California Virtual Campus

"The ex-CU [University of Colorado] president, noting the pressures of instant criticism via the Web, says she made errors in her handling of the football sex scandal and the Ward Churchill flap. Former CU president Betsy Hoffman speaks to the Denver Forum on Thursday, her first public appearance since stepping down Sunday.

Former University of Colorado president Betsy Hoffman said Thursday it became increasingly difficult to make ethical, principled decisions while a "perfect storm" of media fired upon her.

Hoffman said the spread of rumors on Internet blogs creates an instantaneous ‘trial and conviction’ before both sides are heard. She announced her resignation in March amid scandals involving the school’s football recruiting program and professor Ward Churchill’s essay comparing some victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to a Nazi official.

‘Decisions are made in an instant, when real thoughtful change takes time,’ said Hoffman, speaking to the Denver Forum in her first public appearance since she stepped down Sunday.

‘One of the criticisms of me was, "Well, she can’t make a tough decision,"’ Hoffman said. ‘No, that’s not a problem. The real problem was I had a lot of really tough decisions that had to be made in this perfect storm.’

Hoffman said that if she could do it over again, she would listen less to lawyers and more to public-relations staff.’"

By Jennifer Brown
Denver Post Staff Writer

For additional information:

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_2915000

"Walk across the back quad at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, or through the dining hall at Loyola University in New Orleans, and students – sunning themselves between classes or grabbing a snack – will still have their minds plugged into the World Wide Web.

And that’s a good thing, or a bad thing, depending on who you ask.

‘Wireless technology brings the internet to the discussion no matter where they are,’ says James Dalton, executive director of information technology at Roanoke. ‘The barriers to where you use the internet have been broken. The domain of internet connectivity is extended to the entire campus. Students can do research, check email or send instant messages while they are eating lunch, working in the library or sitting outside.’

Since the late 90s, college campuses have been installing palm-sized antennas around their campuses. Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale was a pioneer, outfitting wireless areas in 41 buildings in Florida. Its law school was the first in the nation to go wireless in 1997.

Now nearly every college campus has at least a few wireless areas, resulting in increasing numbers of students toting laptops to class.

The new technology has been an academic boon to most students and faculty. Students can access course materials, do research and contact professors. But it also permits – or even invites – a style of multi-tasking unavailable just a few years ago. Students can play video games, instant message friends and even watch movies – all while faculty are lecturing.

‘In the last couple of years it’s become an issue that none of us were expecting,’ says Lisa Smith-Butler, law library director at NSU, who directs a program the law school has been using that lets professors monitor their students’ Internet use more closely.

‘A fairly typical scene in one of my classes might look like this,’ says Dr. Gerald Smith, professor of religion at Sewanee: The University of the South in Tennessee, ‘A young woman is sitting with one leg folded under the other, shoes on the floor, with her cellphone on waiting for a text message, her iPod is draped around her neck and during class she may insert her ear phones from time to time.

‘On screen, she is surfing CNN, but has open another page for the Speedo bathing suit site, and she is typing a quick email note to her mother to let her know she got back alright from Atlanta last night."

For additional information:

http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/513376/

"The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) recently inked a $30 million deal with Thomson Prometric, an electronic testing and assessment services firm in Baltimore, to convert the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) to a computer-based format.

Electronic methods for administering the popular MCAT tests are expected to expedite the enrollment process and help
simplify admissions among the nation’s medical schools.

Each year about 60,000 students take AAMC’s MCAT test to demonstrate proficiency in areas crucial to success in
medical schools. New computer-based tests will be administered at Thomson Prometric centers around the country."

The MCAT Website is available at
http://newsletters.101com.com/c.asp?id=579562&l=12&c=0551252a0adfa347

Information about the new agreement is available at
http://newsletters.101com.com/c.asp?id=579562&l=13&c=0551252a0adfa347

"If college students had an Eleventh Commandment, perhaps it would read, `Be skeptical about what you find on the Internet.’  For today’s campus crowd, the Net is what the library stacks were to their parents: the first place to go for research.

`I just Google everything,’ said Luke Sutter, a senior finance major at the University of South Florida, whose visits to the campus library are more often to look things up on the Web than to read books and scholarly journals.

`I’m almost done with school,’ Sutter said. `It’s gotten me through.’

It’s no surprise students who use the Internet for everything from instant messaging their friends to downloading music would jump on the Web to research a term paper. They like the ease of turning on a laptop rather than traveling to the library.

This reliance on the Internet, though, has educators at USF and elsewhere concerned about just how adept students are at finding information online and distinguishing what’s reliable from what’s out of left field.

