Keeping Campuses Safe from Evolving Internet of Things

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The Internet of Things has been increasingly more prominent in colleges. From a Google Home in a professor’s office or a control system to a power plant, there is no sign of IoT devices slowing down their spreading. Analysts project that within three years, IoT devices will outnumber traditional computing devices. These devices have a diverse amount of benefits, although they come with a great amount of security concerns. In fall 2016, hackers only added upon these concerns by harnessing thousands of video cameras along with other devices in order to conduct the largest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in history.

These attacks only brought upon the question of the security of the IoT devices. This concern has even been highlighted by many of the IT leaders. Instead of being victim to these attacks, campuses should learn from this and keep their networks secure in the new era. Colleges often use sensors for physical plants to send back data about temperature, humidity, and other issues in order to optimize the functionality. These devices were once hard-wired to control systems, but it is getting more common to connect them to a network.

IoT is also arriving on campus the same way that most technologies do: with students and faculty who use personal devices connecting to the network without consultation from anyone. Anywhere through the campus, especially through the residence halls or faculty offices, there will be IoT everywhere: wireless speakers, game systems, and personal assistants for just a start. Administrators are rapidly deploying IoT devices with the form of any device being a smart device. There is connectivity everywhere, it would be harder to find something that isn’t a smart device, even soda machines or parking card readers. Every physical system upgrade will involve connecting to the network to support payment collection, permission validation, inventory review or another administrative function. Steps to secure all these devices must be taken in order for the safety of the network to be maintained.

For more information, please visit the main article on EdTech

Old Computer Labs Need to be changed

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Bringing your own device is a trend that is changing the way that computer labs are functioning. It has changed from a solitary workspace to more of a bustling venue for 21st century education. They are best represented as a coffee shop with academic attitude with high-end gear and flexible seating. It is the best place for anyone to study or work in groups. The best uses would be for institutions to optimize the investments towards IT to allow better resources for students to do their work. Labs have started becoming more than just an area where a large amount of computers were installed for the use of students. They are better used as workspaces with supportive resources and allow for collaboration to enrich learning.

Transitioning to a new lab base isn’t as easy as it sounds and IT managers are cautioning towards that. It isn’t a wrinkle-free process to create a new lab; it takes planning, commitment to training and support, as well as patient conversations with finance that explain why there won’t be necessarily be cost savings from the new labs. It is also important to not completely get rid of computers for the students who can’t afford the high-end computers and need the resources that only an old lab can provide.

In Minnesota, the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University share curricula and resources; the IT staff are working to recreate the labs for the computer science departments with a new building for the labs. The new department will house Linux and Windows workstations for students to access a virtual desktop using their own personal devices. This will allow for the flexibility of accessing Linux or Windows while using their own device. According to EDUCAUSE, 95% of students who use their own laptops are for coursework.

For more information, please visit the full article on EdTech

Women in STEM Need More Female Role Models

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There has been the discussion about the gender gap in science, math, technology, and engineering (STEM) field in the recent years. A recent survey found that 63 percent of women pursuing a STEM degree struggle with confidence, and they even state that their gender was holding them behind. Women, say that the lack of female role models was the biggest issue when they were asked about the struggle. Coursera, a popular online course provider, decided to run tests when they found out that female students only have 34 percent STEM course completion. It is believed that with the more encouraging women in STEM, the more female learners there could be.

Coursera tested this hypothesis by sending out a promotional email about a machine learning course that are taught by two different instructors with the same credentials, though only one was female and the other was male. In the following weeks, female learners were 26 percent more likely to go on and enroll into a STEM course when the instructor was obviously female as compared to when they were male.

Sarah Richardson, a postdoctoral fellow in biology, says “The first thing [people] say to me is ‘You don’t look like a scientist.’” She didn’t realize that this was the reason that her career was suffering. Her colleagues thought that she didn’t look like a scientist either. Even with women making up 47 percent of the workforce, women are still the minority in science fields. A study shows that the culture of the tech industry that holds mostly males is something that is holding women back from being a part of the science field. Even with the growth of women in biology, chemistry and math, there is a growth in the gap in computer science, engineering and physics fields.

