Today's higher education environment is marked by heightened accountability and decreased budgets. In such an environment, no higher education institution can afford to ignore alternative approaches that could result in more effective and less costly solutions. Open-source software (OSS) can serve as a viable alternative to traditional proprietary…

A 2006 ECAR study defined cyberinfrastructure as the coordinated aggregate of "hardware, software, communications, services, facilities, and personnel that enable researchers to conduct advanced computational, collaborative, and data-intensive research." While cyberinfrastructure was initially seen as support for scientific and…

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…

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…

When MIT first announced the OpenCourseWare (OCW) project in the spring of 2001, many people hoped similar projects would proliferate, allowing instructors in less-developed countries to access timely materials to support their teaching--materials that would otherwise never be available to them. This is happening, as part of a quickly spreading,…

With a new wave of campus IT solutions comes a familiar challenge: How does one encourage and help build distributed applications without being overrun by stovepipe solutions? Anticipating significant enrollment growth (5 percent per year) for the next several years, double-digit annual growth in funded research, and little chance that resources…

"What should I do?" Technology managers have asked this question many times, and most IT leaders have heard similar concerns voiced as technical staff begin thinking about their next career steps. Should they continue pursuing technical certifications or work on the next academic education level (usually a master's degree)? In this article, the…

Five years ago, North Shore Community College (NSCC) encountered rising enrollments in the face of lagging state funding. The addition of two new campuses stretched NSCC thin as it attempted to provide administrative and academic services across five (more recently consolidated to four) locations. Its students increasingly struggled to balance the…

In spring 2003, the Distance Education Network (DEN), Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC), had 860 students and more than 1,000 enrollments in 70 courses toward 10 different degrees. Typically, for assignments in engineering courses, professors require students to show how their answers are derived so that…

Many of the information security appliances, devices, and techniques currently in use are designed to keep unwanted users and Internet traffic away from important information assets by denying unauthorized access to servers, databases, networks, storage media, and other underlying technology resources. These approaches employ firewalls, intrusion…

For years computer viruses have threatened productive use of personal computers, challenging users and support providers to prevent and recover from viral attacks. Now another type of computing malady has begun to enter popular consciousness: spyware. Typically, analyses of spyware focus on technical issues or provide pointers to resources for…

Most professionals interested in the use of technology in education understand the importance of an e-learning course site, whether the course is taught totally online or in a hybrid environment where the instructor has some face-to-face contact with students. However, many instructors have not thoroughly considered the importance of posting…