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You have to learn to let go. The idea that books, magazines, databases or any form of information source can and should be kept for perpetuity is laughable. Items in a library need to be weeded and space is the major reason why. I know all of you want to keep your precious books, and I do to. But who’s going to pay for it, you?... — the other me

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July 2, 2009

A California Dream: Saving State Universities With an Online Campus

Of the four universities linked originally by the proto-Internet in 1969, two of them were part of the University of California system: the Los Angeles and Santa Barbara campuses. Now, as the system grapples with a staggering budget crisis that might close institutions and forever alter what’s considered one of the crown jewels of public education, a proposal comes suggesting that salvation lies in going online.

A new cyber-campus “would have selective admissions; tuition somewhere between community college and the on-campus UC price, part-time and ‘anytime’ options and lectures by the best faculty from the entire UC system,” wrote Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the law school at the system’s Berkeley campus, in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times. “Our online students might miss the keg parties, but they would have the same world-class faculty, UC graduate student instructors, and adjunct faculty.”

“UC-XI,” which is what Mr. Edley calls his vision for an 11th system campus, can be built upon social networks that connect students to instructors and to one another. Hard-to-virtualize facilities like science laboratories could be opened up at night or on weekends. And, Mr. Edley says, the faculty can step up to ensure “UC-caliber instruction and learning.”

Mr. Edley does acknowledge that there have been some failures in online education, “but none involved degree-granting instruction by a premier institution with the kind of market appeal that UC campuses enjoy.” Well, the Board of Trustees of the Illinois system, which sent its expensive GlobalCampus online project back to the drawing board earlier this spring, might disagree. And one can argue about the definition of “market appeal,” but officials in Texas and Utah, both struggling with online-education initiatives, clearly thought their institutions had a certain cachet, at least within their states. But Mr. Edley prefers to focus on more successful ventures like Britain’s Open University and the for-profit University of Phoenix.

“We’ve had decades of increasing dysfunction in Sacramento and smoldering doubts in some quarters about the value of supporting public education,” Mr. Edley writes. “Now comes the resulting surge in victims — present and future — in families and throughout the economy.”

Online learning, he concludes, could save the California dream of a top-notch education for all. The best offense in a crisis, he concludes, “is often innovation.” —Josh Fischman

June 12, 2009

Tech Therapy: My Boss, the Dinosaur

A Tech Therapy listener wrote in to Warren Arbogast and Scott Carlson recently to ask what to do about a boss who is, shall we say, out of it.

“What one should do with a boss or supervisor that is out of date, otherwise known as a dinosaur? I have observed mass confusion due to the fact that the ‘manager’ is incompetent and clueless to new technology and terminologies. He orders the wrong equipment and places all responsibility on people other than himself. He refuses to move forward and has been phoning it in since I have worked here….”

The Tech Therapists offer some advice about going to human resources and going over the boss’s head — and they also raise a contrarian point: Maybe your “dinosaur boss” is the boss for a reason.

June 10, 2009

Arbitrator Rules That Google E-Mail System Does Not Violate Faculty Agreement at Canadian Campus

An arbitrator says Lakehead University, in Ontario, had the right to switch its campus e-mail service to a free program offered by Google and did not violate the collective agreement with the Lakehead University Faculty Association.

The union objected to the switch because it feared that e-mail messages could be opened by the FBI or CIA under the USA Patriot Act since Google is an American company, subject to that law. The arbitrator acknowledged in his ruling that “the likelihood of such incursions by U.S. authority into a private e-mail system (Lakehead’s own former system) was marginal compared to what might occur in the presence of the Google system.” However, he ruled in favor of the university because the wording of the collective agreement was not specific enough to ensure e-mail communication met the concerns of “absolute privacy to faculty members.”