For more information, please visit the main article on edTech

Ways to Help Nontraditional Students with Technology

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Nearly half of the students that are enrolled in a higher education intuitions are considered nontraditional. For a quarter of them, this means that they are over the age of 30, bit despite the large numbers, Forbes reports that the older students are completing their degrees at a lower rate. Being able to leverage technology for the nontraditional students can help them complete their degrees. Here are three effective ways to do so:

  1. Use Adaptive Technology
    One way to increase undergraduate graduation rates, adaptive learning programs can be used. Using these types of learning can change the educational experience to fit each individual. At National Louis University in the Chicago area, their adaptive tools are all cloud-based, meaning that the students will have more flexibility when completing their school work or when they cannot attend class.
  2. App-Based Communities and Social Media Support
    A study done by the Gates Foundation required nine community colleges to use an app to help connect students with each other. As a result, the students using the app received a higher GPA and the rates of enrollment continued. While the app helped overall with GPA, for the nontraditional students, this allowed them to feel a sense of community. According to the study, “their posts tended to be of a more personal nature, exposing their emotions and vulnerabilities… They used the app to seek connection with others similar to themselves and to offer guidance to others in similar circumstances.”
  3. Tech Initiatives Need to Consider Learner Skills
    In a recent study done by Pew Research Center found that when it came to learning technology, adults lack in digital readiness. Those that are older than 50 are more likely to not recognize technology tools used for learning, and those in their 30s and 40s are confident with technology as a whole, but not with those related with education.

Dave Doucette, director of West Coast higher education sales for CDW-G states that “[Universities] need to recognize that different generations may approach technology in distinct ways, and that has implications for new rollouts.”

For more information, please visit EdTech for the full article

 

Priorities Marked Down by University CIOs

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At the annual Leadership Board for CIO’s (Chief Information Officer) information Technology in Higher Education, about 41 percent reveal that “security and privacy issues are their biggest concerns, followed by staffing concerns and funding issues.” They also found a problem with IT budgeting staffing and cloud usage. The role of the CIO is to implement change, which makes the role very complex and frustrating at times. With the ever-growing technology industry, a portion of CIO’s expect an increase of budget in the IT department. With the anticipating increase in budgets, and an increased demand for services, stretching funding will be a challenge.

Those who were surveyed stated that they plan to meet funding challenges by increasing efficiencies. They plan to use more cloud services, centralize support and services, as well as collaborating with other institutions and using more open source software. This isn’t the only increase in efficiency that will be made. Along with finding new resources, they will also delegate Wi-Fi to students intelligently by placing a cap per student based on needs. This had created an immediate increase in reliability and less performance issues. The staff will be one of the few things that stay the same, but more student workers will increase, which will create more valuable hands-on experience. Increases in STEM majors, providing real-world experience, or hiring freezes would all be contributors to this.

75 percent of CIOs do report an increase in investment towards their IT department. This is because of the amount security issues that appear due to the constant evolution of technology. All higher education institutions must understand that there must be communication and good working relations as well as the understanding that potential gaps and vulnerability are always a moving target for security to handle. To manage the ever-changing target, 65 percent of universities have put a chief information security officer in place. CIOs report some security measures that are up from last year.

For the full article, please visit EdTech

Maximizing Context-Aware Security

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Context-aware security decisions must be made every day in higher education institutions to ensure safety. A security guard must make a swift decision on allowing a visitor entry based on vehicles and their drivers. Cybersecurity teams must assess the nature of a device and the information it handles to decide allowing or denying exceptions to endpoint security policies. Context-aware security is here to help make decisions based on background information, which can only be made more effective through automation and analytic. Analysts will be able to dig into security data with less time and effort, which will only reap the greatest rewards for institutions.

Context-aware security requires context, which institutions lack. Contextual and wise security decisions require deep information about users and data, which in turn require a robust identity and access management infrastructure capable of providing useful attributes about individuals. The security data would not have to be in depth, but be able to provide a person’s status, student for example, and their department. With a strong data classification program, there is a helpfulness in identifying important elements of sensitive information handled on the campus.

For example, social security numbers or financial aid records would be labeled as sensitive information, and can be distinguished from general campus population by the context-aware products.

