The Future of Higher Education: Reshaping Universities Through 3D Printing

The Future of Higher Education: Reshaping Universities Through 3D Printing
How 3D Is Accelerating Learning
One of the most significant aspects of 3D printing for education is that it enables more authentic exploration of objects that may not be readily available to universities. For example, anthropology students at Miami University can handle and study replicas of fragile artifacts, like ancient Egyptian vases, that have been scanned and printed at the university’s 3D printing lab.


3D Printing or Rapid Prototyping
Known in industrial circles as rapid prototyping,
3D printing refers to technologies that construct physical objects from threedimensional (3D) digital content such as 3D modeling software, computer-aided design (CAD) tools, computer-aided tomography (CAT), and X-ray crystallography.

Prints Tangible Object From a 3D Design
A 3D printer builds a tangible model or prototype from the electronic file, one layer at a time, through an extrusion-like process using plastics and other flexible materials, or an inkjet-like process to spray a bonding agent onto a very thin layer of fixable powder.

Any Desired Object - Created Layer by Layer
The deposits created by the machine can be applied very accurately to build an object from the bottom up, layer by layer, with resolutions that, even in the least expensive machines, are more than sufficient to express a large amount of detail.

Moving Parts - No Problem
The process even accommodates moving parts within the object.  Using different materials and bonding agents, color can be applied, and parts can be rendered in plastic, resin, metal, tissue, and even food. This technology is commonly used in manufacturing to build prototypes of almost any object (scaled to fit the printer, of course) that can be conveyed in three dimensions.

Relevance for Teaching, Learning, or Creative Inquiry
One of the most significant aspects of 3D printing for education is that it enables more authentic exploration of objects that may not be readily available to universities. For example, anthropology students at Miami University can handle and study replicas of fragile artifacts, like ancient Egyptian vases, that have been scanned and printed at the university’s 3D printing lab.

Examine Rare Fossils Without Damaging
Similarly, at the GeoFabLab at Iowa State University, geology students and amateur enthusiasts can examine 3D printed specimens of rare fossils, crystals, and minerals without risk of damaging these precious objects.

Harvard Leverages 3D Printing for Microbatteries
Some of the most compelling progress of 3D printing in higher education comes from institutions that are inventing new objects. A team at Harvard University and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently printed lithium-ion microbatteries that are the size of a grain of sand and can supply power to very small devices such as medical implants and miniature cameras.

3D Printing - Medical Research Applications
In the field of medical research, innovation at the microscopic level is seeing increasing growth. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin are caging bacteria in 3D-printed enclosures in order to closely approximate actual biological environments for the study of bacterial infections. Scientists at the University of Liverpool are developing 3D-printable synthetic skin that will closely resemble an individual’s age, gender, and ethnicity.

3D Gaining Traction in Higher Education
As 3D printing gains traction in higher education, universities are beginning to create dedicated spaces to nurture creativity and stimulate intellectual inquiry around this emerging technology.

Universities Already Implementing 3D Learning
Examples include North Carolina State University’s Hunt Library Makerspace, the 3DLab at the University of Michigan’s Art, Architecture, and Engineering Library, and the Maker Lab in the Humanities at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. These spaces, equipped with the latest 3D scanners, 3D printers, 3D motion sensors, and laser cutters, not only enable access to tools, but they also encourage collaboration within a community of makers and hackers.
Johnson, L., Adams Becker, S., Estrada, V., Freeman, A. (2014). NMC Horizon Report: 2014 Higher Education Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium. 

Learning Analytics - Leveraging Web-Tracking Tools to Improve Student Engagement

Learning Analytics

Applying web-tracking tools to improve student engagement and provide a high-quality, personalized experience for learners.

Using Big Data to Predict Student Behavior
Learning analytics is an educational application of “big data,” a branch of statistical analysis that was originally developed as a way for businesses to analyze commercial activities, identify spending trends, and predict consumer behavior.

Web-Tracking Tools to Tailor Learning Experience
As web-tracking tools became more sophisticated, many companies built vast reserves of information to individualize the consumer experience.  Education is embarking on a similar pursuit into new ways of applying to improve student engagement and provide a high-quality, personalized experience for learners.

Learning Analytics - Informed Decisions
Learning analytics research uses data analysis to inform decisions made on every tier of the education system, leveraging student data to deliver personalized learning, enable adaptive pedagogies and practices, and identify learning issues in time for them to be solved.

Improving Educational Assessment With "Big Data"
Other hopes are that the analysis of education-related data on a much larger scale than ever before can provide policymakers and administrators with indicators of local, regional, and national education progress that can allow programs and ideas to be measured and improved.

