Schools want apps that can be developed and revamped quickly--and engage students fully with their institutions. A new Blackboard platform aims to help.
"There's been a sea change in community colleges, from a sole emphasis on providing an access to education for all, to placing a much greater, additional emphasis on the students you have already admitted," according to South Orange County Community College District Vice Chancellor Bob Bramucci. In this interview, he tells Campus Technology's Mary Grush how SOCCCD is expanding its toolchest for student success, why that's more crucial now than ever, and what the institution is doing to help other colleges do the same.
This "creativity incubator" promotes the idea of students taking ownership of campus technology; it also helps them make the connection between classroom learning and the nitty-gritty of real work.
In the competitive world of student recruitment, schools must recognize that today's students are finding--and judging--them on their mobile offerings.
At Loyola University Maryland, competitions are giving students real-world practice at conceiving, designing, and building mobile apps.
Blackboard's mobile team has taken what's it learned about developing apps for education environments and created a tool that allows non-developers to slam together their own apps.
The Kuali Foundation has revealed plans to include the Bootstrap Web development framework as part of its new Kuali Rapid Application Development (KRAD) framework with the release of Kuali Rice 2.3, which is scheduled for July 31 of this year. The KRAD framework with Bootstrap will enable developers to modernize the interface and functionality of Kuali applications.
Instead of shoveling functionality from its website into a mobile app, the Fox School of Business built an app featuring only those tools that students need while on the go.
The University of Arizona has launched its own open source-derived site creation and management platform, UA Site-in-a-Box, to help campus departments, clubs, and organizations create and maintain high quality, UA-branded Web presences.
San Jose State University's developing new courses on big data that aim to get "students hired and working creatively with data," thanks to a new partner program from data management software provider Cloudera.