Students at USC can stream lectures and interact UDACITY ...downloads.realviewtechnologies.com/1105media/campus technology... · Yet when Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun revealed

TECHNOLOGY

Empowering the World of Higher Education

IN THIS ISSUEvol. 27 no. 5 campustechnology.com January 2014

2 | LOGIN Beyond the MOOC Hype

DEPARTMENTS

27 | 5 WAYS ONLINE ADVISING CAN IMPROVE ON FACE-TO-FACE

Online tech gives students instant access to advisers and tools to help them succeed.

32 | HELPING STUDENTS TUNE IN ON ANY DEVICE

CUNY faculty members are using student response software to keep students engaged.

7 | WHAT’S HOT, WHAT’S NOT 2014Five IT thought leaders take the temperature of the biggest tech trends in higher education.

18 | BREAKING THE MOOC MODEL Sebastian Thrun has declared that massive open online courses don’t work for higher education. Where do MOOCs go from here?

24 | A COLLABORATIVE APPROACH TO I.T. SUPPORT

Social learning tools tap the expertise of individual users, cutting back on help desk requests.

15 | HOW TO EARN A GRADUATE DEGREE ON A SMARTPHONE

Students at USC can stream lectures and interact with their peers, all on a mobile device.

3 | CAMPUS & INDUSTRY Flipped Classroom Survey

35 | C-LEVEL VIEW Technology: Change Is How You Use It

6 | PRODUCT ROUNDUP Wireless Presentations and More

37 | ABOUT US/INDEXLINK to page xx

UDACITY THREW A WRENCH IN THE MOOC

MODEL BY ABANDONING HIGHER ED. WHAT’S

NEXT? p. 18

MOOCMODELMOOCMODELMOOC

BREAKINGTHE

MOOCTHE

MOOC

Higher Education

IN THISvol. 27 no. 5

7Five IT thought leaders take the temperature of the biggest tech trends in higher education.



2014INNOVATORSCALL FOR ENTRIES

PAGE 13

Higher Education



2014INNOVATORSCALL FOR ENTRIES

PAGE 13

IIF, AS THE The New York Times declared, 2012 was “The

Year of the MOOC,” then 2013 might well be called “The

Year of MOOC Hype.”

It’s always a little sad to see an ed tech innovation with so

much potential fall prey to the backlash spawned by overex-

posure. Though the past year has seen plenty of interesting

experimentation with MOOCs — particularly blended mod-

els — I can recall more than one presenter at the Campus

Technology and Educause annual conferences last year

actually apologizing for adding, yet again, the dreaded “M”

word to the conversation.

Even legitimate concerns from faculty and academic tech-

nologists about the efficacy of MOOC-style learning have

been overshadowed by MOOC burnout:

a general feeling of, “Please, no, not

another MOOC story.” I think this might

be what Gartner’s Trough of Disillusion-

ment feels like.

Yet when Udacity founder Sebastian

Thrun revealed in a Fast Company inter-

view that his company is abandoning

higher education and moving to corpo-

rate training,

he managed to

recapture our

attention in one

fell swoop. How can one of the biggest purveyors of mas-

sive open online college courses be throwing in the towel?

And where do MOOCs go from here?

The truth is, the underlying issues behind MOOCs in higher

education are ongoing. As Athabasca University’s George Sie-

mens told CT in our cover story (see page 18), “A year from

now we’ll be talking about something different from MOOCs,

but in my view, we’ll still be asking essentially the same ques-

tions: How do we teach in digital networked environments?

How do we teach when the power balance between a faculty

member and a learner is different than it was in the past? How

do we teach when learning can be tracked and measured and

assessed outside the university or formal education?”

With or without Udacity, MOOCs are still contributing to

the exploration of new learning models in higher ed. Like it

or not, they will continue to be an important trend for 2014.

MOOCs certainly were a topic of conversation for the five

panelists in “What’s Hot, What’s Not 2014” (page 7), our

LO G I N

Beyond the MOOC HypeWhat new tech trends will knock massive open online courses out of the spotlight this year?

Continue the conversation. E-mail me at [email protected].

CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | January 20142

ADVISORYBOARDLink AlanderVice Chancellor and CIO, Lone Star College System (TX)

Jill Albin-HillCIO, Dominican University (IL)

Keith BaileyDirector, Office of Online Learning University of Georgia

Edward ChapelVP for IT, Montclair State University (NJ)

Maya GeorgievaAssociate Director, Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning, NYU Stern School of Business

Thomas HooverAssociate Vice Chancellor and CIO,University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Alexandra M. PickettAssociate Director, SUNY Learning Network,State University of New York

Sue TalleyDean of Technology, Capella University (MN)

third annual roundup of trending ed tech topics for the new

year. But for the first time, they were edged out in “hotness”

by a new player: adaptive learning. As consultant Phil Hill put

it, “The ability to use online technologies to create multiple

pathways for students and to personalize learning will be a

strength that can even go beyond face-to-face methods.”

Can adaptive learning live up to its promise? We’ll be watch-

ing as early adopters pave the way. Tell us what you think!

SHARE

Rhea Kelly, Executive Editor

What new tech trends will knock massive open online

CALL FOR ENTRIESOur 10th annual

CT Innovators

Awards kick off this month. Entry

deadline: Feb. 17! See page 13.

DOING THE FLIP. Half of university fac-

ulty members have deployed the flipped

classroom model or plan to within the next

12 months, according to a survey from the

Center for Digital Education and Sonic

Foundry. A better learning experience for

students, greater access to supporting

technologies and positive results from ini-

tial trials were listed as the main reasons

faculty adopted the model. And among

respondents who have already flipped a

class, 57 percent said it was extremely

successful or successful. Read the full

story online.

LMS ROLLOUT. Dartmouth College (NH)

is rolling out Instructure’s Canvas learning

management system campuswide, following

an 18-month review and pilot program. The

school was looking for a cloud-based sys-

tem that ran on mobile devices and included

audio and video capabilities; notification and

communication tools; and an easy-to-use

interface. Read the full story online.

RASPBERRY PI LINUX CLUSTER.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center

has built a Linux cluster around Raspberry

Pi devices. SDSC, part of the University

of California, San Diego,

debuted the 16-node Me-

teor cluster this fall in a

UCSD course on visual-

ization. Though its primary

use is as a teaching tool,

it’s also used as a market-

ing tool to help spread the

word about parallel comput-

ing and generate interest in

parallel programming. Read

the full story online.

OPEN SOURCE SIS. With the help of

rSmart, the University of Washington

has deployed Kuali Student, a student

information system built on the Kuali open

source platform. The SIS, which integrates

with UW’s existing systems, includes

modules for student academic planning as

well as course and program development.

Read the full story online.

BIG DATA CHALLENGES. A survey

from the Association for Information

and Image Management identified three

major challenges to big data adoption:

1) difficulty of connecting structured

transactional datasets to unstructured

data or text-based content; 2) lack of

skilled users to work with big data tool-

sets; and 3) security and privacy con-

cerns. Survey respondents came from

a variety of business sectors, including

government, finance and education. Read

the full story online.

MAKING NEWS VIA MOBILE APP.

Student reporters at Lynn University

Industry+CampusTECHNOLOGY HAPPENINGS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

CTONLINE


Click here for breaking news

Pho

to c

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an D

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Pub

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UCSD’s Supercomputer Center built a Linux cluster based on Raspberry Pi devices.


Industry+Campus

(FL) are using a new tool to provide

news coverage of campus events for

their campus television station. The

school has adopted LIVE+, a mobile

app from Ontario, Canada-based

Dejero, a developer of electronic

newsgathering solutions. The app,

loaded onto 10 iPad minis owned

by the journalism department, allows

reporters to record and transmit

video — using a WiFi connection

— to the station, which delivers live

and on-demand video through the

school’s Web site. Read the full

story online.

HYBRID CLOUD FOR EDUCA-

TION. Researchers at the Mas-

sachusetts Institute of Technol-

ogy, The University of Texas at

San Antonio and the University

of Notre Dame are collaborat-

ing with Internet2 and Rackspace

Hosting to build a new OpenStack-

optimized hybrid cloud environment

designed to help the research and

education community use the cloud

for big data research. Expected to

be available to other institutions in

spring 2014, the service will enable

universities to connect their private

clouds to the Rackspace public

cloud using Internet2’s secure high-

performance network. Read the full

story online.

ADVANCING DIGITAL CON-

TENT. Courseload, a provider of

e-textbooks and digital resources

for higher education, has joined the

Readium Foundation, a nonprofit

consortium that seeks to advance

EPUB and Open Web Platform

publishing. Founded in early 2013,

Readium projects include an EPUB

rendering engine for browser-

based readers; an EPUB rendering

engine for native apps; and a Ja-

vaScript library and viewer for ren-

dering EPUB files from Web sites

and cloud readers. Read the

full story online.4

Introducing the SRG Series pan/tilt/zoom cameras.Sony, the people who brought you the best-selling EVI Series, have just upped the ante. Feast your eyes on 1080p/60 HD. Discover wider wide angles, extended zoom, higher sensitivity, IP control, plus View-DR® processing to master the harshest light conditions. What hasn’t changed is the uncanny smoothness of our pan/tilt/zoom or the clarity of our legendary Exmor® sensors. Sony SRG Series cameras. You’ve got to see them for yourself.

Arrange a demo at sony.com/ptz.

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raise your sights

Untitled-2 1 10/16/13 11:22 AM

Industry+Campus

Webinars on DemandRegister for the latest Campus

Technology webinars online.

Transforming Your Campus

Through Mobile Device

Management

Best practices for managing mobile

devices on campus and keeping

security, control and privacy issues

in check.

Sponsored by CDWG

MOOCs: Designing, Developing

and Delivering Them on Your

Campus

Learn about UC Irvine’s experiences

deploying MOOCs on campus.

Sponsored by Canvas Network

Portland State Demonstrates

the Value of IT With Project and

Portfolio Reporting

Project and portfolio manage-

ment reporting has helped Port-

land State University’s (OR) IT

department document its value,

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current activities.

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Upcoming Events

Feb. 3-5

Educause Learning Initiative

ELI 2014 Annual Meeting

New Orleans

Feb. 11-13

Digital Signage Expo 2014

Las Vegas

Feb. 15-18

Instructional Technology Council

eLearning 2014

Orlando, FL

Feb. 23-28

The Data Warehousing Institute

TDWI World Conference

Las Vegas

March 2-5

League for Innovation in the

Community College

Innovations 2014

Anaheim, CA

To submit your event, e-mail

[email protected].

