In order to accommodate new state of the art equipment for its audiovisual programs, California's Modesto Junior College (MJC) was looking not just at rewiring a building, but bringing 1950s-era building construction up to 2009 standards--a huge undertaking by any measure.
The Thunderbird School of Global Management has implemented a Web-based, anonymous hotline and case management system. Originally introduced in 2006 to allow faculty and staff to report incidents of unethical behavior, the school has expanded the functionality to all students as a safety measure.
When Appalachian State University in Boone, NC went through a leadership change several years ago, the new chancellor and provost looked around and realized that much of school's physical assets were not being properly managed. They hired an outside consultancy to confirm their assertions, and then set out to do something about it.
Homework assignments in Lisa Dysleski's general chemistry courses at Colorado State University were supposed to help students--mostly freshmen--understand the subject better and make them reach beyond mere facts and actually think. Instead, students became frustrated with difficult questions, the assistant professor said, and were simply giving each other homework answers.
The president of Loyola University Chicago had a vision several years ago for a network of digital signs throughout the lakeside campuses. The result is 30 screens in key locations, with the marketing and communications department serving as a clearinghouse for content.
When two men assaulted and robbed a merchant outside a bank in Napa, CA and then fled by SUV to Napa Valley College, the community college had the first real opportunity to test out its emergency alert system. What law enforcement officers learned in the course of that day, said campus police chief Ken Arnold, is that new forms of technology are changing fundamental practices of law enforcement in both positive and negative ways.
The team at MinnWest Technology Campus has some pretty aggressive goals when it comes to science and technology. For starters, they see their Willmar, MN-based institution someday becoming a world-class location for companies to grow and collaborate for the advancement of science and technology. They also strive to shape the region where their campus is located, as well as the country and the world as a whole.
Drexel University in Philadelphia, Utrecht University in The Netherlands, the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in Houston, and the University of Bath have all gone public in the last several months with deployments of lecture capture systems within classrooms. Do those increasingly common installations define a new baseline operating requirement for institutions of higher education, or are they simply a new feature that some schools are dabbling in?
It all started in the registrar's office, where every student's file was assigned a traditional "folder" to hold his or her admission documents. After watching those files pile up and require an increasing amount of storage space--not to mention the time spent shuffling through the papers--the technology team at Misericordia University in Dallas, PA decided to do something about it.
"It used to be difficult to gauge students' prior knowledge," according to biology professor Peter Coppinger, who teaches at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. "But now, I can ask a question pertaining to the day's lecture material, get a response, and--right there--I can assess whether to slow down and cover [something] in great detail, or do a cursory overview and go on."