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New Technologies for Colleges?
sinco asks: "I'm on my university's Student Government Association as the position of Vice President of Technology. Our school has currently provided wireless internet, course management software (Blackboard), personal web space for students, the ability to register classes online, and some more tech features. What type of solutions is out there that might enhance the university's technology for students? What type of cool things is your school doing tech wise for its students?"
Here at RIT we've had all those things and more for 5+ years. At least this is my 5th year and I've always registered online. In addition to upgrading already existing technologies, which need it desperately, students are working to push more open source stuff. I got firefox installed in the library, and I'd say almost half the school uses it. One cool thing we have is a movable type license for every RIT facutly, staff and student. Now that's cool.
We also have an extremely fast extremely open network. The school allows you to do just about anything with the network. But if you go too far and they find out they come after you. I always laugh when I hear stories about people who can't even play fpses because the school blocks them.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I don't know about enhancing the school's techonology outlook but for the love of god get rid of blackboard, its such a PIECE OF CRAP!
If you're talking about IT students here, give them more hands-on labs - live network equipment, servers, etc.
If you're talking about liberal arts crowd, just give them more bandwidth, and perhaps a nice online e-library. The Movable Type licenses sound cool.
Overall, more bandwidth and better administration... Things like streaming video classes would be cool, yeah... And I'm sure you can implement a load of nice geeky features, but it would take geeks to use them.
Okay, I'm biased, since I'm part of the group that runs it, but here at Tufts we have a website called tuftslife.com which is run by students, for students.
Little burden on the administration, who pays hardly anything to run the website (student activities pays hosting), incredible benefits to the student body - at a school of around 5000, we get 4500ish uniques a day.
Everyone uses it to find out what's going on - it was an attempt to create a paperless campus, free from those awful fliers and chalkings everywhere.
Just a suggestion for a suggestion. =)
Free email for life! 10mb inbox, free email forwarding. POP3 and web access. Let users choose their own unique username. What better way to ask for donations to the school than have effortless contact with all your aluminis forever?
moox. for a new generation.
I submitted this morning but it got rejected, but this seems a good place to bring it up.
In a tech news story Penn State recommends that its 120,000+ users "use standards-based Web browsers other than Internet Explorer to help minimize exposure to attacks that occur through browser vulnerabilities. Web browser options include Firefox, one of several alternatives available for Windows, Mac and other operating systems. It works with all Web-based applications used at Penn State"
"ITS has made this recommendation because the threats are real and alternatives exist to mitigate Web browser vulnerabilities."
Finkployd
Blackboard is a good idea. Its a common place for professors, TA, students to go for information. Its a common medium to submitting homework to the TA. Blackboard can setup in such a way that you can have class mailing lists, discussion forums, a "whiteboard" for virtual meetings.
It is one interface for ALL classes.
Now the problems with blackboard. It is a PIECE OF SHIT system. You ever try to take a timed quiz with it? Ha! don't press that back button, pray that your browser doesn't crash. Why? Because when you start the quiz, it records that you "took the assessment", even if you didn't submit. So fi you hit the back button or lose your session, bam! bye bye quiz. Email your professor and beg and plead for your quiz to be reset. If your lucky, you can still get those points.
Submitting papers/homework online with blackboard? Well they have a "digital drop box". I've used it before and it's fairly convenient (as in i'm a lazy fatass who doesn't go to lecture every day). So in the digital dropbox, there are two buttons. ADD FILE and SEND FILE. Alot of people get screwed over by ADD FILE and think, oh the TA will see it. WRONG! You have to either ADD FILE and then SEND FILE or the TA won't see it otherwise. In release 6, they fixed that problem by adding the ability to upload files in SEND FILE. Still, many students find it is fairly confusing to see ADD FILE and SEND FILE next to eachother.
Lastly, emailing people in the class. God damned, I get like 10 of these "spams" from fellow students. Basically when you use the email function of blackboard, it doesn't any information about what class/section it was from. So I end up getting these emails "The first midterm scores were really low, anyone want to get together for a study group?" uh huh...and is this for bio or for history?
Lastly. Information control. With plain old webpages, students can troll the internet to find class information professors are covering. This is especially important if one wants to "preview" a class. Well, with blackboard. Unless your registered in the class, you have no access to it.
