Voice Assistants Not Ready for Classrooms

Representatives of Amazon and Google made it clear at the recent International Society for Technology in Education conference that voice-assistant devices should not be used in K-12 classrooms because of compliance and privacy issues. While privacy issues is still a concern, the devices are finding their way into campus dorms and classrooms.

Amazon donated 1,600 Echo Dots to engineering students at Arizona State University, Tempe, and is providing grants to institutions that create class curriculum using Alexa-enabled devices and mentorship. Additionally, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, will give some students the option to connect an Echo Dot device to their university accounts this fall.

Jason Hong, associate professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, has studied the home use of Alexa and said the device isn’t quite ready for educational use. He noted they could be handy in specific college situations, such as a lab where students need hands-free interaction but added there are risks, such as demands to view the dialogue history stored in the device.

“These things are not geared for schools and for lots of people at the same time,” Hong said, adding that could change as the technology improves. “I think it could be really exciting, but also rather thorny.”

Digital Student IDs Are Here

It was just a matter of time before colleges and universities started offering students the choice of digital identification cards. Apple is taking a big step to move the process forward, rolling out a digital student ID initiative to begin in the fall at Duke University, the University of Alabama, and the University of Oklahoma, and at Johns Hopkins University, Santa Clara University, and Temple University by the end of the calendar year.

The ID cards will use the same near-field communications chip used for Apple Pay and will be available on newer iPhones and the Apple Watch. Phil Hill, an edtech consultant and blogger, views digital student IDs as a way for schools to better serve their students and for Apple to sell more watches.

“The bigger play here for Apple is about the watch, with the iPhone thrown in as a backwards compatibility and ensuring a usable program for students who have far more iPhones than watches,” Hill told EdSurge.

Some worry the initiative might be seen as discriminatory since students who don’t have an Apple device won’t be able to participate. Colleges and universities will also need to create guidelines for tracking the information the IDs will collect on students.

“This fits into [the] overall trend of ‘Trojan Horse’ technology that is designed for one purpose, but has data collection as part of its platform,” said Avi Chelsa, founder and CEO of empow cybersecurity. “Universities are becoming more and more data-driven, using data to track behaviors and derive insights in the same way that hotels, airports, and other institutions are.”

New Tech Lets Users Tap Out Messages

A new wearable gadget makes it possible for users to compose, edit, and send messages, texts, and emails by simply tapping their fingers. Tap is a one-handed device made up of five interconnected rings that converts any surface into a keyboard and works with smartphones, smartwatches, tablets, computers, or virtual-reality headsets.

It takes users about an hour to learn the basics through the TapGenius mobile app, according to manufacturer Tap Systems. It works with most Bluetooth-enabled devices and is usable for eight hours on a single charge.

“Tapping your fingers is much faster, more precise, and more rich in combinations than any gesture system that has ever been developed,” said Ran Poliakin, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Tap Systems. 

24/7 Access to Profoundly Change Ed Model

“The digitization of society is inevitable,” physicist, futurist, and author Michio Kaku said in his opening keynote address at the 2017 Educause Annual Conference this week in Philadelphia, PA. He foresees a future in which digital connection will be so ubiquitous that it will vanish from our awareness, just as we take electricity for granted today.

“We won’t use the word ‘computer’ anymore,” said the professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center. “We don’t say the word ‘electricity’ anymore, and yet electricity is everywhere and nowhere. That is the fate of the computer.”

Advances in virtual and augmented reality will blur distinctions between the physical and digital worlds. “In the future, you will blink and be online,” Kaku predicted. Humans will be able to essentially live and work at will in a cyber-environment. That shift will drive fundamental changes to education at all levels.

Kaku said such instant, seamless access to information will mean that instructors can emphasize concepts and principles, reducing the need to memorize facts and dates since such details will be immediately available in cyberspace.

Working in tandem with “robo-professors” powered by artificial intelligence, educators will transition to a role that involves more counseling and guidance to help students stay in school and succeed. “Professors will gradually change more and more into mentors,” Kaku said. “Mentoring cannot be done by a robot.”

Watson Ready to Help K-5 Math Teachers

IBM’s Watson has shown it can win at the TV game show Jeopardy and provide assistance in everything from engineering and health care to basketball and wine. Now, the question-answering computer system has found a niche in education as well.

Teacher Advisor with Watson 1.0 is a tool designed to help K-5 teachers find open educational math resources. Starting with more than 1,000 open educational resources (OER) available in its database, the search engine uses natural language to make recommendations based on content the teacher requires.

