California Virtual Campus

"In the days immediately after Hurricane Katrina devastated Gulf Coast cities and towns, I canvassed the area’s higher ed Web sites and hotlines, trying hard to pull my mind away from the human heartbreak and objectively assess the role of technology in the schools’ disaster responsiveness. What I found as I called the hotlines and scanned the Net for the Web sites of those hardest hit, was universal (and understandable) institutional shock, and varying degrees of rudimentary business continuity-where it existed.

At Tulane, as the university community prepared for the storm, President Scott Cowen explained via the campus Web site that the university was taking preventative measures by a) shutting down e-mail to ‘protect the equipment and allow restoration as early as possible,’ and b) directing everyone to Tulane’s emergency Web site (housed off campus) and alert lines. Via the emergency site, he communicated over ensuing days as he and his staff evacuated from New Orleans to Houston, where power and Internet service would allow more frequent communications. The toll-free and local alert lines, when I called them, were non-functional.

At the University of New Orleans, campus Web site updates four days after the storm advised that the site would be the primary source of information. The university was establishing new office space and trying to restore computing systems, was the message at that time. In an open letter, Chancellor Tim Ryan explained that students would have the option of taking courses electronically for degree credit- an unforeseen benefit of eLearning.

For Southern University at New Orleans, a few lonely lines of text inhabited the space where the university Web site had existed, offering two hotline phone numbers: one for staff/faculty, the other for students (both out of the Baton Rouge campus). The faculty line worked; the student line was disconnected….."

By Katherine Grayson, Editor-in-Chief of Campus Technology.
kgrayson@101com.com

For additional information:

http://www.campus-technology.com/article.asp?id=11812

"Two New England-area undergraduates have pooled their academic capital and raw business instincts to develop and market a software platform for a campus administrative area they believe is woefully underserved: student activities administration. Friends Mark Greene, from the University of Rochester, and Aaron Severs at Wentworth Institute of Technology, in Boston, said they went to work on a business plan for the software after being surprised at the lack of tools to administer student activities they both were interested in.

The result is SA Link, a ‘complete enterprise system for student activities department administration.’ The software underwent beta testing in April 2005, and after a pilot at Wentworth, Version 1.0 will be released this fall. ‘We found that there were a lot of nice products out there for course management, career services, and alumni relations in particular,’ said Severs, co founder of CollegiateLink with Green. ‘What amazed us, however, was the lack of offerings for the co-curricular side of things. Campus unions, student leadership, and athletics were particularly in need of quality software.’

Added Greene: ‘In general, we also found that software for colleges and universities was higher priced and of lower quality than that offered to businesses. We felt that affordable technology should be available that is effective, easy to use, and feels like it’s actually been updated since the ’90s.’ SA LINK will be offered in two packages. SA LINK Enterprise can be purchased as a customizable software application, ready to run on any standard Windows server. SA LINK TurnKey is a subscription service where CollegiateLink provides the server and system administration."

For additional information:

http://www.pr.com/press-release/3144

"Indiana State University will become the first public university in the state to require all undergraduate students to have
notebook computers, beginning with incoming freshmen in fall 2007. ISU provost Jack Maynard said the decision rested on the need to prepare students for a ‘world increasingly defined by technology, globalization, and communication’ and a desire to attract high-achieving students.

While it is not possible to project prices into the future, university officials hope to see laptop computers available for around $1,000 or less by the time the requirement takes affect. Maynard said the program makes Indiana State part of an national agenda to promote ‘one-to-one’ computing in education, which envisions the creation of learning environments in which every student is assured continuous and pervasive access to unprecedented tools and information resources."

For additional information:

http://www.indstate.edu/home_flash.html

A consortium of colleges and universities has offered students displaced by Hurricane Katrina free enrollments
in online college courses to help maintain their education while they are in transition. The Sloan Consortium, together
with the Southern Regional Education Board with a $1.1 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, said it would offer a wide range of courses for students at the community college, university and graduate level regardless of academic discipline. The courses will be given by major universities and other Sloan Consortium members.

