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

HA

[Apreche]

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.

Re:HA

[liquidice5]

I am also at RIT, and I work for the IT dept, we also convinced the sys admins to put firefox as the default browser on the most recent image we use for the several hundred computers that we have in our labs.

I can't imagine what it would be like to register not-online, its how it always had been for me.

as for your "blackboard"
we use something called "myCourses" which, depending on the teacher, can be utilized alot.
myCourses is web based, which is nice because its accessable in the same format from anywhere.

In the IT dept, we use something called Firstclass, an e-mail, conferencing, b-board, chat, instant message, dropbox application all rolled into one. RIT as a whole uses it for their distance learning / online classes as well. Firstclass has an online interface but, well it sucks

for ex. today in database class, we had some ideas, but weren't really brave enough to say it outloud to the teacher, so we started a chatroom for the class in firstclass, and just invited everyone that we knew in the class, so we could have a fast paced convo about it instead of waiting for the teacher to say something about our ideas.

We get 20 megs on www.rit.edu/~our user name
on a unix server that we have access to via ssh, telnet, ftp, sftp, which also provides a place to use the shell in a sandbox way for people who wouldnt otherwise have access

Again, I think that allowing a more open network can be one of the biggest steps in getting students to learn things. I have several servers running web, e-mail, ntp, and other random stuff, because they dont block ports really, and if we can use em, lots of people say "sure, might as well set up my own *nix box with apache, etc."

Who are your audience?

[ilyaa1]

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.

Student Life Website

[Ieshan]

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. =)

Re:Student Life Website

[darthpenguin]

I'm a bit curious about how this is completely in-house code... see, my college's website at Rice university has the exact same looking portal system: http://www.brown.rice.edu

How is it that both sites are nearly identical in design, yet one of them is completely "in-house"?

You can start by ditching blackboard.

[ForestGrump]

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

Raider Card, VMWare, Blackboard, eGRCC, Novell

[Short Circuit]

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.