Page 3 - Campus Technology, November/December 2017

Campus +Industr y TECHNOLOGY HAPPENINGS IN HIGHER EDUCATION
GAMING FOR CREDIT. A video game about 15th and 16th century art is the center of a new course this fall at Texas A&M University. Offered in the College of Architecture’s Department of Visualization, ARTS 489: World of Medici combines faculty-led lectures with ARTé: Mecenas, an art history game developed by Triseum in collaboration with the department’s LIVE Lab to immerse students in the course subject matter. Students are given many attempts to complete the game, which requires them to learn and retain the
course material as they build and maintain a financial empire in Medici-era Florence. Those who achieve 100 percent mastery in the game earn one credit hour. Read the full story online.
CROWDSOURCING PREDICTIVE MODELS. An MIT research project has come up with a way to crowdsource
the development of features for use
in machine learning. Groups of data scientists contribute their ideas for this “feature engineering” into a collaboration
tool named “FeatureHub.” The idea, according to lead researcher Micah Smith, is to enable contributors to spend a few hours reviewing a modeling problem and proposing various features. Then the software builds the models with those features and determines which ones are the most useful for a particular predictive task. Read the full story online.
GROWING ONLINE. In an effort to in- crease access to its bachelor’s and gradu- ate programs and improve time to degree, the University of Nebraska is partnering with iDesign to grow its online offerings. The company’s instructional designers will work with Nebraska faculty and staff on course design and the use of technology for student learning. The project will focus on courses that are not currently offered online, serve a high percentage of students and often have more students who wish to enroll than can be accommodated, accord- ing to a news announcement. In addition, data collected in the courses will help the university assess what instructional ele-
ments most impact student outcomes.
Read the full story online.
BETTER VIDEOS, BETTER LEARN- ING. Taking a lesson from Hollywood,
an institution dedicated to adult learners has brought in Emmy-winning filmmakers, producers, editors and cinematographers and put them to work creating story- oriented videos their students will see in class. Strayer University, a private, online, for-profit institution in Virginia, launched “Strayer Studios” as a pilot project to see what impact quality content would have
on student success. The latest results: Cinematic-caliber coverage of course con- tent improved class attendance, comple- tion of assignments and participation in class discussion. Read the full story online.
STUDENTS WANT DIGITAL. Fifty- three percent of students in a recent survey said they prefer classes that use digital learning tools, according to a new report from McGraw-Hill Education. The company’s fourth annual Digital Study
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | November/December 2017