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"Has the online course creation market gone stale already? Launched on Tuesday, newcomer Versal hopes to breathe life and possibilities into what they see as a very limited set of tools that currently exist. Their course-building platform offers a set of pre-made gadgets that allow teachers to build interactive courses on their platform through a what-you-see-is-what-you-get drag and drop interface. To add interactivity beyond basic pictures, texts and embedded quizzes, Versal uses gadgets to create interactive graphs, simulations, and models. With these gadgets, teachers can build models or simulations that the students use to experience and manipulate the content they are learning."

"What Anbar has in mind is something he calls "active OER." That's taking the standard digital textbook and expanding it with the addition of digital resources, including simulations that are both interactive and adaptive. "The learner doesn't just move something around in the simulation but actually gets prompting feedback that guides them to success," he explained. That's where Smart Sparrow comes in: The company produces aero, a learning platform that allows the instructor to pull together lessons from a set of templates that can include text, tests, assessments, virtual labs and field trips, and other digital components. For the purposes of the consortium, those elements would be pulled from OER materials."

"OCW Educator helps teachers search the vast library of OCW resources to find instructional approaches and teaching materials. Explore This Course at MIT pages to discover how MIT instructors teach their courses, and freely select and adapt their explanations, examples, and simulations to help concepts come to life in your own classroom."

"The Virtuix Omni™ is the first virtual reality interface for moving freely and naturally in your favorite game. The Virtuix Omni™ takes virtual reality to the next level- allowing anyone to stand up and traverse virtual worlds with the natural use of their own feet. Moving naturally in virtual reality creates an unprecedented sense of immersion that cannot be experienced sitting down. Applications of natural movement in virtual reality stretch far beyond gaming: training and simulation, fitness, virtual tourism, virtual tradeshows and events, meet-ups and multi-person adventures, virtual workplaces, museums, VR architecture, VR concerts… The possibilities are limitless."

"An intelligent tutoring system is computer software designed to simulate a human tutor's behavior and guidance. Because these systems are able to interpret complex student responses and can learn as they operate, they are able to discern where and why a student's understanding has gone astray and to offer hints to help the student understand the material at hand. Intelligent tutors provide many of the benefits of a human tutor to very large numbers of students. Intelligent tutoring systems can also provide real-time data to instructors and developers looking to refine teaching methods."

"Hapkit is an open-hardware haptic device designed to be very low-cost and easy to assemble. Hapkit allows users to input motions and feel programmed forces in one degree of freedom. This enables interactive simulation of virtual environments that represent realistic physics (such as springs and dampers) and creative new touch sensations (like textures and buttons). The Hapkit can be assembled using household tools, costs less than $50 for all components, including the microcontroller board, and is easily set up and programmed by novices."

"As Victor begins to lose he gets sarcastic and angry but otherwise he just makes conversation - commenting on words he puts down and generally chattering away while you play. Like the fitness robot, Autom, the designers made Victor so that he would be easily to engage with. By simulating human interaction, you get a unique experience that can make people feel a little better. Plus it's a trash-talking Scrabble-bot. Are we living in the future or what?"

"With deep learning, computer scientists build software models that simulate-to a certain extent-the learning model of the human brain. These models can then be trained on a mountain of new data, tweaked and eventually applied to brand new types of jobs. An image recognition model build for Google Image Search, for example, might also help out the Google Maps team. A text analysis model might help Google's search engine, but it might be useful for Google+ too."

"What do students want in the learning activities for their online STEM courses? They'd prefer more real-life problems to solve and instructional resources such as simulations, case studies, videos and demonstrations. They'd also like the chance to meet and collaborate with other students as well as teaching assistants online. Finally, they'd appreciate clear and consistent information from instructors about instructions, assignments, assessments, due dates, course pages and office hours. What do students currently get? The most common course activities are the completion of major projects or assignments, reading, visiting websites, taking quizzes or exams, and viewing slideshows. The most interaction they report experiencing comes from reading course news and announcements and receiving e-mails from the instructor."

"The challenge of presenting alternative "views" of symbolic and semantic content makes up the leading edge of accessibility research today and many problems have yet to be solved. This document presents an overview of approaches currently in development or in use in fields such as: Mathematics Sciences Simulations and immersion Robots and telepresence Charts, diagrams, and tables Geography and maps Music Languages"

"The Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text. Uses include: data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, data visualization, machine learning, and much more."

"Big data is everywhere-even in education. Researchers and developers of online learning, intelligent tutoring systems, virtual labs, simulations, and learning management systems are exploring ways to better understand and use learning analytics to improve teaching and learning."

We face a critical need to prepare children and adolescents to thrive in the 21st century-an era of rapidly evolving technology, demanding and collaborative STEM knowledge work, changing workforce needs, economic volatility, and unacceptable achievement gaps. This report takes a close look at a core set of noncognitive factors-grit, tenacity, and perseverance-that are essential to an individual's capacity to strive for and succeed at important goals, and to persist in the face of an array of challenges encountered throughout schooling and life.