Our regional institution for higher learning, NMSU, is perhaps primarily a research university, depending on large grants and contracts through the US Dept of Defense. Somewhere over 100M per year funds the PSL, and other projects with WSMR, and drone research etc. NMSU was or is also involved in “commercial space” development in connection with or related to the “SpacePort America” facility north of LC.
As we focus on what are the pieces needed to promote and develop DLE, one component is the R&D that universities conduct, often in conjunction with companies in the same field. There’s MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon, and a few others like Cal Berkeley that are leaders in this sort of publicly funded enterprise.
PSA had an encounter with Carnegie Mellon’s R&D efforts for online learning when they brought their federally funded research and developed “product” to NMSU. Funding was, IIRC, in the hundreds of millions from the US Dept of Education to create effective online tools to support and advance higher ed learning capabilities. We posted here about this project a few years ago now.
Carnegie Mellon has been in the news lately for their relationship with Uber, and the result where Uber hired away most of the robotics research teams that had been working at Carnegie Mellon. That story is covered in story below from Slate.
What does it “tell us” here in LC where another big research university exists? Apparently the old models of how this kind of relationship between public funding, the universities themselves, and businesses who wish to use or perhaps “take over” the research fruits…is in flux, and being “disrupted”.
But what will the new model look like? And how can PSA work with that new model to help promote regional research and product development of DLE?
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Uber’s-Carnegie-Mellon-partnership-How-everyone-wins-in-the-end..pdf”]