President's Message

Have you ever stopped to reflect on how technology is truly changing the way people access education? Like many of you, I went to university in the era before mobile computing and the explosion of the internet. In that era, paper books and journals in the university library opened the world of knowledge to me. If I close my eyes and think about those years, I can still see the narrow staircases that led up and down the floors of the book stacks in my university library and I can still smell the faint musty odor of aging paper books. These are fond memories of a simpler and slower time. It often took hours to find the information I needed among the books in the stacks. I trusted the information because it was curated by the engineering librarians – I felt that the book wouldn’t be in the library if it wasn’t a respected authoritative source.

Today, of course, the wilderness of the worldwide internet is parsed in seconds with queries into the indexes created by search providers. The power of natural language processing helps guide your search through the knowledge graphs that have been created by content crawlers. Thousands to millions of hits appear in your browser for your leisurely reading pleasure. This content has not been curated by the search provider and it is up to the reader to decide what is accurate and what is not accurate. Self-curation is a mature learning skill that experts possess because of acquired knowledge and critical thinking development. Many undergraduates use the internet as their primary reference source. Yet, a lot of these undergraduates have not developed the skills of self-curation and take for granted that every website they access contains accurate information. Thus, as online information becomes the norm, it becomes important that IEEE and the Education Society help provide peer-reviewed and curated information that becomes a trusted source. At the K12 level, IEEE Educational Activities Board programs like TryEngineering.org and TryEngineering Together, present age-appropriate engineering curricula and connect interested students to mentors. And, the new IEEE Learning Network helps practicing engineers learn new skills to advance their careers. Next year, the Education Society will begin exploring initiatives that enhance IEEE curated content at the university level. I will be reaching out to you as our community of experts for help with these initiatives.

Curated content is only one area of technology-supported learning. Another branch of research is distribution channels. Over many decades, distance learning has evolved from live or videotaped lecture formats into the massively open online courses (MOOCs) that are beginning to change not only the way content is delivered but also the audiences that consume the content. The Society hosted its newest continuing education conference, IEEE Learning with MOOCs (LWMOOCs), in October in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. An engaged community of MOOC developers, learning scientists, and learning engineers gathered for three days of keynotes, poster presentations, and lightning presentations (short author pitches about their paper). Some of the many topics discussed include designing content for diverse audiences, engaging learners across the cultural divides caused by geographical distribution, providing content with active learning engagement scaffolded into the MOOC platform, analyzing learner performance across content and time, and tailoring content to improve learning using individualized analytics. I am excited that this topic-specific conference is now part of our Society portfolio. I believe that residential university education and online education can and should co-exist. Different audiences can choose the delivery mode that best enables their development. I want our Society to actively participate in the dialogue on best practices in both modes of delivery. The proceedings of LWMOOCs 2019 will be available soon in IEEE Xplore. You can scan the technical program here.

The Society also hosted its oldest flagship conference, Frontiers in Education (FIE), in October in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Society founded FIE in 1971. As its lead sponsor, we are proud that this respected international forum for the theory and practice of engineering and computer science education is now a half-century old. The conference attracts between 500 and 600 educators from around the world for four days of workshops, panels, special sessions, keynotes, and standard-length author presentations. The conference has an average H-index of 35 and ranks highly in many of the conference quality reports. This year, FIE included many sessions about technology-supported learning. The conference steering committee and technical program chairs recognize that blended learning, learning analytics, gamification, courseware, distance education, and remote laboratories are maturing into standard practices within engineering education. I attended many of these sessions and found the presentations enlightening. The world of the blackboard that I learned within is slowly being replaced by bits and bytes. The presentations helped me think more deeply about how students will engage with content ten or even twenty years into the future. If you’d like to see the program offered this year at FIE, you can scan its technical program here.

The Society is a leader in standardizing technology-supported learning through remote laboratories. Earlier this year, the Society published IEEE Standard 1876-2019, an IEEE Standard for Networked Smart Learning Objects for Online Laboratories. This is the first standard published by the Society and focuses on techniques to ensure that remote laboratories are described and implemented correctly as smart learning objects so that they can be accessed through learning management systems as Laboratories as a Service (LaaS). In November, Dr. Hamadou Saliah-Hassane was recognized by IEEE as the Standard 1876 Working Group Chair when he received the IEEE Standards Association 2019 Emerging Technology Award on behalf of the Working Group. I congratulate the Working Group and Dr. Saliah-Hassane and I look forward to their next standard already under development.

Finally, recognizing the importance of modern publication technologies in continuing education, the Society has decided to offer its first online English language open access publication. In 2020, the IEEE Education Society section of IEEE Access will begin accepting paper submissions from authors. Authors that publish within this section of IEEE Access will pay the open access fee – often a required and budgeted item in sponsored research grants. This open access fee allows worldwide dissemination of research results to any reader for free. The IEEE Education Society section of IEEE Access will have the same high-quality peer-review as our other journals. IEEE Access currently has an impact factor of 4 in the Journal Citation Report (JCR) making our new IEEE Education Society section an attractive publication venue for any Society member that wishes open access for their work. Of course, our other high-quality archival journals remain available as respected peer-review venues for authors not participating in open access.

As education evolves with learning technologies, so must the Society and its products evolve. I look forward to the future! Let me know what you think will happen to education in five or ten years. Use our social media channels to post your thoughts or contact me directly. On behalf of the IEEE Education Society, I wish you a wonderful end-of-year holiday season. Happy New Year!

Sincerely,
Russ