MIT Students Hack Disability Solutions

According to the World Health Association, more than a billion people worldwide need one or more assistive devices to address physical, communication, or other disabilities. However, about 90% of them lack access to such technologies.

To raise awareness of the situation, jump-start innovation, and encourage students to consider careers developing assistive devices, the Assistive Technology Hackathon (ATHack) brings together teams of MIT students every year to brainstorm, design, and create solutions for problems faced by specific disabled “clients” from the Boston/Cambridge community.

The event is interdisciplinary and open to anyone. ATHack coordinators asemble teams of students with complementary skills, interests, and academic backgrounds. Clients often act as co-designers and meet with their teams at a dinner a couple weeks ahead of the hackathon to lay out the particular problem they need solved.

On the day of the event, the teams have 11 hours to produce their solution, from start to finish. It’s understood by all involved that the result may not be an immediately usable prototype, but development can continue beyond the event with some help and resources from the organizers.

Of this year’s 15 projects, eight or nine were completed by the deadline. Among the winners selected were a portable seat to allow someone to use a shower while traveling and an armband that vibrates to alert a hearing-impaired wearer when someone rings their doorbell.

More than 300 participants have collaborated on 70-plus projects since ATHack was launched five years ago. Its organizers hope to post a compilation database of hackathon projects within the next few months.

MicroBachelors Could Be Next for Higher Ed

The online education provider edX has developed 45 MicroMasters degrees, online programs that provide a pathway to admission into a full master’s program. Now, the company is turning its attention to MicroBachelors.

“Education in five to 10 years will become modular, will become omnichannel, and will become lifelong,” edX CEO Anant Agarwal said during a recent higher-ed innovation summit hosted by the U.S. Department of Education. “We are going to make it so. It’s not going to happen by itself, we’re going to make it happen. Modular is good because it can create new efficiencies and new scaling and new bundling of components.”

MicroBachelors are viewed as a low-cost, low-risk online way for students to start an undergraduate education. EdX, which won a $700,000 grant from the Lumina Foundation for the project, is already working with Arizona State University on its Global Freshman Academy, a precursor to MicroBachelors.

One issue that could provide an obstacle is mounting evidence that online education is actually detrimental for some students.

“Online education is still in its youth,” Susan Dynarski, professor of education, public policy, and economics at the University of Michigan, wrote in a column for The New York Times. “Many approaches are possible, and some may ultimately benefit students with deep and diverse needs. As of now, however, the evidence is clear. For advanced learnings, online classes are a terrific option, but academically challenged students need a classroom with a teacher’s support.”

In Search of Business Innovation on Campus

Higher education has a reputation, deserved or not, for being resistant to change. Some universities, according to a report in eCampus News, are trying to dispel that image by appointing a chief innovation officer to lead and encourage positive change on the business side of the institution.

A study by Russell Reynolds Associates found that 20%-30% of the “top” 50 U.S. universities have developed a senior-level position devoted to innovation, entrepreneurship, or new ventures. Their specific duties may vary, but in general “this role is strategic and aims at driving and maximizing revenues from innovation,” said the report.

Chief innovation officers focus on finding new and different revenue sources for the university, rather than looking for ways to bring innovation to teaching and learning, but some are involved in fostering greater collaboration across departments and disciplines.

Innovation can take two forms: sustained or disruptive, according to Education Dive’s new monthly Innovation Column. “Sustained innovation maintains the current framework of competitive idea engineering, while disruptive developments change the trajectory of how leaders must operate for their institutions to stay competitive, or even survive,” wrote Shalina Chatlani.

Chatlani noted that slow adaptation—sustained innovation—may be more effective in higher education. “It’s important for leaders to consider what it means to stay true to a mission or navigate an uncertain financial or political environment,” she wrote. “Positive change does not necessarily have to be disruptive.”

Arizona Creates New Learning Environment

A college classroom with the lecturer in front addressing students seated at rows of desks may no longer be the best way to deliver a quality education. In fact, research done at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point found the lecture model is outdated for the digital natives now on campus.

