning and microlearning opportunities that can be used as stand-alone paths to upskill or reskill or to supplement a degree, offering everyone the opportunity to grow in new ways.

[“source=pearson”]

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Education

Online learning becomes future of education as traditional methods fade

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

The digital revolution has brought a lot of innovations and dramatically affected all businesses including education.

The digital revolution has brought a lot of innovations and dramatically affected all businesses including education.

The digital revolution has brought a lot of innovations and dramatically affected all businesses including education. Traditional institutions will always struggle with their inflexible pedagogical systems more than half of the knowledge that the kids learn in the first year of graduation become obsolete by the time they graduate.

This will not only create challenges for students to get jobs, but it also raises questions about whether the traditional 3-year (or four) degree programs will even survive. Even the quintessential question about the relevance and signalling value of the degree is in question now.

Several of all traditional institutions won’t exist in 10 years because online education will upend their business models and push them towards bankruptcy. The future of education, hence, lies in all institutions at all levels, adopting online learning and online courses right from pre-school up to higher education.

Here are the six reasons that make online learning a compelling proposition for all institutions:

Online learning begins early at preschool:

Online learning is replacing quite a few home-schooling systems across the world. Parents can now let the computer teach the kids as they take a relaxing break.

Online learning now provides personalised learning paths for weaker kids who would do better with some extra levels of tutoring.

These days, online learning provides multiple options for all levels of learners and provides a plenitude of certificate, diploma and even online degree courses.

Online learning provides flexibility to the learner

Online learning is replacing quite a few home-schooling systems across the world.

Online learning provides the flexibility of time and space to the learner you can now do your studies anytime from any place. Working professionals find these programs suiting their work routines as they can plan their lessons around their free time.

Students do not need to bother about a missed class a recorded version of the same would be made available on the learning portal. Acquiring a degree from a foreign university may not need any travel, visa and other hassles!

Several online courses include live teaching:

Several online courses use a mix of self-paced videos and pre-scheduled live sessions by an instructor. Students can interact with the live teacher, get the guidance, feedback and solve their queries.

Since these online programs do not have any geographical constraint (the learner and the teacher can be at different parts of the world), most online courses get very high-quality faculty taking the lessons for the students.

Online education is economical and affordable:

Online courses are generally cheaper than classroom courses. Students can enrol into multiple programs from multiple institutions across the world, simultaneously, if they wish.

Several institutions also offer free-to-learn programs (MOOCs) that can be taken at no cost the certification is also available for a nominal cost. This also allows students to sample a few courses from different institutions and then finally zero-in on one of them.

Online learning works for large batch sizes

Online courses are generally cheaper than classroom courses.

Online courses can enrol a much larger number of students for the courses where each of them can learn at their own pace using their own screens.

Institutions normally divide these online learners into multiple cohorts (groups) based on their initial assessments and plan their group activities.

Live classes are also scheduled for different cohorts where the faculty can conduct their classes at different paces for different groups of learners.

Many choices, many options:

Students can get help from multiple sources if they get stuck in an online course. Some of these sources are free whereas some others may be paid ones.

Several other institutions and individuals provide tutoring and coaching sessions for a fee the benefit is you shall be able to pick the best teacher for yourself across any country without the need to travel there

The impact of online courses on the education system will be a shift from live teaching to the teacher developing online content for students. The role of a teacher or educator will always exist and can never be replaced but the methodology and pedagogy will change with these evolving new models. But for the learner, these courses come as a welcome boon flexible, economical, personalised and effective.

[“source=indiatoday”]

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Education

Is distance learning the future of education?

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Is distance learning the future of education?

Online learning was once frowned upon and thought to disturb the normal learning process students were accustomed to in the classrooms, but with the impact technology has on the life of every individual nowadays, that’s not the case anymore.

Online courses can help students reach the depth of different subjects without having to take an excessive number of classes in a semester as they can do it at their own pace in a familiar environment and with all the help they would get in a normal study group.

Numerous studies have been conducted over the years, to determine whether online learning is more effective than face-to-face courses or should it only be used as an additional method, in parallel with conventional classes.

The results were varied and while some students did better with online classes, others reported their grades were significantly worse. In 2017, a study showed that online classes are a poor option for students who did not have an advanced knowledge of the subject and the dropout ratio was bigger. However, other studies showed that online courses are the best option for students who have a more challenging life such as working full time or raising a kid.

Research conducted on students from rural schools that lack specialised and advanced courses for those more advanced than their peers, shows that online courses can be an excellent addition to conventional studying. The study showed that students who took the online courses did better than those who stuck to the curriculum.

Online teaching has no geographic boundaries
Another advantage that has been brought up when discussing online classes is the cultural diversity and the chances students have to connect with either colleagues or teachers from all over the world. Students have more time to discuss and exchange opinions with other individuals from different cultures, without the pressure of a ticking clock.

Coming in contact with people with a different background can have a huge impact on individuals, as they learn to communicate and listen to different opinions. This increases their opportunity to familiarize themselves with the way other communities see things, an experience they would not have in a classroom.
For instance, an individual from Cyprus can choose to take an online chemistry tuition form a teacher in Singapore, an option that would not normally be available in a conventional classroom.

