With more instructors than ever before teaching remote and hybrid courses this Fall semester, insights into course experience are critical for the continued success of both instructors and students at Georgia Tech. With that in mind, the Center for 21st Century Universities (C21U) has developed a new tool that provides instructors with course-specific weekly snapshots of how students are performing. Designed to work seamlessly with Canvas, Georgia Tech’s Learning Management System, the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) Tool gives instructors a new, near real-time measure of student progress.

In response to the global impact of COVID-19, the National Science Foundation announced and awarded a series of Convergence Accelerator Rapid Response Research (RAPID) grants, of which Eduworks Corporation (Eduworks) and the University System of Georgia’s Bridging the Health Care Skill Gap project is a recipient.

During Spring 2020, C21U initiated a pilot study to explore the idea of awarding digital credentials to Georgia Tech students via Canvas, the current Learning Management System for the university. The need for universally recognized and accepted verifiable digital credentials arises from the gap between the skills that recruiters and admissions committees seek, and the academic proof that college transcripts offer. Currently, many academic credentials are non-indicative of a range of skills that students gain from the courses they undertake in college, thus making it difficult for recruiters and admissions committees to evaluate candidates. If digital credentials are widely recognized and accepted across universities and education providers, it would not only provide students with a one-stop solution for credentials but would also aid university students, faculty, admissions committees, and employers in holistically assessing students’ skills.

This year, as C21U graduate research assistants, we were tasked with researching and designing initial concepts for a nascent but quickly-developing CNE project: the Georgia Tech atrium. As a physical gathering space and gateway to both in-person and digital GT services—such as career counseling, exploring GT credentials, and networking—the GTatrium™ is intended to expand the possibility for individuals to experience Georgia Tech beyond Atlanta. Alongside visiting atria, users will be able to extend their experiences using the GTatrium™ mobile application, weaving together their in-person and digital experiences, from near atria and afar.

Georgia Tech has joined MIT and 10 other international universities as founding members of the Digital Credentials Consortium, a collaborative, intercollegiate research and design group focused on the creation of verifiable infrastructure for digital credentials of academic achievement. The group has released a co-authored report that charts a viable path to developing such infrastructure.

Georgia Tech’s Commission on Creating the Next in Education (CNE) has been named the 2019 winner of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) Annual Achievement Award. 

The Georgia Institute of Technology has been awarded a grant of $499,753 by the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator to develop the Competency Catalyst project in conjunction with the University System of Georgia (USG). The Center for 21st Century Universities (C21U) will work in partnership with a skilled project team that includes university faculty, researchers, and educational technology leaders from across the country to oversee the successful implementation of Competency Catalyst.

With the start of fall semester, C21U welcomes Ashok Goel to the team in the role of chief scientist. Goel will lead C21U's research agenda, with a focus on education innovation in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI).

MIT Press has released a comprehensive, new volume of blended learning research by Georgia Tech faculty. Blended Learning in Practice: A Guide for Practitioners and Researchers was collected and edited by a team housed within the Center for 21st Century Universities (C21U) and spanning a number of departments across the Institute.

What does it mean to be Deliberately Innovative? On April 11, Georgia Tech’s CNE Program Office partnered with CDI to host an information session and workshop focused on the concept and process of Deliberate Innovation.

Effective immediately, the Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics and Computing (CEISMC) will become a unit within the Center for 21st Century Universities (C21U). Following a detailed assessment, including interviews with key stakeholders and a K-12 summit event in fall 2017, the organizational adjustment moves CEISMC out of its current structure within the College of Sciences.

My favorite description of service design comes from Marc Fonteijn: “When you have two coffee shops right next to each other, that each sell the exact same coffee at the exact same price; service design is what makes you walk into the one and not the other, come back often, and tell your friends about it.”

On February 7 2019, C21U hosted a seminar titled “Extended Reality (XR) for Teaching and Learning.” XR refers to real-and-virtual combined environments, including virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR). We invited speakers from four teams across Georgia Tech’s campus to discuss projects currently underway throughout the Institute, and to discuss the future of XR in education.

During the Summer of 2018, the Center for 21st Century Universities (C21U) embarked on a journey to introduce Blockcerts at Georgia Tech. Blockcerts are blockchain-powered academic credentials, housed on a mobile application, that are decentralized, secure, and verified.  

However, in order to realize the full potential of Blockcerts, it is essential that the user groups are actively considered in the creation of the application. That is why, this year, we sought to reach out to the Blockcerts application user groups and conduct research to better understand their experiences using the application, as well as the students’ surrounding contexts of use for the application.

A funny thing happens as online learning scales. At first, learning scales by breaking the requirement for collocated meetings, allowing students to attend live lectures via telepresence from anywhere in the world. Then, learning scales by breaking the requirement for synchronous meetings altogether: with prepared lecture material and textbooks, asynchronous class forums, and modern learning management systems -- there is little need to get together at the same time in the same place… or at least, little strong need for the fundamental requirements of a classroom.

Georgia Tech’s Strategic Plan advisory process will soon be reconstituted to support the Commission on Creating the Next in Education (CNE) Program Office, now housed in the Center for 21st Century Universities (C21U).

From Nov. 29-30, Georgia Tech was host to a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded summit focused on the development of affordable, sustainable, and scalable educational environments, or Scalable Advanced Learning Ecosystems (SALE).

Jenny Strakovsky, Assistant Director of Career Education and Graduate Programs for the School of Modern Languages, is a co-recipient, along with Aaron Santesso, a professor of literature in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, of the GT-FIRE grant directed towards the development of new programs that apply the humanities to training students in 21st century skills and whole person education. These include the Institute's new M.S. in Applied Language and Intercultural Studies (MS-ALIS) and M.S. in Global Media and Culture (MS-GMC), a suite of graduate certificates for professionals, and a new curriculum design lab, 21st century Humanities, which is researching humanities practices in traditionally non-humanistic spaces.

This year our VIP team’s research focus is on data that we've collected through Georgia Tech's online platforms. This includes mass-market courses hosted on Coursera, our online masters programs on edX and data from Canvas, the learning management system that services both our online and on-campus courses. To introduce the students to learning analytics using data from online platforms, we hosted Dan Davis, a PhD student from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.