ECAR collaborated with 157 institutions to collect responses from 13,451 faculty respondents across 7 countries about their technology experiences. ECAR also collaborated with 124 institutions to collect responses from 43,559 undergraduate students across 10 countries about their technology experiences. Please see the 2017 student and faculty studies hub for more about this year’s research.
When it comes to meeting technological support needs, students’ default modality is DIY. Students are more than twice as likely to figure out solutions to technology problems on their own, to search online sources, or to ask a friend than they are to use their campus help desk. Contacting the vendor or company to fix a technology problem is the last resort.
Laptops are king, smartphones are queen, and tablets are on the way out.
Students’ experiences with their instructors’ use of and approach to technology in the classroom are a mixed bag. A majority of students said most of their instructors have adequate technology skills, use technology to enhance learning, and encourage the use of collaborative technology tools. However, students said fewer faculty use technology for sophisticated learning tasks (e.g., engagement, creative and critical thinking), and relatively few faculty ask students to use their own devices for in-class work.
Students are choosing sides in the online versus face-to-face debate. For the fourth year in a row, the number of students preferring a blended learning environment that includes some to mostly online components has increased. The number of students preferring completely face-to-face or completely online courses continues to dwindle. The number of students expressing no preference has been cut by more than half since 2014.
Students are satisfied with features of their LMS…except when they aren’t.Students have favorable opinions about the basic features and functionalities of their LMS. But, the more sophisticated the task and the more engagement required of students, the less happy they tend to be. This may be a function of the tools, the instructors who use them, or both.
Students would like their instructors to use more technology in their classes.Technologies that provide students with something (e.g., lecture capture, early-alert systems, LMS, search tools) are more desired than those that require students to give something (e.g., social media, use of their own devices, in-class polling tools). We speculate that sound pedagogy and technology use tied to specific learning outcomes and goals may improve the desirability of the latter.
Students reported that faculty are banning or discouraging the use of laptops, tablets, and (especially) smartphones more often than in previous years. Some students reported using their devices (especially their smartphones) for nonclass activities, which might explain the instructor policies they are experiencing. However, they also reported using their devices for productive classroom activities (e.g., taking notes, researching additional sources of information, and instructor-directed activities).
See the 2013 report for a full list of key messages, findings, and supporting data.
Students recognize the value of technology but still need guidance when it comes to better using it for academics.
Students prefer blended learning environments while beginning to experiment with MOOCs.
Students are ready to use their mobile devices more for academics, and they look to institutions and instructors for opportunities and encouragement to do so.
Students value their privacy, and using technology to connect with them has its limits.
p. 10 students are generally confident in their prepraredness to use technology for course work, but those who are interested in more tech training favor “in calss” guidance over separate training options.
a study from Indiana University detailed the fears college students have about and the ways they adapt to the fact that they may be photographed at any moment by friends, classmates or even strangers.
Another worry described in the Future of Privacy Forum report is about a type of digital harassment known as “doxxing,”
Many students are loath to share biometric information with colleges and are wary about tools like facial recognition software.
Colleges should teach students about data privacy, ethics and digital literacy.
On October 12, the Unity for Humanity Summit will once again take place virtually to celebrate creators who are using real-time 3D (RT3D) for social impact.
Since the inaugural Unity for Humanity Summit in October 2020, we have awarded more than $2.5 million to support current and future social impact creators who are building RT3D experiences that have a positive and meaningful impact on society and the planet through the Unity for Humanity program and the Unity Charitable Fund.
four content tracks and some of the exciting topics and workshops
Education and Inclusive Economic Opportunity
Workshop: How to make your first Unity build
Different global models for creating inclusive economic opportunity
How to leverage real-time 3D for workforce development and training
Environment and Sustainability
What the gaming industry can do to support a healthier planet: From decarbonization of gaming operations to activating users
Visualizing the future of climate change
How the fashion industry is innovating for sustainability using RT3D
Digital Health and Wellbeing
Using AI for social good in and beyond the age of COVID
The role RT3D can play in the advancement of patient care, healthcare training, and more
Funding healthcare innovations and real-time 3D tools
Responses from the 2020 EDUCAUSE Student Technology report concerning student data privacy highlight a large gap of understanding that institutions need to bridge between student knowledge and administrative plans and policies
Among a myriad of other definitions, Noor (2016) describes Virtual Reality (VR) as “a computer generated environment that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world or imagined worlds. The user wears a headset and through specialized software and sensors is immersed in 360-degree views of simulated worlds” (p. 34).
Noor, Ahmed. 2016. “The Hololens Revolution.” Mechanical Engineering 138(10):30-35.
Weiss and colleagues wrote that “Virtual reality typically refers to the use of interactive simulations created with computer hardware and software to present users with opportunities to engage in environments that appear to be and feel similar to real-world objects and events”
Weiss, P. L., Rand, D., Katz, N., & Kizony, R. (2004). Video capture virtual reality as a flexible and effective rehabilitation tool. Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation, 1(1), 12. https://doi.org/10.1186/1743-0003-1-12
Henderson defined virtual reality as a “computer based, interactive, multisensory environment that occurs in real time”
Rubin, 2018, p. 28. Virtual reality is an 1. artificial environment that’s 2. immersive enough to convince you that you are 3. actually inside it. ”artificialenvironment ” could mean just about anything. The photograph is an artificial environment of video game is an artificial environment a Pixar movie is an artificial environment the only thing that matters is that it’s not where are you physically are. p. 46 “VR is potentially going to become a direct interface to the subconscious”
p. 225 Virtual reality: the illusion of an all-enveloping artificial world, created by wearing an opaque display in front of your eyes.
