A Collaborative for Student Success and Institutional Comparisons

Joined by more than 20 member institutions to date, PAR is a growing not-for-profit collaborative venture that pools normalized (and anonymized) data to support research on student success and create predictive models and strategies for intervention. With 1.8 million-plus records in its dataset, PAR is offering its members highly reliable data modeling for student success, as well as a new potential for comparative institutional research.

IBM and China Make Large-Scale Commitment to Big Data Education

If there's any place where big data ought to rule, that's China, a country where everything is done on a large scale. To help educate students on how to work with the data generated by a population of 1.37 billion people, IBM has announced an ambitious big data program to integrate its software, research, curriculum and other education-related resources into scores of China's institutions by the end of this year.

Report: Importance of Physical Location of Data Diminishing

The physical location of data will become "increasingly irrelevant" over the next few years and will be replaced by other notions of location at most organizations by 2020, according to a new report, "The Snowden Effect: Data Location Matters," by market research firm Gartner.

College Presidents: Hybrid Will Have Bigger Impact than MOOCs

While college presidents are skeptical about massive open online courses (MOOCs), they see plenty of potential "positive impact" with hybrid courses that blend face-to-face and online learning as well as adaptive learning that uses technology to modify lessons based on the progress shown by students.

Carnegie Mellon Builds New Computing Cluster for Education and Research

Carnegie Mellon University is building a new computing cluster, named Narwhal, which will be used for education and research related to large-scale computer systems.

Pearson Launches Competency-Based Education Framework and Readiness Assessment

Education technology company Pearson has developed an assessment tool that allows schools to gauge their institutions' readiness to adopt competency-based education.

Report: Cognizant Computing Will Have 'Immense' Impact on Mobile Computing

Gartner has unveiled a new report forecasting that cognizant computing, which the company says is the next phase of the personal cloud movement, "will become one of the strongest forces in consumer-focused IT" in the next few years to "have an immense impact across a range of industries, including mobile devices, mobile apps, wearables, networking, services and cloud providers."

Report: Open Access to Journal Articles Gaining Acceptance from Researchers

Journal authors report increasingly positive attitudes toward open access journals, according to a new report.

Report: Universities Struggle To Provide Adequate Bandwidth

SIIA's annual survey finds that bandwidth is not keeping up with demand at higher ed institutions but suggests progress on digital content, e-portfolios.

Researchers To Study How School Leaders Use Data To Inform Decisions

The United States Department of Education has awarded $5 million to three universities to find out how (or whether) school and district leaders use research to inform their decisionmaking.

MIT Adopts Cloud-Based Backup for Users

Massachusetts Institute of Technology has selected an enterprise endpoint backup system to back up the laptops and desktops of faculty, staff and students.

Campus Technology 2014