A way of reaching the masses
Studies have shown that distant learning benefits those less fortunate, who have limited access to education. Whether we are talking about rural communities or individuals who have difficulties attending regular classes due to various reasons regarding time, distance or particular situations at home, online courses come to their help. Children from less developed communities, who have limited access to resources like textbooks or attend schools who suffer from a deficit of personnel now have the opportunity to fathom the subjects they are interested in. They can this way prepare for higher education without feeling they are missing out on vital information.

What do professors think? 
While most studies and discussions about distance learning focus on the students, it’s worth knowing what opinions do teachers and counselors have about it. Teachers who embraced the idea of online tutoring want to remind others that learning communities can also be found online. They say the process is much more complex than just downloading 100 pages of content and uploading their final paper at the end of the course. Communication plays a huge role in effective teaching and the online community knows it.
Other professionals say that online teaching helped them enhance their teaching abilities. They learned how to construct their courses and now have a better understanding of the education system and their institution policy, skills they did not develop with just working in a classroom and following a strict curriculum.

What will the future bring? 
It is becoming more and more obvious that online education is going to continue to change and adapt to suit our needs and lifestyle. But what direction is it taking and how will it look in the future, as special education apps are no news and courses are already available everywhere? Will it one day replace the conventional classroom?

Researchers say that online learning is going to be based more on projects than papers, as technology nowadays makes it really simple for students to present and broadcast their projects with the use of a mobile phone.
While online education will not replace classroom education anytime soon, there are many reasons why they should work together, to compensate one another. Teachers should be more open to the idea of bringing their teaching into the present day and adapt to the ever-changing needs of students.

 

[“source=cyprus”]

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Online Marketing

Is machine learning the future of marketing?

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

machine learning

What will the future of marketing hold? Will it be entirely automated by smart AIs that fully understand human nuance? Probably not. Will it be entirely manual and managed only by individual people without the aid of technology? Definitely not.

As we’ll discuss shortly, the top influencers in marketing put their heads together on this very topic, and the results may surprise you. In any case, it’s safe to say that marketing probably isn’t going back to the old days of billboards, newspapers, and radio spots. The numbers don’t lie: the future of marketing is definitely digital.

The digital marketing space continues to grow: Online sales have doubled in the past five years, and more than two-third of adults in the U.S. shop online monthly. Revenue for online advertising recently surpassed that of television for the first time in history, and growth of traditional advertising such as TV and print are projected to stay flat while newspaper advertising continues to decline.

What all of this means is that marketers need to develop effective strategies to realize the opportunities digital provides. However, there are several factors that can either help or hinder your digital marketing efforts, and they all revolve around data and the customer journey.

Too much data, too few answers

Marketers must always strive to understand the needs of their customers, so digital marketing is driven by customer data. The good news is that there’s a wealth of data in every online search and click that can reveal insights about consumer behavior and demographics. Ideally, marketers would use this information to drive customer engagement that leads to increased revenues.

The problem is that data isn’t an easy-to-use solution to marketing challenges in and of itself; it needs to be collected, managed, and interpreted correctly for it to have any value at all. Even valuable data can go to waste when it isn’t integrated properly, and most marketing leaders spend up to half their budget on data analytics that ultimately lead to no company-wide improvements.

Data is also often mismanaged because of a lack of central ownership. This leads to significant digital skills gaps that are projected to cost businesses $3.3 billion by 2020 considering that much of the data marketers collect gets mismanaged and thus becomes irrelevant, redundant, or obsolete.

It’s always a bad investment when businesses spend money on data that goes nowhere. There needs to be a method to solve data management problems so marketers can realize the benefits of using data for digital marketing.

Customers are in control of their own journey

 Back in the day, advertising was a one-way street: Businesses sent advertising messages to customers to drive sales through one-way channels such as billboards, print, and broadcast. There was no dialogue between companies and consumers. People didn’t have the internet to allow them to find the best possible deal, nor did they have powerful social networks to let them know about others’ brand experiences. Nowadays, most of the buying process is customer-controlled.

In addition, consumers are growing intolerant of annoying and irrelevant advertising, and pop-ups and other unwelcome messages are now getting blocked with increasing frequency. In fact, 11 percent of global consumers now use ad blocking software, up 30 percent since last year. Google Chrome will soon have a built-in ad filter feature, as well. The use of ineffective online marketing communications isn’t just wasteful, it can also be toxic to your brand as consumers become annoyed and shut you out completely.

As a result, marketers now need to ensure that they’re reaching the right customer at the right time with the right message to drive brand engagement. Otherwise, they risk annoying or upsetting their customers, thus leading to brand abandonment.

Machine learning helps you use data to serve empowered consumers

In a perfect world, marketers would use insights from data to engage with empowered consumers and help them make smart purchasing decisions through digital marketing. However, the challenge marketers face is managing massive amounts of information to serve a fickle market that will punish them harshly if they make a mistake.

