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Education Technology

New Technologies for Colleges? 86

Posted by Cliff from the new-ways-to-help-students dept.
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?"
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New Technologies for Colleges? More

New Technologies for Colleges?

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  • HA (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Apreche ( 239272 )
    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. Th

    • Re:HA (Score:3, Funny)

      by DaoudaW ( 533025 )
      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 (Score:3, Interesting)

      by liquidice5 ( 570814 )
      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 anywher
      • There are lots of better solutions out there than Blackboard (Which is, for your information, also web-based). My college uses it, and I find it to be hopelessly buggy, not to mention damned hard to use. I mean, just the other day when attempting to use a discussion group, it spat out an error and kindly provided the entire SQL query on which the problem had occured.

        I prefer ClassNavigator [classnavigator.com], which was founded by a friend of mine after he saw how poor Blackboard was, and saw the market for an actually GOOD
        • 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.

    • 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

    • One cool thing we have is a movable type license for every RIT facutly, staff and student.
      Cool!
      When I was at RIT, we were still using DECWriters.
      Does the movable type license extend to alumni?

    • Re:HA (Score:1)

      by izm ( 592666 )
      I'm a student at Stevens Institute of Technology, and I work for the Office of Information Technology. We have quite a vast array of services for our students (and when everything is working, which is about 90% of the time, its great...):

      - Each student upon entering the school is provided with a laptop computer. These machines are brand new, and on the cutting edge (at least as far as consumer models go). They are configured to last 4 years, and are covered for accidental damage as well as theft for the
      • Each student upon entering the school is provided with a laptop computer.

        I can never understand when someone says this triumphantly as if somehow this benevolent school somehow materialized the parts and technology for a laptop out of thin air and produces them for free in a basement somewhere.

        You should really be saying, "The school requires each student to purchase an expensive laptop as part of the tuition cost." I'm sure it's a very nice laptop, and I'm sure that forcing everyone to buy one does add

        • Re:HA (Score:1)

          by izm ( 592666 )
          Well, this is true, but lets be honest. How often have you heard of a school actually lowering its tuition. Tuition is astronomical to begin with, and there's no way it would go down if people weren't forced into purchasing these machines. The convenience for the most part lies in user support, in that if need be, the student can bring the machine down to our service center and get any hardware issue taken care of within a day or 2, while getting a loaner in between. Try that with a laptop you bought from B
  • 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!
    • At the several schools that I'm familiar with, Blackboard is utilised for 10% of its features at most. Sure, it's not the most elegant software ever, but if teachers refuse to use it, and students don't really care, then there's more to it than just software itself.

  • Who are your audience? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ilyaa1 ( 831859 ) on Thursday December 09, 2004 @07:15PM (#11047163)
    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 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ieshan ( 409693 ) <ieshan@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Thursday December 09, 2004 @07:15PM (#11047168) Homepage Journal
    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 [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?
    • 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 administrat
      • 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.
      • 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.
    • 10mb inbox

      Very BOFHish. Can you even fit "Hi" into 10 millibits?

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Yeah, I tried it here too, here being a small liberal arts college. We did a student referendum though, and it turned out 47% for Firefox to 53% for IE... Next semester maybe...
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • I agree, but I'm talking about offering support for it, and encouraging students to run firefox, not forcing it to anyone. To unify the environment here they even use IE in the mac labs. Now isn't THAT a bad decision? IE is bad enough, but then they use IE for mac, when all owners of a mac presumably use safari... So let's unify it by using a DECENT browser on both platforms. And yes, I've heard that argument too, but I've proved them wrong because I personally use linux, and their web applications that wor
      • Yeah, I tried it here too, here being a small liberal arts college. We did a student referendum though, and it turned out 47% for Firefox to 53% for IE... Next semester maybe...

        Thanks for reminding me why I like working at a liberal, arts college (note the comma). (OK, it's actually a semi-autonomous college within a big state university). It's (usually) much easier to get things done around here.

        Last August when Firefox was approaching 1.0, my coworker and I just decided to put it on all the Windows l

  • You can start by ditching blackboard. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ForestGrump ( 644805 ) on Thursday December 09, 2004 @07:29PM (#11047272) Homepage Journal
    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 [ucr.edu]
    • I agree, Blackboard is a buggy PoS. Which is why I prefer ClassNavigator [classnavigator.com], which was founded by a buddy of mine who was also fed up with Blackboard and saw the market for a better solution.
    • 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 l
      • i guess my system is locked down that I can't even browse. It sucks, really.

