Indiana University explores that question by bringing together tech partners and university leaders to share ideas on how to design classrooms that make better use of faculty and student time.
Untether instructors from the room’s podium, allowing them control from anywhere in the room;
Streamline the start of class, including biometric login to the room’s technology, behind-the-scenes routing of course content to room displays, control of lights and automatic attendance taking;
Offer whiteboards that can be captured, routed to different displays in the room and saved for future viewing and editing;
Provide small-group collaboration displays and the ability to easily route content to and from these displays; and
Deliver these features through a simple, user-friendly and reliable room/technology interface.
Key players from Crestron, Google, Sony, Steelcase and Spectrum met with Indiana University faculty, technologists and architects to generate new ideas related to current and emerging technologies. Activities included collaborative brainstorming focusing on these questions:
What else can we do to create the classroom of the future?
What current technology exists to solve these problems?
What could be developed that doesn’t yet exist?
What’s next?
top five findings:
Screenless and biometric technology will play an important role in the evolution of classrooms in higher education. We plan to research how voice activation and other Internet of Things technologies can streamline the process for faculty and students.
The entire classroom will become a space for student activity and brainstorming; walls, windows, desks and all activities are easily captured to the cloud, allowing conversations to continue outside of class or at the next class meeting.
Technology will be leveraged to include advance automation for a variety of tasks, so the faculty member is released from duties to focus on teaching.
The technology will become invisible to the process and enhance and customize the experience for the learner.
Virtual assistants could play an important role in providing students with a supported experience throughout their entire campus career.
In September 2015, the back-then library dean (they change every 2-3 years) requested a committee of librarians to meet and discuss the remodeling of Miller Center 2018. By that time the SCSU CIO was asserting the BYOx as a new policy for SCSU. BYOx in essence means the necessity for stronger (wider) WiFI pipe. Based on that assertion, I, Plamen Miltenoff, was insisting to shift the cost of hardware (computers, laptops) to infrastructure (more WiFi nods in the room and around it) and prepare for the upcoming IoT by learning to remodel our syllabi for mobile devices and use those (students) mobile devices, rather squander University money on hardware. At least one faculty member from the committee honestly admitted she has no idea about IoT and respectively the merit of my proposal. Thus, my proposal was completely disregarded by the self-nominated chair of the committee of librarians, who pushed for her idea to replace the desktops with a cart of laptops (a very 2010 idea, which by 2015 was already passe). As per Kelly (2018) (second article above), it is obvious the failure of her proposal to the dean to choose laptops over mobile devices, considering that faculty DO see mobile devices completely replacing desktops and laptops; that faculty DO not see document cameras and overhead projectors as a tool to stay.
Here are the notes from September 2015 https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2015/09/25/mc218-remodel/
As are result, my IoT proposal as now reflected in the Johnston (2018) (first article above), did not make it even formally to the dean, hence the necessity to make it available through the blog.
The SCSU library thinking regarding physical remodeling of classrooms is behind its times and that costs money for the university, if that room needs to be remodeled again to be with the contemporary times.
China has started ranking citizens with a creepy ‘social credit’ system — here’s what you can do wrong, and the embarrassing, demeaning ways they can punish you
Red Hat, although not quite a household name, is an undeniably significant company, with lots of fingers in lots of pies, especially when it comes to cloud computing and the Linux ecosystem.
The gem in its crown is arguably the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider OpenShift, which directly competes with the Salesforce-owned Heroku and Google App Engine. It also owns and develops Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which is employed across several commercial settings, including workstations, servers, and supercomputers.
Red Hat is an enthusiastic contributor to several major Linux projects, playing a role in developing Libre Office and GNOME, as well as the Kernel itself.
While employers increasingly demand that new hires have college degrees, the transcripts supporting those hard-earned credentials are no longer the most informative tool students have to exhibit their skills.
An estimated 1 in 5 institutions issue digital badges, which can be posted to social media, stored on digital portfolios and displayed by other specially designed platforms. When clicked on, the badge lists a range of skills a student has demonstrated beyond grades.
“The reason they’re taking off in higher education is most employers are not getting the information they need about people emerging from higher ed, with previous tools we’ve been using,” says Jonathan Finkelstein, founder and CEO of the widely used badging platform Credly. “The degree itself doesn’t get to level of describing particular competencies.”
