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.

Analytics software to be free for college students

Students need more access to analytics tools, professors say.

Knowledge of business analytics is a start, educators say, but hands-on experience with compiling and sorting through loads of data makes a recent graduate a popular commodity among private sector recruiters scouring college campuses.

That’s why business schools will provide free analytics software, SAS OnDemand for Academics (SODA), for college students to access outside the classroom. The software has been available to students in the classroom and lecture hall since last fall.

Even before the program becomes free to educators and their students to use off campus, SODA has impacted higher education.…Read More

Universities find the virtualization sweet spot

Server virtualization has become a primary energy-saving strategy for campus technology departments.

There hasn’t been much opposition to ridding college campuses of clunky, energy-guzzling server racks, campus technology chiefs say, although creating virtual servers could result in an unwieldy mess if ed-tech staff aren’t careful.

Colleges and universities, like much of the private sector, have gravitated toward virtual servers in recent years—a move that lets campus technology officials clear the piles of servers that collect over time, cut down on electricity use, and satisfy faculty requests for more servers in less time.

The largest research universities and small private colleges alike have gone virtual with their campus’s servers, meaning the machinery is managed in a distant data center, for example.…Read More

Brown University expands Google services, could save $1M per year

Brown University will bring Gmail to 7,000 staff, faculty, and graduate students.
Brown University will bring Gmail to 7,000 staff, faculty, and graduate students this fall.

Reports of Gmail’s demise, it seems, have been greatly exaggerated. After a spring that saw at least three prominent universities move away from Google’s free hosted eMail and applications, technology officials at Brown University will expand the use of these tools beyond its undergraduates this summer after faculty clamored for the services over the past year—a move that could save the university $1 million annually.

The Ivy League university in Providence, R.I., launched the free Google Apps for Education for its 6,000 undergraduates last academic year—a migration that made students “happy,” “productive,” and “excited,” Brown’s IT director of support services, Geoff Greene, wrote in a June 29 post on Google’s official blog.

“And then some people got jealous,” Greene wrote.…Read More