Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eCampus News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

Universities to students, fans: Don’t recruit athletes via social media

Colleges have asked students to stop making Facebook pages for potential recruits.

Brigham Young University (BYU) last week became the latest school to plead with its students and supporters to avoid Twitter and Facebook recruitment of high school athletes more than two years after the NCAA first warned against the practice.

BYU’s compliance office dispatched a tweet Aug. 16 asking campus sports fans to extricate themselves from the recruitment process.

“Boosters/Fans: Please do not use @”insert prospect twitter handle” to encourage enrollment at BYU. Leave the recruiting to the coaches!”…Read More

March Madness online streaming taxes campus networks

UD Mercy saw a 30-percent increase in bandwidth usage this week.

If Marquette University students weren’t on spring break this week, the school’s IT officials would have faced an internet bandwidth nightmare.

The Marquette Golden Eagles were building a lead in the second half of their first round NCAA Tournament game March 15 against the underdog Brigham Young University (BYU) Cougars when Mary Simmons, Marquette’s director of security and networks, saw that the campus’s bandwidth was “pretty much pegged,” or maxed out, even on the slowest week of the spring semester.

Whoever was left on campus, Simmons said, was streaming the game online, and IT staffers could track the sky-high use of network bandwidth.…Read More

Librarians: Many faculty members embrace digitization

Librarians remind students that some valuable literature isn't yet avaiable online.
Librarians remind students that some valuable literature isn't yet available online.

The sentimentality that college faculty members have for the old-fashioned campus library isn’t the norm at some institutions with vast digital libraries, higher-education librarians and technologists say—countering recent research that lists faculty resistance as a roadblock in digitizing library collections.

Research that refers to the “wistfulness” for the days of wooden bookshelves and massive piles of literary works was released June 2 by the Washington, D.C.-based Council on Library and Information Resources, a nonprofit group that advocates for greater access to information.

The study, titled “The Idea of Order: Transforming Research Collections for 21st Century Scholarship,” charges that entrenched professors and staff members have slowed the creation of digitized book collections. The study also cites the conflicting ideas about whether information should be commodified or made freely available online as a persistent impediment to library digitization.…Read More

Broadband grants include $63M for 100-gigabit research network

Federal funding will provide more broadband access to BYU students in Idaho.
Federal funding will provide more broadband access to students across the nation.

Colleges and universities will be among the anchor institutions in an ultra high-speed nationwide internet network after President Obama on July 2 announced more than $760 million in grants designed to expand broadband web access.

The Departments of Commerce and Agriculture will dole out the federal broadband funding, which will go to 66 recipients, including municipalities, web service providers, libraries, and colleges, according to the White House.

Federal officials estimate that the funds will create 5,000 jobs in the nation’s slumping economy.…Read More

Open courseware as a viable business model?

Open courseware with online video lectures cost the most to make available on the web.
Open courseware that incorporates video lectures costs the most to make available on the web.

Open courseware isn’t the end of higher education, as some have feared, but rather a recruiting tool that can lure people to enroll in credit-bearing classes, according to a Brigham Young University (BYU) study released last month.

The study, conducted by BYU’s Director of Independent Study Justin Johansen, examined the costs of making college course material available for free online, and how many enrollments resulted from having open courses available on a university’s web site.

The university has six open classes—three college-level and three high school courses—that drew almost 14,000 web page visits over a four-month span, generating 445 paid enrollments at BYU.…Read More