To address the issue, the University of Arizona, Tucson, began investigating evidence-based learning and launched a pilot that used objective data to design courses featuring shorter lectures and class activities. The next step was a collaborative learning space (CLS), a large room with portable furniture and tabletop whiteboards that allow students to interact easily with each other.

“Faculty across campus began seeking out opportunities to teach in our CLS,” Jane Hunter, director of academic resources and special projects, wrote in a column for eCampus News. “They tried new strategies they had never been able to successfully implement. They found new joy in teaching which, in turn, ignited students with a passion for learning.”

From that first CLS, the University of Arizona now has 20, ranging in size to accommodate from 24 to 264 students. The new rooms serve 210 faculty members from 60 departments.

“I am trying new ideas in the collaborative learning space that I have never tried in my 10 years of teaching. It has been fun for me,” said Richard Harper, who teaches in the School of Government and Public Policy at Arizona. “The classroom has become a ‘partner’ in the learning process.”

Concerns about Personalized Learning

Many have jumped on the personalized-learning bandwagon because of its potential to tailor instruction to each student’s strengths and weaknesses. While the promise—and substantial funding from groups such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—is there, the results aren’t quite livingup to the hype.

A recent RAND Corp. study of 40 K-12 schools found that customized instruction does produce gains in test scores in math and reading, but those gains were just 3% better than average scores in a more traditional school setting. The study also noted students in personalized-learning schools who started the year academically behind did slightly better than their counterparts in traditional programs.

However, there are challenges. Finding time to develop customized lessons for each student was the most significant issue for instructors, who also had trouble finding high-quality digital resources.

“There’s a growing acknowledgement of the reality of how personalized learning actually plays out,” said Benjamin Riley, executive director of Deans for Impact, a nonprofit that focuses on teacher preparation. “Even if it were a good idea, developing a personalized-learning path for every student, in a system that has to educate tens of millions of children, might not be realistic.”

Apple Has Big Plans for New AI Chip

While Siri gave Apple an early lead in voice-recognition technology, the competition answered with artificial intelligence (AI) devices, such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home. Reports now suggest that Apple is working on a new AI-enabled processor of its own.

“Two of the areas that Apple is betting its future on require AI,” said Gene Munster, former Apple analyst and co-founder of the venture-capital firm Loup Ventures. “At the core of augmented reality and self-driving cars is artificial intelligence.”

The new chip will be a dedicated module designed to control AI functions while providing battery performance, according to a Bloomberg report. Currently, Apple products use their main processor and graphics chips to handle AI processes.

The new AI chip is reportedly designed to handle functions such as facial recognition in the photos application, some speech recognition, and the iPhone’s predictive keyboard. Developers will also have access to the chip to develop apps that can handle AI-related tasks.

Apple has been designing in-house processors since it created the A4 chip in 2010 for the iPhone and iPad. It has also released dedicated processors for the Apple Watch, the wireless component for its AirPods, and the fingerprint scanner for its MacBook Pro.

The new AI chip has been tested in prototypes of the iPhone, but there’s no word that it will be included in the next generation of the device. Apple will introduce the iOS 11 operating system for iPhones and iPads at its annual developers conference later this month, as well as discuss its updates to laptops, which include faster processing chips.

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.”

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.

UMUC Takes Privatization to Another Level

The concept of third-party vendors leasing campus services is all too familiar to college store professionals. The University of Maryland University College (UMUC) is taking that a step further, spinning off it’s own units into start-up companies offering their own services to others, all in an effort to grow endowments and keep tuition rates down.

“We believe that if you look at higher education, there is a core—what you teach, who teaches it, and how we teach it,” UMUC President Javier Miyares said in an interview for Inside Higher Education. “That is the existential, essential core of the university. Everything else are business processes that do not have to be run in the traditional way within the university.”

In 2015, the UMUC office of analytics was converted into a data-analytics service and there are plans to spin off the IT department into a company to be known as AccelerEd. UMUC Ventures was formed as a holding company to help the university realize some financial benefit when these new firms sell their services.

