Environmental Scan 2012

TECHNOLOGICAL TRENDS

• Six IT Trends to Watch in 2012. Experts discuss six trends to watch in IT for 2012, including alternative academic publishing, augmented reality/virtual world, higher education IT budgets, "gamification," social media, and plagiarism.
• Top 10 Ed Tech Predictions for 2011. Ten predictions from ZDNet and Dell's education technology leaders. Alternative sets of Ed Tech predictions have been produced by hackeducation.com and campustechnology.com.
• Top 5 Network Security Threats for 2011. The proliferation of embedded devices from gaming consoles to kiosks, the skyrocketing adoption of social media, and a slew of other evolving technologies are forcing higher education institutions to take a fresh look at safeguarding their networks.
• Seven Ways to Streamline Student Services. Here is how different colleges and universities have been moving services online, automating some, and providing more "self-service" options for students.
• Emerging Cyber Threats 2012. This report emphasizes that collaborative research, education, and awareness are required to battle advanced and large-scale botnet attacks, mobile application exploits, and manipulation of online information.
• Emerging Technology. Each year, the EDUCAUSE Horizon Report describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact on higher education and creative expression over the next one to five years. The areas of emerging technology cited are: E-books and mobile learning, slated for widespread adoption within one year; game-based learning and augmented reality within two to three years; and gesture-based computing and learning analytics within four to five years.
• Information Technology Services at the Community College. Even as budgets are trimmed, enrollment at community colleges is soaring. Community college CIOs share strategies for weathering the storm.
• A Community Cloud Strategy. The Virginia Community College System is saving $20 million in IT costs annually by adopting a community cloud approach.
• Next Generation Learning. This paper by the Bill& Melinda Gates Foundation is about the intelligent use of technology to develop innovative learning models and personalized educational pathways.
• Encouraging Effective Use of the LMS. The learning management systems the keystone of the technology-based learning strategy at any campus, whether that means blended learning, distance learning, or just more convenient classroom administration. Colleges nationwide are struggling with ways to increase faculty adoption rates and meaningful use of the LMS as an instructional tool.
• Piloting Mobile Learning. As more students bring smartphones to campus, institutions who are prepared to deliver instruction via mobile devices will have a competitive advantage. Here is practical advice on how academic leaders can pilot mobile learning effectively.
• 6 Top Smartphone Apps to Improve Teaching and Research. With these applications faculty can go mobile to plan lectures, keep up with scholarship, run classes, and share information with students.
• The Invisible Computer Lab. In the future, campus computer labs will be invisible. Colleges experimenting with "virtual computing labs" say the cloud-based hubs are cheaper, more flexible, and poised to take over.
• Social Recruiting. The University of Kentucky is ditching some of its traditional media and integrating social networking (use of tools like Facebook Places and online outlets like Pandora) and online advertising into its marketing mix to build awareness among prospective students.
• How Colleges Use, Misuse Social Media. This article interviews college students on how their institutions are engaging them effectively through social media channels. Among the takeaways: doing your research to know how your target audiences use different channels.
• Student Tweets Causing Controversy. As Twitter usage increases, universities are becoming increasingly vulnerable to publicity scandals caused by student tweets. Here are some examples of potentially embarrassing tweets by students and student-athletes and how universities have responded or taken preemptive action.
• Five Ways Higher Education is Leveraging Mobile Technology. Roughly 15 percent of colleges and universities have a mobile website, much less an application or set of apps targeted to their prospective, current, and/or alumni bodies. However, nearly all schools are now using social media for everything from brand awareness to event management. Texas Tech’s iPhone app provides the campus community information on courses, class times, bus routes, dining, contact information, etc. with one or two taps on the screen.
• Rethinking the Community College Classroom Experience. Southern California's Santa Monica College is engaging students in new ways with the help of a digital learning studio that includes multiple screens with advanced touch technology, special education software, a Smart Response system with 24 clickers, and eight iPads.
• Five Higher Education Technology Trends for 2012. The five technology trends that will play an important role in higher education in 2012 include E-Textbooks, Open Resources, The Online Classroom, Mobile Devices, and Campuses Move to the Cloud.
