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

[DaoudaW]

One cool thing we have is a movable type license

That is cool! Movable type made a huge difference in 15th century Europe. It is seen as one of the main developments leading to the renaissance. I hadn't realized that they'd started licensing the technology. Wow! what an opportunity. Now we can have our own renaissances.

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

[Ieshan]

The entire website is in-house and done with PHP4.

The Original was coded by a recent Graduate, with new improvements being added as time permits.

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

Re:You can start by ditching blackboard.

[stevie-boy]

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.

That depends on how the system has been configured, if you click the Modules tab and search by course code you will be able to get "guest" read-only access to the module, providing that it hasn't been turned off at system level or overridden at course level by the Instructor/TA

But I would agree it's not a great system, if you think it's bad as a user it's a real PITA to administer

Re:You can start by ditching blackboard.

[wicked_little_critta]

(Thought I'd follow up the 'death-to-Blackboard' rants with a constructive suggestion...)

If you want to ditch Blackboard, take a look at Moodle. It's a dang good PHP-based courseware system that's open source, free (in both senses), very actively developed, and (important for administration types) you can buy support and various other services via Moodle.com. You could set it up in your personal webspace as a sandbox for people to look at and play with.

Plus, you could have CS students write modules or otherwise contribute to development - everybody wins!

You can take a look at how other schools are using Moodle at their site list.

Enjoy!

You are asking the wrong people

[phoenix.bam!]

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.

Calendar

[megaversal]

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.

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.

Depends on the School

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

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.

Example from my university

[kragwad]

At my university I get access to the student portal (coded inhouse in .asp) which provides:

- Access to all my modules
- 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 ;) Although missing practicals isn't such a good idea (as I've found out lately...)

I'm a geography student btw.

moodle.org

[michaelbuddy]

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.