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.

Researchers: Self-selecting college roommates can improve grades

Roommate-matching services have been criticized as tools that prevent students from meeting diverse people, but their supporters argue that students should be allowed to make their own choices.

Sifting through Facebook data for a roommate who likes the same music, espouses the same politics, and hails from a similar background isn’t just for picky incoming college freshmen: It also could make sense for students seeking an academic advantage weeks before the semester begins.

Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE) is among the 40 campuses that have turned to a web-based roommate matching system called RoomSync, which brings together potential roomies in an online repository where students are matched with like-minded peers.

Think of it as a dating site for incoming freshmen hoping to avoid the ever-present irritating roommate. The pen-and-paper questionnaire soon could be a campus artifact.…Read More

How UF uses social media, videos to engage stakeholders

UF promotes videos on Facebook that promote a response.

Dean Tsouvalas, editor-in-chief of StudentAdvisor.com, recently interviewed Bruce Floyd, social media specialist at the University of Florida, about the university’s social media strategy. The University of Florida was ranked No. 14 on the website’s Top 100 Social Media Colleges rankings for spring 2012.

UF is a major public land-grant research university. As the state’s oldest and most comprehensive university, UF offers more than 100 undergraduate degrees and more than 200 graduate degrees. It is one of only six universities in the country with colleges of law, medicine, engineering, agriculture, and veterinary medicine on one central campus. UF is also one of only 17 public, land-grant universities that belong to the Association of American Universities.

In the interview, Floyd discusses how UF manages more than 200 social media accounts and how it engages followers on various social media platforms. He also shares his advice for social media success.…Read More

The best college course ever?

UC Berkeley had a Starcraft course in 2009.
UC Berkeley also offered a StarCraft course in 2009.

Playing the real-time strategy video game StarCraft isn’t just for frittering away afternoons in students’ dorm rooms. It’s now for college credit, too.

University of Florida (UF) education technology doctoral student Nathaniel Poling is teaching the eight-week, two-credit class, “21st Century Skills in StarCraft,” this fall, using the internationally beloved computer game to hone students’ on-the-go decision making skills, resource management skills, and penchant to analyze ever-changing scenarios in the complex game’s platform.

Poling’s course will be conducted entirely online and is limited to 20 students who have, at the very least, “basic knowledge” of StarCraft, a game that pits three species battling for supremacy in the far reaches of the Milky Way Galaxy.…Read More

Online books let college students earn credit—and cash

Traditional textbooks can cost more than $500 per semester, according to national surveys.
Traditional textbooks can cost more than $900 per year, according to national surveys.

Nineteen business majors are trying to sell the idea of free online textbooks to their professors in an internship program that pushes open-content technology designed to counter escalating book costs.

The internships, introduced this year by open textbook provider Flat World Knowledge, let sophomore and junior business students earn college credit and up to $1,800 if their sales pitch convinces a professor to use web-based texts that can be reorganized and modified by chapter, sentence, or word.

Students from schools that include New York University, the University of Florida, and the College of Charleston are being tutored via webinars by Flat World Knowledge sales pros and authors of textbooks that are sold on the Flat World web site.…Read More