• Social Media: From Tactics to Strategy. The five articles in this new edition of Higher Ed Impact: Monthly Diagnostic offer key considerations and examples for leveraging social media to enhance efforts in student recruiting, teaching and learning, and fundraising.
• New E-Textbook and Education Offerings from Apple. Apple has announced several software tools for higher education. A free app called iBooks Author lets anyone create an interactive e-book for the iPad, iBooks 2 is a platform/app for viewing e-textbooks, and the updated iTunes U will allow teachers to create course curriculum on an iPad.
• 10 Tips for Controlling IT Costs. Here are 10 ideas for cutting costs, improving efficiency, and optimizing service delivery in the IT department.
• More High School Students Accessing Institutions' Websites from Mobile Devices. Among other findings and specific recommendations, a survey of 2,300 college-bound students found that 52 percent have viewed a school's website on a mobile device.
• 12 Tech Innovators Who Are Transforming Campuses. This collection of articles profiles 12 individuals who are trying new approaches to using digital tools for teaching and research in higher education.
• Rebuilding the Leraning Management System for the 21st Century. This article examines how some schools are working to improve upon the traditional LMS by moving toward a flexible framework of aggregated web 2.0 and cloud-based tools.
• Pros and Cons of Social Media in the Classroom. What is the role that social media should play in education? Advocates point out the benefits that social media provides for today's digital learners while critics call for regulation and for removing social media from classrooms. Finding a middle ground has become a challenge.
• Improving Wireless on Campus. This article examines the six biggest challenges to improving wireless service on campus and how three schools are forging solutions.
• Students Embrace Technology in the Classroom. The EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) has found that students believe that blended-learning environments support how they learn, want to access academic progress information and course material via their mobile devices, prefer technology training and skill development to new, more, or "better" technology, and use social networks for interacting with friends more than for academic communication.
• Optimizing the College Web Site. More prospective students and alumni are first viewing your institution's website from a mobile device or tablet. For example, market research firm IDC reported last year that by 2015 in the US, more people will access online content through mobile devices than through wired Internet connections. The University of California, San Diego, reports that nearly 20% of its web traffic is from a mobile device or tablet. Yet an informal May 2012 Academic Impressions survey of marketing professionals in higher education found that less than half have their website optimized or enabled for viewing on mobile devices. 
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• The Year Ahead in IT, 2013. Creative destruction reflects the incessant dynamic and mutation of our network-enabled era of global and virtualized capitalism. Many within the academy, from our “risk adverse” faculty to our “rating agency-fearing administration and boards of trustees,” fear that creative destruction destroys more than it creates. The 10 IT trends discussed here will also afford those universities and colleges committed to reinvigoration an opportunity to leverage technology to advance university mission and the pursuit and re-dedication to relevance in the year ahead and well beyond. They are the following:
       1. Open Learning Is Dead! Long Live Open Learning
       2. It Takes a Village to Flip a Classroom
       3. The Always-On University
       4. Learning Analytics Meet Learning Sciences
       5. Net+ and University Collaboration in a Cloud-Enabled Technology Era
       6. The End of ERP (as We Know It)
       7. Learning Spaces – The Final Frontier
       8. Extending the Boundaries of the University: Gig.U and US Ignite
       9. Open Data Models for Campus
       10. IT as a Service and the Future of IT on Campus.
• Expert Tips for Flipping the Classroom. In a flipped classroom, professors assign pre-class homework consisting of brief, recorded lectures and presentations, digital readings with collaborative annotation capabilities, and discussion board participation. This frees up classroom time to promote active learning through collaborative, project-based learning using simple display and sharing tools. The flipped classroom has become increasingly popular lately because there are so many new technologies that make out-of-classroom content creation a little bit easier. While technology facilitates flipped instruction, it takes both planning and experimentation to perfect the model. Three leaders in flipped classroom instruction share their best practices for creating a classroom experience that is intended to inspire lifelong learning. 
• Major Ed-Tech Trends for 2013. OnlineColleges recently posted this infographic detailing some edtech trends for 2013. Some of the major ideas they outline include: SMS marketing to students, social media, free online courses, and 3-D printing.