Massive Online Open Courses could revolutionize university education

MOOCs are linked to the appearance of digital culture in all the areas of our lives, from the way we listen to music to the way we take photos, read the newspaper or watch movies.

“Before, you had to have a radio, and a camera, go to the newsstand to buy the newspaper or go to the cinema, but now there are applications that enable us to do everything digitally,” said the coordinator of the eMadrid network, Carlos Delgado Kloos, during the opening of this conference, dedicated to the transformational effect that the technology of MOOCs has on education; it was held on the Leganés campus of the UC3M, and had over two hundred registered participants.
This disruptive process, in which technology is continually transforming our daily lives, also affects the world of teaching, which is faced with the dilemma of having to adapt to this new educational model, characterized by massification and progressive personalization of the contents being taught, or remaining faithful to its traditional model of lecture classes. Faced with this scenario, various questions arise: How will new technological developments affect Higher Education? Will teaching continue to be done in person or will it be done online instead? Will other educational methods arise? Will syllabi disintegrate into small, rapidly consumed pieces? Who will be responsible for certifying studies and evaluating which are the best teaching tools? Will there be new alliances among institutions? What will the university’s role be? And the professor’s?
Higher education and, especially, the university will have to try to respond to these questions and adapt to these new times, where new technologies, accessibility, mobility and a new type of social interaction through networks are becoming are taking on a major role. According to the researchers, MOOCs are democratizing education, enabling hundreds of thousands of students to sign up for these open courses, because they only need access to internet to do so. “This is not about replicating a lecture class online, because that can be done using a video; rather it is about choosing the parts of the educational process that can be implemented with these platforms, keeping the figure of the professor, who continues to be necessary in this context,” explains Carlos Delgado Kloos, who is a tenured professor in UC3M’s Telematic Engineering Department.
New spaces

One of the consequences of the appearance of MOOCs is the “deterritorialization” of the educational process. This is shaking up the key role played by universities’ geographic proximity when enrolling students, which, according to the researchers, begs the question of whether equalizing the possibilities of access to the most important universities and the less renowned won’t be detrimental to the latter. One way to avoid this risk is for institutions to work together to form joint platforms where they can offer MOOCs; in Spanish, among other platforms, Miríada X and UniMOOC can be found. In the United States students can use Udacity, Coursera and edX.
The eMadrid network is a program of activities among research groups subsidized by the Autonomous Community of Madrid, which promotes R+D+i Technology-Enhanced Learning. The project is coordinated by UC3M in partnership with the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid, the Universidad Complutense of Madrid, the Politécnica of Madrid, the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos and the UNED (National Distance Learning University). In addition, other universities and companies from the sector also participate in the project. This year the eMadrid network held its IV Conference on June 13th and 14th on UC3M’s Leganés campus. Titled “MOOCs, the transformational effect of technology on education”, this conference presented a panoramic view of Technology Enhanced Learning and its evolution.
 

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Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home

Forget to turn off the lights before leaving the apartment? No problem. Just raise your hand, finger-swipe the air, and your lights will power down. Want to change the song playing on your music system in the other room? Move your hand to the right and flip through the songs.

University of Washington computer scientists have developed gesture-recognition technology that brings this a step closer to reality. Researchers have shown it’s possible to leverage Wi-Fi signals around us to detect specific movements without needing sensors on the human body or cameras.
By using an adapted Wi-Fi router and a few wireless devices in the living room, users could control their electronics and household appliances from any room in the home with a simple gesture.
“This is repurposing wireless signals that already exist in new ways,” said lead researcher Shyam Gollakota, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering. “You can actually use wireless for gesture recognition without needing to deploy more sensors.”
The UW research team that includes Shwetak Patel, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering and of electrical engineering and his lab, published their findings online this week. This technology, which they call “WiSee,” is to appear at The 19th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking.
The concept is similar to Xbox Kinect – a commercial product that uses cameras to recognize gestures – but the UW technology is simpler, cheaper and doesn’t require users to be in the same room as the device they want to control. That’s because Wi-Fi signals can travel through walls and aren’t bound by line-of-sight or sound restrictions.
The UW researchers built a “smart” receiver device that essentially listens to all of the wireless transmissions coming from devices throughout a home, including smartphones, laptops and tablets. A standard Wi-Fi router could be adapted to function as a receiver.
When a person moves, there is a slight change in the frequency of the wireless signal. Moving a hand or foot causes the receiver to detect a pattern of changes known as the Doppler frequency shift.
These frequency changes are very small – only several hertz – when compared with Wi-Fi signals that have a 20 megahertz bandwidth and operate at 5 gigahertz. Researchers developed an algorithm to detect these slight shifts. The technology also accounts for gaps in wireless signals when devices aren’t transmitting.
The technology can identify nine different whole-body gestures, ranging from pushing, pulling and punching to full-body bowling. The researchers tested these gestures with five users in a two-bedroom apartment and an office environment. Out of the 900 gestures performed, WiSee accurately classified 94 percent of them.
“This is the first whole-home gesture recognition system that works without either requiring instrumentation of the user with sensors or deploying cameras in every room,” said Qifan Pu, a collaborator and visiting student at the UW.
The system requires one receiver with multiple antennas. Intuitively, each antenna tunes into a specific user’s movements, so as many as five people can move simultaneously in the same residence without confusing the receiver.
If a person wants to use the WiSee, she would perform a specific repetition gesture sequence to get access to the receiver. This password concept would also keep the system secure and prevent a neighbor – or hacker – from controlling a device in your home.
Once the wireless receiver locks onto the user, she can perform normal gestures to interact with the devices and appliances in her home. The receiver would be programmed to understand that a specific gesture corresponds to a specific device.
Collaborators Patel and Sidhant Gupta, a doctoral student in computer science and engineering, have worked with Microsoft Research on two similar technologies – SoundWave, which uses sound, and Humantenna, which uses radiation from electrical wires – that both sense whole-body gestures. But WiSee stands apart because it doesn’t require the user to be in the same room as the receiver or the device.
In this way, a smart home could become a reality, allowing you to turn off the oven timer with a simple wave of the hand, or turn on the coffeemaker from your bed.
The researchers plan to look next at the ability to control multiple devices at once. The initial work was funded by the UW department of computer science and engineering.