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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?"
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. =)
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.
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."
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking - H.L. Mencken
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.