Page 8 - Campus Technology, May/June 2018

Campus +Industr y TECHNOLOGY HAPPENINGS IN HIGHER EDUCATION
GUARANTEED SUCCESS. DePauw University (IN) is so confident of the value of its liberal arts education that it has guaranteed a successful outcome — em- ployment or graduate school acceptance within six months of graduation — for
100 percent of its students. That pledge, dubbed the DePauw Gold Commitment, will begin in fall of 2018 with the class of 2022. To hold up their end of the deal, stu- dents “will be expected to begin preparing for life after college in their first semester,
participate fully in all the opportunities available to them, graduate within four years, and conduct themselves as good citizens during their college experience,” the university said in a news announce- ment. Read the full story online.
NOT SO “SMART.” A joint research project at several universities found that
the “persistent presence” of smartphones comes at a “cognitive cost.” Researchers in the schools of management at the Univer-
sity of Texas at Austin and the University of California, San Diego as well as the Department of Social and Decision Sci- ences at Carnegie Mellon (PA) ran two experiments to attempt to measure how well people finish tasks when their smart- phones are nearby — even if the phones aren’t in use. Across the board, research subjects whose phones were in another room did far better than those who had their phones on the desk in front of them. Read the full story online.
SHARING INTEL. Five universities have banded together to fight cybersecurity threats with OmniSOC, a security op- erations center that will provide real-time intelligence sharing and threat analysis for its members. A joint initiative of Indiana University, Northwestern University (IL), Purdue University (IN), Rutgers Univer- sity (NJ) and the University of Nebraska- Lincoln, OmniSOC’s goal is “to help higher education institutions reduce the time from first awareness of a cybersecurity threat anywhere to mitigation everywhere
for members,” according to a news an- nouncement. Read the full story online.
ACCESSIBLE COURSES. Following a semester-long pilot of Blackboard’s Ally solution for accessible course content,
the University of California, Berkeley is expanding its use of the technology across campus. By the end of next year, the Ally system will provide accessible course materials to more than 40,000 undergradu- ate and graduate students, according to a news release. Read the full story online.
THINKING TOGETHER. Universal access to clean water should be the world’s highest priority, according to a recent pronouncement by a “swarm arti- ficial intelligence” system that connected 70 people in real time via AI algorithms designed to turn them into a “hive mind.” Participants in the swarm were attendees of the SXSW conference in Austin, who were gathered by AI company Unani- mous AI to “think together” on a variety of topics. Read the full story online.4
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | May/June 2018
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