From: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2018/11/07/can-xr-help-students-learn/ : p. 10 “there is not universal agreement on the definitions of these terms or on the scope of these technologies. Also, all of these technologies currently exist in an active marketplace and, as in many rapidly changing markets, there is a tendency for companies to invent neologisms around 3D technology.” p. 11 Virtual reality means that the wearer is completely immersed in a computer simulation.
There is no necessary distinction between AR and VR; indeed, much research
on the subject is based on a conception of a “virtuality continuum” from entirely
real to entirely virtual, where AR lies somewhere between those ends of the
spectrum. Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino, “A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays,” IEICE Transactions on Information Systems, vol. E77-D, no. 12 (1994); Steve Mann, “Through the Glass, Lightly,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 31, no. 3 (2012): 10–14.
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Among a myriad of other definitions, Noor (2016) describes Virtual Reality (VR) as “a computer generated environment that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world or imagined worlds. The user wears a headset and through specialized software and sensors is immersed in 360-degree views of simulated worlds” (p. 34). Weiss and colleagues wrote that “Virtual reality typically refers to the use of interactive simulations created with computer hardware and software to present users with opportunities to engage in environments that appear to be and feel similar to real-world objects and events.” Rubin takes a rather broad approach ascribing to VR: 1. artificial environment that’s 2. immersive enough to convince you that you are 3. actually inside it. (p. 28) and further asserts “VR is potentially going to become a direct interface to the subconscious” (p. 46). Most importantly, as Pomeranz (2018) asserts, “there is not universal agreement on the definitions of these terms or on the scope of these technologies. Also, all of these technologies currently exist in an active marketplace and, as in many rapidly changing markets, there is a tendency for companies to invent neologisms.” (p. 10)
Noor, Ahmed. 2016. “The Hololens Revolution.” Mechanical Engineering 138(10):30-35.
Rubin, P. (2018). Future Presence: How Virtual Reality Is Changing Human Connection, Intimacy, and the Limits of Ordinary Life (Illustrated edition). HarperOne.
Weiss, P. L., Rand, D., Katz, N., & Kizony, R. (2004). Video capture virtual reality as a flexible and effective rehabilitation tool. Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation, 1(1), 12. https://doi.org/10.1186/1743-0003-1-12
Covid-19 is being described as both a crisis and an opportunity for higher education. But how “opportunity” is defined depends on where one stands in the academic hierarchy. While some hope the pandemic provides a chance to reverse troubling trends toward the adjunctification and casualization of academic labor, administrators may see it as a different sort of opportunity, to realign institutional priorities or exert greater authority over their faculties.
A statement by the Tenure for the Common Good group offers 20 recommendations for administrators, including that they “resist using the current crisis as an opportunity to exploit contingency further by hiring more contingent faculty into precarious positions.”
As faculty members are asked to take on greater teaching, advising, and administrative responsibilities, faculty development and retention “will be more important to institutional resilience — survival — than ever before,” Kiernan Mathews, executive director and principal investigator of the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, wrote on Twitter.
To DePaola, the pandemic doesn’t pose new problems to academe as much as it magnifies existing ones. “Everything was held together with gum and paper clips, and coronavirus came and just sort of knocked it all down at once,” DePaola said. “I think none of the crises that this virus is causing are new. They’re just accelerated greatly. And the contradictions of the system are heightened all at once for people to see.”
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The Small World Network of College Classes: Implications for Epidemic Spread on a University Campus
Beginning in March 2020, many universities shifted to on-line instruction to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, and many now face the difficult decision of whether and how to resume in-person instruction. This article uses complete transcript data from a medium-sized residential American university to map the two-node network that connects students and classes through course enrollments. We show that the enrollment networks of the university and its liberal arts college are “small-world” networks, characterized by high clustering and short average path lengths. In both networks, at least 98% of students are in the main component, and most students can reach each other in two steps. Removing very large courses slightly elongates path lengths, but does not disconnect these networks or eliminate all alternative paths between students. Although students from different majors tend to be clustered together, gateway courses and distributional requirements create cross-major integration. We close by discussing the implications of course networks for understanding potential epidemic spread of infection on university campuses.
Institutional support for accessibility technologies
Blended data center (on premises and cloud based)
Incorporation of mobile devices in teaching and learning
Open educational resources
Technologies for improving analysis of student data
Security analytics
Integrated student success planning and advising systems
Mobile apps for enterprise applications
Predictive analytics for student success (institutional level)
At least 35% of institutions are tracking these five technologies in 2020: Support for 5G; Wi-Fi 6 (802.11 ax, AX Wi-Fi); Identity as a Service (IDaaS); Digital microcredentials (including badging); Uses of the Internet of Things for teaching and learning; and Next-generation digital learning environment