Products for context-aware security takes human and financial capital to release, but once set up, they can add a lot of value to the cybersecurity efforts. If the highly sensitive information has been identified, then the next step would to be to follow the data and build the context-aware controls around that information. To really maximize the amount of returns would be to target the higher value departments like finance, accounting, or human resources.

For more information, please visit EdTech for the full article

Welcome to UW Bothell Learning Technologies!

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In this video, Andreas Brockhaus, Director of Learning Technologies at  UW Bothell and the UWB Learning Technology team introduce some of the services provided to support faculty and students.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBO2exFacnI]

Evaluating Web Page Accessibility

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This month is the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disability Act, which is a federal legislation designed “to [eliminate] discrimination against people with disabilities.” Often times students with disabilities can be left out of online curriculum, which is why it is important to evaluate if your webpage is accessible. In an a recent article George Williams discussed how you can evaluate your webpage for accessibility, he noted the best way to engage in accessibility testing is with actual people. However there are also a number of helpful tools that can automatically check your site for the most important accessibility issues:

  • Wave Toolbar
    WAVE can help you evaluate the accessibility of your web content. WAVE is easy to use, you simply enter the web page address or browse to a file on your computer and select WAVE this page. WAVE will then provide you with a report section at the top of your page with embedded icons and error indicators. RED icons indicate accessibility errors and GREEN icons indicate accessibility features.
  • HTML_CodeSniffer
    HTML_CodeSniffer Is a client-side JavaScript application that checks an HTML document or source code for violations of a defined coding standard. It can be extended by developers to enforce custom coding standards by creating your own “sniffs”. This bookmarklet can work with almost any browser.
  • Tota11y
    Tota11y helps visualize how your site performs with assistive technologies. Testing for accessibility is often tedious and confusing, but tota11y aims to reduce this barrier by helping visualize accessibility violations. Your file will have a small button in the bottom of your corner document, once you click on the button you are able to see the accessibility problems your web page may have.
  • Pa11y
    Allows you to check the accessibility of web pages your own or others. If you are more interested in fixing issues rather than hunting them down you can use pa11y-dashboard.

You can also look at W3C web accessibility evaluation tools list. Over 40 tools listed are software programs or online services that can help determine if the webpage is accessible. All these tools will help evaluate webpage accessibility to ensure everyone can enjoy your webpage.

Designing College More Like a Video Game

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In Chapter 4 “Designing College More Like a Video Game” of the book Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning, José Antonio Bowen talks about how to motivate students to think in new ways.

When students make the transition from high school to college, they are asked to alter the way of thinking that had previous led to success. This is a substantial change being asked of them, under conditions that punish failure, and it comes at the start of college, when anxiety about change and failure are at their peak.

It has been shown, through empirical evidence, that the combination of high expectations and low stakes matter for learning; these are the same conditions that make a good video game. However, being approachable and supportive also improves learning.

In order to lower the risk of failure while still maintaining high standards, the means of assessment will need to be reviewed and rethought. By increasing the amount of exams, each individual exam will have less of an impact on the final grade, reducing the risk.

Video games are similar to a series of tests that are innately motivating, unlike most exams encountered in college. Instructors can act like game developers, creating exams that follow a narrative or tackle a problem, as a result tests would become more fun and interesting. By giving consideration to the format of exams, instructors can increase motivation and reduce the stress of their students.

Most Parents Still Value College

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A very informative post was written recently by Sara Lipka for The Chronicle of Higher Education detailing statistical information about parents’ perceptions on the importance and value of a college education for their children, despite the rising and obvious financial costs.

Originally written by the Wall Street Journal, the survey shows some positive and negative viewpoints parents have about the value of their children’s college education when faced with sometimes daunting financial concerns. For example, almost 9/10 parents said that college was an important investment for their children’s future. On the other hand, while parents wanted their kids to go to college, 79% of parents expressed some worry and concern about having enough money to make that happen.

Percentages about how parents fund their children’s college education, the various types of loans available for students and parents to use, and even the common confusion and lack of knowledge parents have about loans were also discussed.

 

For more information about this article, please click here.