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?"

Comments

improve existing systems / solicit student opinion

[Darth_Burrito]

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.