Coastal Pacific Doctor Associates (CPDA) is a multi-physician medical practice located along the west coast. CPDA decided to replace their inadequate and outdated medical office system during a time of tremendous restructuring in the medical software industry. In their impatience, CPDA chose an electronic medical record (EMR) and practice…

Why would schools consider partnering with a vendor to operate a pilot? Why not just wait until the final product is released? For starters, pilots provide schools with a golden opportunity to get an early look at the software, take it for a test flight, and ask for changes tailored to their operating environment and business needs. In some cases,…

Colleges and universities are swimming in an ever-widening sea of data. Human beings and machines together generate about 2.5 "quintillion" (10[superscript 18]) bytes every day, according to IBM's latest estimate. The sources of all that data are dizzyingly diverse: e-mail, blogs, click streams, security cameras, weather sensors, social networks,…

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…

As professional, academic and accrediting bodies have periodically reviewed the need for and content of foundational college curricula in information management, a broad-based consensus has emerged as to what is to be covered in the standard management information systems (MIS) course. Within U.S. business schools today, there is little debate…

With technology changing every second of every day, it is no surprise a learning management system (LMS) quickly can become outdated. But it is no easy task to re-engineer a current LMS or find exactly the right new one to purchase. In this article, three 2010 Top Young Trainers share their experiences with implementing or re-engineering an…

Faced with rising demand for information about early childhood programs, states need to find tools and strategies to monitor the progress of and to identify high-quality early childhood programs. In response, REL Mid-Atlantic convened a regional workgroup for state personnel who work with the systems containing early childhood data. The workgroup…

Clemson University implemented Condor architecture on the Blackboard learning management system (LMS) application servers in order to gain higher throughput when processing Blackboard course archives. Condor has typically been used for high-throughput research computing, not applied to non-research problems involving long processing times. This…

Planning is necessary in selecting the appropriate digital asset management system for your institution. Key issues one should consider in planning: the objects to be stored, where they come from, and how they will be accessed; the end users; and the needed staffing levels for system maintenance. During the development of the system requirements,…

Institutions of higher education are embracing the role of the Internet as a medium to promote on-demand communication between faculty and students. As such, online course management systems have become an efficient and effective means of facilitating learning outside the classroom. To ensure that a course management system meets the needs and…

At the University of Florida, in Spring 2003, more than 32,000 individuals enrolled in courses using the centrally-supported Course Management System (CMS). Because less than 1 full time equivalent (FTE) was allocated to support the CMS, this created problems for both users and support providers. In the face of rapid growth, support resources for…

Using the experience of the University of Illinois at Springfield's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the as a foundation for discussion, this paper addresses the provision of student support services to distant students within the context of development and expansion. Specific issues for consideration include: integrating student support…

Many researchers and practitioners contend that all institutions respond to changing market need and can create competitive advantage through innovation and creativity. Each year, institutions expend significant resources developing new products and processes and yet research shows that more than half these initiatives fail. Successful…