As Arielle Nathanson, a senior anthropology and psychology major puts it, there are so many dubious authorities online `that you just have to filter through.’

Educational Testing Service, the company that administers the SAT, has developed a test to see how well students handle online information. The Princeton, N.J.-based company tried out the exam this spring on 4,700 college students on 30 campuses.

ETS would not disclose the results of the pilot test, but it plans to make the Information and Communication Technology Literacy Assessment available to all colleges and universities starting in 2006.

Today’s students `can do a search but they aren’t particularly good at determining if the information is reliable,’ said Irvin Katz, senior research associate at ETS.

`Is it from an authoritative source?’ Katz said. `Is it timely?’

Colleges could use the test in a variety of ways, such as testing the Internet skills of incoming freshmen.

California State University participated in the ETS pilot program.

Ilene Rockman, who heads the school’s Information Competence Initiative, says Cal State determined in 1995 that its students need to be as proficient in using the Internet as they are in English or math.

“I don’t think they understand the criteria for evaluating information,’ Rockman said. “They accept what they see on the Web as credible.’

School, Survey Reflects Trend

USF illustrates how much the Web has supplanted traditional ways of doing research.

Last month, the school opened its Information Commons in the library on the Tampa campus. The school spent about $480,000 to renovate space used to house reference books. The books were moved to the basement to make room for banks of computers that had been scattered around the building.

Surveys of college students confirm how heavily they rely on the Internet."

For additional information:

http://www.tampatrib.com/FloridaMetro/MGBAS3X40BE.html

"Are schools and manufacturers each giving students the same advice on what to bring to college with them? Especially interesting is this article coverage of the categories of the kinds of advice schools provide for students. (CNET)"

For additional information [The entire article]:

http://news.com.com/2100-1041_3-5777151.html

"Chemistry Professor Stanley Smith has been teaching classes in 100 Noyes Lab since 1960 – an experience hard on the vocal cords. Until a few years ago, the room had no sound absorption or microphones, and there was a dead spot in the middle of the room where it was hard for students to hear.

‘In order to be heard, we had to yell. A kid could be sitting right there,’ Smith said, indicating one of the first several rows of seats, ‘and he couldn’t hear you.’

Now, Smith can wear a wireless microphone clipped to his tie while he lectures. He can perform an experiment, and even those sitting in the back of the classroom can see it – with the help of an overhead camera. He can project photos, a video or an Internet site onto a screen overhead.

‘The difference is enormous from the way it was,’ Smith said. With just a blackboard, he said, ‘We can’t show pictures of things, animations. We can’t get on the Internet. (Now) we’re wired. The whole world is at our disposal by touching a button.’

The classroom was renovated in 2001, part of a program to update neglected classrooms on campus and add technology to make teaching easier.

‘There are kids who had better rooms in the high schools they were in,’ said Steve Hesselschwerdt, associate director for space management who oversees the renovation program….

For the major renovations, workers gut the classrooms. They put in new ceilings and floors; acoustical panels on the walls; new lights on the ceiling that can be dimmed or turned on and off separately to accommodate students taking notes and professors showing slides or videos; lights above the chalkboard; and electronic projection screens that recess into the ceiling. The work can include improvements to the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning.

The rooms also get new seats. The UI [University of Illinois] now uses standard furniture so it can be moved from room to room, and all of it uses the same replacement parts….

The UI’s information technology office adds media cabinets, which include controls for the lights and the projection screen, a public address system, VCR, Internet connection and a computer or a place to plug in a laptop, an overhead digital projector and an assisted listening device so hearing-impaired students can listen to lectures through headsets.
With such technology, Smith can project onto the overhead screen the notes he writes or an enlarged view of a molecular model he holds under a camera. He can show a video of a chemical reaction too hazardous to duplicate in the classroom.
A teacher can also videotape a lecture and combine it with a PowerPoint presentation or other information presented in class and make it available to students instantly.

‘We can take any lecture with all accompanying technology and publish it on the course Web site right after the lecture, and students can see it as many times as they need until they learn the material,’ said Tyson Miller, a chemistry instructor who also teaches in 100 Noyes Lab."

For additional information:

http://www.news-gazette.com/localnews/story.cfm?Number=18531

"Strayer University, a school for part-time students that offers a hybrid in-class and online curriculum, is now holding its 2005 virtual commencement ceremony at http://www.strayer.edu The virtual commencement provides the school’s graduates with an online ceremony that complements their experience in Internet classes.