Untitled-3 1 12/10/13 11:50 AM


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Barco’s CSM Base Unit, part of the company’s ClickShare wireless collaborative presentation system, allows up to eight users to share HD content on a single projector, with one presenter using the screen at one time. Read the full story online. Click here for new releases

rolloutVirtual Security Phone

Rochester Institute of Technology

(NY) has adopted a safety app

that works like a virtual blue light

security phone, allowing members

of the campus community to

connect immediately with public

safety officers in the event of an

emergency. The mobile app is a

service developed by CampusSafe, a company launched

by an RIT MBA student. Read the full story online.

Network UpgradeIn order to support its BYOD and flipped classroom

initiative, Wittenberg University (OH) has revamped

its network with Enterasys products from Extreme

Networks. The network’s core capacity has increased

from 1 gigabit to 10 gigabits, and the WiFi network now

uses the higher

capacity 802.11n

standard. Read

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online.

I . T . T R E N D S

THE START OF a new year has long been a catalyst for re-

flection and prognostication, and at CT it kicks off an annual

tradition: taking the temperature of the top tech trends in higher

ed. We asked five IT thought leaders (see “Meet the Panelists,”

page 8) to assess the “hotness” of everything from mobile de-

vices and flipped classrooms to adaptive learning, badges and

the LMS — and to explain the reasoning behind each rating.

Are they on target, or did they get it all wrong? E-mail us!4

5 IT thought leaders take the temperature of the biggest tech trends in higher education.


WHAT’S NOT 2014 by David Raths

shutterstock.com

PHIL HILLMALCOLM BROWN

ELLEN WAGNER

ADRIAN SANNIERREY JUNCO


I . T . T R E N D S

Mobile Platforms and BYOD

Adrian Sannier: According to a study published

this summer by Google, nearly half of U.S. college students

bring a tablet to school, and three-quarters of students

bring a smartphone. As these percentages grow, the long-

awaited market for a new kind of digital educational experi-

ence will finally open: an experience produced not at cot-

tage scale, but at global scale. It will be realized with high

production value through ongoing investment that incorpo-

rates big data, analytics and personalization driven through

machine learning — to provide students and their teachers

with a much more complete picture of a student’s proficien-

cies and challenges, capable of producing a truly personal-

ized learning path.

Malcolm Brown: Information

technology departments’ normal ap-

proach of “let’s standardize so we can

support you better” will no longer hold in

a time when most faculty and students

have multiple devices and nobody has ex-

actly the same device and app set. So IT

is challenged with respect to its tradition-

al models and its traditional “way of think-

ing” about what business it is in. Like the

MEET THE PANELISTS PHIL HILL (@PhilOnEdTech) is an educational technology consultant and analyst who has

spent the last 10 years advising in the online education and educational technology markets. He

is also an author, blogger at e-Literate and speaker, and has become recognized in the ed tech

community for his insights into the broader education market trends and issues.

REY JUNCO is an associate professor of library science at Purdue Uni-

versity (IN) and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. His research has

focused on informing best practices in using social technologies to enhance learning

outcomes. He blogs at Social Media in Higher Education.

MALCOLM BROWN has been director of the Educause Learning Initiative

(ELI) since 2009. Previously, he was the director of academic computing at

Dartmouth College (NH).

ADRIAN SANNIER is a professor of practice in the School of Com-

puting, Informatics and Decision Engineering at Arizona State Uni-

versity. Previously Sannier was senior vice president for product at

Pearson. From 2005 to 2010, he served as CIO and a profes-

sor in the Division of Computing Studies at ASU.

ELLEN WAGNER is executive director of WCET (WICHE

Cooperative for Educational Technologies), a division of the Western Interstate Com-

mission for Higher Education. She is also a partner and founder of Sage Road Solu-

tions, providing advisory oversight for industry intelligence and enablement services

and solutions practices. Previously, she was senior director of worldwide e-learning at

Adobe and senior director of worldwide education solutions for Macromedia.

HILL

JUNCO

BROWN

WAGNER

SANNIER

HOT

WARM

COOL

COLD

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library has been doing, IT must make

careful decisions about what to out-

source and what to run locally. IT or-

ganizations will be sorting this out for

several years, with no two institutional

approaches being the same.

Adaptive Learning

Sannier: Proponents assure

us that the same machine-learning

techniques that pore through human-

ity’s Google searches and Amazon

purchases to predict so successfully

what we want to know and buy can

also be used to help each of us learn in

our own way, at our own pace, so that

in the end we can all learn substantially

more in substantially less time. From

Knewton’s $54 million in investment

capital, to the $75 million paid by the

Apollo Group for Carnegie Learning,

substantial bets are being placed on

the idea that machine-learning algo-

rithms, crunching the click patterns of

millions of students, can help each of

us learn better and faster. If adaptive

learning is going to work, it will work

first in subjects like math and science,

subjects where student success rates

using traditional approaches are a se-

rious challenge, but where right and

wrong are easier for a machine to es-

tablish. Expect efficacy to be the word

of the day, as institutions begin to go

public with outcomes this year.

Phil Hill: Like MOOCs, adap-

tive learning can be heavy on hype

and light on actual results. For the

first generation of online learning, the

tendency was to replicate the factory

model of education (one size fits all)

but just do it online. For the second

generation, the ability to use online

technologies to create multiple path-

ways for students and to personalize

learning will be a strength that can

even go beyond face-to-face meth-

ods (for any classes larger than 10 to

15 students). One challenge here is

that vendors tend to push automated,

I . T . T R E N D S


I . T . T R E N D S

data-driven solutions as the only way to go, when the op-

portunities for faculty-selected or student-selected path-

ways have at least as much promise.

Brown: Adaptive learning is where learning analyt-

ics was two years ago: lots of potential, lots of promise, with

the vast majority of its future before it. Adaptive learning might

well play out in much the same way that learning analytics

has: a very important and useful tool, but no miracle cure.

Big Data

Brown: Obviously big data is itself not the big deal;

it’s what you do with the data and the actions you take

based on its analysis that is truly the “big deal.” There’s

a great deal of potential for schools to work imaginatively

with their data. Schools might want to think twice before

simply buying ready-made modules and instead think

more specifically about their institutional goals when for-

mulating plans about what to do with their big data.

Rey Junco: There have been some amazing strides

in big data applications in education over the last year. Until

recently, predictive analytics in education has focused on

using limited data points from learning and course manage-

ment systems, and this has limited

the predictive abilities of these mod-

els. More recently, a focus on exam-

ining data already available about

students and data sources that go

well beyond online discussion board

activity has led to breakthroughs

in how prediction might work. For instance, CourseSmart

uses data from student use of digital textbooks to calculate

an engagement index that is a stronger predictor of student

course outcomes than previous academic achievement.

Such data collection is only the beginning.

Ellen Wagner: Relatively few institutions are truly le-

veraging big data techniques such as pattern recognition or

predictive analytics to report on or to evaluate institutional val-

ue and impact, even when it comes to issues such as student

retention, progress and completion. Nevertheless, expecta-

tion of stakeholders from other sectors of the U.S. economy

that do depend on big data for proactively anticipating where

to focus investment, time and energy are forcing the educa-

tion community to move toward data-driven decision-making.

This comes as demands for more accountability, regardless

of the size of the data source(s), continue to grow.

Hill: I believe that the concept of combining data from

multiple sources on a large scale to create unique insights

will be very important for education in the long term. But

right now the focus is too much on enterprise software

solutions to vague problems with ill-defined data. The real

potential in the short term is for consumer-driven tools to

allow experimentation with new data, which will eventually

lead to enterprise-class solutions.

Flipped Classroom

Wagner: As someone who has worked in the field

of educational technology for a while now, the excitement

over the flipped classroom is highly satisfying. Using me-

dia to capture repeatable information-transfer tasks so

that the value of interactive, interpersonal moments can be

maximized has always been the strongest value proposi-

tion for leveraging media in instructional settings. I appre-

ciate that flipped classrooms are helping make this direct

benefit of media deployment for greater learner engage-

ment more obvious.4

“It’s easy to tell that flipped classroom is a hot topic, because it’s already spawned a subgenre of overheated apocalyptic pushback from some segments of faculty.” — Phil Hill

Untitled-3 1 12/10/13 10:50 AM

Sannier: The flipped class-

room movement legitimizes the use of

a wide range of technologies — from

e-texts and instructional videos to

MOOCs and the Khan Academy —

to replace traditional, in-person de-

livery of content. As more and more

instructors make this shift, it will con-

tinue to strengthen demand for quali-

ty. Flipped classrooms strengthen the

value of certain kinds of instructors

— those who connect well with stu-

dents as individuals, and specialize in

providing guidance and inspiration in

addition to expertise. As more classes

flip, pressure for change will mount,

particularly in large lecture classes

aimed at general education. This is a

trend I see accelerating for some time

to come.

Brown: The flipped classroom

is now an established course model; it’s

the “flavor” of blended learning that is

generating the most buzz. The risk here

is to rely too heavily on the model itself;

thinking that simply by executing a flip

that the course will improve is a variant

of “just give them technology and things

will improve.” The opportunity is to do

research into which kinds of flipping lead

to improved learning outcomes. San

Jose State University [CA] has led the

way, as it has begun to discover where it

works and where it does not.

Hill: It’s easy to tell that flipped

classroom is a hot topic, because it’s al-

ready spawned a subgenre of overheat-

ed apocalyptic pushback from some

segments of faculty. You can also tell

because the term “flipped classroom”

has lost much of its meaning. Not all

hybrid classes are flipped classes, and

not all flipped classes are designed on

the same principles. However, there is

solid research that some of the biggest

potential for improvements in learning

will come from deliberately designed

hybrid classes, and the flipped version,

if done well, leads to more active learn-

ing opportunities.4

I . T . T R E N D S



I . T . T R E N D S

Badges and Gamification

Sannier: A lot of new educational technology is serv-

ing to unbundle information — adding new layers of granular-

ity to what students have achieved and what they have yet to

accomplish. Instead of earning a C in College Algebra, Khan

Academy students review badges that show them all the skills

they’ve mastered, the concepts that still need practice and

specific goals still on the horizon. Badges are helping com-

municate learning at greater levels of detail for students and

teachers, and they foreshadow alternative certifications that

can provide better visibility into the actual competencies of

potential employees. These certifications have a certain dys-

topian potential, but I believe they will come on slowly enough

to allow us to address very real privacy concerns.