“UMUC recognizes that higher-education institutions have an obligation to students to reimagine how they achieve their missions,” said Ryan Craig, managing director of the investment firm University Ventures. “Too much of college and university spending is currently allocated to functions that do not directly serve the interests of tuition-paying students.”

However, there are critics of UMUC’s unbundling tactics.

“As a taxpayer of Maryland, I think of UMUC as a state treasure,” said former UMUC employee George Kroner. “The university has a special academic mission, and I hate seeing it put on the back burner. I don’t want to see the great work of UMUC privatized.”

Pulling Higher Ed Out of the Middle Ages

Higher education has fallen woefully behind in the race to keep up with technological change, according to a former dean for graduate education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.

In an effort to close that gap, Dr. Christine Ortiz is planning a new kind of residential research institution to keep up with advances while preparing students for life in the 21st century. The yet-to-be named institution would allow students to design their own learning paths and work with faculty to build an individual curriculum. Ortiz’s team has already developed software for computer-guided intelligent curriculum design that integrates science, technology, and humanistic fields.

By the end of 2016, she hopes to have started several pilot programs and to incorporate as a nonprofit in Massachusetts. The plan calls for her institution to be open to students by 2020.

“Technology is accelerating, and modernization and expansion of the higher-education system is desperately needed,” Ortiz said in an article for TechRepbulic. “Our higher-education system is still stuck in the Middle Ages.”

A New Look for the Apple Store

The College Store of 2015 Report, a study funded by the NACS Foundation and released in 2010, used the Apple Store as an example for college stores to emulate. Now, the Apple Store is reinventing itself.

“This is one of the new store designs we’re starting to roll out in America,” Angela Ahrendts, senior vice president for retail and online stores, said at the opening of a new concept store in Indianapolis, IN. “We have been intentionally reinvesting in the fleet in America because we had about half of our stores that were opened before the iPhone launched in ’07. We needed to make them larger and more customer-friendly.”

Apple wants its new store to be more like a town square with designated areas for phones and accessories, watches, computers, and repairs. In fact, the Genius Bar in the Indy store has been replaced by the Genius Grove, a section behind a large video screen that allows customers to get service on their devices without being out on the shopping floor.

The new concept also calls for staffers who are expert in the fields of photography, music, and gaming to provide customers with more information on using their new purchases. Taking a page straight out the college store playbook, Apple set aside space, called Today at Apple, to host artist events and other creative opportunities.

“A lot of people who have our products may not come into the store,” Ahrendts said. “Now, they see the avenues in the store, the changes monthly that are happening, and there’s always something new to discover. The plan is to increase traffic dramatically.”

Penn State Pilots Robots in the Classroom

For the last year and a half, the Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT) office at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, has been piloting a program to explore ways to use robots in education. The BeamPro Smart Presence System allows students to attend class without actually being there.

The BeamPro technology is being used for a wide variety of projects, including bringing artists to campus virtually, providing tours, connecting  students with their academic advisers, and as a summer outreach program in robotics. Another use envisioned for the robot is allowing students to attend class while off campus because of an illness or family emergency.

“There’s never been a technology that affords you this kind of freedom, and I think it changes the way that we will eventually collaborate or communicate over distances,” Chris Stubbs, manager of emerging technology and media for TLT, said in an article for Penn State News.

The robot has two wide-angle cameras, microphones set up to eliminate echo and reduce background noise, a 17-in. LCD screen, and built-in speakers. Students use a computer application to remotely steer the BeamPro robot to class and can even command the robot to take an elevator or go to other buildings around campus, according to a report in Campus Technology. The device can reach speeds of 2 mph and connects to the Internet through dual-band radios or an optional 4G card.

“Lion Ambassadors could conduct tours, career services could use it for mock interviews with companies located anywhere, and foreign-language classes could invite native-language speakers located internationally to engage in the classroom. That’s just the beginning,” said Kate Morgan, director of virtual education at Penn State Lehigh Valley.  “The future of interaction involves technology like the BeamPro and to have the opportunity to expose our students to it as undergraduates is one more way to prepare them for the millennial workplace.”

