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.

Financial aid technology: More productivity, less drudgery

Financial aid offices struggled through sequestration talks in Washington.

Changes to college students’ financial aid packages caused by the political saber rattling of Congress’s sequestration talks last spring were updated almost in real time, an impossibility in campus financial aid offices of yesteryear.

Colleges and universities in February and March scrambled to let current and incoming students know that the aid available for their college education was in flux, subject to the whims of legislators who couldn’t come to an agreement on how to best solve the nation’s budget deficit.

Tara O’Neill, Marquette University’s associate director of the Office of Finance and Student Financial Aid, said if this sort of political crisis had threatened to alter financial aid awards already doled out to students in need of college funding in the mid-2000s, schools wouldn’t be able to make the proper adjustments and send updated information for days after changes tool effect – weeks, even.…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

List names Top 10 most influential campuses on Twitter

About half of faculty members say they don't know how to use Twitter.

Stanford University was named the most influential Twitter feed in higher education, according to a ranking of campuses’ Twitter activity that shows which schools best use the microblogging website considered a key component to college outreach.

Klout, a website that tracks the popularity of tweets, released the top-10 rankings Jan. 17, unveiling scores for each college or university based on how often a Twitter message is re-tweeted, number of followers, and how a school’s tweets are used by influential people in higher education.

Stanford finished with a top score of 70, followed by three schools that scored 64 in Klout’s ranking: Harvard University, Syracuse University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.…Read More

Colleges turn to unified communications to save costs, boost productivity

More schools are implementing unified communications solutions.
More schools are implementing unified communications solutions.

More K-12 schools, colleges, and universities are turning to unified communications as a way to streamline campus communication and save money in unpredictable economic times, a new survey suggests.

Unified communications is the convergence of enterprise voice, video, and data services with software applications designed to achieve greater collaboration among individuals or groups and improve business processes. Component technologies include video, audio, and web conferencing; unified messaging; and more.

The benefits that education technology stakeholders see in implementing unified communications are the same that executives in the government and business sectors see, according to the second annual Unified Communications Tracking Poll from CDW Government Inc. (CDW-G), which provides products and services to education and other sectors.…Read More

Class in 140 characters or less?

Only 14 percent of college faculty said they saw educational value in social media such as Twitter.
Only 14 percent of college faculty said they saw educational value in social media such as Twitter.

There are more than 20 million college students in America, and more than 50 percent will not graduate. The No. 1 reason contributing to student dropout rates is a lack of engagement. The billion-dollar question for our education system is: How do we motivate and stimulate students to take a more proactive role in their academic success?

An obvious starting point might be the environments in which we know today’s students are currently engaged, all day, every day—social networks. To date, a significant chasm has existed between students’ interactive, stimulating experiences with social media and the reality of their “low-tech” classrooms.

Of course, there are exceptions, but on the whole, the education system isn’t yet capitalizing on the social networking and Web 2.0 tools that keep today’s digital natives motivated. It’s time to unleash that potential.…Read More