Faculty

Yixuan Xu, Yue Gu, Zichun Zhu, Jafar

University of Southern California

The department of International Academy

 Abstract

With the development of IoT, i-campus is embraced by more and more universities, who

believe that i-campus can provide top-notch and cost-effective educational program. However,

faculties in the universities have difficulty to deal with, such as cyberslacking, hacking and other

privacy and security issues. And the solutions offered in the articles are using library computers,

grading class participation, nabing faculties’ IP address.​ ​Both the efficiency of education and the

security of personal information or education resources are assumed to be greatly improved due

to our solutions. Meanwhile, additional technical support and training efforts are also required to

establish the new system. Further site-specific experiments should be carried out to determine

which methods are truly effective.

1. Introduction

As demonstrated in the IoT privacy and security challenges for smart home

environments (Lin H. & Bergmann N. W., 2016), the Internet of Things (IoT) has gained much

attention in the recent years, which connects internet with other non-traditional devices such as

household machines, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems or medical appliances,

pacemakers. Besides these, from the article “The future of higher education:smart campuses”

(Lehman N., 2019), the existence of Wi-Fi network and IoT promotes the rise of smart campus,

which transform the traditional campuses into digital ones, by using smartphones or other

mobile devices to gain access to their assignments or grades online wherever students are

using digital devices to pay for meals, installing cameras and sensors in the facilities to help

students locate their lost textbooks, etc. Lehman proposes that smart campuses offer the

topnotch and cost-efficient educational programs, helping students win the competitive social

work. Also, according to “A vision for the development of i-campus” (Kwok L., 2015), i-campus is

not the campus using technologies but helping students equipped with the ability to deal with
 new or difficult situations. The new development in campus provides new opportunities to

teaching and learning, however, educators and students cannot ignore the drawbacks it brings

out.

In the article “Cyberslacking in Shanghai: What my students taught me”(Starkman,

2013), Starkman finds that with technologies in class, her students tend to be cyberslacking,

burying themselves in the devices rather than facing the other students, be aggressive to other

students, which results in difficulties for faculties to manage class. Besides cyberslacking,

privacy and security of Internet are the pervasive concerns when it comes to IoT. For example,

the database would share some secret information with unauthorized people, or the faculties’

mailbox may be hacked maliciously, which will expose the faculties’ efforts to be stolen, and

finally damage their initiatives to improve teaching methods. Moreover, Kwok states that it is

much faster for students to catch the new technologies than those faculties who consist of some

elderly professors but with rich experiences in old-school teaching methods. Consequently,

faculties would be exhausted when focusing on learning new technologies and developing a

new teaching style suitable for “smart class”.

The aim of this paper is to find out some ways of dealing with faculties’ dilemma in

i-campus through technological era. The remaining sections in this paper discuss the plausible

solutions to the problems above and evaluation of if the solutions are practical or some ongoing

problems of them.

2. Solution

For cyberslacking, there are some following points to solve students use other websites

during class. Students use library computers which cannot download irrelevant programs to

search the resources in the library. Moreover, the system can block the website which is

irrelevant, such as shopping, video games, and movies. Next, through the monitoring system to
monitor whether students use other websites or chatting during class and evaluate the

frequency of students using appropriate websites. Then at the end of each term, students can

increase scores, also reduce the incidence of cyberslacking ​(Godlewski, 2015)​.

Take participation grade could promote students' positive performance and create more

new ideas in the class. In addition, the class would be more active ​(Taylor, 2018)​. For example,

students are tired of having the class in the morning, in that way participation grade can

increase student interaction and response rate. Furthermore, when some students start to

participate, other students will follow and focus in class. Ultimately, professors should train

themselves to be more ​innovative​ so that students will likely to attend class rather than doing

their own things.

Several effective solution need to be applied to address hacking in i-campus.