The Canadian Association of University Teachers now intends to advise all Canadian faculty associations to review the protection of privacy wording in their contracts. —Karen Birchard

May 19, 2009

New Web Site Helps Track Flu's Impact on North American Universities

Mexico City — With the H1N1 flu epidemic wreaking havoc on exchange programs throughout the Americas, the Consortium for North American Higher Education Collaboration started a new Web site today to track the virus’s impact on universities.

Since the epidemic broke out in Mexico, in late April, the organization, known as Conahec and based at the University of Arizona, has been flooded with calls and e-mail from university administrators, students, and parents. Many have asked whether to halt or delay international programs in Mexico and whether students already there should be sent home, said Francisco Marmolejo, Conahec’s executive director.

The new site, accessible through a flashing icon on Conahec’s main Web page, includes flu-related statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from the Mexican government, as well as the responses of universities throughout the region to the health crisis. —Marion Lloyd

April 30, 2009

Research and Education Network Leaders Look for Lessons in Inauguration-Day Traffic Spike

Arlington, VA — It has been about 100 days since Barack Obama took office, but this week college networking leaders were talking about what an Inauguration Day spike in Internet traffic means for the role of high-speed research networks on campus.

A session here at the annual meeting of Internet2, a college high-speed networking group, focused on what it called “the Obama effect” on campus networks. On January 20, the day President Obama was sworn in amid record-setting crowds and an onslaught of media coverage, Internet use on campus networks spiked to record levels as people on campuses watched video of the speech on their computers or sent Facebook updates about the event, according to a college officials who spoke at the session.

That spike caught some officials off guard. “All of us were a little surprised by the impact of this,” said Marla Meehl, manager of network engineering and telecommunications at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “It’s a new thing we have to consider — that a media event could lead to such a spike.”

The session was led by Jen Leasure, president and chief executive of a networking group called the Quilt, which represents state and regional academic and research networks. She said that many officials have traditionally turned to their high-speed research networks when they know there will be a need for large amounts of Internet bandwidth — and that usually those situations have involved educational or research projects planned by professors. Now that students and professors, like many others, are turning to the Internet for video of major news events, college administrators might want to consider using high-speed networks to help ease the load when big news happens.

“We tend to focus internally on educational research projects,” she said. “Now we need to check on external factors too. The next time we know of a big public event, we’ll talk to each other ahead of time.” —Jeffrey R. Young

April 16, 2009

Tech Therapy: A College Leader Talks About Outsourcing E-Mail

Paul Turner, manager of academic technologies at the University of Notre Dame, discusses his university’s decision to outsource e-mail on the latest edition of Tech Therapy, recorded live at The Chronicle’s Technology Forum last week. Students had been unhappy with the e-mail system’s performance, and officials at Notre Dame wanted a solution that would be more secure and possibly save money.

The university investigated a number of e-mail companies and ended up going with Gmail. “The students got a much faster and smoother e-mail experience,” Mr. Turner says. “To move students to Exchange, it would have cost us $1.5-million. To go to Gmail cost us nothing.” By outsourcing e-mail, the university IT staff is able to concentrate on other things.

Warren Arbogast, co-host of Tech Therapy, says that outsourcing e-mail services might be a viable trend for the future. Facebook is huge on campuses right now, but no college would consider “insourcing” — or creating their own — Facebook.

March 25, 2009

'Idaho Education Network' Cut Out of State Budget

A plan to connect public schools, universities, and business in Idaho with a high-speed broadband network may be delayed after the State Legislature cut the project’s seed money out of its annual budget, the Associated Press is reporting.

The Department of Administration had requested $3-million from the state for the 2010 fiscal year—a sum it hoped to more than triple with federal matching funds and private foundation money—to increase broadband access across the state. This would involve building an “Idaho Education Network”—similar to one in neighboring Utah—that would allow learning institutions to swap interactive videos, among other things.