“The consensus was: Start with math at the elementary level because those teachers are usually licensed as elementary teachers—they may not have strong subject-level expertise,” said Stan Litow, president emeritus of the IBM Foundation. “If you could focus in on math, that would be a moonshot.”

Teachers will be able to search particular concepts and Watson will provide targeted lessons and recommended activities. It can also adjust to grade levels, which should help teachers with students having differing math skills.

Watson’s continuously evolving artificial intelligence will also allow the tool to refine its databank through usage to provide even more applicable searches. The system can even search its content bank to pinpoint particular parts of videos that are relevant to a teacher’s search and go directly to those segments.

“When you go and research a specific area—for example, equivalent fractions—you can look at the different designs for each lesson,” said Christine Manna, a math coach for the Waterford Township School District in New Jersey. “You can look at the wording and see very quickly if it’s higher [difficulty] or more for students who struggle. That cuts down all the work for you. I think that is most appreciated.”

Amazon Sends Alexa to College

Amazon is working to make its Echo smart speakers part of the educational experience for students, urging colleges and universities to experiment with the device and add it to their curricula.

The company has already given 1,600 Echo Dots to engineering students at Arizona State University, Tempe, to gain experience in voice technology. It created the Amazon Alexa Fund Fellowship to provide students funding to develop courses that utilize the device, plus set up a multimillion-dollar research competition called the Alexa Prize for developing new ways to use conversational artificial intelligence.

“Amazon’s strategy is much more about establishing Alexa and the mechanisms and the way that people interact with the virtual world, almost becoming the front end of the next generation of Internet access,” said Phil Hill, ed-tech consultant and blogger for e-Literate. “They’re looking to say, ‘People won’t be doing this much on the browsers anymore, they’re going to be interacting with natural language and voice, and we want that to go through us.’”

Utah State University, Logan, started using the device without any prompting from Amazon, installing an Echo Dot in a classroom for a visually impaired instructor, who uses it to turn on projectors and lower screens with voice commands. At Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI, an instructor is using Alexa to expand the vocabulary of students in his computing and information systems courses.

Of course, not everyone is impressed. A professor of computer science at Rice University, Houston, views Alexa as more of a gimmick. There are also privacy concerns since the device listens constantly for a trigger word when activated.

“It raises the question, OK, you have to say, ‘Alexa, tell me this,’” Hill said. “That doesn’t mean the device is not listening at all times. It just means it uses the Alexa keyword to trigger a command. Where does that information go? Does Amazon store it? Does it get thrown away?”

Iris Scans Could Be the Next Student ID

Identification cards have served college campuses well over the years, allowing students to do everything from gaining access to buildings to eating in the dining halls to charging purchases in the campus store. Soon, however, advances in technology may make the ID card obsolete.

With fingerprint readers and iris cameras already basic components in smartphones, some colleges and universities are working on ways to put those features to work. Campus stores are already experimenting with low-energy Bluetooth beacons to offer shoppers discounts as they enter. Advances in hand-geometry readers, which identify the shape of a user’s hand, are also on the horizon.

The University of Georgia, Athens, will allow students to enroll in a system that uses iris authentication to enter dining halls and the student center. Georgia Southern University in Statesboro has used iris cameras to control entry into dining halls since 2013 and has found data gained from the technology useful.

“If we have a freshman who’s living on campus and required to have a dining plan, and suddenly we see the student’s not coming in anymore—what’s going on?” said Richard Wynn, director of Eagle Card services at Georgia Southern. “We can actually alert housing staff and let them know we haven’t seen that student in a while and they can actually go check on them.”

Iris authentication could also be used for entry into residence halls, the library, and sports venues, providing the institution an idea of how individual students spend their day. That sort of information would be valuable in university marketing efforts, yet it also brings up privacy concerns.

“These aren’t scanners,” Bryan Varin, executive director of UGA dining services, said of hand-geometry readers and iris cameras. “Both of them are simply taking a picture and ending up with a mathematical equation that grants you entry.”

AI to Take Higher Ed Out of ‘the Dark Ages’

The artificial-intelligence (AI) wave isn’t on the horizon; it’s already here, according to Joseph Qualls, a clinical assistant professor at the Coeur d’Alene branch of the University of Idaho’s College of Engineering. “You are either going to surf that wave or it’s going to crash on you,” he told EdTech Magazine: Focus on Higher Education in a recent Q&A.

Qualls is also CEO and president of RenderMatrix Inc., a research-and-development engineering company, and co-founder of Avid Intelligence, which researches and prototypes AI-focused products for the defense and private sectors.

He predicts AI applications will cause “massive change” from K-12 to higher ed, creating a highly personalized, interactive, and faster path forward for each student. The notion of massive lecture courses and having students all learning the same material may someday be viewed as “education out of the Dark Ages,” Qualls said.

