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.

Key campus technology challenges ‘no longer about IT’

2013 Campus Computing Project survey reveals shifting higher-education technology needs, priorities

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The technology itself is “the easy part” of campus IT leaders’ jobs, Green said.

The top challenges facing campus technology leaders today “are no longer about IT,” Casey Green, founding director of The Campus Computing Project, told attendees of the 2013 EDUCAUSE conference in Anaheim, Calif., Oct. 17.

Instead, the top challenges for campus technology leaders include supporting faculty and students, and communicating technology’s effectiveness to presidents and provosts.

The technology itself is “the easy part” of campus IT leaders’ jobs, Green said. He added: “Technology is almost linear by comparison” to all of the other demands that campus IT leaders face, such as managing people, policies, priorities, and egos.…Read More

Report: Mobile app use exploding on campus

The number of private universities deploying mobile apps rose to 50 percent from 42 percent in fall 2010.

Colleges and universities have made significant gains in deploying mobile applications over the past year, according to the 2011 Campus Computing Survey, the largest continuing study of higher-education technology use in the United States. But the survey also suggests that colleges have been slow to move key operational and research functions to cloud computing, and budget constraints continue to affect campus ed-tech services.

The 2011 survey shows big gains in the percentage of schools deploying mobile apps, and these gains appear across all types of institutions.

More than half (55 percent) of public universities have activated mobile apps or plan to do so in the coming year, compared to a third (33 percent) in fall 2010. Public four-year colleges also posted good gains (44 percent in 2011, up from 18 percent in fall 2010), while the numbers more than tripled among community colleges (41 percent this year vs. 12 percent last fall).…Read More

Google to build ultra-fast web networks

The US ranks 28th in broadband internet access, according to a report released last summer.
The U.S. ranks 28th in broadband internet access, according to a report released last summer.

Google Inc. plans to build a handful of experimental internet networks around the country to ensure that tomorrow’s systems can keep up with online video and other advanced applications that the company will want to deliver. The internet search giant’s plans would include connection speeds 100 times faster than today’s connections, and could be key for rural colleges hoping to expand broadband web access to students and faculty.

The Google project, announced Feb. 10, is also intended to provide a platform for outside developers to create and try out all sorts of cutting-edge applications that will require far more bandwidth than today’s networks offer.

The company said its fiber-optic broadband networks will deliver speeds of 1 gigabit per second to as many as 500,000 Americans.…Read More

Nova Southeastern dean making IT grads more marketable

Irakliotis said computer science students should be encouraged by the rise of data mining in public policy.
Irakliotis said computer science students should be encouraged by the rise of data mining in public policy.

Leo Irakliotis doesn’t just want to develop academics and researchers. The newly appointed dean of Nova Southeastern University’s Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences also wants tech-savvy business people who can talk the talk of the corporate world.

Irakliotis was named the Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.-based university’s computer program chief on Jan. 25 after 13 years as a professor at the University of Chicago, where his business acumen and community connections helped grow the school’s Computer Science Professional Program by 20 percent annually.

Academic immersion remains a central part of a computer science education, he said, but campus IT decision makers should help students develop the communication skills they’ll need to explain complicated IT concepts in simple terms—and network with the companies in search of young computer pros.…Read More