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6/23/2005
“The pain of the Oracle/PeopleSoft acquisition was that there were two product lines for higher ed, and Oracle [therefore] had to make decisions,” Harris explains. She expects to see more acquisitions as the largest integrated systems vendors look for additional modules to add to their education suites.
And security issues continue to challenge IT administrators, Harris adds, pointing to Gartner’s tracking of a 50 percent increase in security incidents in higher education in 2004. Despite the fact that anti-virus software was available at every school the research firm surveyed, only 73 percent of those institutions required anti-virus software to be in place before students could connect to their campus networks. This clearly illustrates the need for better security policies, Harris maintains.
On the eLearning front, better library search products can help entice students who currently use Google to instead use specific tools to search the more focused, higher-quality content of university libraries. Harris cited as promising the May announcement of a collaboration between Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) and Ex Libris SFX (www.exlibrisgroup. com/sfx.htm). Under the agreement, Google Scholar searches will be able to return OpenURL links to SFX.
“I’ve been saying that we need to make [college and university] libraries better,” Harris declares. “This is a step in that direction.” The analyst says she expects to see Google make similar agreements with other companies.
More teaching-model merging. Although learning styles are certainly evolving, face-to-face time in classrooms clearly isn’t going away, Harris offers. “Socialization is still a big part of the college/university experience,” she says, adding that she expects to see more combinations of traditional classrooms and eLearning in the next five years. “We’ll still see Blackboard (www.blackboard.com) or WebCT (www.webct.com) for most classes, with perhaps an online course mixed in. We’ll see a lot of that.”
Harris also predicts big changes in learning devices, citing the influence of Apple’s iPod, in particular. “Audio books are going to make a big comeback because of iPods,” she says, pointing especially to electronic books. While multitasking students find it hard to read and do anything else at the same time, they can listen and do other things, Harris explains, portending a growth in audio books for students used to constant audio input. “I believe students will want to have audio books that they’ll check out and use on their devices.” So much for eyestrain from late-night reading.