Gamification is such a powerful motivator that it must cer-

tainly continue to grow in influence, but I think it’s hard to do

much at cottage-industry scale. As the market for high-produc-

tion-value adaptive learning experiences grows, badging and

gamification will be integral to their design, helping motivate

students to amass achievements and clearly communicating

their competencies to instructors and potential employers.

Junco: I’m not sure whether badges as a container for

micro-credentialing will survive, but I see a growing need for

micro-credentialing in the near-term future. Employers are

more and more interested in having data on potential employee

skills. But frankly, the way badges are currently being imple-

mented is too rudimentary and will lead to their demise. (Grant-

ing a credential for completing a basic activity such as showing

up for an event demotes the value of said credential.) Perhaps

a better framework would be to consider badges a symbol of

attainment of complex skills, assessed through evaluations de-

veloped as part of the curricular development process.

When I think about gamifying an educational intervention,

I consider how game dynamics might be used in order to

teach process instead of content. I’ve seen way too many

educational games that look like board games that serve to

repackage content with a shiny new exterior. Not only is this

dull, it is bound to create educational ennui in our students,

leading them to be less likely to engage in more effective

methods of gamification.

Wagner: Badges are interesting because they pro-

vide evidence of learning, mastery, competency and com-

pletion. Increasingly at the center of a growing number of

conversations related to school-to-work transitions, pro-

fessional certifications, degree completion and the like,

badges will be getting hotter. Gamification also is very hot

these days as educators are trying to better engage with

learners to improve success metrics such as student reten-

tion and program completion. It promises to help educators

shift from talking at people in learning settings to inducing

people to engage more deeply in completing tasks through

motivational hooks such as rewards and recognition.

iPads and Other Tablets

Brown: iPads and tablets are cooling off, as it would

have been impossible to sustain the record-breaking rate

of diffusion. Overall, we’re moving toward market saturation

and the technology is settling down into its “sustaining in-

novation” period. Two aspects of tablets (and mobile tech-

nology generally) are significant, and neither one of these

two aspects involves the tablet’s hardware. First, it is the

VIDEO SPOTLIGHT

For captioned versions, visit CT on YouTube.

VIDEO: Why Phil Hill thinks adaptive learning has great potential but is no silver bullet.

VIDEO: Adrian Sannier on why the time is right for adaptive learning to go mainstream.

CampusTechnology.com/Innovators

10years!Celebrating

AWARDS 2014

Call for Nominations!Campus Technology Innovators Awards recognize higher

education institutions, technology project leaders, and

vendor partners who have worked together to deploy

innovative technology solutions to higher education

challenges.

Official Sponsor of the 2014 Campus Technology Innovators Awards

6 Award Categories:• Teaching and Learning

• IT Infrastructure and Systems

• Student Systems and Services

• Leadership, Governance, and Policy

• Administrative Systems

• Education Futurists

Nominate an IT Superstar Today!Nominations accepted Jan. 6 – Feb. 17

connectedness of these devices that

will count in the future, as our person-

alized network of devices, aided and

abetted by the Internet of Things, will

continue to “grow into” our household,

our cars and many other dimensions of

our lives. Second, the true story will be

in software, the apps. As [Silicon Val-

ley veteran] Marc Andreessen put it:

“Software is eating the world.”

Junco: Giving students iPads and

other tablets does not automatically

lead to better learning outcomes. It’s

part of a myth that many in higher edu-

cation have readily adopted: that throw-

ing technology at an educational prob-

lem will automatically produce better

learning outcomes. Accepting this myth

then absolves institutions from provid-

ing faculty professional development

to best use these tools in the curricu-

lar process. Instead of starting with the

learning goals or outcomes, institutions

start with the technology (because it’s

“cool,” “new” and/or “shiny”) and hope/

expect that the learning outcomes will

automatically follow. Before investing

considerable resources in tablet initia-

tives (or even worse, requiring students

to invest their own resources), we must

ask ourselves: What is the goal of using

tablets and can those goals be more ef-

ficiently and effectively reached without

an expensive technological tool?

Wagner: Tablets are shaking up

thinking on how to design learning ex-

periences that take better advantage

of mobility, personalization, connectiv-

ity and convenience. But it seems that

the creative discussions around learning

design and distributed pedagogy are

running in parallel with the implementa-

tion and security questions that IT orga-

nizations need to balance. The devices

themselves are part of a big enterprise

IT conversation that has been burning

brighter for a while now. But I don’t see

them as the creative catalyst that the

other so-called “hot technologies” are

bringing to this conversation.4

I . T . T R E N D S


I . T . T R E N D S

Learning Management Systems

Junco: I’m glad to see the LMS trend “cooling down.”

LMSes are a perfect example of what can happen when as

an educational system we adopt a technology before eval-

uating all of the possibilities for reaching desired learning

outcomes (not that I believe any learning outcomes were

ever considered when colleges and universities were first

adopting LMSes). LMSes are static, unengaging platforms

that are typically not intuitive to use. For these reasons,

faculty and students dislike them. In fact, research shows

that students would much rather use social technologies

such as Facebook for the “learning” features of LMSes.

It’s about time we move toward more engaging platforms

that help bolster student engagement and social and aca-

demic integration.

Wagner: There is a perception in some circles that

LMSes as we have known them — primarily the content and

course syllabi, student participation and record manage-

ment tools — are artifacts of the past. I would suggest that

as learning experiences of all kinds migrate to the Internet,

and as online learning, blended learning and on-the-ground

learning programs all look to leverage digital assets and ex-

perience more effectively, we are seeing a new generation

of LMS emerge. The need for learning and content man-

agement platforms that interoperate with academic plan-

ning and advisements systems, CRM systems, social me-

dia and student information systems is more pronounced

than ever. LMSes as we have known them earn two chilies.

The new emerging platforms that cover enterprise learning-

experience management are closer to three chili peppers.

Hill: I’m going to go against the grain and say that the

LMS is a hot topic, albeit a boring and frequently frustrat-

ing one. While many people recognize that first-generation

course management systems do not directly impact learning

in most cases (they give administrative benefits by managing

classroom chores), we are just now getting to the point where

a majority of faculty actually use an LMS in their classes. The

systems are finally accepted, and it is hard to argue with the

benefit to students of seeing grades and having access to

course materials in an organized fashion. The opportunity is

for LMS providers (old and new) to keep these benefits while

moving past the walled garden approaches that got us here.

Ease of use and intuitive design cannot be overestimated as

important aspects for future systems.

Sannier: Am I just stubborn? How can I maintain year

after year that the LMS is dead, when the LMS market is so

clearly flourishing and expected to grow more than 25 per-

cent annually each of the next five years? Investors are ex-

cited about LMSes too. Just over a year ago, Desire2Learn

raised $80 million in venture money and Canvas raised $30

million this past June. Even stodgy market leader Black-

board has a fresh new CEO bent on resurgence. If this is

dead, then what does hot look like?

The LMS is an established learning technology, a way for in-

dividual teachers, one class at a time, to digitally hand out pa-

pers, collect assignments, deliver quizzes or post announce-

ments. To the extent that this technology introduced modest

efficiencies in the classroom, those (very modest) gains have

been fully realized. I don’t dispute that more LMSes will be

sold next year than were sold last year. I just don’t expect

them to have any more impact on improving teaching and

learning next year than they had this year. Dead.

David Raths is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia.

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NEXT: How to Earn a Graduate Degree on a Smartphone


WHAT ABOUT THE ‘M’ WORD?When five higher ed IT experts have a conversation

about trends, you can usually expect at least one of

them to mention MOOCs. To find out what our panel

had to say about massive open online courses, e-text-

books and open educational resources, read “3 Learn-

ing Content Trends to Watch in 2014” at CampusTech-

nology.com. Also, don’t miss this issue’s “Breaking the

MOOC Model” on page 18.

M O B I L E C O M P U T I N G


toni fuhrman

With the help of a smartphone or tablet, graduate engineering students at USC can access live streaming lectures, and interact with their lecturer and fellow students.

same faculty — mostly full-time, tenure-track — wheth-

er they’re on campus or online,” said Binh Tran, execu-

tive director of USC’s DEN@Viterbi, which is powered

by Blackboard.

DEN@Viterbi currently offers more than 40 online engi-

neering graduate programs and professional courses. “We

have more than 4,000 graduate engineering students,”

explained Tran. “Of those, close to 1,000 are online stu-

dents,” with the majority part-time, averaging 1.5 classes

per semester.

The school’s sizable investment in technology has obvi-

ously paid off. Last year, DEN@Viterbi was ranked as the

top online engineering program in the country by U.S. News

& World Report, which also ranked USC as one of the top

10 graduate engineering programs.

While the primary goal of the DEN@Viterbi makeover is

to make its online education offering as effective as face-

to-face, the school has also put tremendous emphasis on

optimizing its system for mobile devices.

“I watch all my DEN@Viterbi lectures on my iPhone,” said

Sapphire Lopez, who is studying for a master’s degree in

How to Earn a Graduate Degree on a Smartphone

A PART-TIME graduate engineering student sits

at his gate at Los Angeles International Airport, awaiting

his flight. He gets out his smartphone, checks the time,

clicks on a link, logs on and within seconds he’s watching

and participating in a live lecture at the University of

Southern California.

Distance education? Yes, and then some. The Distance

Education Network at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering

— now called DEN@Viterbi — has been around for more

than four decades, but this year’s version is state-of-the-

art and definitely mobile friendly.

In the wake of a massive tech overhaul, students can not

only stream their lectures in real time, but also participate

in classroom discussion by phone, live chat or VoIP. The

newly upgraded classroom suites have custom audio-

video integration, with cameras directed at both the

instructor and the students, and ceiling microphones that

pick up in-class responses and enable discussion between

online and on-campus students.

“With this blended format, our graduate engineering

students have the same classroom experience and the

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chemical engineering and materials

science. “It’s very easy and convenient.

I like that I can watch lectures anywhere

and don’t have to pull out my laptop.”

The average class size is 44, with

most classes accommodating a maxi-

mum of 10 to 20 online students.

These students might be on assign-

ment in another country, or they might

be at home with the kids. “They’re

very mobile,” emphasized Tran, “and

we make sure that the technology

supports that mobility with interactive

tools.” The course management sys-

tem, for example, is accessible via

mobile and tablet browsers, along

with digitized notes and various

course tools.

“Mobile access is important, but the

ability to access information at a

distance is transformational,” said

Gaurav Sukhatme, professor and

chairman of the USC Computer Sci-

ence Department. “The fact that

geography doesn’t impose con-

straints on education is transforma-

tional. The fact that you don’t have to

uproot your life in order to finish your

education is transformational. The

mobile device provides added flexibil-

ity, and is important in that regard.”

