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Campus Leadership

Most Popular of 2015, No. 2: 20 should-know technology tidbits from EDUCAUSE


16.A Meeting of Giants

Blackboard, one of the largest Moodle providers, is adopting Microsoft’s Office 365 plugins for Moodle and offering it to their Moodlerooms customers worldwide. While the plugins have been adopted by multiple Moodle customers and partners around the world, Blackboard’s adoption of the plugins will be the largest adoption of its kind. Microsoft is also offering LMS integration and Learning Tools Interoperability support for both OneNote Class Notebooks and Office Mix, including integration with Canvas, Schoology, Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Haiku and Moodle; and the company is offering updates to Office Lens and Office Clipper enabling users to save to One Note, Word and PowerPoint using their work or school accounts.

17.Cloud and Mobile to Drive Process

Today, cloud and mobile solutions are emerging as the cornerstone to ensure increased agility for higher education to deliver content, experiences, services, and technology to the campus community however and wherever they desire. Along those lines, Oracle made several product announcements A selection of these announcement include:

In addition, Oracle Higher Education announced:

  • Ohio State University Deploys Oracle Solutions to Help Streamline Compliance and Enhance Self-Service Functionality for Faculty, Staff, and Students.
  • Pittsburg State University Selects Oracle Applications Cloud to Modernize Human Resources, Financials, and Planning and Budgeting.

Here’s a full listing of Oracle’s announcements.

18.Doing Digital Content Right 

Pearson announced a partnership with the University of Missouri to bring Digital Direct Access programs to students. These programs aim to increase access to high quality, digital course content that prepares students for success from the first day of class. The programs lower costs for students and provide educators with insights into student performance, allowing for early intervention when needed. Other schools testing Digital Direct Access include Algonquin College and Indiana University. These institutions say they have successfully implemented similar models of providing affordable access to required course materials from the first day of class.  All three of the partners from the report participated in a well-attended presentation, “Transition to Digital: Strategies that Impact Education” during EDUCAUSE. Learn more here.

19.Using the IoT to Drive Research

SAP SE, a software and solutions business, discussed how more institutions are finding the value in a high-powered analytics and modeling platform with in-memory capabilities, which the company says can be found in its SAP HANA® solution; for example, in cancer research. SAP HANA and the SAP® Business Suite 4 SAP HANA suite form a “digital core” that can also improve customer experience, campus business processes, staff engagement, vendor collaboration and Internet of Things (IoT) integration, in addition to aiding processing-intensive research, said the company. SAP listed examples at work at The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich (ETH Zurich), which recently selected SAP S/4 HANA for its finance, human resources, logistics and business warehouse systems. ETH Zurich plans to replace all its Oracle databases with SAP HANA databases by mid-2016; Weill Cornell Medicine, and its selection of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud to support teaching, medical research and patient care; Duke University’s partnership with SAP to develop the SAP Fundraising Management application; and many others. For more information, visit the SAP News Center.

20.Virtual Technology for Innovation

According to Tim Merrigan, Vice President SLED Sales at VMware, “Customers are leveraging new technology to provide access to curriculum for new students and faculty in online or distributed campus environments on an ever-widening range of personal devices, and all the while safeguarding personal and financial information.” For example, this September at the University of Wisconsin, the faculty introduced a digital lab environment for students that gave all students in the program the same desktop experience, no matter where they were physically located. The new program gave each student access to the same resources, as well as the ability to interact and collaborate with professors and other students throughout the process. The university, alongside its integrator partner Gantech, accomplished this in six weeks thanks to Wisconsin’s existing VMware Horizon VDI platform via Horizon Air, running on vCloud Air. Another example, mentioned Merrigan, includes the Rochester Institute of Technology, whose director of IT operations, Steve Bertino, spoke during EDUCAUSE on strategies in IT operations to benefit both employees and their institutions. In addition, RIT’s Academic Cloud, using a mix of VMware solutions including vCloud Air, vRealize, VMware Virtual SAN, NSX and others, will provide the platform for its Department of Computing Security’s penetration testing competition this November. The program is designed to address the ever increasing need for cybersecurity penetration testing professionals. Finally, Merrigan discussed the University of South Carolina to create a more dynamic learning environment that supports anytime access to information and greater student and faculty collaboration. The university’s VDI environment, also based on VMware Horizon, allows it to create course-specific learning experiences accessible via student’s personal devices. Today, there’s a 50/50 split in logins on campus vs. off campus, and most schools offer the exact same experience in either location.

Read more in-depth highlights from CDW-G, from Dell, and from Fortinet.

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