As the culmination of several years' collaboration with educational institutions and industrial partners, ARM has launched ARM Educational Media, a subscription-based digital content hub offering interactive online courses and electronic textbooks. The content will initially be open to organizations to offer their students and employees, and will become available to individual learners in early 2017. The goal, according to ARM's chief technology officer Mike Muller, is to help close the knowledge gap between industry needs and what traditional engineering education teaches its students.

"Technology is moving at a fast pace," ARM's director of education and research enablement Khaled Benkrid told EE Times in an interview, "and at universities the emphasis is on research, not teaching. The result is a growing gap between what's taught and what industry needs." Benkrid gave as an example that many schools are teaching embedded systems development using 8-bit devices such as the 8051, leaving recent graduates scrambling to tackle work projects involving connected 32-bit processors.

To help address such shortfalls, Benkrid said, ARM as spent the last three years working with universities, governments, and industry to identify and develop academically rigorous programs of study that can be used to develop industry-critical skills. The courses are multimedia-rich, self-paced, and include hands-on laboratory exercises and knowledge testing, following a hands-on, learning-outcome-driven approach. Courses comprise ten or more modules, each module requiring four to five hours of study for completion. Laboratory exercises culminate by the end of study into full system-level designs. "We want the students to understand underlying principles," Benkrid said, "not just get something to work."

The initial offering from ARM Educational Media contains four courses of study: digital signal processing, efficient embedded systems design and programming, rapid embedded systems design and programming, and Internet of Things. The courses assume a basic understanding of programming and computer architecture, Benkrid, noted, that is easily met. "An engineer with computer coursework from the 90's is ideal," Benkrid said, "as are computer engineers, or even those who have worked with the Arduino and Raspberry Pi." He added that engineers from other disciplines, such as civil, biotech, and mechanical engineering, are also looking at these courses.

For now, ARM Educational Media will primarily work with established academic institutions and industrial subscribers, serving as a resource for instructor-based training. Academic and corporate instructors can use the material as the basis for coursework and use the provided multiple-choice questions to help assess and guide student progress. Hands-on activities will require instructor assessment for now, however. Longer term, Benkrid said, the offering will include more advanced testing, such as posing problems and assessing solutions online, allowing individual students to gain certification through independent online study. "It's the next phase of the journey," Benkrid noted. He anticipates that individual subscriptions to the courses will be on the order of $100, "about the cost of an engineering textbook."

ARM has expansion plans beyond the initial four-course offering, Benkrid said, with a roadmap that stretches until late 2018. The additional core courses include:

*Real-time operating systems on microcontrollers

*System on chip basics (small cores) using FPGAs to prototype

*Advanced SoC designs using Cortex A processors

*Custom Linux kernel development

*Mobile gaming

*Mechatronics and robotics

*VLSI design from concept to fabrication

*Processor architectures (design a processor given an instruction set architecture)

Additional topics will then be developed based on industry demand and student interest.

By: DocMemory
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