In a nutshell. Blackboard sucks.
Forest Grump, Blackboard User
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
First banana
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
free ipods for incoming freshmen?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Do you have common systems with shell access? (telnet, ssh, whatever.) Nothing better than having some 'old school' tools available, plus it gives a nice sandbox environment for learning about *NIX, programming, etc.
My UID is the product of 2 primes.
This is a question that should be posted to the students of your university. Just because it's cool doesn't mean it's needed. And if it isn't needed it won't be used. Implementing something that your school needs is a lot better than putting in a system that only you and the slashdot readers would care to use.
If you are at a public university, your state open-records law might require your school to give you the grade distributions for all of the classes offered. My SGA offers this service to students. http://sga.smsu.edu/
I posted this in a previous /. article about student films, but no moderators thought it was interesting enough to mod up:
Kiosks in the student union to: 1. browse trailers of student films and 2. pop in a blank DVD-R to burn the film for viewing pleasure at home, the dorm, apartment, etc.
That's one idea. Another is for kiosks in the student learning center or the library so students can plug their portable mp3 players (or burn CDR) to download lecture audio, student notes (could be from a paid student note-taking service), or if you go even more high-tech, powerpoint slides and lecture video. But what am I thinking? No need for kiosks when you have high speed internet -- could be useful for the commuters though.
I've always been a terrible listener in class and have relied heavily on these aids in the past (albeit via the traditional pen and paper notes or the occassional typed notes when available -- shows my age). If you don't spend the money on hardware, then at least spend it on paying students to take notes -- it's a win-win situation. The note-takers learn more because they are forced to listen and convey the class lecture, otherwise their colleagues will be pissed at them. And the classmates get notes as a written record for studying later on.
Linux at home
As the lead website programmer for the Student Government Association for Emerson College, I and my fellow team members are working on an issue tracking system for the entirety of Emerson College. Thought the system, we can identify, analize, and resolve issues and concerns in an open diologe for all members of the college community.
This system (We're calling it ECVoices) is for any student, staff, or faculty member to submit an issue of concern about the college to the SGA. Our intent is to bridge the gaps between the faculty, administration, and student together about the small and large issues of Emerson College.
I'm sorry I can't give a preview right now since we are still in development, but I want to make the point that available of technology is only worth the investment if there are tools that utilize the technology. Emily Garr, the president of the SGA first came up with the idea of such a forum. When she enlisted the help of the crew and I, we worked with her and the rest of the Emerson College community to develop this system.
My hope to you (the poster and any others in similar positions) is that you take advantage of the technology put in place. Do not be afraid if you do not know how to program or know the gross details of developing a technology. Know what you want from the technology, then find the people who can help make it happen.
If you (or anyone else) is interested in the ECVoices project, feel free to send me a note.
AnamanFan - Trying to find the Truth, one post at a time.
I teach Java at Southwestern Illinois College. We have two semesters (Java I and II). One thing the students seem to like is all of the FREE software I expose them to, as part of the class (Java, Eclipse, and Tomcat).
Not only do I teach the students how to write Java programs, but I teach them how to install and configure the software. Unfortunatly, we might not get to all of the materials becuse of the pace I set; but it is all available for them. As a technology note. All of the classrooms are equiped with SmartBoards
One thing I find incredibly basic, but incredibly useful, is an online calendar, preloaded with my current quarter's classes. I haven't the faintest idea what software my school ( http://www.uci.edu ) uses, but it seems to be in-house. They also have the ability to go back and forward years in time (though I wasn't here, it shows 1995 as the first year) and all my past quarters classes are listed as well.
It's really handy to plan your day right on that calendar, around your existing classes. The UCI one is rather fully featured (though I feel sometimes not perfectly intuitive), but I still find it ends up being a nice time-saver.
Sig!
Sweet site but I didn't see a dating extension?
Probably not so useful / necessary for Ugrads but for Grad Students??
Possibly this is because there still IS a stigma with online dating? (Or perhaps I didn't RTFSite good enuf)
At Grand Rapids Community College, we have what we call the Raider Card. It's a sort of debit card that works for on-campus services like parking and some vendine machines. (I believe Subway, Quiet Cafe, the cafeteria, and Art & Bev's are going to support it come January.)
