Motlow State Community College is a public community college with multiple locations in southern Middle Tennessee. The main campus opened its facilities in 1969 and is located in Moore County on 187 acres of land donated by the late Senator Reagor Motlow and family. Motlow College also has learning centers in Fayetteville, McMinnville and Smyrna, a teaching site in Sparta and a partnership in Shelbyville at the Middle Tennessee Education Center.The college serves more than 540,000 citizens in an 11-county service area including Bedford, Cannon, Coffee, DeKalb, Franklin, Lincoln, Moore, Rutherford, Van Buren, Warren, and White. The college also allows residents of three border counties in Alabama to pay in-state tuition: Madison, Jackson, and Limestone counties.Motlow participates in baseball, softball, and men's and women's basketball, and women's soccer as part of the Tennessee Community College Athletic Association and the National Junior College Athletic Association.Motlow Women's SoccerSince its inception in 2017, the Motlow women’s soccer program has enjoyed great success. The first five years of soccer at Motlow were capped by the incredible 2021 season. Motlow not only won the regular season and Tennessee Community College Athletic Association (TCCAA) conference tournament but also won the district playoff and advanced to the National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA) national championship tournament.In addition to the team's success, Head Coach Andy Lyon was named the NJCAA Region VII Coach of the Year in 2021 by the TCCAA. In 2022, the team ranked as high as number 11 in the United Soccer Coaches poll national rankings.AmazonIn 2022, Motlow announced the college was selected as an education partner for Amazon’s Career Choice program, providing Amazon’s hourly employees access to coursework in Entrepreneurship, Digital Agronomy, Information Systems/Cyber Security, Medical Office Technology, Nursing, Mechatronics, and Robotics.Amazon’s Career Choice program is an education benefit that empowers employees to learn new skills for career success at Amazon or elsewhere. The program meets individual learners where they are on their education journey through a variety of education and upskilling opportunities including full college tuition, industry certifications designed to lead to in-demand jobs, and foundational skills such as English language proficiency, high school diplomas, and GEDs. In the U.S., the company is investing $1.2 billion to upskill more than 300,000 employees by 2025 to help move them into higher-paying, in-demand jobs.T-MobileIn 2021, Motlow partnered with T-Mobile to provide free cell phones to students. Through a ground-breaking program, Motlow State is giving 2,100 students Samsung Galaxy A32 5G smartphones with T-Mobile service on the nation’s largest, fastest and most reliable 5G network to enhance student success and learning. The project ensures students are prepared for the future and have the technology needed to succeed. Motlow State is working with faculty to develop curriculum focused on augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to enhance learning in-and-outside of the classroom..
As electric vehicles experience an all-time peak growth, Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles continue to make a strong case in range and performance, particularly in extreme low and high weather conditions. Their main drawbacks include their greenhouse effect and their low thermal efficiencies which are in the range $30-43 \%$. Research suggests that electric vehicles excel in the compact and short-range vehicle classes even without government subsidies. Their performance, however, decreases as vehicle size class and range increases, making them underperform ICE vehicles even with government subsidies in the large vehicle classes. The main challenge that faces electric vehicles is the extremely low specific energy of current battery technologies compared to that in hydrocarbon fuels, for instance current batteries can store up to 2.5% of the energy stored in gasoline of similar weight. Under a scenario where research achieves ICE efficiencies in the 60% range, these engines could potentially remain a significant force in global transportation for several decades. However, eventually for them to continue dominance, a revolutionary change in internal combustion engines that is not based on the Carnot cycle is needed, in order to advance their efficiencies to beyond the 67% limit.
In this work we evaluate the state of the semiconductor manufacturing industry and its challenges and trends. Future trends in the industry are analyzed from three perspectives: the evolution of Industry 4.0, the advances in semiconductor materials, and the impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic. The semiconductor manufacturing industry witnessed an acute decline in the United States and other regions in the two decades prior to the CoVid-19 pandemic. The decline was only uncovered after the chip shortage of 2021 that resulted from the severe supply chain disruption. Trends in the industry were analyzed from three perspectives: Industry 4.0, advances in materials, and the Post-pandemic era. As a result of the evolution of the fourth generation of industry (Industry 4.0), trends in semiconductor manufacturing include robotization, which caused the industry to become the largest market for industrial robotics since 2020, and an all-time peak globalization. The semiconductor industry is a very globalized industry with corporates from different parts of the world taking part in the production of the final product. Although some materials such as carbon and Gallium Nitride show promising trends to replace silicon as the material of choice. It will likely not be before two or three decades when a semiconductor material will be able to replace silicon. Challenges for the industry include the shortage of the trained-workforce, and the added inter-country restrictions that may hinder the globalization of the industry.
One of the characteristic features of the next-generation of Industry 4.0 is human-centricity, which in turn includes two technological advancements: Artificial Intelligence and the Industrial Metaverse. In this work, we assess the impact that AI played on the advancement of three technologies that emerged to be cornerstones in the fourth generation of industry: intelligent industrial robotics, unmanned aerial vehicles, and additive manufacturing. Despite the significant improvement that AI and the industrial metaverse can offer, the incorporation of many AI-enabled and Metaverse-based technologies remains under the expectations. Safety continues to be a strong factor that limits the expansion of intelligent industrial robotics and drones, whilst Cybersecurity is effectively a major limiting factor for the advance of the industrial metaverse and the integration of blockchains. However, most research works agree that the lack of the skilled workforce will no-arguably be the decisive factor that limits the incorporation of these technologies in industry. Therefore, long-term planning and training programs are needed to counter the upcoming shortage in the skilled workforce.
Advancements in computer technology have revolutionized extended reality (XR) experiences, including augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR), and 360° photography and videography. These technologies have found widespread adoption in various educational contexts, from K-12 schools to universities. However, community and technical colleges in the United States have been slower to adopt these innovative instructional modalities. This study aims to investigate the factors influencing the adoption of XR technologies at 2-year institutions, guided by the consolidated framework for implementation research (CFIR). A qualitative research approach was applied by interviewing 13 educators from 2-year colleges to identify their perception and the challenges faced while implementing XR-enabled instruction. Limited availability of XR educational content, restricted development opportunities of XR content, limited integration of these technologies with existing learning management systems, resource constraints and training needs of educators are some of the factors that hinder implementation of these technologies at 2-year colleges.
In this work, we present an analysis of the results of the evaluation of a project that aims at increasing knowledge of industrial robotics in general, and collaborative robots in particular, among STEM educators. The analysis includes evaluations conducted on six train-the-trainer workshops on intelligent industrial robotics that were organized over a span of four years from 2021 to 2024. The workshops targeted STEM faculty of community and technical colleges and high schools. Evaluations were conducted by an independent evaluator. The overall assessment shows that evaluations were successful in capturing the effectiveness of the workshops. The main challenges in capturing effectiveness of workshops include the low response rate of workshop attendees for follow-up surveys, and the discrepancy in answers to demographic questions for pre- and post-intervention surveys that may result from various reasons. The workshops included factory tours, industry speakers, and hands-on activities on industrial robot and vision system programming. Evaluation of the effectiveness of the workshops was measured using surveys at the end of the workshops, pre-and post-intervention assessments, and six-month follow up surveys.