As brilliant as marketers are – and must be in these challenging times – it’s difficult to downright impossible for individuals to put their arms around the millions of data points that constantly stream in from their digital marketing campaigns every nanosecond. Thus, an automated process called machine learning is necessary to take all the data you collect, organize it, manage it, and use it to predict the best ways to reach people with messages to galvanize buying behavior most effectively.

Machine learning means using predictive analytics and intelligent automation to formulate data-driven predictions. It allows marketers to identify the likelihood of future outcomes based on historical data. In a recent survey of top marketing influencers, 97 percent said that the future of marketing will actually be a combination smart people armed with machine learning – in other words, that machine learning is the future of marketing. Some of the use cases for machine learning include:

  • Chatbots and Voice Assistants – The increasing use of conversational chatbots and voice assistants from Google, Amazon and Facebook highlights the importance of being able to intelligently create a relevant and engagingly conversational user experience based on empirical data.
  • User Engagement – The use of machine learning to build predictive analytics models, such as those created by Urban Airship and Microsoft Azure, can determine potential points of customer churn and proactively help businesses retain customers.
  • Natural Language Processing – Machine learning can be used to optimize bidding in digital advertising, mitigating data scarcity with highly accurate predictive models based on semantically similar keyword groups, such as the model used by QuanticMind.

The rise of digital marketing presents many challenges and opportunities for marketers. Those who manage data effectively to communicate with consumers appropriately will have an advantage over those who don’t. Machine learning offers marketers the ability to fully realize the benefits of digital marketing, build real user engagement rather than being filtered out…and ultimately grow their business and revenues by always being where their customers are.

[“Source-thenextweb”]

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Education

Disadvantaged pupils learning watered-down curriculum, says Ofsted

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Parents have told Ofsted that preparing for exams was eating into their children’s learning time. Photograph: Eye Ubiquitous/Alamy

Disadvantaged children are being shut out from learning a rich range of knowledge, as schools restrict low-attaining pupils to “badges and stickers” rather than history or geography, the chief inspector of schools in England has said.

Amanda Spielman, the head of Ofsted, said social mobility could be at risk if some pupils were given restricted options and schools watered down their curriculum to concentrate on exam results.

“Low-attaining pupils need basic skills, as all pupils do, but they shouldn’t as a consequence be shut out of parts of the essential body of knowledge for any pupil,” Spielman said in a commentary published by Ofsted.

Her comments were based on initial results from research carried out by Ofsted, involving visits to 40 schools, discussions with headteachers and other data such as inspection reports and parent surveys.

“In a few of the schools visited, lower-attaining pupils did not have any opportunity to study a language or some arts subjects, as the school directed them on to a pathway that excluded the subject as an option, in some cases from the age of 12,” Spielman said.

“It is a risk to social mobility if pupils miss out on opportunities to study subjects and gain knowledge that could be valuable in subsequent stages of education or in later life.”

Spielman said the results showed a worrying trend of children from poorer backgrounds or more challenging circumstances being offered fewer choices at GCSE level than their better-off peers.

Restricted subject choice for low-attaining pupils “disproportionately affects pupils from low-income backgrounds”, she argued. “The focus here should be on what these pupils should be learning and what they need to do to progress. It should not focus solely on the qualification they are taking.

“This leads us back to school leaders mistaking ‘badges and stickers’ for learning and substance. It should also not be taken as read that higher scores for the school always means a better deal for pupils.

“If a pupil gains valuable knowledge, for instance in history, but does not get a grade four [C], they will still be better educated for having studied it.”

The research also found schools opting to start pupils studying for GCSEs a year early, curtailing key stage three by a year in order to improve exam results.

“This inevitably means that a considerable number of pupils will be experiencing only two years of study before dropping, for example, history or geography or a language, possibly never to study these subjects again,” Spielman said.

“And for most children, the end of key stage three is the last time they will take art, music, drama or design and technology.”

The Ofsted research also confirmed that some primary schools have been discarding the national curriculum in favour of more test preparation in key stage two.

Parents told Ofsted that preparing for tests was cutting into their children’s learning time. One school told Ofsted its pupils sat mock tests every week in years five and six, in the run-up to standardised tests at the end of year six.

Spielman said: “Testing in school clearly has value. This kind of test is intended to measure the child’s ability to comprehend. However, the regular taking of test papers does little to increase a child’s ability to comprehend. A much better use of time is to teach and help children to read and read more.”

Geoff Barton, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said pressure from the government meant schools in England would be determined to improve their performance in tests and exams.

“If Ofsted wants them to focus less on these assessments, we would suggest it lobbies the government for a change to the accountability system rather than criticising schools,” he said.

Spielman’s comments come as Justine Greening, the education secretary, announced the first details of “T-levels” – technical and vocational qualifications for sixth-formers.

The first subjects, including childcare and construction, will be introduced from 2020 with a full range of subjects including hair and beauty, catering and business, starting from 2022.

“As part of making sure that the technical education ladder reaches every bit as high as the academic one, I want to see T-levels that are as rigorous and respected as A-levels,” Greening said.

[“Source-theguardian”]

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