Smoother career re-entry with online learning | MIT News

MIT News writes, "MITx course and internships help STEM professionals return after a break from the workforce to care for family."

Ruchi Garg re-entered the workforce with an upgraded skillset thanks to an MITx online programming course and an internship program.
Photo: Office of Digital Learning

They are described as the hidden gems of the workforce: mature, skilled, and highly-motivated STEM professionals who return to their careers after a hiatus of two years or more. Often they have already navigated the complicated life experiences — marriage, career changes, children, and relocations — that still lie ahead of their younger counterparts. As a result, employers view them as stable, energized, and capable. 

Ruchi Garg was one of those people, but she didn’t feel like a hidden gem. Six years prior, she had left the workplace to become the primary caretaker for her two young children. Now she felt like many of the 216,000 women across the U.S. with computer science or engineering degrees who left their technical jobs. She wanted to get her career moving again but was worried that her skillset had grown stale in the wake of rapidly advancing technologies and evolving computer engineering practices.

It was during this period of uncertainty that Garg came across Carol Fishman Cohen’s book, “Back On the Career Track.” Cohen is co-founder and CEO of iRelaunch, a company that specializes in helping women and men re-enter the workforce. In partnership with the Society of Women Engineers, iRelaunch created the STEM Re-Entry Task Force in 2015 and established internship programs with Booz Allen Hamilton, Caterpillar, Cummins, General Motors, IBM, Intel, and Johnson Controls.
 
Jennifer Abman Scott of the Society of Women Engineers says that, upon re-entry, “women often encounter a landscape that demands new technical skillsets and levels of expertise.”

“While they often have management or executive experience, they may lack updated technical skills and struggle with feelings of inadequacy. By investing in training to get re-entry candidates up to speed, firms can attract mature and vetted employees,” Scott says.

The internships caught Garg’s eye, but she knew that to be a viable candidate she’d have to revitalize her skillset. She understood that the best way to get back into the engineering groove was to take a class on a current programing language that employed the latest engineering techniques, but while colleges and universities near her offered computer science courses, they were either too basic or didn’t provide the curriculum she needed.

Then Garg found 6.00.1x (Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python), an MITx online course taught by professors John Guttag and Eric Grimson and lecturer Ana Bell.

“I looked for courses at institutions near me but couldn’t find what I needed. Online learning brought resources from around the world to my door, and I was able to find the course I was looking for,” she says. “Without online learning, I’m not sure how I would have closed the gap in my knowledge base.”

After completing the Python course, Garg returned to iRelaunch with an upgraded skillset and soon landed a position in the inaugural cohort of the IBM Tech Re-Entry program. Upon completion of the 12-week paid internship, she was hired as a data analyst at The Weather Company, an IBM subsidiary that runs The Weather Channel and Weather Underground.
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Source: MIT News

Young: Massachusetts’ slow embrace of virtual learning | Wicked Local Medfield

Photo: Julie Young

"For two years running, Bloomberg’s State Innovation Index has hailed Massachusetts as the country’s most innovative state economy" summarizes Julie Young, deputy vice president of Education Outreach and Student Services at Arizona State University (ASU)

Photo: Via Pioneer Institute‏ 

Looking at such metrics as research and development; concentration of science, technology, engineering, and math employment; and numbers of science degrees, it’s no wonder that the commonwealth placed first.

But it’s not just postsecondary education that makes Massachusetts a leader in innovation. Its K-12 public schools also boast some of the most dynamic and thoughtful approaches to brick-and-mortar education, providing a model for the rest of the country.

Despite these successes, Massachusetts struggles to keep pace with innovative online educational offerings that have helped students thrive throughout the nation. The commonwealth is home to digital learning experts Paul Peterson, Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn, and John Flores, yet it has been unable to establish a strong virtual learning ecosystem.

Several years ago, Massachusetts passed virtual school legislation. Susan Patrick, president and CEO of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, advised the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education on regulations to accompany the new law. She recalls making three basic recommendations: don’t put any geographic restrictions on the schools, don’t impose an enrollment cap on them, and let the money follow the student. Unfortunately, the department largely ignored her advice.