Universities should require students and faculties to use separate network systems. IT teams in

universities can nab students’ or others’ IP address who were attempting to gain access to hack

into faculties’ networks such as grading system. They can report these unauthorized access to

universities or even police office.

In addition to this, unique username and complex password with no sorts of trail are

required. Students or faculties need to do email or message verification to log in universities’

WIFI or IoT technologies in order to offer better campus security and safety. (Lehman N., 2019).

To strengthen password, Universities have to set password expiration, which requires faculties

to change password every 180 days. Also, dynamic password “code” or bio-tech such as face

recognition technology or fingerprint identification to improve the security and privacy issues in

the future.

What is more, professors usually have their own research project results and

achievement. Also, in order to transfer conventional universities to i-campus, lawmakers should

 “expanding computer crime laws and penalties” such as unauthorized access, viruses, malware

and computer trespass. (NCSL，2019) to meet legislative requirements. Universities and

governments should work on addressing cybersecurity data and information security. In the

future, to achieve intelligent campus, a better supporting infrastructure should not only include

computer or networks, but also consider people as part of the infrastructure. More education will

be required to improve human intelligence. (Kwok L., 2015).

3. Evaluation

First of all, given that cyberslacking is an important issue affecting classroom efficiency

which would largely affect the performance of both the instructor and students, restricting

students' authority to download and install irrelevant software on school public computers and

blocking some specific websites will largely focus students’ attention. What’s more, quantifying

the amount of time students spend on each application and website on the Wifi system and

count participation into grading system will effectively improve the situation that school codes or

class regulations regarding distraction are generally ignored by students through our evaluation.

As a result, additional technical support and software development needs are provided.

Meanwhile, a small scale comparative experiment should be conducted to determine which

methods are feasible by comparing the improvement results of students in the classes taking

these measures with those in ordinary classes. Secondly, except for the situation in

class,anti-hacker measures should be put on the agenda to effectively protect everyone’s

personal information, educational resources and the research achievements of our professors.

For instance, using unique username and separate campus network for faculty, students and

guests so that network technicians can trace the source of illegal invasion and attack, the
adoption of biometrics and dynamic cryptography will ensure that our security system will not be

breached in the coming information revolution brought by quantum computing in the near

future(Song F., 2014). At the same time, these measures will be better implemented with sound

laws and regulations as a deterrent system, and with well-trained and highly qualified staff. A

pilot starting is suggested in the department most vulnerable to hacker attacks, and observe the

changes in the frequency and success rate of the subject before and after the comparison, and

then carry out universal-wide promotion.

Reference

Godlewski, J. (2015). 3 Simple Ways to Increase Efficiency in the Era of Cyberslacking. Retrieved from

https://www.timecamp.com/blog/2015/10/time-tracking-software-cyberslacking/

Taylor, B. (2018). An Argument for Grading Participation | Faculty Focus. Retrieved from

https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/effective-teaching-strategies/an-argument-for-grading-participation/

Song F. (2014) A Note on Quantum Security for Post-Quantum Cryptography. In: Mosca M. (eds) Post-Quantum

Cryptography. PQCrypto 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8772. Springer, Cham

Huichen Lin, & Neil W. Bergmann. (2016). IoT Privacy and Security Challenges for Smart Home Environments.

Information,​ ​7​(3), 44–44.

Kwok, L. (2015). A vision for the development of i-campus. Smart Learning Environments, 2(1), 1–12.

https://doi.org/10.1186/s40561-015-0009-8

Starkman, R. (2013). Cyberslacking in Shanghai: What My Students Taught Me. Technology in the Classroom:

Useful or Distracting? 14, 430-434.

Lehman N. (2019). The Future of Higher Education: Smart Campuses. March 2019 issue of College Planning &

Management. http://www.beckgroup.com/beck-think/higher-education-smart- campus/

Cybersecurity Legislation 2019. (2019, April 9). Retrieved June 26, 2019, from

http://www.ncsl.org/research/telecommunications-and-information-technology/cybersecurity-legislation-20

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