Apple Teaching Coding with an App

Teaching students how to write computer code is almost as common at the three R’s. Coding camps have become big business and the Florida Senate approved a bill that would declare computer coding a requirement for graduation.

Now, Apple has is making a splash with its Everyone Can Code curriculum, a free coding app it introduced during the launch of the iPhone 7 in early September. The program, aimed at middle-school students, uses Swift Playgrounds software that allows students to write code to guide characters through a graphical world, solve puzzles, and master challenges using the Swift programming language.

“When you learn to code with Swift Playgrounds, you are learning the same language used by professional developers,” Brian Croll, Apple vice president of product marketing, said in an article for The New York Times. “It’s easy to take the next step and learn to write a real app.”

The Apple coding app requires an iPad tablet to operate but is free to download. The app is so simple anyone could use it to teach themselves to code at home, according to Croll.

Coming to Grips with Higher-Ed Value

Voters often complain that the U.S. Congress needs to change, while continually voting their own representatives back into office. A new survey found something similar in higher education: Academic leaders agree that college and universities are responsible for why institutions are delivering less value than 10 years ago, but that doesn’t include their own school.

In the report, from the research firm Eduventures and set to be published Sept. 29, about half of the administrators said their own institutions provided either more or somewhat higher value than a decade before, while another quarter said the value was roughly the same. When asked to rate the value of higher education as a whole, nearly 75% said it had decreased or remained the same.

“What I’m sensing is a bit of a vacuum,” James Wiley, principal analyst for Eduventures and author of the report, said in an article for Inside Higher Ed. “Leaders are pulled in all directions, and if there’s no real ownership or space to do anything, then what fills that void?”

One conclusion from the report is that colleges and universities may be suffering from “initiative fatigue.”

“Higher education is drowning in initiatives right now,” said Gunnar Counselman, CEO of the ed-tech firm Fedelis. “What’s happened in the last 10-12 years is that higher ed has recognized that what got them here is not going to get them there. They’ve recognized that they’re going to have to change and, as a result of that, they’ve put a dozen initiatives in the water.”

Grading Is Part of MIT Philosophy MOOC

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is offering a new certificate option for a popular online philosophy course through its MITx platform. It’s the first massive open online course (MOOC) to provide students with the opportunity to have written assignments graded by professional philosophers.

“Listening to lectures and reading books is great, but philosophy is all about taking complex ideas and organizing them in a simple way,” Caspar Hare, the MIT professor running the course, said in an article for eCampus News. “You learn by writing, specifically writing to someone.”

Philosophy: God Knowledge and Consciousness introduces students to the basic topics considered by philosophers and the development of critical reasoning and argumentative skills. Writing helps combine those skills and feedback from trained philosophers lets students know how well they actually understood the material.

“Writing is essential to developing these skills,” Hare continued. “Just answering multiple-choice questions isn’t enough. You need to interact and bounce ideas off of other people. And from MIT’s perspective, the new feature helps bring to light different ideas from people with different cultural backgrounds. Writing enables these insights to pass through the community, which benefits everyone.”

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.”

Study Finds Classroom Noise Useful

Some teachers see conversations in the classroom as disruptions that need to stop. A professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, is using voice-recognition technology to understand if the noise could help teachers gain a better understanding of what’s going on during class.

“I think one of the things we’re noticing is that even if you are incorporating active learning, it’s very easy to focus on the students at the front of the classroom raising their hands, and this data can let teachers know whether they’ve got an equitable spread of participation across the classroom,” Amy Ogan, assistant professor of human-computer interaction at the CMU School of Computer Science, said in an article for eCampus News.

The technology provides instructors with a dashboard that displays classroom activities in different lights. Sensors analyze sounds in the room, not specific conversations. The colored lights give teachers insight into whether they should change or continue their teaching approach.