I know why those recommendations were not followed. Massachusetts knows what good brick-and-mortar schools look like, and they look different than good online schools. Liberating education from schoolhouse walls takes boldness — the willingness to mingle with the gray areas of learning, to refocus on the student of 2017. It’s hard to take a chance on digital learning when what you’ve got is working.

When implemented well, digital learning helps students in much the same way as other pioneering educational models do. More and more families are seeking educational opportunities beyond their local school; they’re looking for a school of one, always with an eye toward what’s best for their child.

For some families and students, it’s best to learn at a pace and time that works for them. Some students seek a head start on college, others need to revisit concepts for mastery. Digital education handles both of these students with ease, without holding one back academically or pushing the other ahead before foundational concepts can cement.
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Source: Wicked Local Medfield

Cox Digital Academy offers free online resources to make learning fun | Coast News

"Cox Digital Academy, designed with the entire family in mind" continues Coast News.

Since 2012, more than a quarter million people have been connected nationwide to the internet via Cox’s Connect2Compete program.
Photo courtesy of Cox Communications

Cox Communications has launched the Cox Digital Academy, a website that gives families access to free online resources such as educational games, social media safety, do-it-yourself science projects, and computer basics.

Whether it’s homework help and a “making it rain in a jar” activity for students, or computer and internet basics to financial literacy for parents, families can take advantage of a host of resources to improve their digital literacy skills...

The Cox Digital Academy offers:

• Computer and internet basics, teaching users how to conduct web searches, create and manage email accounts, and how to navigate search engines.
• Educational games and resources for students and teachers, providing homework help, teaching strategies, and more.
• Job skills, enabling parents to easily navigate job search engines, create resumes and fill out online applications.
• Social media and online safety, giving parents and children the tools to help prevent cyberbullying, learn about social media basics, and protect social media privacy.
• Online financial literacy, such as setting up or managing a checking account online and managing an online budget.

For more information, or to sign up for Connect2Compete visit https://www.cox.com/aboutus/connect2compete.html

The Digital Academy is available at www.cox.com/aboutus/connect2compete.html.

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Source: Coast News

Free tuition draws Minnesota students to University of the People | Minneapolis Star Tribune

Photo: Maura Lerner

Maura Lerner, higher-education reporter says, "At a time of mounting anxiety over college costs and student debt, the online school is doing its best to smash the mold." 

Jeanette Oehlers of Willmar despaired of ever finishing college. By her account, she was already deeply in debt and at least two years away from earning her degree.

That’s when her father-in-law decided to search the internet. “Hey, I found a university for you,” he told her.

“How much money?” she asked.

The answer, she admits, was hard to believe.

Now, she’s one of some 10,000 students from over 190 countries enrolled in the University of the People, an online school where tuition is zero.

At a time of mounting anxiety over college costs and student debt, UoPeople, as its known, is doing its best to smash the mold. Billed as the world’s first nonprofit, tuition-free accredited university, it relies mainly on volunteer instructors and course material that is freely available online.

The University of the People isn’t completely free. Students pay an assessment fee at the end of each course ($100 for undergrads, $200 for grad students), plus a one-time $60 application fee.

In all, a four-year bachelor’s degree would cost $4,060 — compared to, say, $50,000 at the University of Minnesota, or $210,000 at Carleton College, based on current sticker prices. And for now, the California-based initiative offers degrees in just three fields: business administration, computer science and health science.

While some wonder how much clout a University of the People degree will carry, the school is slowly gaining a foothold around the world, including on the Minnesota prairie. As of August, the school reported 111 students in Minnesota...

Influential TED Talk

The school was the brainchild of its president, Shai Reshef, an Israeli businessman who once ran a for-profit education company and gained a measure of fame from a 2014 TED talk outlining his vision for a tuition-free university.

“We set out to build a model that will cut down almost entirely the cost of higher education,” he said then. His prescription: no bricks and mortar; no textbook fees, and little payroll: “Even the professors, the most expensive line in any university balance sheet, come free to our students,” he said. Thousands of professors, graduate students and others have volunteered their time, according to Reshef, to design the curriculum and teach classes.