:)
We student workers (GRCC students employed by GRCC) get a credit on our Raider Cards every pay day, independant from our paycheck. It's intended to replace our old parking credit system, but it's still available for my daily vending-machine-provided breakfast.
In the Computer Applications Department, the classes that teach Windows and Linux use VMWare to provide students with a preconfigured sandbox. (Which is awesome for us student tutors who tutor those subjects...the lab PCs are generally locked down to the point where a lot of the functionality taught in the classes is unavailable.)
Blackboard modules are available to all classes and instructors, and are used extensively in many of those classes. Blackboard modules are also used by sanctioned student organizations as an online meeting place under the control of the college.
eGRCC is a web interface for students and staff to both class registration and for employment history. I can look at my transcript and at my paycheck history through the same interface.
Novell is used to provide a web interface to student email.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
We are currently trying to build an institutional repository using DSpace. Open Source and pretty cool:
http://www.dspace.org/
In the Library we are testing LOCKSS. It looks like it could go far if it catches on:
http://lockss.stanford.edu/
I never understand this big attraction of providing 'free College branded email addresses for life'. Anyone coming into a college these days will no doubt already have their own email address and I would assume more people would be loathe to change everything over. Email addresses are a dime a dozen - this is no 'cool' factor in having a college address, if anything, I would even rate a gmail.com address over any college.edu address. Even more so if you are way past College 'age'.
From a College administration side, I only see downsides in providing email for life: you have to make sure you don't lose people's email, you worry about spam, there is always the possibility that people will mistake a users email as representative of the College's position etc etc
I was thinking of adapting our existing in-house website (notes, marks, timetables, enrolment, etc) so it could be used on small screens, like Opera running on Nokia's Series 60 platform. Any students out there think something like this would be valuable? Or do you all tend to have good enough access to full-blown PCs?
I'm a freshman at Grove City College which has been giving laptops to incoming freshmen since '95 (in a deal with compaq/hp). This year, for the first time, we got HP TC1100 Tablets.
They are wonderful. I take them to class, do all my work on them, read slashdot on wireless during class.... I don't even know what a pencil is anymore.
We have some decent web acessing things for scheduling and such. For some reason, we have to submit schedules by hand to the registrar, but after that we can add/drop classes online... until our Advisor approves our schedule, then we have to do it by paper.
We have WebCT and Blackboard for the teachers to use in classes, but most teachers don't seem all that interested. In my physics lab, we take exit quizes each week on WebCT, but that's about it.
Wireless is a feature that every college should have. We have it, starting this year, in our Student Center, Science Building, and main Academic Building. It is wonderful to be able to be anywhere in the student center and access the web - not just sitting 2 feet from a wall.
-Tim
Better yet - set up a free email forwarder for life.
College, for some, is one of the most influential parts of a person's life. I wish the college that I graduated from 5 years ago would offer something like this.
i've noticed its kinda hard to figure out what all you've gotta take to get gurs and yer major requirement and all, and the pre reqs for classes can be kinda random sometimes. it seems like it'd be real nice if you could have the computer crunch the numbers on that. like, you could have an option that each time a student registers for classes, they could just select their desired major and the computer would sign them up for the available classes that they need to take. i mean, all that schema cascading seems best suited to a computer.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Where I go to school, most of the technology benefits are for faculty not students. We have two IT departments one for students, and one for faculty. The faculty get all the benefits and students get left behind.
The Computer Science department used to offer shell accounts to students with all the bells and whistles (Apache/PHP, SQL, mail). They are retiring that server this winter. The only thing students are allowed to use now is a Frontpage server. When I asked my boss why we were taking services away from students. He said there is too much politics involved. He had to pick his battles, and this wasn't one of them.
The coolest thing is to have the unemployment office right on the campus, especially in the IT and EE buildings. Trust me, this saves time after graduation.
One thing my college did was made by some grad students. It was an add on to the traditional web registration. What you would do is enter the courses you wanted to take. You enter the course number, not the section, the program came up with several combinations of class sections to fill your schedual. It would then show a week long schedual. This way you don't have to wade through all the offerings and figure out a schedual by yourself.(not that its hard just takes time) Usually one can find one combination that is good, if not just rerun the program and ask for more combinations!
