News

There’s no question that higher education is undergoing a transformation. Over the past few years, rising tuition costs and a slow economic recovery have driven tremendous interest in, and experimentation with, alternative educational models and tools such as MOOCs, online degrees, coding bootcamps, personalized and competency-based learning, and learning analytics, just to name a few….

December 20, 2016 CCLE has released an new customization of the Moodle source code that dramatically improves usability.  A new, simplified activity chooser allows you to quickly access the items you use the most. To enable the new activity chooser, please do the following. Log onto CCLE. Select the down arrow near your name, and…

When arriving to UCLA in 2008, I was surprised to see just how decentralized the campus was in approaching the technological needs of the students, faculty, and staff, and the larger need for us to work across disciplinary fields. Designations of north vs. south campus, colleges vs. schools, centers vs. departments may make sense in…

Recently published work in the Journal of Medical Internet Research is the product of several years of collaboration between Professor Vwani Roychowdhury’s group in UCLA’s Department of Electrical Engineering, Professor Roshan Bastani’s group in the UCLA School of Public Health – Health Policy & Management, and myself, funded by a grant from the National Institutes…

Drum Corps International (DCI) labels itself “Marching Music’s Major League”, and it is the amalgamation of years of musical study, marching precision, and entertainment. Participants range in age from 14-21 and come from all over the country to march in numerous competitions throughout the US from June until August. The ensembles are made up of…

Last time we looked at how photogrammetry was used to reconstruct the 1898 bust sculpture of Henry David Thoreau. Now we will see how 3D printing can create a copy of the original with the magic of a 3D printer. Going from a virtual to a 3D-printed object one is a fairly straightforward process—made all…

The International Association for Language Learning Technology (IALLT, http://iallt.org/) is a professional organization that provides leadership for the integration of instructional technology into the foreign language classroom. IALLT has released their list of webinars for the 2016-17 academic year, and the list looks great.   HumTech will also be hosting a number of them in…

There have been a number of changes and improvements to UCLA’s Common Collaboration and Learning Environment (CCLE), and one of them is certain to excite language instructors across campus. You may now set (i.e., “force”) the language of your individual course, which converts the standard nomenclature to your desired target language. Best for intermediate through…

In June 2016, the UCLA Center for Digital Humanities, in partnership with the Thoreau Society and the Walden Woods Project, created a three-dimensional, digital reconstruction of the 1898 bust sculpture of nineteenth-century author Henry David Thoreau. This virtual object was created using a process that renders 3D models and realistic textures from high-resolution digital photographs, otherwise known…

“What is Digital Humanities?” I asked myself this question three years ago as a Communications Studies major at UCLA. The name itself seemed to be a compound of two paradoxical words, considering our general understanding of humanities studies. Many people I encounter to this day continue to ask me this same question. At the time,…