After selling his education company, Reshef plowed $3 million of his own funds to start University of the People in 2009, with dreams of serving massive numbers of students. It would, he predicted, “open the gates to higher education for every qualified student.”
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Recommended Reading
Shai Reshef - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 
 

University of the People

Shai Reshef is the President of University of the People (UoPeople)—the world’s first tuition-free, non-profit, accredited online academic institution dedicated to opening access to higher education. 

The World's First Tuition-Free Online University - How does it work? 
 

Source: Minneapolis Star Tribune and University of the People Channel (YouTube)

"What Are the Arts and Sciences? (A Guide for the Curious)," edited by Dan Rockmore | Santa Fe New Mexican

In the introduction to this collection, Dan Rockmore, a professor of mathematics and computer science at Dartmouth College, reports about reading W.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World with his eight-year-old son

What Are the Arts and Sciences?
Dartmouth College Press, 2017.

“It made me think about how most of us — if not all of us — irrespective of age, don’t really know what the big subjects of inquiry are about,” he writes. Gombrich, an acclaimed art historian, published his volume in 1936 with the aim of presenting the vast sweep of world history — events, inventions, ideas, beliefs — in a way young readers might grasp. The book proved popular in its original German and in many other languages, though it was not issued in English translation until 2005. Writing in Vienna in the mid-1930s, Gombrich (who fled to Britain in 1939) tried not to sound entirely despondent about things, but neither did he whitewash reality. “The history of the world is, sadly, not a pretty poem,” he wrote. “It offers little variety, and it is nearly always the unpleasant things that are repeated, over and over again.”

So much has changed since then, and perhaps so little. One change, for sure, is that fields of inquiry have grown ever more specialized. The possibility of an individual person mastering the world’s knowledge with both depth and breadth has grown increasingly remote with passing years. Still, colleges are in the business of helping people acquire insights to how the world thinks, and Rockmore’s book could serve as a stimulating guide not for eight-year-olds but rather for college-bound students examining what roads of discovery lie open to them.

Rockmore roped in 27 Dartmouth professors (including himself) to write 10 or 12 pages each on what kinds of questions their respective fields address and how they go about examining them. They present basic definitions and boundaries for their study, they suggest some of the specialized avenues of scrutiny their disciplines embrace, and most of them provide an interesting case study or two that reveal how a master of such-and-such a field might go about examining a problem. I began reading this volume with the mistaken idea that the scholars were setting out to convey what’s hot in their areas right now, but on the whole these essays look in the direction of fundamentals rather than toward the cutting edge. How could it be otherwise? If your last brush with math was high-school trigonometry, there’s no way you can comprehend whatever got the PhDs exercised at last year’s convention of the American Mathematical Society.

The essays range in quality, but many of them very successfully frame these disciplines — classics, geography, linguistics, political science, theater, and many others — in ways that would make a person want to dig deeper. “Chemistry is the science of understanding the properties of matter and how matter forms from the basic elements that make up our universe,” writes Rockmore’s colleague F. Jon Kull. “Although chemistry is often called the central science, I think of chemistry as occupying an arc in a great circle of disciplines that help us understand that world we live in. To one side, chemistry is flanked by physics, beyond which is math; and I think many would agree that math edges up against philosophy. On the other side, chemistry blends into biology, beyond which is physiology, and, for humans, psychology, sociology, and you guessed it, philosophy. … You can start your journey of understanding our world at any point on the circle.” Maybe you hadn’t thought of things quite that way.
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Additional resources  

“It’s not a polemic, but if you sample from this buffet of ideas, it will feed your curiosity about the liberal arts,” says Professor Dan Rockmore.
Photo: Robert Gill

What Are the Arts and Sciences? 27 Professors Give Answers by Charlotte Albright.
"In a new book of essays, Dartmouth faculty write about their work."