For instance, a Notre Dame student who goes on a trip to Ecuador to build bridges can earn a badge for mastering the calculations involved in the construction, says G. Alex Ambrose, associate program director of e-portfolio assessment at the Indiana university’s Kaneb Center for Teaching & Learning.
Students can be pretty certain when they have passed calculus or creative writing, but they don’t always recognize when they’ve excelled in demonstrating soft skills such as critical thinking, communication and work ethic, says MJ Bishop, director of the system’s William E. Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation.
Badges have been most popular in the school of education—including with student teachers who, in turn, have created badges for the elementary and secondary classrooms where they’ve apprenticed, says Anna Catterson, the university’s educational technology director.
The campus library is another badging hotspot. Students there have earned microcredentials for research, 3D printing and other skills. These badges are being shared on LinkedIn and other platforms to obtain internships and scholarships.
The university runs faculty training sessions on badging and has established a review process for when faculty submit ideas for microcredentials.
One pothole to avoid is trying to create a schoolwide badge that’s standardized across a wide range of courses or majors. This can force the involvement of committees that can bog down the process, so it’s better to start with skills within single courses, says Ambrose at Notre Dame.
When creating a badge, system faculty have to identify a business or industry interested in that credential.
Badges that have the backing of a college or university are more impressive to job recruiters than are completion certificates from skill-building websites like Lynda.com.
Students won’t be motivated to earn a badge that’s a stock blue ribbon downloaded off the internet. Many institutions put a lot work into the design, and this can include harnessing expertise from the marketing department and graphic designers
Badges are more than just participation trophies. Design them to commensurately represent the knowledge and skills gained.
While many institutions have used digital badges as an alternative way to recognize the skills and knowledge developed by students, some are also starting to use this approach in their in-house professional development programs – especially in faculty development programs.
By offering well-designed badges that accompany these programs, you can boost both participation and impact. Join us for this online training and learn how to design your badges to encourage deeper engagement that goes beyond “showing up”. Our instructor, Lindsay Doukopoulos, will share best practices for badging criteria at Auburn University, where 82% of participants chose to earn badges at annual professional development workshops.
indsay Doukopoulos Ph.D.
Assistant Director, Biggio Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning, Auburn University
Lindsay’s teaching expertise includes experiential, active, and team-based learning in small and large lecture formats. Her research interests include instructional technologies and the use of digital artifacts (e.g., badging, ePortfolios, etc.) to assess and enhance integrated learning, gameful learning, and metacognition for students and faculty.
After a brief overview of our instructor’s faculty development badging program, we’ll walk through several badges Auburn has implemented for faculty. For each badge collection, we’ll address the following:
How was it designed, and what elements were considered in the design process?
What are the criteria for earning the badges? Why?
Who has earned the badges to date?
What impact did badge earners self-report?
What kind of data or artifacts did faculty submit to earn this badge / badge constellation? What did these show about how faculty were using what they learned?
We’ll close with a brief exercise that will let you start designing your own badge criteria for a program on your campus.
“Shifts in students’ learning style will prompt a shift to active construction of knowledge through mediated immersion.”-Chris Dede
The theory of constructivist-based learning, according to Dr. Seymour Papert, “is grounded in the idea that people learn by actively constructing new knowledge, rather than having information ‘poured’ into their heads.”
Moreover, constructionism asserts that people learn with particular effectiveness when they are engaged in constructing personally meaningful artifacts (such as computer programs, animations, 3D modeling, creating spatial environments in virtual reality or building robots).”
Technologies like virtual reality, especially for Gen Z students’, provides avenues that allow them to engage in a social, collaborative, and active learning environment.
Virtual reality, especially when combined with powerful storytelling, allows the student to participate in the story, develop empathy to experiences outside their current realm of understanding and allows them to be fully immersed in their own exploration and learning.
Digital transformation (DX) is having a profound impact across all industries, but what does it mean for higher education? Join members of the EDUCAUSE Digital Transformation Task Force as they describe their efforts to understand what DX means for higher education and why institutions should be planning for change now.
Outcomes
Explore how DX will impact higher education culture, workforce, and technology
Understand the importance of planning for digital transformation now
Learn about plans under way at EDUCAUSE to help institutions move forward with digital transformation initiative
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Dvorkin, A. Y., Shahar, M., & Weiss, P. L. (2006). Reaching within Video-Capture Virtual Reality: Using Virtual Reality as a Motor Control Paradigm. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 9(2), 133–136. https://doi.org/10.1089/cpb.2006.9.133
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