The Houston Community College System is operationally decentralized, with six colleges and 26 campuses spread out across 660 square miles. With faculty and staff running their own reports in different formats using data from various sources and time periods, it was not uncommon last year to find six different versions of the same report. HCC’s Vice Chancellor of Information Technology explains how a BI solution implemented in the past year has provided centralized online reporting, a dashboard, and consistent information for better decision making.
Higher education seems stuck in a tricky dilemma: how to move, en masse, to new learning models that seem, on the surface, to require a lower teacher-student ratio. But the dilemma is tricky only if the basic assumption about how students learn remains in the box of behaviorism. And it is tricky only if technology is seen as peripheral--handy but not transformative.
WCET Executive Director Ellen D. Wagner will give a keynote at Campus Technology 2011, just prior to the CT 2011 Innovator Awards recognition ceremony. In a brief interview, CT asked Wagner for her views on IT innovation and adoption in higher education.
The phrases "faculty resistance," or the "lack of faculty buy-in" to adopting information technology for the core teaching/learning paradigm, have become by-words in academia. Yet both phrases are empty and lead nowhere.... Technology advocates urge faculty members to go away from what they've been doing but don't explain what they should go toward.
CIOs must spearhead the move to sustainable campuses, for the sake of their institutions and their own jobs.
Discussions of educational change and debates over traditional values versus new movements in education have seemed to ebb and flow over the history of education, particularly during the 20th century. But is the environment now right for a true revolution, with the push toward "21st Century skills" and new media? Michael Wesch examines trends over several decades to offer some perspective.
The presentation paradigm is starting to change with the times. We may finally get free from the “boxed” ideas in PowerPoint slides. A good first step is Prezi.
Director of Retention Angela Naginey has employed a “holistic” strategy in her retention initiative at Cal Lutheran University. Her plan includes partnerships across campus, early identification of at-risk students, and a continuous review process. All components are supported both with software, including Hobsons’ Retain, and with ongoing outreach efforts.
Learning in higher education--formal, informal, and social--is constantly disrupted and almost always scattered during the years of undergraduate education. Learning experiences during those years are discontinuous and vertically organized because of an over-arching business model that undermines the continuity of learning by making knowledge into separate chunks instead of recognizing it as flow. But, there is an alternative…
It’s 2011 already. What’s the holdup with e-readers designed for the needs of academia?