In the long term, “having large universities and large faculties teaching students is probably going to go away,” he added. Until then—for the next 20 years in Qualls’ estimation—instructors will continue to step in when the AI isn’t ready for the task at hand. After that, he noted, professors’ roles might change “from educating a student to educating an AI.”

Researchers Create Bendable Touch Sensor

Researchers Create Affordable, Bendable Touch Sensor

Researchers at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, are working on flexible, stretchable touch sensors that could make the next generation of touchscreen devices bendable.

Sensors are already being used that can detect touch or a hovering finger, and there are also sensors that are foldable, transparent, and stretchable. The work at UBC combines all those features into one package.

To create the sensor, a highly conductive gel is inserted between layers of bendable silicone. The process casts an electrical field above the sensor that can detect touch even while bent. In addition, the materials used in the process are low in cost, making it attractive for use in a wide range of products.

The research, funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, is part of a larger effort to create robotic skins that could make human-robot interactions safer.

This video (below) from the UBC Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering offers a closer look at the material used to create the sensor.

VR and AR Await a Tip to Reality

Virtual reality (VR)—computer-generated “reality” that immerses a viewer in a place and situation that may be as real as the Alamo or an unreal as a spaceship traveling to Pluto—seems a natural fit for educating students about history, the sciences, and other topics. The same is true for augmented reality (AR), which places a layer of information over reality, such as lap speeds superimposed on racecars in a televised NASCAR event.

In response to a survey at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show, 37% of attendees said that VR’s most significant impact would be in teaching and learning. However, integration hurdles still need to be surmounted and learning outcomes demonstrated before these technologies become mainstream.

The 2016 New Media Consortium/Consortium for School Networking Horizon Report K-12 edition forecast it would be another two to three years before VR adoption hits a tipping point in education. Futuresource Consulting Ltd.’s report on the 2017 Bett Show (formerly the British Educational Training and Technology Show) suggests that VR/AR products won’t find their market until there is a widespread clamor (read: large purchase orders) for them, as eventually happened when laptops entered education.

Augmented reality may have an edge on gaining adoptions since it doesn’t require special devices the way VR does; users can experience AR with nothing fancier than a smartphone and the right software.

The potential is vast. A Goldman Sachs report predicted that virtual and augmented reality will represent an $80 billion market by 2025, with the education sector attracting up to 15 million VR/AR users.

New Batteries for Higher Ed’s IoT

As more Internet of Things (IoT) connected devices find their way into higher education—whether as aids to student learning or components of campus infrastructure—the need will only increase for advanced batteries to keep them powered round-the-clock.

“Knowledge development, discovery, and sharing are not really on/off tasks that one starts and stops easily and often,” Pedro Ferreira, assistant professor of information systems, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, told EdTech: Focus on Higher Education. “We are constantly learning, and we need IoT devices on 24/7 to support that.”

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, discovered a way to prevent highly conductive but fragile nanowires in lithium-ion batteries from fracturing in the course of repeated charging and discharging, potentially increasing their lifespan significantly.

Many other universities are immersed in researching refinements or replacements for existing batteries. The Pocket-lint site outlined some of the most promising and interesting advances that are either already on the market or could be coming soon to a gadget near you, including:

• The Bioo plant pot that generates a photosynthesis reaction to charge a device.
• Copper-foam batteries that offer faster charging, longer life, smaller size, and lower price—all without any flammable electrolyte.
• A Stanford University-developed aluminum graphite battery that can recharge a smartphone to full in only a minute.
• A waterproof, foldable, paperlike battery that could be used for wearable devices or connected clothing.
• Nanogenerators that can convert ambient noise into electrical current.
• An MIT-created organic flow battery that uses quinone molecules—nearly identical to those found in rhubarb—and would save 97% per kilowatt hour over metal batteries without sacrificing efficiency.

Watson Tries Tutoring

Educational publisher Pearson is partnering with IBM to have the latter’s Watson computer system tutor students via Pearson’s courseware. Watson will translate questions students ask through their learning programs and provide explanations, feedback, and guidance to get past misconceptions.

Instructors will be able to use data gathered from that process to see what parts of their courses are generating confusion for students and also identify which students require additional assistance.

The partnership between IBM and Pearson will try to replicate and expand upon an experiment IBM conducted at the Georgia Institute of Technology last year, where students in a computer-science course on artificial intelligence had online access to tutoring from a teaching assistant named “Jill Watson.” Researchers had input all the questions ever asked in that course’s online discussion forum into the Watson platform. They wanted to find out if students would discern a difference between human tutors and a virtual counterpart.