‘We know that many colleges and universities in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi will not be able to resume their
fall semesters and students are scrambling for alternatives,’ said Dave Spence, president of the Southern Regional Education
Board. ‘With the help of dozens of colleges and universities nationwide, we can now offer students key courses online to
bridge them through this difficult time and eventually allow them to return to their home campuses.’

An eight-week accelerated semester is being funded by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Colleges and universities offering the courses will forgo tuition and fees to help students at institutions disrupted by Katrina. "Online
learning can be an important means of academic continuity in a time of crisis," said Frank Mayadas, program director,
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. "We are getting a tremendous response from both those who want to offer courses and
from impacted institutions that need the help." At this time, the goal is to accommodate at least 10,000 student
enrollments.

For more information visit: http://www.SloanSemester.org.

"Ugly as she was, Katrina may have given BellSouth a rare opportunity: the chance to turn one of the oldest cities in the USA into a showcase for 21st-century communications. Talk of how New Orleans could look some day may seem fanciful considering it may take years to make the city livable again.

Assuming New Orleans rises again, a city rebuilt from the ground up could boast the best voice, data and video communications infrastructure in the nation, says Bill Smith, BellSouth’s chief technology officer.

‘It’s hard under the circumstances to see this disaster in that light,’ Smith says. "But if you were bound and determined to find a silver lining to this catastrophe, one could say that there is the potential here to rebuild a state-of-the-art network in every respect.’

If BellSouth does decide to rebuild its network, it could be ‘a golden opportunity for the city,’ says Forrester Research analyst Lisa Pierce.

Wired with a state-of-the-art broadband network, she says, New Orleans could make vast improvements to health care, education and the local emergency communications network."

For additional information:

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2005-09-11-katrina-communications-edge_x.htm

"How does a small liberal arts college in Ohio get caught up in a distance education scandal in Florida in which thousands of its credits were awarded for no work? A lot of the problem appears to be not paying attention, according to a statement released Wednesday by Otterbein College, which finds itself in this embarrassing situation.

Otterbein announced that it was revoking thousands of credits awarded to hundreds of Florida teachers, enabling some of them to receive certification, recertification or raises. The college also announced that it would donate the funds it received for the courses to a charity in Florida.

The college’s involvement with the distance education programs in Florida was ‘inconsistent with the standards and integrity long associated with Otterbein,’ said a statement from Thomas C. Morrison, chairman of the college’s board.

Many details about the programs and their link to Otterbein may not become clear because the official who authorized them, Dan Thompson, died in March. Thompson was associate dean for academic affairs. Otterbein’s investigations are partly in response to an investigation by Katherine Fernandez Rundle, a state attorney in Miami-Dade County, Fla.

A grand jury report released this summer found numerous irregularities in the way some Miami-Dade teachers have their education credentials evaluated. Specifically, it found that William McCoggle, a former Miami teacher, created two sham entities – the American Academy of Distance Education and Training and Move On Toward Education and Training – through which credits were awarded to teachers for work they never did at colleges they never attended. (McCoggle could not be reached for comment.)

The grand jury report found that in this program, ‘There were no tests; there was no homework; there were no assignments and there were no class discussions…. There was no learning and no educational end was attained. The teachers simply paid money and later received a transcript.’"

For additional information:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/09/02/otterbein

"When classes start Sept. 6 at the University of California at Merced, the campus will be packed with so much technology, students will be able to monitor their laundry via the Internet. The campus is wired with countless miles of computer cable, blanketed with wireless networks and chock full of other technology, said Richard Kogut, chief information officer for the college’s information technology department.

The moment students register, they will be handed some technology – a radio frequency identification (RFID) chip – in their identification cards, Kogut said. The cards are called ‘cat cards’ after the campus mascot, the Bobcat.

