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101 BEST PRACTICES >> Connectivity

11/23/2006

39 :: HOW TO LIVEN UP THE CMS

One of the largest distance education programs in the world, with some 1,000 online courses offered annually, UMass-Online is moving to Horizon Wimba’s Live Classroom to support all live classes and meetings. The live virtual classrooms feature audio, video, application sharing, and content display. A seamless integration with Blackboard’s Vista Enterprise (UMassOnline’s course management system) was at the heart of the decision to use Live Classroom. Brian Douglas, chief technology officer and director of operations for UMassOnline, explains, “Through integration with Vista, we will enable faculty to use Live Classroom as they see fit for their programs and courses.” Horizon Wimba’s synchronous platform will support live interaction in many of UMassOnline’s professional programs, including the RN-BS in Nursing and other high-touch, highly interactive professional areas. More info here.

40 :: PARTNERING UP TO GET THE MESSAGE OUT

CCSN’s digital signage solution
involved the combined effort of
several tech vendors.

The Community College of Southern Nevada is already one of the largest community colleges in the country, and it’s growing fast. With communication as a top issue, IT leaders are using video over IP in a simple, yet innovative way to get targeted messages out via large display monitors strategically placed throughout the main campus and in surrounding high schools in the Las Vegas area. The system is the result of a partnership among SunGard Higher Education, VBrick Systems, Brainstorm Networks, and Cisco Systems, blending technologies from those companies to create capabilities for streaming video in MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, video-on-demand, ticker information, and more. The Cisco Application and Content Networking System and VBrick Systems set-top boxes are used in combination with various sizes of wall-mounted LCD monitors.

41 :: BIG COMPUTERS SOLVE BIG PROBLEMS

STANFORD’s CEES Center
tackles complex geologic
simulations and predictions.

This past June, Stanford University (CA) officially opened the Stanford Center for Computational Earth and Environmental Science, a research partnership among Stanford’s School of Earth Sciences and affiliates from the Stanford Computer Systems Laboratory, government, and private industry. The center will serve as a portal to computational geosciences, featuring access to CEES Grid, a powerful computational resource. The CEES Grid hardware is organized into three resource clusters connected by a 1GbE network to two Sun Microsystems V40z machines running Linux, a 10GbE network to a Sparc Cluster running Solaris 10, and an InfiniBand network to an AMD Opteron cluster comprised of 64 Sun V20z dual CPU nodes running Linux. The center will take on complex computational problems surrounding analysis, simulation, and prediction of geologic processes and systems, while working toward significant advances in relevant computing technologies.

The chief Silicon Valley partner, Sun Microsystems, contributed hardware, software, and program support for a new High Productivity Technical Computing Center (one of three thematic units at CEES). Sun donations for CEES have amounted to $3 million in hardware and cash. A major affiliate, Cisco Systems, contributed $250,000.

Says Stanford President John Hennessy, “If you want to solve big problems—important, critical problems to human society and to our environment—you need big computers.” More info here.

42 :: DEVICES AND NETWORK ACCESS

CAMPUSWIDE network access
control saves the day at CMU.

For the IT staff of Central Michigan University, the threetimes- a-year crush of students, faculty, and staff returning to campus is now little more than another day at the office. Instead of a semester-long backlog of work orders created by opportunistic viruses and lack of usage policy enforcement, CMU enjoys the order and automated security that comes from campuswide network access control.

CMU implemented Bradford Networks’ Campus Manager, an out-of-band NAC solution that manages, secures, and controls all devices accessing the network while enforcing network registration and authentication policies. The system automatically pinpoints and isolates problem users (correlating users to systems via their MAC addresses) to enforce campus usage policies and to mitigate the introduction of viruses onto the network. Problem users and their machines are quarantined in an isolation VLAN, notified via e-mail, and given directions to have their network access restored without calling the help desk.

Last year, to prevent the propagation of the Nachi and Blaster worms, for three months one staffer did nothing but port activations/reactivations, traveling to dorms and wiring closets to manually drive the viruses from the network. But that’s all changed with the new system. Network Manager Mark Strandskov remarks on the difference: “This fall went smoothly. Two weeks into the term we were dealing with two pages of work orders; less than a dozen cases in all.”

43 :: ‘ON-DEMAND’ DEMAND

NEU’s Bob Weir

Northeastern University (MA) VP of Information Services Bob Weir sees a growing trend in higher ed toward “ondemand” services.

“Incoming freshmen, born in 1988, have never known life without PCs or the net. To be relevant, higher ed must reflect the real world…an ‘on-demand’ world,” he says. In that world, “all course-related software is available to faculty and students anytime, anywhere, potentially eliminating the need for computer labs. Students become knowledge manipulators and generators: Faculty can expand assignments to focus on experiential versus rote learning.” More info here.

44 :: CONNECT TO YOUR LOYAL FANS

SCHOOL SPIRIT comes
to the cell phone.

At many institutions, fight songs are now playing all over campus: on the quad, on the bus, in the cafeteria, and sometimes (though not ideal) even in class. Just about any place you’d find a cellular phone, you can hear a school’s fight song in all of its rah-rah glory. Thanks to a new and lucrative form of content delivery, the songs actually come from the phones themselves, as special polyphonic ring tones that students can purchase, program to replace the phone’s traditional ring, and play every time they receive a call. And at the University of Pittsburgh (PA), school spirit is more than just a song: The school recently signed a deal with Collegiate Images to offer a variety of logos and other images for users to install on their phones as wallpaper. In some cases, trailblazing schools are also inking mammoth licensing agreements for anything and everything: sports scores via text messaging, breaking news updates, sales on merchandise, and more. Though these latter deals are rare right now, Mike Merrill, chairman and CEO of content provider Smartphones Technologies, says they are becoming increasingly common, and the sky’s the limit for what happens next. More info here.