Linux Works
My college has a larger number of cheap public computers provided by the student assembly that run our small email client, called Blitzmail. (The explain is somewhat dated, but still mostly correct). It's similar to IMAP in that everything stays on the server, but the program itself is well suited to use on public computers, eliminating the need to use webmail. And it's small enough to run on pretty much any old piece of junk (I've seen it running on a Mac Classic).
Anyway, the point is that we have public iMacs pretty much everywhere. The computer penetration here is deeper than anywhere else I've been (note: I haven't been to RIT yet), and email has not been replaced by cell phones. If you had the money and could make the software side of things work, it's very convenient to have as many public kiosks as you can.
You could set up a server that would nmap the entire network to see who was using Windows filesharing, and then make a database so that everyone could access their files.
We used to have something like this at Gonzaga, run by some students, until the administration had it shut down.
I think it brings up an important point: replacing teachers with computers/technology even partially distances students with the teachers. This will come to haunt you in: class and teacher evaluations as well recommendations for school when even the smallest thing goes wrong -- the "teacher" is always to blame not the computer.
My university, or at least the program that I'm enrolled in (not Comp Sci) uses computers somewhat minimally. I like it that way.
If anything, encourage profs to upload course material/documents to private WWW sites and start up a form, blog or Wiki or similar. That would be best.
If you went to a prestigious school having the alumni e-mail address on your resume is some good psychology. I've received several to my ivy e-mail address saying, "oh, I see from you e-mail address you went to..." Yeah, I know it's down in the Education section - the recruiters aren't reading down that far.
Besides, gmail will be so passé in a couple years. The school will be constant, at least.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Our school has currently provided wireless internet, course management software (Blackboard), personal web space for students, the ability to register classes online, and some more tech features.
It sounds like you are looking for the next big thing. Don't. Instead encourage the university to improve existing systems and processes. For example, consider how students use the online system to register for classes.
At my own university, we have many problems with the registration process. First, virtually every aspect of the process is treated as an independent system. You can not add classes from the same interface that lists descriptions of the classes. You can't view the number of open seats in a class from the signup page. Course descriptions are notoriously vague and inaccurate. This is all just the tip of the ice berg. I don't know if your registration process is as bad as ours, but I would guess there are plenty of technology systems at your university that could similarly stand for improvement.
Part of the fundamental problem in identifying systems that need improvement is that no one ever solicits student (or even faculty/staff) feedback. Sometimes it may be common knowledge that the registration system sucks, but no one ever tells the people responsible for it why it sucks, or how it can be improved. The end result is that people in university offices spend all their time working on the needs of others in nearby offices (the people who express their needs most readily) regardless of whether or not that fits the mandate. Where I work we literally spend weeks preparing an anual report that has little benefit to 99% of the people we serve.
If you did want to create a next-big-thing kind of university initiative, consider partnering with your communications/web standards department to add some kind of interactive feedback mechanism to all online systems. For an idea of how this might work, consider opine-it. Basically, imagine a system where every page or system has a corresponding message board that can be accessed directly from a "comment on this page" link.
sheesh. i hoped USF was the only school that used it. forcing technology on clueless professors is a recipe for disaster.
is to negotiate good contracts with hardware manufacturers and software companies so computers and peripherals become cheaper for students
i go to UCLA and it's lame that the only hardware discounts we get are 15% off apple products. This is the only 'discount' we get AFAIK. Over at USC each student can buy two ipods for $150 each -- so if your school has the buying power, use the leverage and hook your students up.
Another real cool thing to do is to give away the old hardware to cs/cse students etc. I had some real fun clustering old pentiums thrown away by school -- but if I hadn't known the professor getting rid of them, they would have ended up straight in the trash.
Finally, have your school adopt a single Linux distro and open a Linux comp lab for general students, not just the engineers who demand it. I find Gnome and KDE far easier to use than macintoshes, if only because they parallel windows so closely in terms of UI.
Last but not least, if you're going to have an apple lab, at least unleash some of the power of the mac with photoshop etc and it would be nice if i could use the shell for anything useful --
Only moaning because I'm sitting in a mac lab during finals week and can't use these fscking boxes to program anything....
shooting is not too good for my enemies
For instance, you could implement a new liberal arts class. The classwork would be p0rn production that could be streamed on demand to d0rm tv's and computers.
