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The IoT-Connected ClassroomReach more students through enhanced virtual learning opportunities

College students want a highly personalized, engaging educational experience with increased virtual learning opportunities and more flexibility in classroom models. To meet these demands, colleges and universities can bring the Internet of Things (IoT) into their classrooms to help connect the hardware and software that faculty and students use every day. An IoT-enabled classroom can take advantage of a college’s existing technology investment to help automate and simplify classroom tasks, improving both online and face-to-face learning.

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Students Expect to Learn Virtually

Student demographics in higher education have shifted. The typical college student is no longer fresh out of high school, living and studying full-time on campus. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), only about a third of college students are 18 to 21 years old and attend college full time.1 More college students are a combination of part-time attendees, older, and working. In fact, nearly 40 percent of all college students are older than 25.2 And the trend for increasing student enrollment at age 25 and above is expected to nearly double that of younger students through 2020.3

Because of these shifting demographics, more students than ever are seeking increased remote learning opportunities and adjustable classroom models so that they can better juggle school, jobs, and commutes. According to the EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research, 72 percent of students prefer blend-ed classrooms, where they get a mix of both online and face-to-face learning.4 Students want to be able to communicate with instruc-tors in person and to have anytime, anywhere access to course materials.

To attract more students and to meet their educational expectations, universities and col-leges must learn to use technology more effectively so that they can offer more blended learning environments with fewer technical difficulties. Schools that accomplish this will offer their students the highly personalized, engaging, and flexible educational experience that students seek from higher education.

The Project Minerva Solution:

IoT in the Classroom

It can be challenging on many levels to create blended classrooms that work smoothly. Administrators and IT must come together to find a way to put the best tools in the hands of their faculty and students—while making use of existing investments, such as classroom hardware that varies from building to building or university-wide learning management sys-tem (LMS) software. The end goal is to simplify and automate processes so that technology can enhance learning instead of getting in its way. Imagine how distracting and frustrating it can be for instructors to lose even a few min-utes of class time setting up or troubleshooting the lecture recording software that helps enable the hybrid classroom.

Now, what if that recording software could be automated by using an IoT solution, saving the instructor the hassle of doing it manually? This is possible today, and it is only the begin-ning of what Citrix software can do with IoT in the classroom.

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What Is the IoT and What Does

It Mean for Education?

The Internet of Things is a network of connected devices (such as printers, projectors, digital white boards, and cameras) that can be centrally managed. These devices also generate data that can be used to gain insights about how they are being used. Along with management software, these connected devices can simplify classroom tasks so that teachers can spend more time teaching and less time fiddling with classroom hardware or software.

The Project Minerva solution, an experiment from the Citrix Education Experience Incubator, is designed to help educational institutions use and connect their existing technologies to provide an IoT-enabled classroom. Project Minerva uses the Citrix Octoblu IoT platform to help connect and automate the physical and virtual aspects of the class, so classroom tasks can be automated and simplified. Project Minerva integrates with common components and solutions already found in the classroom today, such as the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) environment; LMS software; IoT hardware such as sensors and the Intel IoT Gateway; third-party cloud services; and other learning apps or software (see Figure 1).

The software and hardware that faculty use on a daily basis can be connected through Project Minerva, requiring just one logon to the dashboard to manage them all, including setting up automated workflows. Project Minerva makes it simple and automated for faculty to post class content to the LMS so students get quick, easy access to more relevant content.

A Typical Blended-Classroom Experience

Elyse, a business writing instructor, waits outside the classroom for the previous class to finish up.5 By the time the room clears out, she’ll have about five minutes to set up for her class. This time frame causes her a lot of angst; she rushes in, connects the laptop to the podium, sets up the video recording hardware, pulls down the screen, opens the slides for the day on the screen, logs on to the LMS, and adjusts the lights. Because of all these setup requirements, her class often starts late, and she doesn’t have time to talk with the students or answer any questions.

Minerva

Figure 1. The Project Minerva solution uses Octoblu software as the hub that connects and integrates with common components and solutions already found in the classroom today, such as the BYOD environment; LMS software; IoT hardware, such as sensors and the Intel IoT Gateway; and third-party cloud services, software, and apps.

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Elyse’s class is a hybrid model, in which she provides a live broadcast of each session, so her students can attend up to half of her classes remotely. More often than not, though, the video recording software and the camera can give Elyse trouble. Trying to broadcast her class live proves problematic. She spends a lot of time getting the camera to link to her laptop, downloading the recording after class, and making it available on the LMS. And when she has back-to-back classes, she often doesn’t get a chance to add the recording to the LMS until several hours after class ends.

About one-third of the course is designed for group work, so Elyse has tried various ways to engage remote students in real-time group work. Her students have used a variety of collaborative tools with only moderate success, often feeling frustrated that the various tools don’t work well with each other or with the university’s cloud-storage service or LMS software.

By the end of class, Elyse often feels that managing technology has cost her valuable instruction time, which causes her to feel less connected to her students. In turn, her students feel the same frustration, are less engaged, and are not impressed with the less-than-seamless blended-classroom experience.

A Blended Classroom with the Project Minerva Solution

Automated classroom setupThe Project Minerva IoT solution automates many of Elyse’s daily tasks by connecting the hardware and software that she uses to enable a blended classroom. Now, when she enters the classroom, all she has to do is press a button on her laptop or smart phone to initiate the automated processes that get her classroom ready. The projector turns on, the screen lowers, the lights adjust, and the live video recording starts. Project Minerva also communicates with the LMS software to pull Elyse’s presentation slides for that day’s lesson from the cloud, open them on the laptop, and display them on the screen.

