With the exception of a plague of locusts, it seems as if the past five years have thrown every imaginable challenge at IT--from the incredible shrinking budget to BYOD and now the MOOC monster. For those of a superstitious bent, these were probably just appetizers to the crises that will inevitably accompany a year featuring the number 13 (cue…

More than ever, faculty and students are working jointly on documents sharing screens in class, swapping course materials and taking their collective pulse through polls. Nevertheless, many faculty members complain that technical support for group projects is lagging on campus, leaving them searching for solutions elsewhere. While some faculty…

This is the first article in a six-part series on the elements of a collaborative classroom: furniture, social media, video/web conferencing tools, collaborative software, interactive devices, and mobile devices. With most universities facing tight budgets, convincing administrators to invest in expensive new classrooms is a challenge. Many higher…

With their budgets under increasing pressure, many campus IT directors are considering open source projects for the first time. On the face of it, the savings can be significant. Commercial emergency-planning software can cost upward of six figures, for example, whereas the open source Kuali Ready might run as little as $15,000 per year when…

For many IT shops, the cloud offers an opportunity not only to improve operations but also to align themselves more closely with their schools' strategic goals. The cloud is not a plug-and-play proposition, however--it is a complex, evolving landscape that demands one's full attention. Security, privacy, contracts, and contingency planning are all…

With the widespread digitization of art, photography, and music, plus the introduction of streaming video, many colleges and universities are realizing that they must develop or purchase systems to preserve their school's digitized objects; that they must create searchable databases so that researchers can find and share copies of digital files;…