‘This virtual event brings the graduation directly into the homes of Strayer University Online students and their guests,’ said Pamela Bell, provost of Strayer University. ‘The online ceremony is a perfect fit for our technologically savvy students, who have earned
their degrees using an e-learning platform. Our virtual commencement ceremony is the logical evolution in online education.’

In the 2005 virtual commencement ceremony, Strayer grads are greeted with a rendering of ‘Pomp and Circumstance,’
while viewing their names and degrees in a diploma format on the computer screen. Grads can navigate through opening remarks,
student biographies, pictures of classmates and hear a keynote speaker, as well as addresses by Provost Bell and Dr. Chris
Toe, president of Strayer University. More than one-third of  Strayer students now take 100 percent of their courses online."

For additional information, see the link above.

"Due to an e-mail mistake by the University of Kansas, 119 students who failed all their classes during the last semester found out who shared their misfortune. The students were notified earlier this week that they were in jeopardy of having their financial aid revoked. The e-mail sent Monday by the Office of Student Financial Aid asked for additional information to determine if they were still eligible for aid.

The e-mail address list included the names of all 119 students, with the result that everyone on it could see the names of all the others.

‘It was a completely inadvertent, unintentional mistake," university spokesman Todd Cohen said Thursday. "It was our error, our mistake and we deeply regret it.’

Nancy George of Gardner, one of the students on the list, was livid, saying the mistake was tantamount to releasing the grades of students without their permission, which the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act prohibits.

‘When I saw everybody’s names listed on here, I thought this was totally asinine,’ she said. ‘I have everybody’s name and information, and they have my information.

‘Nobody should have known that I failed a class or that I even had a student loan,’ she said. ‘It is really upsetting.’

George said she took only one class last semester and failed it because she had to spend time tending to her young daughter, who developed pneumonia.

Cohen said that after discovering the error Tuesday, the university began contacting students to apologize and tell them of steps being taken to make sure a similar mistake doesn’t happen again."

For additional information:

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2005-06-17-email-failing-students_x.htm

"Vantage Learning (www.vantagelearning.com) today announced the release of version 2.0 of I-Manage(TM), a web-based management tool first released last year, which allows customers using the IntelliMetric(TM) web-services based API to easily integrate automated essay scoring with their writing assessment and instructional applications. Version 2.0 offers significantly greater functionality with expanded web services and line by line feedback.

With I-Manage, customers can accurately score essay responses; provide line by line feedback on spelling, grammar and mechanics; identify parts of speech for each word or phrase; and identify the readability level of the student’s essay. I-Manage 2.0 also includes VIOLERT(TM), which is capable of evaluating a writer’s intent to do harm to oneself or others and CLEANSPEAK(TM), to identify potentially inappropriate words included within the essay.

‘I-Manage gives customers an unprecedented level of control over the IntelliMetric essay scoring service,’ said Scott Elliot, Chief Operating Officer for Vantage Learning. "Customers can now offer a much broader range of essay scoring services to their end users.

Customers can use I-Manage to add new writing prompts and rubrics, as well as allow users to edit both. The tools include several quality control and testing features, which facilitate a smooth and seamless implementation. Customers can easily monitor usage and obtain reports with an easy to use interface that allows selection by date range, prompt and other relevant criteria. …

The results of over 120 studies conducted in range of K-12 and higher education environments found that IntelliMetric scores as accurately as human expert scorers. The scores produced by IntelliMetric agree with the scores assigned by human experts nearly 99% of the time….

Vantage Learning provides services in all 50 states directly to end-user clients and provides services to educational leaders such as The College Board, ACT, Harcourt Educational Measurement, CTB/McGraw Hill and Thomson Learning."

For additional information:

http://www.vantagelearning.com

"A Midwestern college is using Radio Frequency I.D. technology to automate student attendance records required for financial aid funding. The school will use credential IT tags from Axcess International Inc. as a unique student ID card to
record their attendance. The school said the system will reduce student attendance records by up to 80 percent.

‘The method for verifying student attendance for financial aid was very cumbersome for the professors and paperwork
intensive for the staff,’ stated Dr. William Dunbar, president of Midwest College of Oriental Medicine (WI and IL).
‘We needed a system that would free the professors from submitting the attendance records required for governing
financial aid funding and allow them to concentrate their time on their students.’

Network receivers located throughout the campus query the RFID tags once an hour and log the identification number
of the tag. The tag ID number is linked to the attendance database and automatically records which students are
currently in class. The reporting is mandatory for students receiving financial aid that has funds electronically transferred to the school."

For additional information:

http://acupuncture.edu/midwest/index.html