At first, Jill Watson’s answers were “odd and irrelevant,” but by the end of the experiment her answers were delivered with ”97% certainty,” according to the research team. Student response was “uniformly positive” when they were eventually told the nature of their tutor.

What's Better than Apps? Chatbots

College students value their smartphones and the apps that allow them to play games and make purchases. Chatbots could replace apps as the interface, allowing users to find the things they want and need from the same messaging applications they already use to talk to friends.

“Chatbots are the singularity that smart devices have been waiting for, the streamlined experience that will finally unshackle us from the burden that our apps put on our devices,” Craig Elimeliah, director of creative technology for the digital marketing agency VML, wrote in a column for VentureBeat. “Apps slow us down. For most of what we do on our mobile devices, the chatbot and chat interface are ideal.”

Elimeliah said chatbots will be a better way for businesses to engage customers with their brands because they can be used in so many places and with so many different platforms. They can also be voice- and text-enabled.

“The ability that chatbots have to parse language for meaning and context means we can now create much more meaningful and precise 1:1 experiences that can scale way beyond the finite interfaces of an app,” he concluded. “In the end, chatbots are going to make apps look like clunky experiences that don’t really take into account that today’s mobile users need the most lightweight and easily accessible features and functions to blaze through their day.”

Higher Ed Keeping an Eye on VR

The release of two consumer virtual-reality headsets has more people thinking about buying the product, particularly those in the world of immersive games and interactive videos. That has caught the attention of higher education, according to Carl Straumsheim in a column for Inside Higher Education.

“The technology still has a way to go, but early adopters of virtual reality imagine a future in which students go on field trips around the world from the comfort of the VR lab, joined by tour guides who connect to the class remotely,” Straumsheim wrote. “Students in online programs, instead of only interacting with their classmates through discussion forums, meet in virtual classrooms, where they can lean over and talk to their neighbors or work together on a problem on a blackboard.”

Despite the excitement over VR, there are still some concerns that must be addressed, starting with cost. The two commercial headsets released earlier this year cost at least $600 each, and that doesn’t include the gaming computers needed to use them.

Headsets are clunky and wireless technology remains years away. In addition, some users have experienced eyestrain and a type of motion sickness caused by the difference between what the eye sees and the ear senses.

“Costs will come down, the software might be easier to develop, and the technology will continue to advance,” Nitocris Perez, an emerging-technology specialist at Indiana University, Bloomington, told Straumsheim. “I don’t think it’s going to be tomorrow, but three years from now things will be radically different.”

Campus Blockchain Initiative Underway

Blockchain technology, developed as a digital ledger to record transactions using the digital currency bitcoin, is finding its way onto campus. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab and educational software provider Learning Machine recently launched an open-source initiative that allows institutions to create, share, and verify blockchain-based educational credentials.

The potential uses of blockchain technology on campus include providing credential verification and tracking students’ progress through their coursework. Through the platform, credentials collected by students can be securely shared with anyone, such as an employer, who requires official documents.

The platform ensures the documentation sent is authentic and valid, according to a release on Blockchain News.

“The goal of our collaboration with the MIT Media Lab is to empower individuals with shareable credentials that can be used peer-to-peer and verified as authentic,” said Chris Jagers, co-founder and CEO of Learning Machine. “The current system for sharing official records is slow, complicated, expensive, and broken for everyone in a myriad of ways. The first generation of students to grow up entirely during the Internet age have started applying for college, and many admissions officers can share stories about applicants trying to text photos of their academic records. The expectations, while seemingly humorous, convey an honest impression about the way things should work. It should be that easy for people to share certified records directly with others and have them trusted as authentic.”

Helping Business Fill Empty Classroom Seats

No one benefits from empty seats in a college classroom. A new online platform is being developed to provide a solution.

Anyone’s Learning Experience (ALEX), a company led by students from Harvard University, created a program that matches the educational needs of employers and their employees with excess capacity in classrooms. ALEX received $10,000 in funding from the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard to get the project off the ground.

ALEX works with businesses that already offer tuition assistance to their employees. The goal is to help employers reduce training costs while improving employee development and retention. The company is currently focused on Boston-area businesses, but plans to roll out the program to other cities.

“Many people are struggling to improve their education, companies need better-trained employees, and every year there are about two million unfilled U.S. classroom seats—there is a huge need and potential for the platform we’ve created,” Sergio Marrero, CEO of ALEX, said in a release for University Business. “Connecting working professionals without college training with available seats in classrooms is an effective and cost-effective way to help business thrive while improving the lives of millions of people.”