Source: Santa Fe New Mexican

At St. Cloud State: Harry Potter and the philosopher's class | St. Cloud Times

St. Cloud State University professor
Carolyn Hartz sits at her desk with
materials for her philosophy course
focused on the Harry Potter stories
on campus, Tuesday, Sept. 5.
Photo: Nora G. Hertel

Nora Hertel, Government Watchdog Reporter at St. Cloud Times Media notes, "It's the season when students gather their textbooks — and their magic wands and cauldrons — to return to school at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry."

The non-magic students, or muggles, at St. Cloud State University can mix the magical world of Harry Potter with lessons on philosophy courtesy of  professor Carolyn Hartz. 

On St. Cloud State Professor Carolyn Hartz's desk sits a potion puzzle she recreated from the first Harry Potter book for her philosophy students.
Photo: Nora G. Hertel

Her class applies Aristotle's 2,500-year-old writings on friendship to character relationships in the J.K. Rowling books-turned-movies about boy wizard Harry Potter. 

"Most of the students in the class are Harry Potter nerds. That's why they sign up for it," Hartz said. "I tell them: 'You can bring your wands, but you can't use them on exams.'"

Hartz's class covers ethics, logic, love, the human soul and the nature of time through the lens of the Harry Potter stories. Students consider the philosophy of education too, because, after all, the stories all take place at the school Hogwarts. 

"These are fundamental human concerns," Hartz said. "Philosophy is, in my view, critical thinking about fundamental areas of human concern."

Miles Nelson, a second-year St. Cloud State student, took Hartz's Harry Potter course last spring and it inspired him to pursue a minor in philosophy. His major is mass communications in TV broadcasting.

"This class really solidified how much I love thinking about hard problems and questions with hard answers," Nelson said.

Hartz's class made Nelson a bigger fan of the Harry Potter series as well. Nelson took the course with Hartz in Alnwick Castle as part of a British study-abroad program. Filmmakers shot some scenes for the early Harry Potter movies there. 

Rowling's stories provided understandable examples for the tough concepts in philosophy, Nelson said. And the class showed the depth of Rowling's work.

"If you read (the Harry Potter series) through as a kid, you probably didn't see the elements of the story that are really deep and profound," he said.

Hartz's sunlit office has Harry Potter-themed trinkets in every corner, and she wears a Time-Turner around her neck, a necklace used by the character Hermione Granger to go back in time (and take more classes). 

On her desk Hartz has a recreated logic puzzle from the first book, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." To students she hands out red stones, known as philosopher's stones in the British version of the book. 

Using principles of ethics, they consider which magical spells should be allowed. They talk about how author Rowling views a human soul, as the dark magic in the story includes dementors, which can suck out a soul, and horcruxes, which are made to hold part of a desecrated soul. 

Hartz has taught her course for a few years and it usually fills up, she said. It's the third week of the semester and she has about 20 students and room for more.

She's not the only college professor to tap into students' enthusiasm for Harry Potter. 

Read more...

Source: St. Cloud Times  

The sustainable scientist | Science Magazine

Photo: Jeffrey McDonnell

Jeffrey J. McDonnell, professor in the School of Environment and Sustainability reports, "After I started out in a university faculty position nearly 30 years ago, the early years were rough. Not because of problems, exactly, but because of opportunities—too many of them" 

Photo: Robert Neubecker

I did not know how much was enough, so I just did more and more. As a result, I lived a life distracted, both at home and at work, with too much to do and too many people to possibly satisfy. Guilt was a constant companion—for not spending enough time with my family, for not devoting enough time to my students, for not accepting a review request or committee assignment. It simply was not sustainable. It took me several years after getting tenure to come back to some semblance of a balanced life.

“Stride across the finish line … with a smile on your face.”

Now, when I mentor early-career scientists I warn them about the unsustainability trap that I fell into. And I try to instill the idea that the goal is to stride across the finish line—whether you are completing a postdoc, getting tenure, or reaching some other career goal—with a smile on your face, not in a state of collapse.

But how? A sustainable scientist is still a hard-working scientist. Combining hard work with laserlike focus and ruthless time management is an important step toward making your life sustainable. Even more important is opportunity management.