        I enrolled in this business econ class, dropped it because the professor was like "Don't bother buying the book. just come to class is all you need" kinda type. So I'm screwed because I have work friday that conflicts with the class.

        So I dropped. I would like the basic info for the class tho, because I still have to take it later.

        I hate ilearn/blackboard.
    • Two comments:

      First, in Blackboard 6, the digital drop box has been complemented (and largely superceded) by other much smoother functionality built in to the assignments sections, so that uploaded files are actually associated with assignments.

      Secondly, if you can't preview classes, that's due to the way that your admin has set up Blackboard. It certainly contains that functionality. In fact, some schools use it as their web registration -- browse, find the class you like, enroll yourself.

    • (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 [moodle.org]. 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 [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

  • free ipods for incoming freshmen?
  • 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.
    • Only students enrolled in specific classes have access to either of the two student-accessible Linux machines on campus. Shell access is a security risk, no matter how you slice it.
      • Shell access is no more a security risk than gui access.

        The risk isn't in letting a student have access to a *nix system or a cli, the risk is in letting a student have physical access to a system. At least on a *nix system you have full accountability and real security.

        If your allowing students access to windows systems that can't really be locked down, why would you deny them access to non-server linux systems?
        • The XP Pro machines in the computer labs are fairly well locked down. And student usage is monitored by staff that's walking around the lab. Non-tightened-down Windows installations are run from within VMWare, on stations in a section of the intranet that has special firewall filter rules on it.

          The student accessible Linux machines on campus (grccsql and raider) can be connected to remotely (Through telnet, not ssh. AUGH!), so monitoring them live is prohibitively expensive in manpower, if not technicall

  • You are asking the wrong people (Score:3, Insightful)

    by phoenix.bam! ( 642635 ) on Thursday December 09, 2004 @07:51PM (#11047431)
    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.
    • This is a question that should be posted to the students of your university.

      His questions were, "What technologies exist?" and "What are other schools doing?" Those are actually pretty good questions for people who are not students of his university.

      I agree, of course, that they should only do things that solve local needs. But it's not like he said, "Hey, tell me what I should do here!" Rather than assuming, with no evidence, that he's clueless, it might be more productive to phrase your comment in a w
    • I'm all for a student-responsive institution, but one of the things a college is expected to do is to expose students to things they don't know about. If they knew everything, they wouldn't be students. When I started college back during the late Cretaceous, the school started offering all students something called "e-mail". It wasn't something the Duran-Duran/Journey/Quiet-Riot-listening student body were asking for, but a fair number of us found it pretty useful. Being pro-active isn't a bad thing.
  • 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/ [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 [slashdot.org] 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 n
  • As the lead website programmer for the Student Government Association [sga-emerson.org] for Emerson College [emerson.edu], 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 gap

    • It sounds very interesting and would be of great use on our small campus - what license are you thinking of for your work?

      Sera

      • We haven't really went that far yet since my deadline proceeds the attempt to develop it as a free software project. Though it's not outside of my thinking. Though likely it will be GPL and released on SourceForge.net.

        The site is a grand experiement so a lot of infustructer may be change when we release in May. But I'll bring it up to the team and start thinking about moving towards that end. The problem is trying to build parts that fit into Emerson College, yet still can be used at other colleges. A pain

  • Calendar (Score:3, Insightful)

    by megaversal ( 229407 ) on Thursday December 09, 2004 @09:29PM (#11048006)
    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.
  • At Grand Rapids Community College [grcc.edu], 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

  • We are currently trying to build an institutional repository using DSpace. Open Source and pretty cool:

    http://www.dspace.org/ [dspace.org]

    In the Library we are testing LOCKSS. It looks like it could go far if it catches on:

    http://lockss.stanford.edu/ [stanford.edu]

  • 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'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 see
    • While this post is rather incoherent, the idea is a good one IMHO and I'd hold my nose and mod it up if I had points -- some sort of a tree structure showing prerequisites would be very helpful for less structured (read: non-engineering) programs.
    • 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.
  • 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 combinatio
  • 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 materi

  • improve existing systems / solicit student opinion (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Darth_Burrito ( 227272 ) on Friday December 10, 2004 @01:53AM (#11049166)
    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 [opine-it.com]. 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.
  • 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
    • 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.
  • 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 th
  • At my university [plymouth.ac.uk] 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 el

  • moodle.org (Score:2, Informative)

    by michaelbuddy ( 751237 )
    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
  • 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.

  • I recommend looking into the SINAPSE Project ( http://www.sinapse.org [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 [sourceforge.net]), 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 [ou.edu]), Bayl

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