Although Mike Gwartney, the department’s director, had requested a 69-percent increase from this year’s allocation, the bean counters stymied him, trimming the agency’s take by 1.7 percent instead. –Steve Kolowich

March 23, 2009

U. of Virginia Plans to Phase Out Public Computer Labs

The University of Virginia has begun a three-year process of shutting down all of its public computer labs as part of an effort to cut costs.

In an explanation published on the university’s Web site, information-technology officials say that students’ changing habits have rendered the public labs obsolete. A survey conducted last fall revealed that 99 percent of new students brought their own laptops to the campus. And while the labs are still heavily used (students spent 651,900 hours in the labs last year), internal data indicated that 95 percent of the time those students used the lab computers to surf the Web and read and compose text documents—tasks that officials say they could easily do on their own computers.

“In these budget times, we have to distinguish between providing essential services and providing ones that are merely convenient,” said James L. Hilton, vice president and chief information officer at the university.

While some students do rely on the lab computers to run specialized programs—such as MatLab, Eclipse, MathCAD, and SPSS—Mr. Hilton said he believed the university would be able to negotiate licensing agreements with the software companies that would allow students to run the programs on their laptops through the university’s network.

Mr. Hilton said the university now spends about $300,000 per year maintaining the labs. But it is difficult to predict how much the university will save by closing those facilities, he said, since it is not yet clear how much the new system will cost to implement.

What about the 1 percent of students without computers? Or students without printers who now rely on the labs to print out their papers? Mr. Hilton acknowledged that some issues will need to be worked out during this transition. “Printing is the bane of everyone’s existence everywhere, and we will continue working on finding better printing solutions,” said Mr. Hilton. “But there are solutions out there.”

He said that the university would be open to adjusting the plan as necessary, depending “on what impact we start to see it having.” —Steve Kolowich

March 19, 2009

U. of Manitoba Researchers Publish Open-Source Handbook on Educational Technology

Technology is changing the way students learn. Is it changing the way colleges teach?

Not enough, says George Siemens, associate director of research and development at the University of Manitoba’s Learning Technologies Centre.

While colleges and universities have been “fairly aggressive” in adapting their curricula to the changing world, Mr. Siemens told The Chronicle, “What we haven’t done very well in the last few decades is altering our pedagogy.”

To help get colleges thinking about how they might adapt their teaching styles to the new ways students absorb and process information, Mr. Siemens and Peter Tittenberger, director of the center, have created a Web-based guide, called the Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning.

Taking their own advice, they have outfitted the handbook with a wiki function that will allow readers to contribute their own additions.

In the its introduction, the handbook declares the old pedagogical model—where the students draw their information primarily from textbooks, newspapers, and their professors—dead. “Our learning and information acquisition is a mash-up,” the authors write. “We take pieces, add pieces, dialogue, reframe, rethink, connect, and ultimately, we end up with some type of pattern that symbolizes what’s happening ‘out there’ and what it means to us.” Students are forced to develop new ways of making sense of this flood of information fragments.

But Mr. Siemens said that colleges had been slow to appreciate this fact. “I don’t see a lot of research coming out on what universities might look like in the future,” he said. “If how we interact with information and with each other fundamentally changes, it would suggest that the institution also needs to change.” –Steve Kolowich

March 17, 2009

Australian University Decides to Outsource Its Entire IT Department

The University of Canberra is axing some 50 information-technology jobs and moving them to India as part of institutionwide cost-cutting measures, The Australian newspaper reports.

University officials said sending its IT systems, administration, and payroll services abroad will save about $5-million over the next five years. Wipro, one of the world’s largest IT outsourcing firms, will take over services beginning this month.

The move was part of reforms that began two years ago that are aimed to reduce the university’s large deficit. Officials said the decision was not related to the economic downturn. In all, 150 jobs have been cut since layoffs began in 2007.

The decision has been criticized by local labor unions, but union officials said they would not strike. Last week, Australia’s National Tertiary Education Union said sending university administrative functions to India was unprecedented. —Martha Ann Overland

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