Early on, I worried that each new opportunity—an invitation to give a talk, participate in a proposal evaluation panel, or join a committee of a scientific society—might never come along again. I felt like I couldn't say no. I now understand that early-career opportunities, like gray hairs, don't stop appearing, and that sometimes it's important to turn them down so that you can complete the things you've already said yes to. As you work on learning to say no, the “want to–need to” matrix can be a useful tool: Say yes only to the things you both need and want to do, and say no if you either do not need or do not want to do something.

Read more... 

Additional resources  
Science  15 Sep 2017:
Vol. 357, Issue 6356, pp. 1202 

doi:10.1126/science.357.6356.1202

Source: Science Magazine

Beyond FinFET: The Research Alliance’s Plans for Microprocessor Evolution | Evolving Science - Computer Science & Technology

Photo: Deirdre O’Donnell

"FinFET-based computer processors are one of the great breakthroughs of this age. Their form factors and architectures have allowed for the development of nearly every chip in nearly every device that enhance and sometimes define our lives today" argues Deirdre O’Donnell, professional writer for several years. Deirdre is also an experienced journalist and editor.

Photo: Evolving Science

Without these silicon microstructures, computerised gadgets as we know them might not have progressed to the relative power and portability they demonstrate as productivity and media-consumption tools. However, FinFET does have upper limits, particularly in terms of transistor density over a given area. Therefore, if computer processing is to get any stronger or more complex, processor architecture will inevitably have to move beyond this historical threshold and take on a new form. A collaborative effort between IBM, Samsung and other companies may have produced the next generation of transistors that will miniaturise processors beyond the traditional 7nm barrier.

FinFET Structure and Some of its Functions 
FinFET is the transistor standard that has revolutionised the form factors, computing abilities and power consumption of computer processors. It enables chips to have the small footprints we’re all familiar with, as well as their relatively astronomic electronic speeds that modern users take for granted. Without FinFET, consumer-grade electronics, particularly lighter and thinner device types including laptops and smartphones, simply could not exist. The transistors made based on FinFET architecture take the form of non-planar rectangles, or ‘fins’, of silicon atoms at the nanometric scale, stacked alongside one another. The fins can switch between states such as on or off very easily, while using ever-decreasing amounts of current at very high efficiency. This is the essential basis of modern data transfer and storage.

The Limits of FinFET 
Modern increments in processor speed and power depend on the steadily-increasing density and complexity levels at which the fins can be ‘stacked’. However, these properties inevitably meet ceilings, which are mainly determined by the atomic structure of silicon and the forces acting on it. This translates into a real-world limit of 5nm per FinFET-powered chip. However, because of other physical limits, mostly those of current flow between fins, these processors would be beaten by other form factors of a superior architecture on a chip of the same size. For example, silicon ‘fins’ are relatively static, which means they cannot adjust variably to the presence of current. Therefore, the best available FinFET-based processor units, or ‘nodes’, are about 10nm in size, whereas there is potential for more processing power per nanometer in the presence of improved silicon-based transistor types.

5 nanometer transistor -- how they did it


In other words, FinFET is still limited as to how many transistors can be packed into each nanometer of processor size. Currently, the best ratio that industrial research has produced equates to about 20 billion transistors across a 7nm node. This impressive array was developed by the Research Alliance, a consortium of investigators who have come together from major multinationals such as Samsung, GLOBALFOUNDRIES and IBM to assess the next directions for processing technology and how they may be realised. That was nearly two years ago, however. Currently, the Research Alliance has presented the debut of their new, 5nm node. This new device has increased the transistor number to 30 billion, and may represent the new generation of large-scale computing.
Read more... 

Source: Evolving Science and IBM Research Channel (YouTube)

Brain-Machine Interface Isn't Sci-Fi Anymore | WIRED - Backchannel

"Thomas Reardon puts a terrycloth stretch band with microchips and electrodes woven into the fabric—a steampunk version of jewelry—on each of his forearms. “This demo is a mind fuck,” says Reardon, who prefers to be called by his surname only" continues WIRED.
 

Thomas Reardon talks with his staff.
Photo: Alex Welsh

He sits down at a computer keyboard, fires up his monitor, and begins typing. After a few lines of text, he pushes the keyboard away, exposing the white surface of a conference table in the midtown Manhattan headquarters of his startup. He resumes typing. Only this time he is typing on…nothing. Just the flat tabletop. Yet the result is the same: The words he taps out appear on the monitor.

