Higher Education

In order to get the most out of virtual reality tools, schools and universities need to train educators how to use them and address accessibility concerns that may come with adopting related programs.

Gimbals, gear ratios, torques, coding and the like, will again rule at Fairmont State on Saturday, when the school hosts the West Virginia FIRST LEGO League championships.

With the growing frequency of cyber attacks around the world, the Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service has established a new cybersecurity certificate series to help protect organizations and data.

At Syracuse University, professors from two different academic departments are developing an AI-powered treatment method they hope will weaken heroin or oxycodone cravings caused by neurophysiological stress.

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board's annual conference, recently rebranded as Higher EDge, will feature sessions on topics such as AI, innovations in credentials, and digital learning, teaching and advising.

A private, health-care-focused university in Dallas has partnered with VictoryXR to build a 3D “digital twin” replica campus where students can use VR headsets to participate in virtual courses and lab activities.

Researchers at the university are working on algorithms — sets of programmed instructions — that can monitor shoreline change, identify rip currents, and alert lifeguards of potential hazards.

Based on a recent professional development course about generative AI, college professors still have reservations about data privacy, plagiarism, accessibility and mixed messages around the technology.

A public community college in Ohio is one of 16 institutions in the state acknowledged by the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security for having a high-quality cybersecurity program.

As winners of Sacramento State University's entrepreneurship competition, the college-completion tool Inspirame and the duck-tracking app AgriNerds each received $7,500 to grow their businesses.

More than 8,500 applicants to the University of Washington this fall chose computer science as their first-choice major, with hundreds more transferring from other majors or the state's community college network.

UND researchers will work with others at Iowa State University, ComEd and the software firm Kevala to develop a software tool to protect distributed energy resources such as solar panels, wind turbines and EV chargers.

The University of Southern California is developing Wi-Fi technology that will allow hearing-impaired students to tune into lectures and other campus events with their smartphones or receivers provided by the university.

The nonprofit Complete College America recently unveiled a 78-page document enumerating more than 170 use cases for generative AI in higher education, including predictive maintenance, data analytics and tutoring.

The university’s Online Course Design Institute will impart best practices for online instruction, including how to choose course goals and objectives, map out course material and design assignments and assessments.

A business professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign had ChatGPT write a script for his course, used text-to-speech AI to replicate his voice reading the script and a digital avatar speaking it.

Some universities have developed their own on-premises generative AI tools for students and staff, which have the advantage of data privacy but may require considerable money and expertise to launch and maintain.

Robotics have come a long way the past couple decades, and their potential to integrate with artificial intelligence and revolutionize industries could make them increasingly important in higher education.