Classroom Design is Being Upended

Games are becoming more integrated into education because students are demanding more engaging experiences. That, in turn, is changing the way classrooms are set up.

Instead of an instructor facing rows of desks, thought leaders in the field now envision classrooms equipped with desks on wheels, movable walls, and screens that allow students to work out gaming solutions in groups.

“It’s a huge deal,” Robert Brodnick, founder of the Brodnick Consulting Group Inc., said in an article for eCampus News. “Classrooms have remained unchanged for decades. We’ve learned this all really matters. If you build and create spaces in a more flexible way, you’re not dictating to students how they’re going to have to learn.”

Gamification is just one part of what is happening to classroom space these days, according to Brodnick. The space need to be flexible enough to accommodate multiple learning formats, such as makerspaces that encourages students to invent and learn. There should be room for immersive visual learning and enough space to promote personalized, project-based learning.

“What we’re starting to realize is that learning is happening out of the classroom more and more, as students are increasingly connected to each other and to information through their phones,” he said. “Learning by doing is much more powerful than acquiring content and apply it five years later on the job. As you move around throughout the day, you have learning experiences, and it’s having a significant impact on how campuses are designed. You might not need as many classrooms or as many bookshelves in libraries.”

Blockchain Makes Keeping Records Easier

Technology developed alongside the digital cryptocurrency bitcoin may provide colleges and universities with an inexpensive and secure way to handle student records. Blockchain makes it possible to deposit information to a global network that is both publicly available and secure.

“Because of the design of the blockchain-distributed database, it cannot go down and cannot be altered, making the data always available and secure … the blockchain does this free of charge,” Sylvain Kalache, co-founder at Holberton School in San Francisco, said in a report for CNBC. The software engineering institution was established as a project-based alternative to college and plans to share academic certificates on blockchain starting next year.

Universities can use blockchain to provide microcourse and microcredential verification, as well as to track and record student coursework. The technology also makes it possible to easily control who views student transcripts and to securely transmit the data.

“The technology has the potential to realize an entirely new infrastructure for sharing records securely over the network in any number of ways, opening new doors of possibility for academic records and how they are assessed,” Sony Global Education said in a press release last February announcing plans for its own blockchain service.

Using Music Videos to Teach Science

The idea that music can teach science has shown enough potential that a website has been created for K-12 instructors to find music videos that provide students with scientific content. Now, a study has been conducted by researchers from the University of Washington, Seattle, and the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, to find out if it actually works.

The research, published in the International Journal of Science Education, tested the hypothesis that scientific content can be learned through songs, by studying more than 1,000 students using 16 music videos in three separate tests.

The first test of students, ages 8-17, found that those who watched a music video that delivered scientific content did learn some of the information that was provided. A second test found no evidence that the music video helped students when compared to a traditional instructional video, although it was more enjoyable to watch.

A third group of New Zealand seventh- and eighth-graders were randomly assigned to watch a music video about fossils and compared to another group that was assigned a video with the same content but with no music. Both groups showed improvement on test scores immediately after watching the video, but the group that watched the music video did a better job on assessment tests 28 days later.

“These studies are only preliminary, but point to the promise of novel approaches to formal science instruction,” Tania Lombrozo, psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an article for National Public Radio. “Incorporating music and other media might not only have mnemonic benefits, but also help make science more accessible and more engaging to a broad range of students.”

Napping Is the Next Big Thing on Campus

Colleges and universities have put up rock-climbing walls and state-of-the-art recreation centers to attract and retain students for years. Now, some are starting to promote napping.

Students at some major universities across the country can reserve space in specially designated nap zones that prioritize sleep. There’s even a high-tech option called an EnergyPod that vibrates, plays music, and has a helmetlike visor to help students nod off while others in the area are busy working on assignments and talking to friends.

“It’s fair to say that students are more stressed and anxious than ever before because of uncertainty about their futures and high expectations set for them by friends and family,” Ishtpreet Singh, vice president of the University of Miami student government, said in a report in USA Today. “Even 20 minutes [of sleep] can provide additional stamina.”

The student government at the Coral Gables, FL, institution pushed for the pods in an effort to improve mental health on campus. The university responded by placing napping stations in the Shalala Student Center and the Whitten University Center, adding a massage chair near the pod in the Whitten building.

“We worked with student government leaders, who presented a compelling case to purchase the nap pods for our student center complex,” said Pat Whitley, vice president for student affairs at Miami. “Research shows that having the ability to take a nap can enhance well-being, have a positive impact on mental health, and can help boost academic performance. Our students, especially those who commute, will be able to take advantage of these safe and private rest stations, which provide an opportunity for a quick, 20-minute nap.”