That’s cool, but what makes it more than a magic trick is how it’s happening. The text on the screen is being generated not by his fingertips, but rather by the signals his brain is sending to his fingers. The armband is intercepting those signals, interpreting them correctly, and relaying the output to the computer, just as a keyboard would have. Whether or not Reardon’s digits actually drum the table is irrelevant—whether he has a hand is irrelevant—it’s a loop of his brain to machine. What’s more, Reardon and his colleagues have found that the machine can pick up more subtle signals—like the twitches of a finger—rather than mimicking actual typing.

You could be blasting a hundred words a minute on your smart phone with your hands in your pockets. In fact, just before Reardon did his mind-fuck demo, I watched his cofounder, Patrick Kaifosh, play a game of Asteroids on his iPhone. He had one of those weird armbands sitting between his wrist and his elbows. On the screen you could see Asteroids as played by a decent gamer, with the tiny spaceship deftly avoiding big rocks and spinning around to blast them into little pixels. But the motions Kaifosh was making to control the game were barely perceptible: little palpitations of his fingers as his palm lay flat against the tabletop. It seemed like he was playing the game only with mind control. And he kind of was.

2017 has been a coming-out year for the Brain-Machine Interface (BMI), a technology that attempts to channel the mysterious contents of the two-and-a-half-pound glop inside our skulls to the machines that are increasingly central to our existence. The idea has been popped out of science fiction and into venture capital circles faster than the speed of a signal moving through a neuron. Facebook, Elon Musk, and other richly funded contenders, such as former Braintree founder Bryan Johnson, have talked seriously about silicon implants that would not only merge us with our computers, but also supercharge our intelligence. But CTRL-Labs, which comes with both tech bona fides and an all-star neuroscience advisory board, bypasses the incredibly complicated tangle of connections inside the cranium and dispenses with the necessity of breaking the skin or the skull to insert a chip—the Big Ask of BMI. Instead, the company is concentrating on the rich set of signals controlling movement that travel through the spinal column, which is the nervous system’s low-hanging fruit.

Read more...

Source: WIRED

5 Things You Need To Know Before Choosing To Study Online | Junkee - Uni - Campus

"More and more universities are upgrading their offerings to include classes, units and whole degrees that can be completed from home – or wherever there’s internet access" says Seb Starcevic, freelance writer based in Melbourne.

Photo: The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt/Netflix)

As someone who has studied remotely for the better part of two years, take it from me that this arrangement has its benefits. But it’s also not for everyone.

Forget those frantic, heavily caffeinated early mornings navigating public transport. No more rushing to catch that 6am train or fighting for a parking space. With no butt-in-seat lessons to attend, heading to class is as simple as rolling out of bed and powering on your computer. Pants optional.

For those with mobility issues, this means one less major headache. Same goes for those living more than an hour or two away from campus.

Distance learning’s greatest strength can also be its biggest drawback. Once you’ve removed any reason to venture out into the world, you run the risk of succumbing to social isolation and turning into a full-fledged hermit. Sad reacts only.

No matter how introverted you think you are, human beings have thrived on social interaction since our caveman days. It’s vital to our health – and I say this as a committed shut-in. Give me the Netflix password and a takeout menu and I’ll see you in two weeks.

Of course, isolation isn’t so much an issue for those with an active social life or part-time job pushing them into new social situations. More on that later.

There’s something about lecture theatres that immediately makes me want to doze off. Maybe it’s the way the lecturer always seems to speak in a monotone. Or maybe it’s the ambient lighting, dimmed to comatose levels for a slideshow or video presentation. It’s certainly not because the chairs are comfy.

At any rate, one of the major perks of taking online classes is that lectures are usually pre-recorded, meaning you can listen to them in your own time, fast-forwarding through the boring bits or pausing to rewind that crucial snippet. You can even multi-task by slipping on a pair of headphones and going about your day, a bit like a podcast.
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Source: Junkee