Syllabus News Update for July 29th, 2003
Syllabus News Update:
An Online Newsletter from Syllabus Press
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Today's Issue Sponsored By:
Education Technology Companies to Exhibit at Syllabus2003
http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=1814
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News for Tuesday, July 29, 2003
* Syllabus IT Survey Reveals Higher Ed Priorities, Concerns
* BlackBoard Holds First CMS Developers’ Conference
* NYU Digital Library to Preserve Afghan Heritage
* U. Penn Hospitals Build Global Content Management System
* Biology Mavens Promote Undergrad Bioinformatics Education
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Syllabus Survey Reveals Higher Ed IT Priorities, Concerns
Course management systems – their price, their mechanics, and
whether they ultimately contribute significant pedagological value –
is the number one topic of concern among campus IT executives
today, according to a survey of higher ed officials released Sunday
by Syllabus magazine.
The survey results were released and discussed at the Syllabus2003
Executive Summit, a gathering of higher ed IT executives prior to
the Syllabus2003 conference in San Jose, Calif. Forty-nine senior
executives form 45 institutions and university systems, including IT
directors and CIOs were interviewed during spring of 2003 for the
survey.
The survey showed that campus IT directors are facing an
increasingly complex situation in which rapidly rising user
expectations, tight budgets, and difficult staffing requirements,
have collided. A daunting number of challenges are facing the
community as Web-delivered academic and administrative
applications converge and are delivered to an ever-expanding range
of desktop, laptop, and handheld wireless computing devices.
The institutions covered by the survey ranged from those with an
average IT budget of $15M. The average size of the IT staff on
campuses represented in the survey was 120 people. About a a third
of the schools included had small increases in their IT budgets in the
last year; two had 25 percent to 30 percent increases. Less than 10
percent reported decreases of up to 15 percent. The remaining 60
percent of participants reported flat budgets.
A recurring theme from the survey was applications integration and
Web-delivery.
In the Course Management System arena, respondents said IT
departments are facing rising end-user support demands while at the
same time trying to sort out how CMSes will integrate with student
information systems and other ERP systems they are bringing online.
The timing of the increased interest in CMSes coincided with
migration of legacy systems to modern ERP systems, a task that
participants said takes longer and costs more than expected. The
demands of CMSes have added enormously to the pressures on IT
staff and budget.
CMS suppliers doubled the price of their products at about the same
time as budgets and IT headcount were being frozen or cut, the
respondents complained. To further complicate the situation, the
campus network, which was finally wired, is now transitioning to a
wireless overlay, contributing to concerns about security risks.
Among the conclusions from the survey: more meaningful dialogue
is needed between the vendors of IT products and the directors who
are responsible for IT in the academic enterprise. Vendors create
feature-rich products but they rely on the campus IT staff for training
and supporting the end users and making the products integrate with
other enterprise systems.
For more information visit:
http://www.syllabus.com
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BlackBoard Holds First CMS Developers’ Conference
Course management system vendor BlackBoard Inc. will hold a
developer’s conference at Georgetown University in Washington,
D.C., which the company said was the first time a dedicated
developers’ event has been held for a major e-Learning platform.
The meeting is intended to shed light on what the next generation
of e-Learning technologies will look like, and how developers can
use Blackboard's ‘Building Blocks’ architecture and industry
standards to build on top of the Blackboard platform. The software
development kit includes tools and interfaces to “productize” the
discovery of add-ons in a campus learning environment.
For more information visit:
http://www.blackboard.com/about/events/b2workshops/materials.htm
NYU Digital Library to Preserve Afghan Heritage
New York University is working with Sun Microsystems on a
project to preserve what's left of the written cultural heritage of
Afghanistan. During its reign, the Taliban sought to destroy all
pre-Islamic items in Afghanistan. That included famous statues and
books that could never be replicated. The NYU-Sun project seeks
to digitize all books published in Afghanistan since 1871, when the
first book was printed in that country, through 1930. The first
phase of the project will digitize, catalog and upload to a Website
the 43 books known to have been published in Afghanistan
between 1871 and 1900. The books will be downloadable and thus
freely available to researchers worldwide.
U. Penn Hospitals to Institute Global Content Management System
The University of Pennsylvania Health System is working on a
content management system that would allow hundreds of
organizations throughout the system, which includes four hospitals,
three specialty satellite facilities, and a primary-care physicians
network, to contribute content to their departmental Web presences
in a way that is consistent in form, accurate and approved through
an appropriate workflow. The system will enable UPHS to manage
current content on the Website, expire outdated content, and notify
content owners when aging content requires review and updates.
The project is being managed by McFadyen Consulting and is using
InterWoven, an enterprise content management platform.
Biology Mavens Promote Undergrad Bioinformatics Education
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the National
Science Foundation, Geospiza Inc., which develops bioinformatics
software and systems, and Sun Microsystems are hosting a meeting
to promote the teaching of bioinformatics in undergraduate
education.
The meeting will include hands-on practice with
genomics, proteomics, microarrays, and structural bioinformatics
in addition to discussions about how bioinformatics materials can
be integrated into biology courses. Conference organizers said that
although bioinformatics has become a standard tool in biological
research, it's seldom seen in the biology curriculum. This has
contributed to a growing technology gap between computational
biologists and bench researchers.
For more information visit
http://www.geospiza.com/outreach/bio21.
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Education Technology Companies to Exhibit at Syllabus2003
Syllabus2003 celebrates its 10th annual summer conference
July 27-31 in San Jose, Calif., and on the campus of
Stanford University. In addition to cutting-edge keynotes,
breakout sessions, and panel discussions, attendees will see
the latest products for campus technology during designated
exhibit hall hours. Some of the companies attending include:
Computer Comforts, designer and manufacturer of innovative
furniture and products for the electronic classroom;
Unicon, provider of Academus, an enterprise portal solution,
with fully integrated course and content management environments;
Polyvision, an international manufacturer and installer of static, active,
and interactive visual communication products for the education and
corporate markets, and TippingPoint Technologies, whose suite of
network-based security products protects networks
from cyber threats, piracy and bandwidth abuse.To view the entire
exhibitor list, as well as to register for Syllabus2003, go to
http://www.syllabus.com/summer2003/hall.asp.