To give its students maximum flexi-

bility and make the online learning

experience as valuable as possible,

the school provides faculty with exten-

sive tech support — a dedicated

“Mobile access is important, but the ability to access information at a distance is

transformational. The fact that geography doesn’t impose constraints on education is

transformational.” — Gaurav Sukhatme, USC



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NEXT: Breaking the MOOC Model

operator monitors up to 13 classes from a central control

room — and a range of technology options. Professors

have at their disposal computers, writing pads, electronic

boards and tablets. Wearing a clip-on microphone so they

can walk or sit, instructors can use voiceover as a camera

zooms in on formulas or notes; use a blackboard or white-

board; write on paper; or speak and look directly at the

camera. “This is a healthy diversity of teaching styles, all of

which are embraced,” said Sukhatme.

Most of the 130 classes held each semester are highly

interactive, with WebEx and phone conferencing enabling

online students to be seen and heard in the classroom. The

instructor or room moderator can also pass control to online

participants for remote presentation sharing. For student

group meetings, there is a link for an interactive group URL,

which sends students into a virtual meeting room, with the

ability to use videoconferencing, desktop sharing and chat.

To avoid disturbing their classmates, those students par-

ticipating via mobile device must follow some basic guide-

lines. For instance, they must keep their phones on mute

unless they are asking or answering a question. Sukhatme,

who has been teaching classes with mobile access for

about three years, believes that “remote students are good

about this.” As a result, he said, he is generally not aware

of where students are located, whether at work, an airport,

offshore or in a combat zone.

Asynchronous Options

Because many USC engineering students are out-of-state

or abroad — the school has students from 20 different

countries — scheduling can be a problem. “We have a lot

of global partners,” said Tran. “We work with international

corporations, such as Kuwait Oil Company, with engineers

taking master’s and completing Ph.D. programs.”

To accommodate different time zones, bandwidth limita-

tions and student schedules, DEN@Viterbi does not

require students to attend lectures live, if it’s not feasible.

Instead, it provides a variety of options for downloading

and streaming materials. Some students might use audio

only; others might download the recorded lecture, which

is available 15 minutes after class for mobile devices and

tablets. “Those in petroleum engineering, working offshore

or in the military might have Internet access once or twice

a week,” explained Tran. “Our program allows them to stay

up-to-date.”

The way students use mobile devices to attend lectures

and complete their coursework varies widely, although it

does require a certain amount of discipline on the stu-

dents’ part. “On-campus students use mobile devices to

review material,” said Sukhatme. “Truly remote students

often do everything on their remote devices. In either case,

it works quite well for engineering. The challenge with

mobile devices is time management. The student has to

discard other cognitive load and pay attention to the lec-

ture. Also, reviewing and relearning can be a challenge.”

“With a live interactive component in all classes, there

are always challenges as to how we manage the applica-

tions,” concluded Tran. “But, on the plus side, the faculty

has access to professional students with real-life experi-

ence, and the technology keeps the students engaged.

The mobile infrastructure enables student success.”

Toni Fuhrman is a writer and creative consultant based in

Los Angeles.

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To accommodate different time zones, bandwidth limitations and student schedules, DEN@Viterbi does not require students to attend

lectures live, if it’s not feasible. Instead, it provides a variety of options for downloading and streaming materials.

O N L I N E L E A R N I N G

IT WAS ABOUT a year ago that the

idea of using the Web to provide open-

access, online learning at scale was

thrust into the international spotlight. In

November 2012, The New York Times

christened “The Year of the MOOC,”

and a concept that had been percolating

relatively quietly in academia quickly

became The Next Big Thing.4

Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun threw a wrench in the MOOC model by declaring that massive open online courses don’t work for higher education. What’s next for the online learning trend?


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By John K. WatersMOOCMODELMOOCMODELMOOC

BREAKINGTHE

MOOCTHE

MOOC

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Now a founder of one of the leading

for-profit MOOC providers says mas-

sive open online courses aren’t work-

ing in higher education. In a recently

published Fast Company interview,

Sebastian Thrun, co-founder of Udac-

ity and one of the most-often quoted

champions of the MOOC model, said

that his company has “a lousy prod-

uct” and revealed that he’s planning to

shift his enterprise’s focus from higher

education to corporate training.

Thrun, a Google Fellow and pioneer

of the self-driving car, has a high pro-

file in the MOOC world, so his com-

ments provoked widespread reaction

— everything from gleeful I-told-you-

sos and barbed comments about his

company’s “Silicon Valley blindness”

to existing learning research, to point-

ed criticisms of Udacity’s business

plan and Thrun’s hyperbolic branding

and buildup of unrealistic expectations

about an online education delivery

model that is still evolving.

There’s plenty of evidence — and no

shortage of acronyms — to suggest

that MOOCs are, in fact, evolving. The

first generation of cMOOCs, based on

the connectivist peer-learning model,

led to the xMOOCs that hit the market

in 2011 with a more traditional lecture-

based format and the backing of com-

panies like Udacity, Coursera and edX.

Cathy Sandeen, vice president for

education attainment and innovation

at the American Council on Education

(ACE), has identified a third genera-

tion — MOOCs 3.0 — which disag-

gregates the elements of the xMOOC



“The truth is, it’s never been at all clear what people mean when they say ‘MOOC.’”

— Michael Wesch, Kansas State University

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for customized uses on campus.

Some have labeled versions of this

model “small private online courses”

(SPOCs). In early 2013, University of

Texas at Austin psychology profes-

sors James Pennebaker and Samuel

Gosling taught the first “synchronous

massive online course” (SMOC),

which added coordinated live lectures

to the model. This past fall, some 17

colleges and universities offered a

MOOC variation developed by Anne

Balsamo, dean of the School of Me-

dia Studies at The New School (NY),

and Alexandra Juhasz, a professor of

media studies at Pitzer College (CA),

called “distributed open collaborative

courses” (DOCCs), in which classes

are organized around a central topic

and the expertise is spread among

the participants. Last spring, Daniel

Hickey, associate professor at the In-

diana University School of Education,

got a grant from Google to create a

“big open online course” (BOOC), a

MOOC-like class built on Google’s

Coursebuilder course management

system for up to 500 students. And

coming in 2014: homemade MOOCs

built on a platform that will be man-

aged and hosted on mooc.org by edX.

What does it say, then, about the fu-

ture of the morphing MOOC when the

man who has been called “The Godfa-

ther of MOOCs” seems to be throw-

ing in the towel?

According to George Siemens, not

that much in the long run. Siemens is

a professor at the Center for Distance

Education and a researcher and strat-

egist with the Technology Enhanced

Knowledge Research Institute at Atha-

basca University in Alberta, Canada.

Back in 2008, Siemens and online

learning maven Stephen Downes de-

signed and taught what is widely con-

sidered the first MOOC (of the con-

nectivist variety).

“A year from now we’ll be talking about

something different from MOOCs,”

Siemens told Campus Technology,

“but in my view, we’ll still be asking



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essentially the same questions: How

do we teach in digital networked en-

vironments? How do we teach when

the power balance between a faculty

member and a learner is different than

it was in the past? How do we teach

when learning can be tracked and

measured and assessed outside the

university or formal education?”

Those questions point to the underly-

ing trends that spawned the MOOC in

the first place, Siemens said — namely

rising tuition and the growing influence

of technology and social media on

learning.

“MOOCs are a reflection of a series

of trends that continue to influence

the education sector,” he said, “which

means that tomorrow MOOCs could

go away and those challenging as-

pects of our higher education systems

would still be there.”

Full Steam Ahead?

MOOCs certainly don’t seem to be

going away any time soon. Thrun’s

broody admissions notwithstanding,

other MOOC-in-higher-ed ventures

are moving forward apace. Future-

Learn, for example, is busily rolling out

courses for a big pilot program in the

United Kingdom. Coursera just landed

another $20 million in new funding.

The business-oriented social network

LinkedIn announced partnerships with

Coursera, edX, Udacity and others that



“It’s the blended model that gets the improved outcomes, that gives the MOOC a different role — as a resource that can improve the quality of

the residential university experience, rather than an entity that competes with it.”

— George Siemens, Athabasca University



will make it possible for members to cite their completed

MOOCs in their résumés. Stanford University’s (CA) Ven-

ture Lab project has blossomed into NovoEd, which is part-

nering with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement

of Teaching on MOOC-like approaches to support college-

level quantitative literacy and math skill development. And

Udacity’s own partnership with Georgia Tech to offer the

first fully accredited MOOC leading to a low-cost Master of

Science in Computer Science degree is about to bear fruit.

The program was developed in partnership with AT&T and

is set to launch this month.

Siemens has mixed feelings about all the entrepreneurial

activity erupting around MOOCs. He said he was happy ini-

tially to see pioneers like Thrun and Coursera’s Andrew Ng

and Daphne Koller “experimenting and trying to stir up the

inertia in the education sector,” but the hype generated by

Thrun’s branding activities in particular “derailed the qual-

ity conversations” among researchers and educators about

the challenges MOOCs were addressing.

Thrun went on the record early with rhapsodic predictions

about the impact of MOOCs on higher education. “You can

take the blue pill and go back to your lecture of 20 stu-

dents,” he told journalist Blake Graham shortly after his first

MOOC experiment at Stanford. “But I’ve taken the red pill

and seen wonderland.” A few months later, he told Wired

magazine that in 50 years, the proliferation of MOOCs

would reduce the number of institutions delivering higher

education worldwide to 10.

This kind of rhetoric cast the MOOC as competition for

traditional colleges and universities, which would eventually

rile faculty and, Siemens argued, obscure the potential of

the model to expand services to students and the commu-

nity. But he also noted that that language has been chang-

ing as MOOCs are increasingly seen less as models that

might replace faculty and more as potential extensions of

the university.

No “One Course Format to Rule Them All”

Thrun’s announced pivot away from higher ed comes after

San Jose State University (CA) published the initial re-

sults of a much-talked-about experiment with a for-credit

MOOC program developed with Udacity. Disappointing

student performance prompted the school to put the pro-

gram on pause this past fall, with plans to start it up again

this month. Lost in the headlines generated by those re-

sults, Siemens pointed out, is an earlier SJSU program de-

veloped with edX, the joint effort of Harvard (MA) and the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create an open

source online learning platform. That program provides edX

courses as optional resources for SJSU professors who

want to use them for flipped classes.

“It added a MOOC layer to existing university activity, and

that produced significantly better results,” Siemens said.