Tracking and Ranking - Online Content Accessed
Adaptive learning data is already providing insights about student interactions with online texts and courseware. One pathway to creating the level of data needed for effective learning analytics is seen in creating student devices that will capture data on how, when, and in what context they are used, and thus begin to build school-level, national, and even international datasets that can be used to deeply analyze student learning, ideally as it happens.

Interest of Education Policymakers, Leaders and Practitioners
Since the topic first appeared three years ago in the far-term horizon of the NMC Horizon Report: 2011 Higher Education Edition, learning analytics has steadily captured the interest of education policymakers, leaders, and practitioners.

Same Tailored Consumer Experience as Amazon, Netflix and Google
Big data are now being used to personalize every experience users have on commercial websites, and education systems, companies, and publishers see tremendous potential in the use of similar data mining techniques to improve learning outcomes. The idea is to use data to adapt instruction to individual learner needs in real-time in the same way that Amazon, Netflix, and Google use metrics to tailor recommendations to consumers.

Transforming Education from "One Size Fits All"
Analytics can potentially help transform education from a standard one-size-fits-all delivery system into a responsive and flexible framework, crafted to meet the students’ academic needs and interests. For many years, these ideas have been a central component of adaptive software, programs that make carefully calculated adjustments to keep learners motivated as they master concepts or encounter stumbling blocks.

Visual and Analytic Reports
New kinds of visualizations and analytical reports are being developed to guide administrative and governing bodies with empirical evidence as they target areas for improvement, allocate resources, and assess the effectiveness of programs, schools, and entire school systems. As online learning environments increasingly accommodate thousands of students, researchers and companies are looking at very granular data around student interactions, building on the tools of web analytics.

Stanford Pioneering Education "Big Data" Analysis
Pearson Learning Studio, for example, provides an LMS infrastructure that is aggregating data from the millions of learners using their systems, with the aim of enabling school leaders and national policy makers to more effectively design personalized learning paths.  Similarly, a group at Stanford University is examining vast datasets generated by online learning environments.

Stanford Lytic Lab - Analytics Dashboard
These efforts are taking place through the Stanford Lytic Lab, where researchers, educators, and visiting experts are currently building an analytics dashboard that will help online instructors track student engagement in addition to conducting a study of peer assessment in a MOOC on human-computer interaction, based on 63,000 peer-graded assignments.

Bill & Melinda Gates - $200,000 Funding
In April 2013, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded Stanford more than $200,000 in funding to support the Learning Analytics Summer Institute, which provided professional training to researchers in the field.

Sophisticated Web-Tracking at Leading Institutions
Sophisticated web-tracking tools are already being used by leading institutions to capture precise student behaviors in online courses, recording not only simple variables such as time spent on a topic, but also much more nuanced information that can provide evidence of critical thinking, synthesis, and the depth of retention of concepts over time.

New Analytic Tools to Manage Growing Complexity
As behavior specific data is added to an ever-growing repository of student-related information, the analysis of educational data is increasingly complex, and many statisticians and researchers are working to develop new kinds of analytical tools to manage that complexity.

Predictive Analytics Reporting Framework
The most visible current example of a wide-scale analytics project in higher education is the Predictive Analytics Reporting Framework, which is overseen by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE), and largely funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

16 Institutions = 1.7M Student Records + 8.1M Course Records
The 16 participating institutions represent the public, private, traditional, and progressive spheres of education. According to the WICHE website, they have compiled over 1,700,000 student records and 8,100,000 course level records in efforts to better understand student loss and student momentum.

Social Media - Researching Online Discussions
Companies such as X-Ray Research are conducting research in online discussion groups to determine which behavioral variables are the best predictors of student performance. The tools reflect the potential of analytics to develop early warning systems based on metrics that make predictions using linguistic, social, and behavioral data. Similarly, studies at universities are proving that pedagogies informed by analytics can prove the quality of interaction taking place online.

Solution: Visualization - Improving Student Engagement and Discussion
At Simon Fraser University in British Columbia researchers applied analytics to solve an issue that past experiments revealed — discussion forums used for online courses were not supporting productive engagement or discussion. They developed a Visual Discussion Forum in which students could visualize the structure and depth of the discussion, based on the number of threads extending from their posts. Learners in this study were also able to easily detect which topics needed more of their attention.

Johnson, L., Adams Becker, S., Estrada, V., Freeman, A. (2014). NMC Horizon Report: 2014 Higher Education Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium. 

