Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

AMD COVID-19 HPC Fund Adds 18 Institutions to Fight COVID-19

High performance AMD EPYC CPUs and Radeon Instinct GPUs to power COVID-19 focused research at Stanford School of Medicine, The University of Texas at Austin, UCLA, University of Toronto and other institutions across the U.S., Europe, and India

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) today announced a second round of high-performance technology contributions to assist in the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. AMD is now contributing high-end computing systems or access to Penguin-On-Demand (POD) cloud-based clusters powered by 2nd  Gen AMD EPYC™ and AMD Radeon Instinct™ processors to 21 institutions and research facilities conducting COVID-19 research. With 12 petaflops of total supercomputing capacity now awarded, the combined compute capacity donated through the AMD COVID-19 HPC Fund would rank among the fastest supercomputers in the world according to the most recent Top500 list.

“AMD is proud to be working with leading global research institutions to bring the power of high performance computing technology to the fight against the coronavirus pandemic,” said Mark Papermaster, executive vice president and chief technology officer, AMD. “These donations of AMD EPYC and Radeon Instinct processors will help researchers not only deepen their understanding of COVID-19, but also help improve our ability to respond to future potential threats to global health.”…Read More

Students care most about education, economy

As the University of California prepares to discuss another student fee increase for the next academic year amid continuing budget woes, students will look to Governor-elect Jerry Brown and a new Legislature to commit to higher education funding, reports the Daily Bruin. In exit polling conducted by the Daily Bruin at polling sites, students overwhelmingly marked education and economy as the issues that influenced them most. Brown historically has supported higher education, but UCLA political science Professor Tom Schwartz said it is not clear that Brown can solve a budget crisis that extends across the entire state…

Click here for the full story

…Read More

UCLA resumes streaming video after legal complaint

UCLA's video streaming lab will have extended hours this spring.
UCLA's video streaming lab will have extended hours this spring.

In the latest development in a dispute with broad implications for colleges nationwide, UCLA says it will continue to stream online instructional videos to students. The move comes after a trade group urged the university to review copyright laws and threatened legal action if campus officials did not stop offering free unlimited access to the educational content.

UCLA officials suspended their streaming video program in January after the Association for Information Media Equipment (AIME)—a nonprofit organization that advocates for “fair and appropriate use of media”—said the university didn’t have permission to offer unlimited access to students through its password-protected class web sites.

A university IT official said March 3 that UCLA’s resumption of the streaming video initiative was a necessary stand against opponents of open access to educational resources.…Read More

UCLA partners with Clicker to fight campus file sharing

Students at UCLA don’t have to rely on illegal file-sharing sites to get their fix of online TV anymore, reports the New York Times, thanks to a new partnership with Clicker, a programming guide for online TV content that launched in November. Through this partnership, UCLA students soon will be able to use a co-branded version of Clicker that will give them convenient access to student-generated content, university-generated content, and regular online TV content and music videos from services such as Hulu. The service indexes TV shows from most American broadcast and cable networks, as well as web originals. UCLA students also will be able to access proprietary UCLA content, including videos of lectures and university events. Clicker currently indexes more than 400,000 episodes from more than 7,000 different TV shows. One organization that’s happy about this new collaboration is the Motion Picture Association of America. The organization said it applauds Clicker and UCLA “for fostering a campus culture that respects creativity and supports the livelihoods of the millions of people across the United States and around the world who create the movies and TV shows that we love, and for helping to ensure that these great jobs will be there for future college graduates.”

Click here for the full story

…Read More