“That’s the biggest change we’re seeing now. It’s the blend-

ed model that gets the improved outcomes, that gives the

MOOC a different role — as a resource that can improve

the quality of the residential university experience, rather

than an entity that competes with it.”

Alexander Halavais, associate professor in the School of

Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State Universi-

ty, is a social media researcher, well known higher ed blog-

ger and president of the Association of Internet Research-

ers. He agreed that pitting the MOOC makers against the

colleges and universities, whether part of the plan or a by-

product of the hype, has been counterproductive.

“MOOCs have, at least in the incarnation that has been

especially pushed by Udacity, been hyped to a ridiculous

degree,” Halavais said. “In particular, placing them in ten-

sion with a traditional liberal arts classroom, which is a pretty

rare beast, is guaranteed to make them a losing proposition.

It’s not about MOOCs replacing courses at liberal arts col-

leges. It’s about learning happening across a large number

of institutions and networks in lots of new ways, and making

sense of that new complexity.”

Halavais sees the MOOC as “a collection of disruptive

elements sparking something else in the higher ed ecosys-

tem,” and doesn’t believe the term “evolution” fits in that

context. “MOOC” is shorthand for “experimenting with on-


line education at scale,” he said. But the term could work,

he allowed, if the evolution of the MOOC is seen as more

of a Cambrian Explosion, in which a large number of new

approaches are appearing quickly and disrupting the eco-

system as a whole.

“There isn’t one course format to rule them all,” he said.

“There never will be and there never should be. MOOCs

were and are just one potential collection of approaches to

organizing a course.”

An Ongoing Evolution

In fact, said ACE’s Sandeen, “MOOC” may be a sexy buzz-

word for the press, but for those in the thick of educational

research it’s just another stage in the ongoing evolution of

online learning. Even among the big three providers, it’s an

imprecise category, she noted. Coursera is all about global

access, so “massive” was always part of its strategy, as was

partnering first with elite universities to gain enrollments.

Udacity was always about a higher level of instructional de-

sign and the use of analytics. The resulting MOOC was a

much more vertically integrated and controlled product. In

the middle is edX, a nonprofit that integrates a high degree

of instructional design into its programs but provides little

instructional design support for institutions.

“The MOOC is going in all sorts of directions,” Sandeen

said, “which is understandable. But we at ACE still be-

lieve there’s some promise in the idea of using MOOCs to

help students gain degrees. Some institutions will accept

MOOCs for credit if they have third-party validation associ-

ated with them, and usually some authentication. And some

employers may consider MOOCs on job applications. So

there are many different ways in which this story will con-

tinue to unfold.”

The most exciting thing about that unfolding story, said Mi-

chael Wesch, associate professor of cultural anthropology at

Kansas State University, is the way those who are experi-

menting with and changing MOOCs are dissolving catego-

ries and “making us rethink what it is we’re actually up to.”

“‘MOOC’ is not so much a definable thing as a rallying

cry to serve people who cannot come to traditional higher

ed institutions,” Wesch said. “The term has taken on a lot

of baggage, but I suspect we won’t be using it for much

longer. The truth is, it’s never been at all clear what people

mean when they say ‘MOOC.’”

Gerry McCartney, CIO at Purdue University (IN), is no

fan of the MOOC in higher education and said corporate

training is a much more appropriate application of the mod-

el. However, he applauded the MOOC makers for demon-

strating that “content has almost no value.”

“The money is not in the content,” he said. “It’s not in the

material, and it never was. I can watch The History Channel

and learn a whole pile of stuff, but I don’t get college cred-

its for that. What a MOOC does is automate a part of the

process that was already fairly low value. That’s what the in-

vestors missed. You’re not hitting the high-value part of the

equation. It’s not just a question of, well, now we can get the

best Chaucerian professor in the world and have her teach

one class to everyone in the whole world. They can just go

read her book if they want that experience. It’s the personal

interactions with the people who are in the room with you

— the instructors, the other students — that have the value.

And that’s not scalable.”

Amin Saberi, the Stanford associate professor of manage-

ment science and engineering who developed the NovoEd

platform, argued that Thrun’s pivot has within it something

essential for the evolution of the MOOC in higher education.

“We need that kind of willingness to acknowledge les-

sons learned and to make changes accordingly,” Saberi

said. “We maybe don’t think of him as humble, exactly, but

this shows a kind of humility that we need to move forward.

The technology of the Web and online education are going

to continue to have a disruptive effect on higher education,

but MOOCs are just one model. We will all be learning our

lessons and then applying them in slightly different ways as

online learning evolves.”

John K. Waters is a freelance writer based in Mountain

View, CA.

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NEXT: A Collaborative Approach to IT Support


H E L P D E S K


dian schaffhauser

At Davenport University, central IT is using social learning tools to tap the tech expertise of students, faculty and staff, cutting back on help desk requests and helping to create a culture of mutual support.

bilities in one place. Plus, the software needed to be easy

to use so that anybody could create content and post it for

others to access.

Crowdsourced Learning

In March 2011 the university turned to Bloomfire, which

has gained a foothold as a knowledge management sys-

tem in companies such as Whole Foods Market, Re/Max,

Comcast and Etsy, along with several institutions of high-

er education: the University of North Florida, MIT, Geor-

gia Tech and St. Luke’s College in Iowa, among others.

Bloomfire’s service, which goes by the same name as the

company, combines the ability to create and post content;

share, search and browse content; post questions to the

community and have members provide answers; person-

alize feeds to let a person “follow” another user or mem-

bers of a group; make user recommendations; and moni-

tor data about site and resource usage.

“If you’re a subject-matter expert in Microsoft Excel, you

don’t have to be on the IT training team to deploy a video

that says, ‘Here’s how I do pivot tables with my financial

documents,’” Miller explained. “If you’re the finance per-

son, by all means, get out there and push out that video.”

Now, the site main-

tains about

1,300 pieces of

user-generated

content —

including

A Collaborative Approach to IT Support

WHEN FACULTY AND staff at Davenport

University have a tech question, they often turn to each

other for help. And while that kind of social learning is

beneficial, the 11-campus and online institution based in

Grand Rapids, MI, wanted a way for individual interactions

to reach the greater community.

“A lot of screen captures were being pasted into Word

docs and e-mailed,” recalled CIO Brian Miller. “There were

some screen recording tools that people were deploying.

Somebody might call and ask, ‘Hey, how do I invite 10

people to an appointment in the calendaring software?’ I

could record my screen and send it to them. It’s an interac-

tion between you and me, but it has no power to reach

more people.”

While learning management systems, lecture capture

tools and even sites like YouTube offer some of the fea-

tures Davenport was looking for — such as the ability to

post supporting documents, ask questions, hold threaded

discussions, capture analytics, generate content and

deploy easily to the Web — the school wanted a Web-

based solution that would consolidate all of those capa-

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269 videos, 12 training series, 300

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Starting Up

Miller and his team spent some “sig-

nificant IT time” in getting “INsite” —

the university’s branded name for the

Bloomfire service — integrated with

the school’s identity management

tools. As a result, users can access

the service based on their roles within

the university as full-time employees.

“After that, it was hands off” for IT,

Miller added. Administration of content

is handled by functional experts across

the university. “We don’t get in the way.

They don’t have to call us for assis-

tance. Everybody loves our help desk;

but when we don’t have to deploy help

desk resources to fix things that peo-

ple should be able to do themselves,

that’s a win for us. In this case, it’s nice

and easy to use and it just works.”

To help users become familiar with

the use of INsite, IT populated the

service with videos it had already cre-

ated, such as tips and tricks for using

Google Apps; sessions about cam-

pus mobile applications; and training

clips on how to use components of a

highly complex ERP package.

But for the formal introduction in fall

2011, taking place during an all-

hands meeting that kicks off the aca-

demic year, the team cherry-picked

“pilot content authors”: people who

had experience in front of the camera

and had engaging stories to tell. IT set

them up with video production experts

to record videos specifically for a new

change initiative being rolled out by

campus administration.

“We had well known people from

across the university at various levels

get in front of the camera and talk

about specific cultural values. Then

we played those at an all-staff meet-

ing,” Miller noted. “That let people see

what [the program] looks like. It breaks

down the fear that this is going to be


H E L P D E S K

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to TOC

NEXT: 5 Advantages of Online Advising

some highly complex piece of software they have to learn.

You’ve seeded the online community with quality content

you want everybody to listen to and check out.”

Now people create their own training sessions with the

webcam recording features built into the program. Users

simply log in to the site; the camera on their computer

“activates”; and the recording can begin.

Getting IT “Out of the Way”

Users access INsite through a customized portal page

with featured content and recent and popular posts, ques-

tions and video series. The latter are collections of videos

created to address a given topic. Staff can filter results by

type of resource, subject category and tags. They can also

choose to “follow” specific contributors, which is how

functional areas within the university are staying on top of

current department activities.

The service has been well adopted within Davenport,

reported Miller. Recently, for example, the university has

been posting content into INsite to help staff prepare for the

goal-setting process. “We’ve got 584 full-time staff, and

there are some goal-setting videos that have that much traf-

fic on them. People are going in there to figure out, ‘How

am I supposed to write those Smart Goals again?’”

But what most amazes Miller, he said, is the cultural

impact of the social learning platform that provides con-

nections across geographic boundaries.

“If you look at our organization, we are spread out across

the state with significant numbers of students and staff in

multiple locations. Without having to deploy all kinds of

specialized software, we can leverage the Web for learn-

ing instead of just e-mail,” Miller said.

One example: A couple of years ago, Davenport began a

“virtual in-seat learning” (VISL) program that allows students

to participate in higher-level courses at other campuses by

connecting synchronously via webcam and videoconferenc-

ing software. But the institution was finding that VISL “works

really well in some places and not so well in other places,”

Miller explained. “We would hear from Saginaw that they

were having all sorts of trouble with instructors not standing

in front of cameras. Students in the remote locations would

see the whiteboard, but they wouldn’t see the instructor.”

However, Davenport’s Holland campus was having “fan-

tastic success,” Miller continued. To help share their skills,

the Holland faculty used INsite to record and post a series

of videos on best practices for VISL. This grassroots effort

became a “really popular video series,” he recalled.

Miller was quick to credit users for the benefits of the

social learning system: “People would start thanking me

for it, but IT had nothing to do with this wonderful success.

I told them, ‘Go thank Linda in Holland.’ They just used

these tools exactly the way they were meant to be used,

to roll out learning socially on the other side of the state

without any big roadshow or training event. They were able

to put this stuff up there.”