Flipped Classrooms: Learning: Class Time "Flipped" From Lectures to Real-World Applications

Important Developments in Educational Technology for Higher Education

Flipped Classroom
Flipped Learning: Defined
The flipped classroom refers to a model of learning that rearranges how time is spent both in and out of class to shift the ownership of learning from the educators to the students.
 
Big Change: Class Time "Flipped" to Real-World Applications 
In the flipped classroom model, valuable class time is devoted to more active, project-based learning where students work together to solve local or global challenges — or other real - world applications — to gain a deeper understanding of the subject.  

Information Dispensers: Videos, Podcasts, E-Book and Online Communities
Rather than the teacher using class time to dispense information, that work is done by each student after class, and could take the form of watching video lectures, listening to podcasts, perusing enhanced e-book content, and collaborating with peers in online communities. 

Result: Increased Interaction, Tailored Instruction and Accelerated Learning
Students can access this wide variety of resources any time they need them. Teachers can devote more time to interacting with each individual. After class, students manage the content they use, the pace and style of learning, and the ways in which they demonstrate their knowledge; the teacher adapts instructional and collaborative approaches to suit their learning needs and personal learning journeys. 

Belief: Students Learn More Authentically by Doing

Blended Learning - Inquiry Based Learning
The flipped classroom model is part of a larger pedagogical movement that overlaps with blended learning, inquiry-based learning, and other instructional approaches and tools that are meant to be flexible, active, and more engaging for students.

Flipped Classroom: Pioneers
The first well documented example of the flipped classroom was in 2007 when two chemistry teachers at Woodland Park High School in Colorado wanted to address the issue of students missing class when they were traveling to and from school activities.

Social Media's Impact on Learning
Students were struggling to keep up with their work. The teachers, Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams, experimented with using screen capture software and PowerPoint to record live lessons and post them on YouTube. They immediately observed a dramatic change in the classroom: the focus shifted to increasing interactions and fostering deeper connections between them and their students, as well as between students.

Educational Coaching in Small Groups
Their roles transitioned from lecturers to coaches, guiding the learning of students individually. They observed students as they worked on assignments in small groups, made more accurate assessments about who needed extra attention, and then created mini-lecture videos that catered to those learners.

Free! Flipped Classroom Learning Resources
With a vast array of free resources readily accessible, faculty that are flipping their courses often do not have to create any materials from scratch, but instead focus on curating the best content for the subject matter.

Origin Flipped From Historical Learning Innovations
Whereas many learning technology trends first take off in higher education before seeing applications in schools, the flipped classroom reflects an opposite trajectory. Today, many universities and colleges have embraced this approach, enabling students to spend valuable class-time immersed in hands-on activities that often demonstrate the real world applications of the subject they are learning.

Increased Relevance: Efficient and Enriching - Class Time
Relevance for Teaching, Learning, or Creative Inquiry The flipped classroom model is becoming increasingly popular in higher education institutions because of how it rearranges face-to-face instruction for professors and students, creating a more efficient and enriching use of class time.

Learning Environment - More Dynamic and Social
By reviewing the comments and questions that students pose online, instructors can better prepare for class and address particularly challenging ideas during face-to-face time. The learning environment transforms into a dynamic and more social space where students can participate in critiques or work through problems in teams.

Duke Testing / UNC Confirms Scores Increase 5.1%
Healthcare is moving towards teams of collaborating practitioners; the Duke Institute for Brain Science has used the flipped classroom as a way to develop stronger collaboration and creative thinking skills in emerging practitioners. A study conducted on foundational pharmaceutics courses at the University of North Carolina shows that the flipped environment increased test scores by 5.1%.
Johnson, L., Adams Becker, S., Estrada, V., Freeman, A. (2014). NMC Horizon Report: 2014 Higher Education Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium. 

Flip Teaching

Developing Students who are Responsible for their Learning

Flip teaching, as defined by Wikipedia, is a “form of blended learning which encompasses any use of Internet technology to leverage the learning in a classroom, so a teacher can spend more time interacting with students instead of lecturing.” Its principles assume that students will be able to gain more form self-moderated course modules because they can watch and re-watch them at their own paces. Flip teaching provides in-person class time that can be used for more engaging activities than traditional lectures. The practice is used in k-12, as well as higher education. Most successful implementations include specific directions for students on how they are to be prepared their in-person class session. For example, students may be required to hand in notes for the lectures they watch, contribute to online discussion boards outside of class, or have questions drafted to ask the instructor or to prompt discussions with fellow classmates. With this course format, instructors can more easily poll students on concepts on which they need additional instruction. Instructors also receive filtered feedback from all students as to have complete samples of both excelling and struggling students.

