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.

College students taking their smart phones, tablets, to charging stations

Auburn students pay $5 to use the charging station.

Students at four universities can avoid a modern-day campus nightmare: The last of your smart phone’s battery power runs out on the way to the lecture hall.

Towson University near Baltimore, the University of Miami (UM), Auburn University, and the University of Alaska (UA) have unveiled mobile-device charging kiosks that can refuel a host of smart phones and computer tablets that students rely on for in-class interaction, note taking, and web searching.

The kiosks, made by Baltimore-based NV3 Technologies and sold for $6,500 apiece, charge up to a dozen mobile devices at once, from Apple iPhones to Blackberries and a range of tablets like the iPad.…Read More

Colleges struggle with students’ data demand

Video streaming and downloading consume 70 percent of bandwidth on some campuses.

University of Missouri students arrived on campus this fall with a slew of new electronic toys and immediately wrought havoc with the school’s wireless network.

Early on, too many gadgets were vying for attention, leaving some students unable to connect. There was, of course, a lot of virtual hand wringing and outrage from students furious and frustrated over the slow or severed connections.

Still, it was far from a total crash.…Read More

5 things freshmen need before they set foot on campus

"I want them to know that the main priority is to put their job–that of being a student and earning a degree–absolutely first," said one reader.

Education stakeholders often complain about students’ lack of college readiness, or the lack  of skills, characteristics, and general know-how needed before they set foot on campus. But besides knowing to bring flip flops to the shower, what are the most important things incoming freshman need to know?

As part of our eCampus newsletter’s ‘Question of the Week’ series, we asked our eCN readers: “What’s the one skill you’d like incoming freshmen to master before they come onto campus?”

And though answers such as “the ability to plot a line on a graph” may seem like an obvious answer, many responses were more basic than one might expect.…Read More