1/24/2008
When a prospective student phones a college for information, answering questions quickly might mean the difference between enrolling that student and having that student decide to go elsewhere.
1/11/2008
Oklahoma's Campus Life and Safety and Security (CLASS) Task Force next week will present Gov. Brad Henry with the results of its seven-month study on the state of campus security in Oklahoma. Among the recommendations, released in draft form this week, are calls for increased spending on security in post-secondary institutions and greater collaboration between higher education, law enforcement, and mental health professionals.
1/9/2008
Sandy Schaeffer makes a call for higher education technology decision-makers to put pressure on the LMS vendor community to begin to un-bundle their products... with particular emphasis on greater flexibility in terms of content management.
12/11/2007
In the mixed computing environments common on university campuses, supporting multiple operating systems and myriad hardware configurations can be a nightmare for IT. In the past, one solution has been to go with a single platform. Great for IT. Not so great for users. But at Bemidji State University in Minnesota, they've come up with another solution....
12/5/2007
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, is deploying new data visualization and analysis tools for its Key Performance Indicators (KPI) initiative, a project that will be used to "assess the present state of business, measure performance and progress toward goals, and inform decisions on future courses of action," according to the university.
11/20/2007
Continuing and professional education (CPE) sites are somewhat effective at helping students with their enrollment decisions, but they're lacking in some key functionality areas: content, search capabilities, and multimedia. In the second of its three-part series of research reports, "Optimizing School Web Sites as a Marketing and Recruitment Tool," education consultancy Eduventures found that prospective continuing education students in large part think these sites come up short in areas they consider crucial and made specific recommendations for the types of content that should be added to these sites to boost their effectiveness.
11/13/2007
As the costs of traditional textbooks fly into the stratosphere, a wide range of digital text options comes to the rescue. Where do you stand on the digital textbook debate? E-mail us at editors@campus-technology.com; selected responses will be published in our March 2008 issue.
11/12/2007
IBM said today it's entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Cognos, a firm that provides business intelligence technologies to K-12 and higher education and other sectors. The deal is still dependent on shareholder and regulatory approval and other conditions but is expected to close in the first quarter of 2008 and is valued at about $5 billion.
11/8/2007
How do you get students (and others) to opt in to text-messaging campus alert systems, such as the one used to good effect earlier this semester at the University of Colorado? Once they've opted in, how do you capture their attention and get them to keep your system loaded with their current information?
10/29/2007
Colleges and universities have done little over the last three years to improve information security. Hindered by lack of staff resources and funding, security efforts remain largely unchanged, while incidents of breaches--including the theft of personal information from within and without--continue to plague campuses. And, what's more, the integration of physical and IT security is still a reality in only a small minority of schools.
10/29/2007
With the administrative computing market reaching $2.0 billion by 2010, growth drivers include increased use of data by administrators in institutional decision-making, use of CRM-type tools for enrollment management development, and into 2008-2010, introduction of new SOA architectures.
10/25/2007
Small and medium-size institutions looking for ways to beef up technology programs without adding staff might consider outsourcing some or all of IT. At Ocean County College on the coast of New Jersey, an outsourcing partnership has resulted in a popular and growing selection of online courses.
10/25/2007
Last week, IT architects put their profession squarely on the map at the first annual IT Architect Regional Conference for Southern California. This local San Diego-based event, part of the International Association of Software Architects (IASA), wasn't just a typical forum for punditry on the sometimes obscure topic of service-oriented architecture (SOA). It was more a meeting of colleagues. The keynotes and sessions were frequently paused to answer spontaneous questions and remarks from attendees.
10/23/2007
Five factors will change the way that IT organizations operate, according to Gartner Inc. The points of change cited by the research firm include Web 2.0-style applications, software as a service (SaaS), global-class computing, the "consumerization" of IT and open source software.
10/22/2007
City University of New York (CUNY) is revamping its administrative systems, consolidating a wide array of student information, human resources, and financial systems as part of its Fully Integrated Resources and Services Tool (FIRST) project. The university system, which comprises 23 institutions serving more than 430,000 students, will integrate its data using Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Campus Solutions 9.0, for which Oracle will also provide hosting and consulting.
10/17/2007
IBM last week formed a new superinitiative called the Center for CIO Leadership, a global community of executives and academics focused on developing CIOs and advancing the profession as a whole. The Center will be headed by Executive Director Harvey Koeppel, with a governing council comprising CIOs and professors from MIT, INSEAD, Harvard, and other institutions.
10/16/2007
Open source software (OSS) is not so much the underdog in the IT world, according survey findings announced by Barracuda Networks, a provider of e-mail and Web security appliances. Barracuda polled 288 IT security professionals and found their preferences to be roughly split on the likelihood of deploying OSS versus proprietary software, particularly for applications with similar functionality.
10/10/2007
It was more than two years ago that Blackboard Inc. approached Seton Hall University to join its product development partner program to work on the Blackboard Outcomes System. Now, technology leaders at the university expect that in the coming year the system will be in use across the campus for reporting and learning outcomes.
10/4/2007
Indiana University is launching a new multi-campus communication system based around Connect-ED from the NTI Group. The system, part of the wider IU-Notify system, will be used to provide emergency communications to students, faculty, and staff.
9/26/2007
The new DSpace Foundation is fostering open access to scholarly works with the open source DSpace platform for storing, managing, and distributing digital collections. Here, Campus Technology interviews Michele Kimpton, executive director of the nascent nonprofit created this past July by MIT and HP as a successor to their joint DSpace project begun in 2002.
9/14/2007
A growing trend in the corporate sector is to more closely integrate or even merge the oversight of information security, physical security, and fiscal security. Is this trend relevant to higher education? What can we learn from corporate experiences?
9/12/2007
Since his retirement in 2005, UC Berkeley's Associate Vice Chancellor and CIO Emeritus John W. (Jack) McCredie has devoted much of his professional energy to studying, writing about, and speaking about IT governance and leadership in higher education. Currently an ECAR senior fellow, he is leading Educause's study of IT governance to be released in early 2008. CT asked McCredie for his perspectives on IT governance issues.
9/12/2007
Several institutions report that new senior-level IT officers are appointed or top IT positions are becoming available. The University of Ottawa named Sylvain Chalut as the new CIO; the University of Arizona has appointed Michele Norin as interim CIO; UC San Bernardino named Spencer Freund as its new vice president for information services; and top-level IT posts are coming open at North Georgia College and State University and North Carolina State University.
9/10/2007
The University of Ottawa has named Sylvain Chalut as its new chief information officer. Chalut, who was most recently director of Business Relations Management with Bombardier AƩronautique's information systems services, will provide "strategic leadership for IT across the university by ensuring business alignment, performance management and investment management."
9/5/2007
Colleges and universities across the nation have realized that technology is an absolute when considering how courses on their campuses will be delivered--either face to face sessions, through distance learning sessions, or in mixed formats.