Industry Briefs
NEWS
 LEGAL DOWNLOADING.
More and more colleges and universities are offering legitimate music and movie
downloading services, in order to comply with digital copyright laws and, at the
same time, enhance the college experience. American University
(DC) is certainly leading by example, with its new music and movie downloading
service from Ruckus Network (www.ruckusnetwork.com).
Exclusive licensing agreements allow students to download thousands of movies
and music from major and independent labels. |
A NEW LMS.
With 3,000 to 4,000 courses offered,
Rochester Institute of Technology
(NY) was seeking an eLearning management system that would enhance teaching, as
well as integrate and leverage its existing campus authentication system. Enter
Desire2Learn’s (
www.desire2learn.com)
Learning Platform, a suite of teaching and learning tools for course development,
delivery, and management. All of RIT’s existing courses will soon be converted
to the new platform.
OPEN SOURCE PORTAL.
Beginning mid-2005, the
University of Guelph (Canada) will implement
Unicon’s (
www.unicon.net) Academus Portal
to maintain its campus portal platform. Folks at the university were attracted
to Portal because of the single-sign-on access and the open-source uPortal framework.
PUT AWAY YOUR LAB NOTEBOOKS.
Students at the Schools of Chemical Engineering and Industrial Pharmacy at
Purdue University (IN) will be moving away from traditional
note-taking and research, and toward electronic lab notebooks provided by EKM
Corp. (www.ekmco.com). Purdue licensed the enterprise version of EKM’s
LABTrack eNotebook software for large pharmaceutical engineering projects, thus
filling the need for real-time collaborative notebooks. LABTrack allows researchers
to format electronic pages that mirror paper-based notebooks.
EXTREME BLACKBOARD MAKEOVER.
Blackboard (
www.blackboard.com),
provider of enterprise software and services, will undergo its own reality-show-like
“transformation” by redesigning its Web site. The Pappas Group
(www.pappasgroup.com)
has been selected to rebrand and redesign the existing site, and provide creative
and production services for Blackboard. Blackboard’s previous marketing
firm, DBC Public Relations (www.dbcpr.com) will provide PR and market research.
CONNECTING ALUMNI ACROSS THE GLOBE.
Seattle University (WA) has deployed Blackbaud’s (
www.blackbaud.com)
NetCommunity, an online community solution, to give Seattle U grads a chance to
become more engaged in campus events. The university has since been able to connect
with their alumni more successfully than ever before, say campus and Blackbaud
spokespeople.
DIGITAL MIDDLETOWN.
Ball State University (IN) has turned to Proxim Corp.’s
(
www.proxim.com) broadband
wireless Tsunami systems and products to initiate the research project Digital
Middletown. The project will uncover how students, teachers, and households
in Middle America use and interact with high-definition content delivered via
wireless networks, and the impact of that content on social activity and learning.
PEOPLE
NEW VP.
Serena Software (
www.serena.com), provider
of application lifecycle management solutions, appointed Matthew DiMaria to VP
of Marketing. DiMaria brings more than 20 years of software sales and marketing
experience to Serena. .