Student debit accounts can be established on campus and linked to the cards, Kogut said. The cost of services and materials will be debited from those accounts, he said. They’ll even work in campus vending machines.

‘With the cat cards, you can quickly slide library books through a scanner with your card on top and it will automatically record what books you are checking out,’ Kogut said. ‘The cat cards also can be used to do your laundry.’

Using the cat card in the laundry room also will connect the student’s washer or dryer to the Internet.

‘Students will be able to check when the washers or driers are finished with their cycles over the Internet,’ Kogut said. ‘They can go back to their rooms to study and keep on eye on the laundry at the same time. They also will be alerted if the door to a washing machine or drier was opened.’

Cat cards will serve as identification at the financial aid office, the employment center and other campus facilities.

If a card is lost or stolen, the student can quickly invalidate it and get a new one. The RFID chips don’t have any student information on them, only a key, or coded personal identification number.

Chips also are being put in library books, said Bruce Miller, university librarian, and will help keep track of the volumes if they are lost.

‘We can also see what books are being checked out,’ he said. If a book isn’t used for several years, it will go into storage, Miller said, but if it’s needed, it can be returned to the shelves within a day.

The Leo Kolligian Library is networked with other UC campuses, so books at other libraries in the system can be delivered to a student in two to three days, he said.

‘Because of that access to other libraries, our library system is second only to The Library of Congress in terms of what we have access to,’ Miller said. ‘Books in Berkeley, Irvine, San Diego or any other UC, those are ours, too.’

And access is what all the technology is about.

Students and staff members won’t have trouble getting to the Internet or the school’s network, Kogut said.

Thousands of computer ethernet ports around campus will allow students to plug computers into the network, and the campus also will be blanketed by wireless coverage, he said."

Bee staff writer Patrick Giblin can be reached at 578-2347 or pgiblin@modbee.com.

For additional information:

http://www.modbee.com/reports/ucmerced/story/11151728p-11904647c.html

"The California Community College (CCC) system is moving forward with plans to automate the way it manages
transcripts and transcript requests. Its proposed CCCTran System will enable the 2.9 million student-community
college system to enhance transcript security and turnaround time among its 109 campuses, and ‘trading partners,’
including the California State University (CSU) system, the University of California (UC) system, and California
Student Information Services (CSIS). CCC awarded Xap Corp. a contract to develop and implement the system.

Catherine McKenzie, a spokeswoman for the CCC’s Chancellor’s Office, said, ‘As the largest college system in the country,
we expect the CCCTran System to set the industry standard for efficient transcript processing.’ Transcript costs are
expected to decrease from the current $6-$10 for a conventional manually-issued transcript to $0.50 per
electronic transcript, she added. The new system will  be a centralized service for securely transmitting
transcripts ‘in real time’ from CCC member schools to authorized educational institutions–regardless of
current student information systems or business practices for transcripts."

For additional information:

http://www.cccco.edu/

"Developing a hybrid course involves more than simply uploading online articles into Blackboard or WebCT and slapping together a discussion board. To be effective, hybrid models must be carefully planned and structured. Here’s what instructors must keep in mind, and how they can either have a tremendously successful learning event or end up with disgruntled, confused students."

For the complete article:

http://www.xplanazine.com/archives/2005/02/the_hybrid_chal.php

"The Southern Universities Purchasing Consortium (SUPC), a European purchasing combine for more than 40 universities and colleges in the U.K. signed a four-year agreement with ebrary.

The schools will use ebrary’s Dynamic Content Platform, which provides full-text online books to its member institutions. The deal with SUPC will enable the consortium to provide its patrons content and research tools at better licensing rates.

Under the terms of the contract, consortium members will be able to chose a variety of licensing options for either subscription or perpetual access. ebrary currently offers a selection of more than 60,000 full-text, online books, reports, and other content from more than 200 academic, scientific, and professional publishers."

For additional information:

http://supc.procureweb.ac.uk/home.jsp