Anoter benefit of the program is that cheerleaders could enroll in the class, this eases the enourmous burden placed on them to keep up with both their extracurricular activities and classes. By integrating aerobics into a class which factors into their GPA you've done them a huge favor IMHO.
To really keep up with the times, you could also stream these feeds live to students enrolled in distance and online courses via the internet.
- Access to all my modules
;) Although missing practicals isn't such a good idea (as I've found out lately...)
- Download electronic format of lecture notes
- Online examinations and tests (Using perception software)
- Outlook web acces (yuk)
- Online timetbale & calendar
- Online enrollment
- Voyager library system:
- Search the library for books/videos/cd/other media online
- Check which books you have out
- Renew existing loans
- Various other little things...
The entire campus now uses electronic swipe cards for everything from self-service library to access to the computer labs, the gym, etc... so it makes providing electronic resources that much easier.
Coupled with wifi access across the entire campus, I'm pretty impressed with the e-services they provide.
The killer for me is probably the electronic lecture notes. It saves going to lectures
I'm a geography student btw.
I think if you get an external firewire disk, and load your bootable OSX and programs onto it, you can hold down a key during powerup which would let you boot into your unrestricted OS.
I have looked into an open source course management product called moodle. it's pretty awesome and apparently does more than blackboard too. perhaps your friend could get some ideas from it for his product.
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I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
Blackboard got into the game early with the online course stuff, so I guess it's a standard, but I don't know why people aren't dropping it for moodle. http://moodle.org/
It's got more functionality, open source, and less than a 20 meg setup using mysql and php. You can do content, testing, flash, and it's all easy, with template options, and flexible as far as you want to customize to your ability with CSS graphics etc.
blackboard is in the neighborhood of 100,000 dollars right? I'm pretty sure they do a yearly maintenance, or support fee right, and you can't mess with their system too.
ouch. Schools can use that money elsewhere. Get moodle, and invest in flash, and a dozen canon xl2 cameras and some vegas video workstations.
Make available as many discounted art supplies and free ebooks as possible.
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I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
In da HIZZY!
I'm a student here. Anyway, we have Linux and Windows labs, laptops you can check out in the Library, wireless connectivity in the buildings, wired dorms, webmail, and complete online administrative control (unless we need a sig to register for a class). We also have a VERY serious Math dep't. I'll miss this place when I graduate... back to finals prep now.
We're using Apreso for Classroom here in U of M. It has allowed me to skip class and view the lectures at my own convenience. Needless to say, I skip any 8 o clock lectures and get much more sleep!
PD
I recommend looking into the SINAPSE Project (http://www.sinapse.org). SINAPSE is a free, open-source student community tool (we like to call it a nexus, not a portal). It's written in PHP (on SourceForge - http://sourceforge.net/projects/sinapse), and it's a strict CMS system (no open editing - each app has controlled input and output). It's Developed at University of Oklahoma (go Sooners!) and run by students there.
You can see it in action at OU (The Sooner Information Network - http://sin.ou.edu), Baylor (Baylor Information Network - http://bin.baylor.edu), Purdue (HAIL - http://hail.purdue.edu), Southern Miss (The Varsity - http://thevarsity.usm.edu), California University of Pennsylvania (CalYou - http://calyou.cup.edu), SW OK State U (LIFE - http://life.swosu.edu), and Eastern VA Medical School (http://student.evms.edu)). There's also a similar site at William and Mary (SIN - http://sin.wm.edu) that's not running SINAPSE, but should be.
SINAPSE Consulting (http://www.sinapseconsulting.com) also makes some for-pay add-ons like LegiSlate which allows SGA's to do their Legislative processes online (voting, tracking, attendance, etc.) It's in action at OU (http://congress.ou.edu), OK State (http://www.osusga.com), Central Arkansas (http://uca.mysga.com), and very soon at Rhode Island, Illinois Institute of Tech, and U Texas - Arlington (and possibly Miami).
Every time scheduling time came around, it was always a rediculous amount of work to figure out what you needed to take at what time, up to 3 years in advance!
I spent so much time just figuring out my different options... it would be great if the computer just presented every possible schedule configuration for me. As graduation neared, of course the number of configurations for the following quarters and years would dwindle down.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.