Back in sixth grade, I was a robot. Or at least, that's what I told anyone who asked--in reality, my 11-year-old self was completely human. In 2018, I was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a rare bone cancer that meant nine months of chemotherapy and too many surgeries to count. It was a year punctuated with hospital visits, needle pokes, and days when I felt too nauseated to even look at a plate of food. And yet, my primary concern was that in my immunocompromised state, I was no longer able to attend school.

Michael Bodekaer Jensen is both an EdTech innovator and a multi-disciplinary academic. He is a co-founder and CEO of Labster. After two disruptive years, many students resemble Ferris Bueller's bored classmates. Exposure quarantines pushed remote classroom learning from the occasional into the commonplace. Both teachers and educational institutions are scrambling to identify new ways to improve distance learning experiences, engagement and equal access to tools and facilities in the post-pandemic world.

Right about now, a whole lot of parents are looking around and asking themselves: What is school going to look like this year? Here in New York, this is the time of year when I get letters telling me who my kids' teachers are going to be and how to track down school supplies. In other parts of the country, kids are already back in classrooms. And after more than a year of disrupted and hybrid learning, everyone has had this hope that this year will be different. You just have to press play on a couple of videos from school board meetings across the country to realize how elusive "normal" still is. A lot of the meetings I've been watching recently are about masks--who should be wearing them and who shouldn't.

A 15-month schedule is underway to develop Ferris State University's $29.5 million Center for Virtual Learning on the Big Rapids campus.The future facility, planned for the site of the former Vandercook Hall, will be home to Information Security and Intelligence, the School of Digital Media, School of Education, eLearning and the new Artificial Intelligence program. The state of Michigan will contribute $22 million for the Center for Virtual Learning's construction as a capital outlay project. In December 2020, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed the Public Act awarding the funds, and Ferris' Board of Trustees approved construction plans in February. At that same meeting, the trustees approved a Bachelor of Science in Artificial Intelligence. Faculty members involved in the Center for Virtual Learning's development see the project's collaborative nature as benefiting future student learning.

Imagine a classroom in the future where teachers are working alongside artificial intelligence partners to ensure no student gets left behind. The AI partner's careful monitoring picks up on a student in the back who has been quiet and still for the whole class and the AI partner prompts the teacher to engage the student. When called on, the student asks a question. The teacher clarifies the material that has been presented and every student comes away with a better understanding of the lesson. This is part of a larger vision of future classrooms where human instruction and AI technology interact to improve educational environments and the learning experience.

Imagine a classroom in the future where teachers are working alongside artificial intelligence partners to ensure no student gets left behind. The AI partner’s careful monitoring picks up on a student in the back who has been quiet and still for the whole class and the AI partner prompts the teacher to engage the student. When called on, the student asks a question. The teacher clarifies the material that has been presented and every student comes away with a better understanding of the lesson. This is part of a larger vision of future classrooms where human instruction and AI technology interact to improve educational environments and the learning experience. James Pustejovsky, the TJX Feldberg Professor of Computer Science, is working towards that vision with a team led by the University of Colorado Boulder, as part of the new $20 million National Science Foundation-funded AI Institute for Student-AI Teaming. The research will play a critical role in helping ensure the AI agent is a natural partner in the classroom, with language and vision capabilities, allowing it to not only hear what the teacher and each student is saying, but also notice gestures (pointing, shrugs, shaking a head), eye gaze, and facial expressions (student attitudes and emotions).

A new software platform, created by two University of Toronto alumni, aims to make virtual classrooms more functional by providing real-time feedback and specific insights into how student understanding of mathematics is changing. Last March, Nived Kollanthara, an alumnus of the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, was living in New York City, where he volunteered part-time at a shelter, helping kids with their math homework. When the pandemic hit, he realized right away the impact it would have. "The kids I work with need extra, individual attention to help them succeed in the classroom," Kollanthara says. "I was worried about how they would be getting that in a remote environment."

A shopper walks past shelves of school supplies at a Target store in San Rafael, Calif. Preparing for both in-person and virtual learning has families budgeting for new school supplies and bigger purchases. A shopper walks past shelves of school supplies at a Target store in San Rafael, Calif. Preparing for both in-person and virtual learning has families budgeting for new school supplies and bigger purchases. Getting her daughter ready for the first day of sixth grade, in a normal year, Lidia Rodriguez would have by now spent a pretty penny on a lunch box, her charter-school uniform and a special backpack, perhaps embroidered with her name: "Sofia."