A recent blogpost by Herman Berliner, on Inside Higher Ed’s “Provost Prose,” delivered great optimism for the use of flip teaching to improve higher education. Berliner suggested that there could be models to alleviate some institutional costs by engaging students with open course learning experiences (like edX) paired with graduate student led face to face sessions for discussion and evaluation. This proposition cuts costs by minimizing the number of lecture class sections led by faculty members. An article in Education Next from earlier this year also references the sharing of recorded course sessions. This opens possibilities for catalogs of course content that could be shared and used to develop uniquely delivered curricula at institutions around the globe.

Skeptics of flipped teaching claw at the pressures that the practice puts on students to dedicate time to teach themselves concepts without instructors present. Supporters of the flipped classroom agree that there is a great level of responsibility provided to students. According to an article in The Daily Riff, “The Flipped Classroom Revealed,” the authors provide a listing of the characteristics of a successful model – many of which depend on student engagement:

Discussions are led by the students where outside content is brought in and expanded.

These discussions typically reach higher orders of critical thinking.

Collaborative work is fluid with students shifting between various simultaneous discussions depending on their needs and interests.
Content is given context as it relates to real-world scenarios.

Students challenge one another during class on content.

Student-led tutoring and collaborative learning forms spontaneously. 

Students take ownership of the material and use their knowledge to lead one another without prompting from the teacher.

Students ask exploratory questions and have the freedom to delve beyond core curriculum.

Students are actively engaged in problem solving and critical thinking that reaches beyond the traditional scope of the course.

Students are transforming from passive listeners to active learners.

One commentator on Berliner’s post explained that the use of such innovative teaching practices can be dangerous to non-tenured faculty whose employment is often based on student success and satisfaction. As referenced in our post “Simplify Your Internal Marketing,” in order to improve higher education and find successful solutions for more personalized learning, the culture needs to embrace some risk and get on board with ready, fire, aim approaches to innovation. Let us know what successes and challenges you have faced with flipped teaching models in your classrooms.

Becky Yannes, AEFIS Team

For more, check out the sources mentioned in this post and let us know what you think by leaving a comment...

Bennett, Brian, Jason Kern, April Gudenrath and Philip McIntosh. “The Flipped Classroom Revealed.” The Daily Riff. 03 May 2012. http://www.thedailyriff.com/articles/the-flipped-class-what-does-a-good-one-look-like-692.php

Berliner, Herman. “Flipped Classroom.” Provost Prose. 22 Jul 2012. http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/provost-prose/%E2%80%9Cflipped-classroom%E2%80%9D

Tucker, Bill. "The flipped classroom: online instruction at home frees class time for learning." Education Next 12.1 (2012): 82+. Academic OneFile. Web. 17 Sep. 2012

Photo from Knewton

Right Here, Right Now

There are more students attending college than ever before. To ensure that all of these students are following through on their education, parents are finding innovative ways to stay involved. csMentor was recently highlighted on Inside Higher Ed, a Washington DC born, web-based program that brings together video mentoring and connections between students and their parents to promote quality communication.

After dropping traditional students off at college for their freshman year, parents will not receive the high school feedback they are used to from their students’ universities. Although many schools ask students to sign waivers to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) so that they may share grade and advising information, there are limitations for parents to be involved in their students’ academic careers. csMentor takes the approach of engaging students and parents before the big first day and continuing conversations as students make their way through the semester. The program invites users to watch brief videos and respond to multiple choice questionnaires that help to identify how things are going academically and socially. This information allows students and parents to have meaningful conversations about adjusting to college life. Work with the College Success Foundation has expanded the use of the paid services to a group of low income students at no cost to learn more about its capabilities to support student retention.

So this addresses parent and student conversations, but are there similar opportunities to share information between students and instructors or advisors? The interest our team has grossed in collaboration with academic partners for the Instructional Decision Support System (IDSS) includes individuals and institutions who believe that there are ways to use student personality information to improve classroom experiences.

Other than dash-boarding student personality information and personal responses to questionnaires, how can we use assessment data, right here, right now to support personalized learning and student retention in higher education?

Becky Yannes, AEFIS Team

For more, check out the following recommended reading and let us know what you think by leaving a comment...

Helicopter App http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/08/29/new-app-updates-parents-their-students-progress

Do College Students Call Home Enough http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/campus-overload/post/do-college-students-call-home-often-enough/2011/08/11/gIQAhuK58I_blog.html