As a result, student surveys are showing growing satisfac-

tion with VISL from multiple locations. And, said Miller, “I can

personally guarantee you that our faculty are feeling much

more confident about their ability to deliver class materials

this way, which was the goal of those training videos.”

Miller now is an advocate for social learning. “When it’s top

of mind, you can take action. When somebody else needs

an answer, they can go out and look for it, which is pretty

nice,” he declared. “The best tool is the one where you don’t

need IT to use it. You just need us to get it working. Once

it’s working you just need us to get out of the way.”

Dian Schaffhauser is a senior contributing editor of Cam-

pus Technology.

SHARE

“Everybody loves our help desk; but when we don’t have to deploy help desk resources to fix things that people should be able to do

themselves, that’s a win for us.” — Brian Miller, Davenport University

S T U D E N T S U C C E S S


55Online technologies are moving advising out of academic offices and onto the Web, where students gain anytime, anywhere access to advisers and tools to help them succeed. By Dian Schaffhauser

Ways Online Advising Can Improve on

Face-to-Face

A LOT RIDES on the shoulders of college

advisers. They’re the ones who make sure students

have the right mix of courses to graduate. They help

out with information and guidance about transfer

credit and policy, financial aid, personal concerns,

study abroad opportunities, academic petitions

or special requests, complaints about instructors,

dropping and adding courses and making referrals

to other campus services. They’re often expected to

help students set life goals and explore career options.

They evaluate students’ academic progress and help

steer them toward reaching their academic goals.4

shutterstock.com



It’s a heavy load, but when you take into consideration the

fact that many advisers are responsible for hundreds of stu-

dents at once, the task seems almost superhuman. As a result,

institutions have turned to online systems to streamline the

process, helping automate administrative tasks and giving stu-

dents self-service access to decision-making tools. But even

as the use of technology has grown tremendously in the work

of academic advising, the human element is still an important

part of the mix. Here, CT looks at five ways online advising sys-

tems can complement — and even improve — face-to-face.

1) Making Requirements Transparent

As is typical of most sizable institutions, the University of

Hawaii System offers a variety of pathways to a degree,

including a “ton” of exceptions and special allowances for

particular students, said Gary Rodwell, architect of the insti-

tution’s STAR degree-audit system. First released in 2006,

STAR lets students track their progress toward their degrees.

Rodwell described it as a cross-institutional “cloud” interface

over the system’s Banner student information system.

When students were given permission to bypass a partic-

ular class, sometimes those exceptions would show up in

STAR, and sometimes they were written out on a piece of pa-

per tucked into a file. That in turn led to disputes over course

requirements and waivers as students moved from one major

to another or from one university or college to another.

In the name of transparency, a watchword for the STAR ini-

tiative, the vice chancellor strong-armed the system’s Council

of Academic Advisors into agreeing that all advisory excep-

tions needed to be put into STAR. Now, “everybody can see

what’s going on and students can move to different programs

and majors,” Rodwell said. “It’s still not 100 percent,” he ac-

knowledged, but it did “move things along a lot.”

That transparency has also shed some light on conflict-

TOP TIPS FOR DEPLOYING AN ONLINE ADVISING SYSTEM Don’t worry about mobile yet. Usage analytics at the University of Washington show that students don’t expect to do

their academic planning on a small screen. “Academic planning is not something that people do every day,” said IT Student

Program Director Darcy Van Patten. While a “mobile-first perception” exists, she explained, “Certain interactions that are

highly complex require processing of a lot of information at the same time.” Those activities are tough to do on a mobile device.

Keep advising solutions student-centered. The University of Hawaii conducted surveys among the student popula-

tion before it set out to design and build its STAR online advising system. And at UW, the development team’s user experi-

ence designer spent two months interviewing students to understand their needs. She used those to create four separate

“personas”: one-page descriptions of end user “types” that help steer development priorities.

To improve student engagement, get advisers engaged. Even though it was the student technology fee committee

that commissioned development of UW’s MyPlan online advising system, the university has learned that it’s not enough to

promote use of the advising system to students alone. “A lot of adoption is going to be because of the influence of advisers

on this process,” said Van Patten. “So it’s incorporated into how they talk to their students about planning, how they use

their face-to-face time; it’s not something that’s separate.”

Pursue staged development. In order to track the functionality of its online advising tool, Advising Sidekick, Brown

University (RI) started with the needs of its 2009 freshman class. Said Director of IT Christopher Keith, “As the class of

2013 entered as first-years, we had enough functionality for them to upload their letters to advisers. In 2010-11, we had

to develop the ability for 1,500 sophomores to declare an academic major.” Now 10 distinct modules meet the needs of

students at different points in their academic careers.

Untitled-4 1 11/14/13 4:40 PM

ing academic requirements within the

university system. Individual schools in

Hawaii may have different requirements

for the same degree: For example, one

may require more social sciences units

than another. However, a global agree-

ment among the institutions says that

if you meet the requirements for one

campus, you meet them everywhere.

Sorting that out “without STAR is very

hard work, but STAR does it automati-

cally,” Rodwell said.

As a result, the campuses are being

forced to reconsider their requirements.

“It’s actually quite good,” he added. The

online advising system is identifying

conflicts among the academic

programs and forcing faculty

from across the system “to talk

about core.”

2) Helping Advisers

Take Action

A major goal of MyPlan, de-

veloped at the University of

Washington, was to offer a

tool that pulls together all the

information needed by stu-

dents and advisers into a sin-

gle place “that’s actionable,”

said Darcy Van Patten, stu-

dent program director in the

university’s IT organization.

Funded through the student



VIDEO: Bob Bramucci, vice chancellor of technology and learning services for the South Orange County Community College District (CA), talks about why student advising should be a blend of face-to-face and online tools.For a captioned version, visit CT on YouTube.



technology fee, MyPlan allows students to search for cours-

es, receive recommendations from advisers, map out plans

by quarter, and monitor their academic progress through a

degree-audit function. Previously, students relied on an as-

sortment of applications — word processors, spreadsheets,

the course catalog, the time schedule and a legacy degree-

audit system — to cobble together academic plans. Now,

with MyPlan, once the student has a plan in place, it can be

shared (or not) with an adviser, and an in-application mes-

saging feature can be used for back-and-forth conversation.

Because advisers in the central advising staff at UW may be

assigned rosters with several hundred students, they have little

time to start from scratch with each student, especially those

who come in “believing that we have four or five majors.” (The

university has about 160 majors.) Now advisers can have an

introductory meeting and tell students, “Why don’t you go out

to MyPlan, do some exploration, start to develop a plan and

then let’s sit down and start to talk about that plan.” The result

has been a reduction in the use of face-to-face advising “for

things that could be met in other ways” — while making the

collaboration between student and adviser “more efficient but

also more value-add,” said Van Patten.

3) Guiding Recommendations

If Amazon can figure out what we might want to read next, why

shouldn’t schools be able to tell students what courses they

ought to take next? That’s the idea behind the guided recom-

mendation functionality in Degree Compass, a course recom-

mendation tool developed at Austin Peay State University

(TN) and acquired by Desire2Learn early last year. Using pre-

dictive analytics based on grade and enrollment data, the pro-

gram provides two kinds of insight: a sequence of courses

that best suit a student’s program of study, and a star rating

to inform the student about how well he or she is expected to

do in any given course. The student makes the final decisions.

“We sort of hoped that when students made more in-

formed choices, they would do better. And they have,” said

Tristan Denley, the mastermind behind that online service

who has since moved from the university to the Tennessee

Board of Regents as vice chancellor for academic affairs.

A similar pursuit — informing choices — comes into play

with UH’s STAR; but in that case, an academic pathway

diagram lays out a student’s progress toward a degree. As

Rodwell pointed out, a lot of students assume that once

they hit 120 units, they’ll be eligible for a degree. It’s a shock

to realize that what courses they take is just as important.

“This is [part] of the evolution of trying to find a trigger point

that students really find valuable right from the beginning,”

he said. “The issue we want to overcome is that a true lib-

eral arts education is really diverse in what you can take to

ADVISING STUDENTS WHERE THEY HANG OUT ONLINEHand-crafted advising systems are great — if you can get ’em. But some schools are supplementing their student outreach

with online media they know students inhabit or wear comfortably. The advisers in the College of Arts & Sciences at Texas

Tech run a Facebook fan page. University of Oregon advisers maintain a blog called “Grade First Aid: Your Guide to a

Healthy GPA.” The Academic Success Center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas maintains a Twitter account. Ohio

State provides advising in person or via video. Advisers at Northern Illinois University use Skype as well as face-to-face.

Radford University (VA) offers a public chat room where students can tune in and pose anonymous questions.

Some experiments, however, have seen their day and passed into obscurity, like the advising podcast produced by Uni-

versity of Washington advisers, which still lives online in a hundred episodes but hasn’t been updated since 2009; or

the Second Life advising center maintained by the Penn State World Campus, which generated a lot of attention when it

launched in 2009 but now presumably exists only in the archives of the virtual world platform.


meet the requirements, but that leaves so much choice open

for students. You can choose from 1,500 courses. You’re

numb because you can’t possibly make that decision. STAR

guides you down and down through those choices.”

4) Finding Hidden Information

Frequently, the inability to steer through university process-

es holds students back from obtaining their degrees, and

these people may never reach out for professional help.

“There is some high percentage of students who go in and

out of college having never seen an adviser,” said UW’s Van

Patten. “It’s a reality whether you have good systems or bad.

But if you have good systems, [students are] getting better

information than they would have otherwise, and at least

they’re not purely self-advising or peer-advising.”

In fact, online advising systems can help uncover informa-

tion that might be missed by both student and human advis-

er. In a process called

“reverse transfer,” for

example, UH’s STAR

system informs stu-

dents when they’ve

earned a degree even

if they were unaware

of it. As Joy Nishida,

assistant director of

the STAR Technology Office, explained, students of Hawaii’s

public institutions can pursue a degree at any campus from

any campus. Somebody attending Manoa, for example, could

receive a degree from Hilo, as long as a stipulated number of

credits are earned from the degree-granting university.

This could happen, for instance, when somebody transfers

from a community college to a four-year school without com-

pleting an associate’s degree. As classes are taken at the

second school, STAR automatically sends those new credits

back to the first institution to see what the result is. “When

they’re eligible, it says, ‘Bling!’” Rodwell noted. That’s impor-

tant because “if you have these milestones along the way, it

helps the student go forward with the next degree.”