Her settings are preconfigured in Project Minerva, which connects automatically to IoT hardware already in the classroom, such as the Intel IoT Gateway and sensors built on Intel technology. About a year ago, the university IT admins chose the Intel IoT Platform as the foundation for their IoT ecosys-tem, which includes the Intel IoT Gateway. The platform simplifies the connection of IoT software and hardware and makes it easy for organizations to grow into the IoT solutions of the future.

The Intel IoT Platform also provides value through rich data analytic solutions at the endpoint or in the datacenter. This capability helps the university to collect data that lets them determine which class times are best suited for hybrid models, or to track how many students log in to live broadcasts remotely. IT admins also like the peace of mind they get from knowing that all Intel hardware and software products are embedded with trusted McAfee security features and are designed to work well with any third-party solution, including Project Minerva.

Educational IoT Made Simple

with Octoblu and Intel

Citrix Octoblu and the Intel IoT Platform can help you connect the isolated technologies that you already have so you can remove distractions and simplify classroom functions. Octoblu software is the engine that drives Project Minerva and is a powerful solution for automating, monitoring, and analyzing connected devices. Octoblu automates many everyday classroom-management functions based on triggers, such as when an instructor logs in to the LMS.

The Intel IoT Platform is an end-to-end reference model and family of products from Intel that works with third-party solutions, like Octoblu, to seamlessly and securely connect devices. By providing pre-integrated, pre-validated hardware and software building blocks, such as sensors and the Intel IoT Gateway, the Intel IoT Platform connects legacy and new systems and enables data flow between edge devices and the cloud. The Intel IoT Platform also offers advanced data management and analytics from sensor to datacenter and delivers this trusted data with a tight integration of hardware- and software-based security.

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Simplified video streaming and recording When Elyse arrives in the classroom and initiates Project Minerva, Citrix GoToMeeting software opens and connects with the camera in the room via the Intel Gateway hardware. At 10 A.M., the start of class, Project Minerva triggers the camera to start streaming the live broadcast of the classroom for students who are attending remotely. GoToMeeting is also recording the classroom video to make it available online for later viewing.

When class is over, Project Minerva saves the recording, closes GoToMeeting, and saves a link to the recording on the LMS—the link is categorized by day and time, so that students can easily find and access the recordings. All of these tasks are automated, so Elyse doesn’t have to deal with them after class.

Students are more engagedBecause Elyse isn’t manually doing all these tasks, she can spend a few minutes before and after class visiting with the students and answering their questions, connecting with them on a more per-sonal level. To help the students who attend class remotely feel more connected to the classroom and more engaged in the learning, Elyse has set up the GoToMeeting software to keep a live chat window open during the broadcast. She keeps an eye on the notification light to see if students have asked any questions online. At the end of class, the chat conversations are saved and emailed to her so that she can respond to any questions that might not have been addressed in class.

Remote collaboration made easyWhen it comes time for in-class team projects, the Project Minerva solution is a game changer. Project Minerva connects the LMS software to Citrix ShareFile cloud storage and to Citrix GoToMeeting. Elyse set these tools up for her students to use so that they can mimic a real-world business environment, collaborating with remote team members. Teams with members who are attending class remotely that day use Citrix GoToMeeting video-conference software to work together during class, and they share and work on their collaborative writing assignment by using their preferred cloud storage service, such as Citrix Sharefile, Microsoft OneNote, or Google Drive. Students often collaborate like this outside of class as well, which is much easier than trying to meet in person because they have such varied schedules and don’t all live nearby campus.

At the end of class, Elyse feels good about maximizing her instruction time. She also feels like her students are in good hands with Project Minerva outside of class too. Students can access Project Minerva from any device, giving them access to all the tools that they need to accomplish their out-of-class assignments. Her students are grateful for a productive classroom with more attention from their instructor, less technology disruptions, and excellent real-world collaboration experience.

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About CitrixCitrix (NASDAQ:CTXS) is a leader in virtualization, networking and cloud services to enable new ways for people to work better. Citrix solutions help IT and service providers to build, manage and secure, virtual and mobile workspaces that seamlessly deliver apps, desktops, data and services to anyone, on any device, over any network or cloud. This year Citrix is celebrating 25 years of innovation, making IT simpler and people more productive with mobile workstyles. With annual revenue in 2013 of $2.9 billion, Citrix solutions are in use at more than 330,000 organizations and by over 100 million people globally. Learn more at www.citrix.com.

Copyright © 2015 Citrix Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Citrix, the Citrix logo, Citrix ShareFile, and GoToMeeting are trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. and/or one of its subsidiaries, and may be registered in the U.S. and other countries. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

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Bring Project Minerva to Your Campus

You can attract more students by offering a wider variety of blended classroom options that accommodate the needs of your students, whether they’re on-campus, on the job, or commuting. And, with college enrollment numbers growing, you’ll need this flexibility to maximize your limited classroom space.

The Project Minerva solution helps automate and simplify daily tasks for instructors and students—which means more time for both teaching and learning. Minerva can help you provide what your students want most—a personalized, flexible education model that allows them to learn anytime from anywhere.

To learn more about Project Minerva or to take part in our beta testing, visit http://edu.ctxs.co/project-minerva/.

Learn more about Citrix and Intel IoT platforms at now.citrix.com/intel/octoblu or intel.com/iot/.

1 National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). “Digest of Education Statistics.” September 2011. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_200.asp.2 National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. “Report: Snapshot Report—Adult Learners.” April 2012. http://nscresearchcenter.org/snapshotreport-adultlearners/.3 National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). “Fast Facts.” http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98.4 Dahlstrom, Eden, and Jacqueline Bichsel. ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2014. Research report. Louisville, CO: ECAR, October 2014. Available from http://www.educause.edu/ecar.5 Elyse is a fictional composite.