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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.
Emergency notification in jeopardy if students tune out digital signage
If a digital sign can’t convey a message in seven seconds, the technology runs the risk of blending into the background, one expert says—and during campus emergencies, that could prove dangerous.
Schools and departments on college campuses are often competing with each other to see which building touts the most advanced digital signage, but in the arms race for fancy graphics on impressive screens, the potential for emergency messages is lost, said Sean Matthews, president of Visix, a developer of software that’s used in digital signage.
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College changes emergency alert system after tsunami scare
Marymount College in Palo Verdes, Calif., has switched to a cloud-based emergency notification system after the campus’s old alert technology failed to warn students and faculty of a possible tsunami headed toward the school last spring.
Marymount officials said that the aging emergency notification system not only left the 800-student campus–located near the Port of Los Angeles–without timely warning, but school administrators weren’t able to contact the company in charge of the system as reports swirled of a tsunami off the California coast.
Denise Fessenbecker, the college’s director of general services, said customer service representatives who managed Marymount’s account with the emergency alert company didn’t respond to the school’s requests for six days after the tsunami threats first surfaced.…Read More
No problems with text alerts after latest Virginia Tech shootings
Virginia Tech students said they received a nearly constant stream of text message and eMail updates from school officials after a gunman killed a campus police officer and himself Thursday afternoon.
Virginia Tech’s homepage provided updated information about the shootings, the suspect, and what students and faculty members should do while police scour the campus. Students and the campus’s student newspaper, the Collegiate Times, tweeted updates throughout the afternoon.
At 2:59 p.m., about three hours after the first reports of a police officer shot to death during a routine traffic stop, final exams were postponed. Exams were slated to start Dec. 9. Police would not confirm if the second body found in a nearby parking lot known as “the cage” was that of the gunman’s; however, a law enforcement official who had knowledge of the case and spoke on condition of anonymity told The Associated Press that the gunman was believed to be dead.…Read More
Translating Twitter for campus disasters
Twitter just got even more concise: Students, faculty members, and campus administrators can tweet more efficiently with an application that provides a shortcut for asking for #Help or telling loved ones #Imok.
Bucket Brigade Keyboard, a free app for Android devices developed by University of Colorado (CU) doctoral student Daniel Schaefer, uses an alternative keyboard to translate Twitter chatter into syntax used during fires, earthquakes, floods, or campus shootings.
Creating a common language for emergencies, Schaefer said, could improve social media communication during the tense first hours of a natural disaster or security incident. Students, in other words, won’t be yelling into the void of tweets and random hashtags.…Read More
New Blackboard notifications: Customizable, quick, and mobile
College students already inundated with eMails and texts to their smart phones now can decide when they get campus messages blasted out to the student body using Blackboard Inc.’s latest iteration of its emergency notification system. Emergency alerts, regardless of customization, would still be sent to everyone.
Officials from Blackboard’s Connect division announced July 11 that new features available through the company’s alert program would include customization, easier targeting of specific student groups, and the option of sending messages via Apple mobile devices.
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Not getting the (text) message
It is a typical morning on campus, with students heading to class and professors and staff arriving for work, when suddenly there is an emergency. It could be a flood, a gas leak, or an intruder on campus. How quickly can the campus notify the community? How many people can the campus reach in those critical minutes immediately following an emergency?
Traditional methods of mass notification, such as sirens, television, and radio, only provide critical information to the community in a timely manner if they tune in. And, in the event of a power outage, those methods might not be available at all.
In recent years, higher-education institutions have been forced to re-evaluate emergency response systems, including mass-notification solutions. Many institutions have added eMail and text messaging to their mass-communication methods roster, which works well with today’s generation of college students, who already rely heavily on cell phones and text messages.…Read More
Notification delay surfaces in Alabama shootings
Nearly an hour passed before University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) officials dispatched emergency notification to students and faculty after fatal shootings allegedly committed by a professor, raising new questions about campus-based alert systems.
University President David Williams sent an eMail to faculty and students Feb. 15—three days after the shootings that killed three people and injured three others—and said campus police responded to the gunfire within minutes, but the university community was not alerted via text message or eMail.
“… Some of you are understandably troubled about the speed with which a text message alert was sent following the shootings,” Williams said in his open letter to UAH students and faculty. “As any institution would do after an incident like this, our university will conduct a complete examination of the emergency response. How to more effectively use the university’s text message system in the midst of a fast-moving, life-threatening situation will certainly be part of that review.”…Read More