5) Improving Human Interactions

The most effective online advising systems act as a kind

of exoskeleton that extends human advisers’ capabilities. In

one example, UW’s Van Patten cited a student who was

pursuing a double major: one in community, environment

and planning, and another in civil engineering. His goal was

to finish his studies in as timely a manner as possible. With

the help of undergraduate adviser Mariko Navin, the stu-

dent was able to use MyPlan to create a roadmap of all the

courses he would need. In that process, adviser and student

also uncovered a way to add two minors — in mathematics

and urban planning — and graduate in the same time.

A student could do all of that on his or her own, said Van

Patten, “but they would have to cross-reference the majors

and the minors and make sure they haven’t made mistakes. I

love that MyPlan could help that student, but it couldn’t have

been done had he not also sat down with Mariko, his adviser.”

In other words, the current crop of online advising tools

supplement — not supplant — face-to-face time between

adviser and student. With every form of outreach, the ad-

viser is tending to job one: helping the student make the

decision to remain in college, excel or extend by providing a

one-on-one relationship that forges a personal link between

student and institution.

The tools themselves are making students “more ‘planful,’”

as one UW adviser expressed it to Van Patten. Online advis-

ing programs are making students think more about their aca-

demic planning early on, so they’re more intentional about the

coursework that they take. “That’s a great result,” she said.

“Their No. 1 priority is registration and getting the classes

they need; but at the same time they need to be thinking

ahead — they’re not just getting into classes, but the right

classes. It’s kind of like the difference between ‘Help me do

the things I’m doing better,’ and ‘Help me do better things

and be more effective in my decision-making.’”


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NEXT: Helping Students Tune in on Any Device

VIDEO EXTRASTo learn more about the advising systems in

this article, check out these online videos:

University of Hawaii STAR for Students

Academic Pathway

University of Washington MyPlan

Desire2Learn Degree Compass


S T U D E N T E N G A G E M E N T


dian schaffhauser

Faculty members at the City University of New York are using student response software to keep students awake and attentive in class.

research project using the program in their classes as a tool

to improve student performance.

Finding an Attention-Grabber

Wandt was convinced there had to be some form of technol-

ogy that would allow him to reach students through their

smartphones and tablets and encourage them to stay atten-

tive in class. He discussed the problem with a doctoral stu-

dent who also happened to be a software engineer, and on

a lengthy bus ride shortly after that conversation, the student

created a rudimentary version of what Wandt sought. A quiz

built with PowerPoint slides would show up on the screen

in class, and a student would use software on his com-

puting device to answer each question, submitting his

e-mail address for identification.

“It was very basic and it didn’t do much; but I

knew we were going in the right direction,”

said Wandt.

Then, Wandt attended an education technolo-

gy conference and happened to hit the trade

show booths, where he discovered Via

Response. This program, from a company of the same

name, is a Web-based tool that lets the instructor create

quiz content that can be delivered to student devices for

assessments, homework, polling and social learning ses-

sions. It integrates with Blackboard, Desire2Learn and

Instructure Canvas; it interoperates with other learning

management systems via the IMS Global Learning Tools

Interoperability specification.4

Helping Students Tune in on Any Device

WHEN STUDENTS enter one of Adam Wandt’s

night courses at the City University of New York John Jay

College of Criminal Justice campus, the first thing they do

is sit down and turn on their computing devices. They know

that at precisely 6:15 p.m. they’ll be able to access that eve-

ning’s quiz for exactly 10 minutes. After that, it’s no longer

available and they’ll lose any credit they could have received.

Wandt continues to pop up polls and other interactive

activities throughout the class time. The goal: to keep these

working adults and tired graduate students awake and

engaged in the class after a long and tiring day of, well, life.

Wandt, an assistant professor and deputy chair for aca-

demic technology in the Department of Public Manage-

ment at John Jay, hasn’t always structured his courses this

way. But over and over he was finding that even his best

students were coming to class exhausted and ill prepared

for a two-hour session on information security. Plus, they

were continually distracted with their mobile devices.

The solution he eventually adopted turned out to be a soft-

ware application that could be used in multiple ways. To test

it out, Wendt and a group of CUNY faculty undertook a

shutterstock.com



PH

OT

O B

Y G

AR

Y P

AR

KE

R

Campus Technology Innovators Awards recognizehigher education institutions, technology projectleaders, and vendor partners that have worked together to deploy innovative technology solutions to higher education challenges.

6 Award Categories:• Teaching and Learning

• IT Infrastructure and Systems

• Student Systems and Services

• Leadership, Governance, and Policy

• Administrative Systems

• Education FuturistsOfficial Sponsor of the2014 Campus Technology Innovators Awards

2013 Innovators: San Jose State University

Derrick Meer, president and co-

founder of Via Response, told Wandt

that he’d supply a free semester-long

license of the software to any class of

a faculty member who wanted to try it

out. (While the program is always free

to faculty, students pay at most $20

per semester for access; the price

goes down for longer commitments.)

Wandt took that offer back to one of

the academic technology subcommit-

tees he participates in, the Academic

Technology Research and Develop-

ment Group. Skunkworks, as it’s also

known, pulls 40 active volunteer

researchers from almost every cam-

pus in CUNY to meet virtually and talk

about academic technology. A hand-

ful of them — representing LaGuar-

dia Community College, The City

College of New York, Lehman Col-

lege, Queensborough Community

College and Queens College —

agreed to join Wandt at John Jay Col-

lege in a research project during the

spring 2013 semester to try the soft-

ware with their students and report

back on how it worked.

“We had professors in biology, chem-

istry, philosophy, public policy and

cybersecurity all trying this stuff out in

the same time,” recalled Wandt. “We

gave them the software; we set them

free; and what we were really impressed

to find out was that almost every

researcher did something different.”

Attendance and Polling

One instructor used the program sim-

ply to take attendance. At the begin-

ning of class the faculty member would

display an attendance slide with a

password for the night, which students

had to be in class to see. A student

would pick up his device, log into Via

Response, enter the password and be

recorded as being in attendance.

Wandt tried a similar approach for the

first couple of classes and found that it

forced students to get to class on time

so they’d see that password before it

disappeared. But after a class or two,



he eliminated that and replaced it with his quiz.

Wandt said he frequently hears complaints from under-

graduate professors who “hate to take attendance because

it takes too much time.” But in some cases they’re required

to do so by law. “In this circumstance you could put [the

attendance feature] on the screen, time it for 10 or 20

seconds and then turn it off. Whether you allow students

to register late or not is up to you.”

Two other researchers — including Wandt — used the

system as a classroom clicker. “The student doesn’t have to

go to the bookstore and spend $40 or $50 on [a dedicated

device] they’re never going to use again,” he noted. “They

use their smartphones, laptops or tablets.” He would create

“quick polls” in advance to make sure the students under-

stood the topic or to make sure they stayed on topic.

Homework and Tests

Other researchers in the project used the homework module

of the program. The instructors would enter questions into a

“curriculum content bank” and then assign a set of homework

questions to the students. “Then they were able to monitor

the homework module over the course of the week,” Wandt

explained. “If they saw students not taking the homework [or]

having difficulty with the questions, they could reach out. If

students did very well, they could congratulate them.” Then,

right before a class would begin, the teachers could check

the general metrics to see where the majority of students had

problems so they knew what subject matter to emphasize.

“We don’t want to waste class time going over ideas and

topics that students are already proficient with. By using

the homework module, professors were able to get a real-

ly good idea of where their students’ strengths and weak-

nesses were before they came into the classroom, so they

could focus on the right places,” he added.

Wandt expanded on his quiz practice by delivering full-

length midterms and final exams through the software. But

in those cases he also recommended that students bring

in a laptop or use a college-supplied one. “It could be a

little problematic taking a 50-question quiz on a smart-

phone,” he noted. The program allows for multiple choice,

true-false, short answer and long answer questions.

Magical Metrics

When the semester ended, Wandt surveyed the students

in his class and those from another course on the soft-

ware’s usability and value.

The majority of respondents — 69 percent — found the

program “intuitive” or “very intuitive.” Most students were

able to get the software going on their devices with little help.

Three-quarters were able to use it without any outside help.

The others “needed somebody standing over their shoulder

for a minute or two of help.” But for the most part, he added,

faculty and students “could get set up on day one.”

To avoid delay in his courses now, Wandt asks his students

to set up the software before class. He ensures it happens

by giving them a homework assignment in the program. “I find

that works really well,” he said. “It gives the student time to

play around with it before they come into the classroom.”

The entire student survey group “agreed” or “strongly

agreed” that the use of Via Response “forced” them to

come better prepared for the class; 90 percent said it

helped them succeed. “I think these are really the magical

metrics,” Wandt reported. “The reason I started this proj-

ect was because as a professor I was getting very frus-

trated with my students not reading properly before class.

I understand their stresses, that they’re busy. But I also

need to make sure when we all get into the classroom, we

can have a very targeted conversation about something

they already have a background on.”

Applying technology to encourage students to prepare

for class could help them in small but influential ways to

fulfill their learning objectives, Wandt observed. “If we can

get over our preconceived notions about smartphones in

class [being] bad, we can really give them tools that will

help them succeed in the long run.”


pus Technology.

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Sally Johnstone, a true pioneer in the use

of technology in higher education, has

worked extensively in high-level technol-

ogy policy, strategy and application for the

advancement of higher education at pres-

tigious education institutions and in pro-

fessional organizations, collaborations and

projects. Today she is the vice president

for academic advancement at Western

Governors University, a competency-

based, online institution. At the WICHE

Cooperative for Educational Technologies

annual conference this fall, Johnstone

joined a panel that reflected on change

over the past 25 years, particularly in on-

line learning. Below, CT asked Johnstone

to share some of her own perspectives.

CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY: What is dif-

ferent now from 25 years ago and

how is that driving change in higher

education?

JOHNSTONE: There’s a series of societal

issues now that are driving some real re-

thinking and changes within postsecond-

ary education. One is the terrific push by

our policy leaders for more credentialed

citizens, both to enable us to compete in-

ternationally and also for us to be able to

have a fully employed adult citizenry.

Another big push that we’re seeing at

both state and federal levels is for more ac-

countability within higher education. With

the reality that we now have the capacity

for better analytics — because of all the

technologies that are in place to collect very

good data — the question becomes: Why

aren’t we all using the very best practices

that we know will ensure or at least in-

crease the chances of student success?

And today, this discussion is very public.

The examination of student success and

accountability is no longer taking place be-

hind closed doors; rather this is a very open

experience for everyone.