The technology suggests classroom literature for teachers on ways to better engage students who aren’t participating by sending messages to their phones between classes. Ogan and her colleagues are also working on ways to use cameras to distinguish patterns in the things students do while they are in the classroom.

“We’re working with a university right now with lots of lecturing,” she said. “When the system detects that students haven’t participated in a while, we flash a big red screen on the instructor’s laptop to notify them to incorporate some student interaction.”

Keep an Eye on VR Products

Developers of virtual-reality products are currently focused on the gaming industry, but that could change rapidly. Companies are already beginning work on applications of VR technology in the medical field, with retail and education not far behind.

“What we learn from textbooks or labs can be really dull, but VR and AR [augmented reality] will greatly enhance learning abilities,” Chinese investor Zhu Bo said in a report for phys.org. “It can also be used in e-commerce. In the future, you will step into a real scene; you can see the products on the shelves, touch and feel them. So our shopping experience will totally change.”

International Data Corp. predicted shipments of VR devices will increase by more than 2,400% this year, but the market still needs development before retailers jump on the bandwagon. Current VR products only allow individual users to play a game or watch a movie, but companies are expected to continue creating more VR-related hardware and software.

“To experience VR, you need a powerful engine,” said L.Z. Wang, managing director of chipmaker AMD. “Without content, you can’t experience anything.”

Georgia School Taking Classes to Students

In 2013, Central Georgia Technical College, Warner Robbins, received a grant to test blended-learning methods in its health-care program over an 11-county area of rural Georgia. That led to BlendFlex, an initiative that provides students the option to switch instructional delivery formats.

“In the past, students had to sign up for face-to-face, hybrid, or online courses—they had to make a choice,” Carol Lee, educational technology director at CGTC, said in an article in eCampus News. “We have a lot of students who would sign up for a face-to-face class, but then lifestyle changes, sickness, or family issues would force them to drop out and we would lose those students.”

Even though CGTC has satellite campuses for rural students, before BlendFlex the only choice for many was to drive to one of the institution’s central campuses or take the course online. Once the telepresence option was added, faculty could teach in their classroom as well as to students who joined from the rural centers via the videoconferencing that is part of the program.

CGTC reports that BlendFlex classes have only a 12% dropout rate, compared to a 21% rate among other classes the institution offers. In addition, evaluations indicated that 99% of students said they liked the ability to switch delivery methods, 93% would recommend a BlendFlex class to other students, and 91% would definitely take another BlendFlex course.

“The biggest challenge is getting teachers to [rethink their role] in the classrooms that are now student-centered,” Lee said. “But that’s what it’s going to take to be a successful college these days.”

Taking a Look at Online Master's Degrees

The online master’s degree being offered by the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, has earned praise from students enrolled in the Online Master of Science Computer Science (OMS CS) program. And what’s not to love about a program at a highly respected institution that requires no entrance exam and costs less than $7,000?

Some worry it may be too good to be true, but William Fenton, contributing editor for PC Magazine, took a closer look and liked a lot of what he found. Now in its third year, the program offers four areas of specialization, compared to 11 with the traditional master’s program, and is still working on ancillary services such as career counseling.

However, Fenton was impressed by the program’s accessibility. The OMS CS costs a third of the traditional program and its enrollment standards only require undergraduates to earn a 3.0 grade point average or higher in computer science at an accredited undergraduate institution.

Fenton still has concerns about the program’s corporate sponsors, but admitted the Georgia Tech partnerships with Udacity and AT&T work. The school shares revenue with Udacity for its platform, support, and consistent styling, while AT&T provides investments and students.

The program does rely on teaching assistants to keep pace with grading and enrollment hasn’t been as diverse as hoped. U.S. citizens make up 80% of the online class, with more than 700 applicants already having advanced degrees and more than 120 holding Ph.Ds.

“While the OMS CS degree may not democratize higher education, it doesn’t cannibalize it,” Fenton wrote. “In addition, all the buzz around Georgia Tech’s OMS CS degree is driving interest in the university in general and in its computer science programs in particular.”