The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA) convened the Examining Software Providers' Compliance With the NASFAA Code of Conduct Working Group in September 2019 to research and analyze the role that student financial aid management software plays in institutions' ability to provide accurate and clear aid offers. The…

In the article the avatar-based learning and teaching (A-BL&T) as a concept of control and managing knowledge in modern socio-economic conditions is proposed to use for assessment a university's economic efficiency. It is shown that all elements, methods and techniques (tools) do not operate in isolation, but rather are interrelated,…

The purpose of the report is to inform Australian campus leaders and decision-makers about important developments in technologies supporting teaching, learning, and creative inquiry in tertiary education across the continent. It was produced to explore important developments in technology and forecast their potential impact expressly in an…

Where does privacy belong in the college/university ecosystem, and what should its relationship be with security and compliance? Are the three areas best kept separate and distinct? Should there be some overlap? Or would a single office, officer, and/or reporting line enable a big picture of the whole? This article examines several of the campus…

Data-driven decision making, popularized in the 1980s and 1990s, is evolving into a vastly more sophisticated concept known as big data that relies on software approaches generally referred to as analytics. Big data and analytics for instructional applications are in their infancy and will take a few years to mature, although their presence is…

Voice over IP (VoIP) has been infiltrating campus networks, but more like stray weeds in an unattended garden than like a well-planned crop. Trouble is, in most instances, moving directly from a PBX or Centrex service to VoIP represents a shift too costly and dramatic for many academic institutions to undertake. Instead, schools have been…

Like anything else, there are good fundraising campaign Web sites and bad fundraising campaign Web sites. The author took a closer look at fundraising campaign sites to see if her intuitive judgments about these could be translated into a logical, research-supported set of best practices. She set up a study that gauged the ease of use and…

The authors describe the University of Central Florida's top-down/bottom-up action analytics approach to using data to inform decision-making at the University of Central Florida. The top-down approach utilizes information about programs, modalities, and college implementation of Web initiatives. The bottom-up approach continuously monitors…

Cloud computing is the latest paradigm shift for the delivery of IT services. Where previous paradigms (centralized, decentralized, distributed) were based on fairly straightforward approaches to technology and its management, cloud computing is radical in comparison. The literature on cloud computing, however, suffers from many divergent…

When the author was brought on as CIO of Westmont College in October 2008, the president, Board of Trustees, and campus environment made it clear that technology needed a major overhaul to meet the college's growing requirements. Also, these changes needed to happen without significantly increasing the IT budget or staff. Marketing Charts…

High-profile criminal acts continue to plague United States (US) college campuses despite recent efforts to implement more aggressive risk mitigation practices, such as criminal background checks. Despite these efforts, incidents such as the most recent shootings at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University continue to demonstrate that,…

The University of Washington (UW) adopted a dual-provider cloud-computing strategy, focusing initially on software as a service. The original project--to replace an obsolete alumni e-mail system--resulted in a cloud solution that soon grew to encompass the entire campus community. The policies and contract terms UW developed, focusing on…

Good enrollment managers know that keeping current enrollment must be Job Number One and that maintaining enrollment must be the concern of all campus constituencies. However, a large number of students are "lost" during registration due to closed classes. Lost enrollments are a largely invisible phenomenon that represents frantic and…

Merrill proposes First Principles of Instruction, including a problem- or task-centered strategy for designing instruction. However, when the tasks or problems are ill-defined or complex, task-centered instruction can be difficult to design. We describe an online task-centered training at a land-grant university designed to train employees to use…

Have you updated your Web site today? Is it possible that answering "yes" to this simple question is the key to the success of your marketing and recruiting efforts? In the current recruitment arena, the ability to update and maintain this one high-value asset (your Web site) might be the key to the potency of your institutional…