Add to all this a whole new set of stu-

dents. On the one hand, we see the in-

clusion of more working adults within our

student framework, and postsecondary

institutions and organizations still must

change in order to meet those students

on their own terms — working adult

students are not going to come to cam-

pus and sit in classrooms all day. This

demands technological flexibility. We’re

learning more and more about what

works well and what doesn’t — and what

kinds of pedagogical practices we need

to include in the support for working adult

students (or post-tradition students).

Finally, when we look at students who

are coming into the postsecondary sys-

tem straight out of secondary school, we

see generally younger folks who are typi-

cally engaged with all kinds of technolo-

gies and are used to personalizing every-

thing around them: what they choose to

look at, who they choose to communicate

with, how they set up their communica-

tion patterns…. They are always going to

go for whatever technology works best,

and they have high expectations for the

quality of what they are using. These are

people entering our postsecondary sys-

tem, bringing these high expectations.

Frequently there is a big clash between

their expectations and the capacity that

we have on what we think of as our more

traditional campuses. The bottom line is:

Technology: Change Is How You Use ItIn the face of changing technologies and student needs, institutions must reevaluate the nature of learning in higher education. By Mary Grush

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There is a terrific demand for very differ-

ent ways of doing things and for very dif-

ferent ways of using technologies.

CT: How has the use of technology in

higher ed changed over the past 25

years, and what are some changes we

still need to make?

JOHNSTONE: When we look backwards,

about 25 years, we see that we were using

certain kinds of technologies that enabled

us to reach students who were not coming

to a campus. Most of those technologies

were video or audio based, but our use of

them basically meant that we were export-

ing the classroom. We had satellite and

cable television, and the like. These enabled

the faculty member to reach beyond what

he or she did in the face-to-face setting and

export that, usually to certain, fixed sites. It

reached places where students may have

gathered for access.

As we move forward in time and the

Internet is ubiquitous, we have incred-

ible storage capacity, amazing transmis-

sion speeds and multiple different kinds

of receiving devices. So now we have a

great framework to reach out everywhere.

Unfortunately, we are still somewhat stuck

in that old model of mostly exporting the

classroom.

CT: But isn’t that changing?

JOHNSTONE: Yes. It’s difficult, though,

because people think in terms of faculty

“controlling” the curriculum. And I would

agree that faculty should always control

the curriculum within their programs.

But: Curriculum today may no longer

be so focused on what goes on inside a

classroom. When we move into another

way of thinking about how we can help

make students successful, and how we

can change our thinking around postsec-

ondary education, and begin thinking in

terms of competency-based education,

we really shift the conversation dramati-

cally. Then, the pedagogy does not have

to be “exporting the classroom.” Instead,

we can talk with faculty about curricu-

lum being their definition of what it is that

students need to learn and how you are

going to know whether they have actually

learned it.

CT: Does that shift mean placing more

focus on assessment and less on

classroom delivery?

JOHNSTONE: Assessment will mean dif-

ferent things for different fields. In many

ways, it may mean different things for dif-

ferent institutions, allowing institutions to

maintain their own unique identities. But

strong assessments make learning ex-

plicit. So when you begin having that kind

of conversation with faculty, the notion of

how the learning takes place becomes

much less important than the ability to

demonstrate the skills and knowledge

that are expected: the learning outcomes.

CT: If demonstrating outcomes is

more important than the specific de-

livery of education, does that open up

the use of various learning resources?

JOHNSTONE: The growth of open edu-

cation resources and the variety of high-

quality learning resources available to stu-

dents today plays right into that. Resources

like Khan Academy, along with materials

available from publishers that are truly per-

sonalized learning activities, can be incor-

porated. There are incredible materials that

are just emerging and being used, that are

terrifically interactive and help students be

actively engaged in learning.

CT: Then how would you summarize

the change you are looking for now?

JOHNSTONE: We can change the na-

ture of learning within the structure of

postsecondary education, letting faculty

be in charge of the curriculum — but re-

defining the idea of curriculum to include

what it is students need to know and how

we are going to measure that. We can

offer students a much wider variety of

learning resources. This all takes us back

to our efforts to better serve the needs of

working adult students while meeting the

expectations of our technologically con-

nected students for a more personalized

experience.

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Campus Technology (ISSN 1553-7544) is published monthly by 1105 Media, Inc., 9201 Oakdale Avenue, Ste. 101, Chatsworth, CA 91311. Complimentary subscriptions are sent to qualifying subscribers. Subscription inquiries, print back issue requests, and address changes: Mail to: Campus Technology, P.O. Box 2166, Skokie, IL 60076-7866; e-mail CAMmag@ 1105service.com or call 866-293-3194 for US & Canada, 847-763-9560 for International; fax 847-763-9564. As a subscriber of an 1105 Media, Inc. Education Group publication, you’ll periodically receive information about related products and services. To view our privacy policy for more information, visit: 1105media.com/privacy.html© Copyright 2014 by 1105 Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Electronic sharing of individual pages or single issues of an edition by subscribers is permitted on a limited basis. Institutions that wish provide institution-wide access to academic users for research purposes only must e-mail rkelly@ 1105media.com. For all other uses, submit your request at 1105reprints.com.The information in this magazine has not undergone any formal testing by 1105 Media, Inc., and is distributed without any warranty expressed or implied. Implementation or use of any information contained herein is the reader's sole responsibil-ity. While the information has been reviewed for accuracy, there is no guarantee that the same or similar results may be achieved in all environments. Technical inaccuracies may result from printing errors and/or new developments in the industry.

vol. 27 no. 5campustechnology.com

EXECUTIVE EDITOR Rhea KellyEDITOR Mary GrushSENIOR CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Linda Briggs, Dian Schaffhauser, Matt VillanoCONTRIBUTORS Toni Fuhrman, David Raths, John K. Waters CREATIVE DIRECTOR Jeff LangkauGRAPHIC DESIGNER Erin HorlacherDIRECTOR, PRINT AND ONLINE PRODUCTION David SeymourPRODUCTION COORDINATOR Anna Lyn Bayaua

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, ONLINE David NagelONLINE/CUSTOM CONTENT EDITOR Kanoe NamahoeMULTIMEDIA/ONLINE EDITOR Joshua Bolkan

PRESIDENT James CauseyCHIEF CONTENT OFFICER Anne ArmstrongCHIEF REVENUE OFFICER Wendy LaDukeCHIEF MARKETING OFFICER Carmel McDonagh

PRESIDENT & CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Neal VitaleSENIOR VICE PRESIDENT & CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER Richard VitaleEXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT Michael J. Valenti

VICE PRESIDENT, FINANCE & ADMINISTRATION Christopher M. Coates VICE PRESIDENT, INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT Erik A. LindgrenVICE PRESIDENT, EVENT OPERATIONS David F. Myers

CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD Jeffrey S. Klein

COLLEGE/UNIVERSITY INDEX

Arizona State University .........................8, 22Athabasca University (Canada) .....2, 20-21Austin Peay State University (TN) ............ 30Brown University (RI) .................................. 28Capella University (MN) ................................2City College of New York, The .................. 33City University of New York John Jay Col-lege of Criminal Justice ........................32-33Dartmouth College (NH) .......................... 3, 8Davenport University (MI) ....................24-26Dominican University (IL) ..............................2Georgia Tech ......................................... 22, 24Harvard University (MA) ............................. 22Indiana University ......................................... 20Kansas State University ...................... 19, 23LaGuardia Community College (NY) ....... 33Lehman College (NY) ................................. 33Lone Star College System (TX) ...................2Lynn University (FL) ....................................3-4MIT ...................................................... 4, 22, 24Montclair State University (NJ) ....................2New School, The (NY) ................................ 20Northern Illinois University ......................... 30NYU Stern School of Business ...................2Ohio State University .................................. 30Penn State .................................................... 30Pitzer College (CA) ..................................... 20Portland State University (OR) ....................5Purdue University (IN).............................8, 23Queensborough Community College (NY) .33Queens College (NY) ................................. 33Radford University (VA) .............................. 30Rochester Institute of Technology (NY) ...... 6San Jose State University (CA) ......... 11, 22South Orange County Community College District (CA) .................................................. 29Stanford University (CA) ......................22-23State University of New York ........................2St. Luke’s College (IA) ................................ 24

Texas Tech ..................................................... 30University of California, Irvine .......................5University of California, San Diego .............3University of Georgia .....................................2University of Hawaii System ................28-31University of Nevada, Las Vegas .............. 30University of North Florida ......................... 24University of Notre Dame ..............................4University of Oregon ................................... 30University of Southern California ........15-17University of Tennessee at Chattanooga ...2University of Texas at Austin ...................... 20University of Texas at San Antonio ..............4University of Washington ................3, 28-31Western Governors University (online) ... 35Wittenberg University (OH) ..........................6

COMPANY INDEX

Adobe ...............................................................8Amazon ......................................................9, 30Apollo Education Group................................9AT&T ............................................................... 22Barco ................................................................6Blackboard ...................................... 14-15, 32Bloomfire .................................................24-26Califone ............................................................6CampusSafe ....................................................6CDWG ..............................................................5Comcast ........................................................ 24Courseload ......................................................4Coursera .......................................... 19, 21-23CourseSmart ................................................ 10Data Warehousing Institute, The .................5Dejero ...............................................................4Desire2Learn .................................. 14, 30-32Extreme Networks ..........................................6Facebook ................................................ 14, 30FrontRow ..........................................................6FutureLearn ................................................... 21Gartner..............................................................2Glip ....................................................................6

Google .....................................8-9, 19-20, 25Instructure .................................................3, 32Knewton ............................................................9LinkedIn ......................................................... 21Microsoft ....................................................... 24NovoEd ....................................................22-23Pearson .............................................................8Rackspace Hosting ........................................4rSmart ...............................................................3Sage Road Solutions .....................................8Sonic Foundry .................................................3TeamDynamix ...................................................5Twitter............................................................. 30Udacity .................................. 2, 18-19, 21-23Via Response ..........................................32-34WebEx ............................................................ 16YouTube ...........................................12, 24, 29

ADVERTISER INDEX

Barco ............................................................. 9barco.com/corporateavCampus Technology Innovators ...13, 33campustechnology.com/innovatorsCampus Technology Subscription ......16campustechnology.com/subscriptionCanon ..........................................................11usa.canon.comCanon ..........................................................29missingkids.comFischer International ................................ 5fischerinternational.com/eduLive! 360 DEV Las Vegas 2014 ...........25live360events.com/lasvegasSony ............................................................... 4sony.com/ptzSony .............................................................19sony.com/laserSony ......................................................20, 21sony.com/eduprojectors

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