The main goal of accessibility standards and guidelines is to design websites everyone can use. The "IT Accessibility Constituent Group" developed this set of draft guidelines to help EQ authors, reviewers, and staff and the larger EDUCAUSE community ensure that web content is accessible to all users, including those with disabilities. This…

Universities are increasingly looking into self-service systems with intelligent digital agents to supplement or replace labor-intensive services, such as academic counseling. The Open University of Hong Kong has developed an intelligent online system that instantly responds to enquiries about career development, learning modes, program/course…

Increasing instructor-student interactions and improving support personnel interventions with students positively affects their academic performance, retention, and graduation rates. This article discusses the Grade Performance Status (GPS) which is Northern Arizona University's new online, academic early alert tool for increasing instructor…

User-created virtual worlds, such as Second Life, are a hot topic in higher education. Thousands of educators are currently exploring and using Second Life, and hundreds of colleges and universities have purchased and developed their own private islands in Second Life, including the University of Kansas Medical Center (KUMC). Because it is so easy…

The convergence of web-enabled smartphones, the applications designed for smartphone interfaces, and cloud computing is rapidly changing how people interact with each other and with their environments. The commercial sector has taken the lead in creating mobile websites that leverage the capacities of smartphones, and the academic community has…

When Annie Stunden came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) in 1999 as CIO, she had a vision of providing all students, faculty, and staff their own Web sites where they could store and share documents and files, a place where they could easily and intuitively collaborate with each other. Before joining UW-Madison, Stunden had been…

The Fifth Annual Educause Current Issues Survey ranked "security and identity management" near the top of the list of critical IT challenges on campus today. Recognition of the crucial importance of securing networked resources led Internet2 to establish its Middleware Initiative (I2MI) in 1999. While Internet2 was founded to develop and deploy…

Today's incoming freshmen, born in 1988, have never known a time when the Internet and personal computers were not ubiquitous. They expect "what I want, when I need it, wherever I happen to be, on whatever workstation I have available." Many industries already meet this demand--entertainment (legal or pirated), cable TV, digital video recorders,…

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 1995, Gonzaga University embarked on a project to implement a university-wide information system. The search for an "out-of-the-box" solution began following an attempt to build an integrated data management system in-house. In 1994, Gonzaga decided to look at commercial solutions to its database management problems. With the blessing…

Universities increasingly employ information technology to distribute elements of their educational programs beyond campus borders and to find new uses for the intellectual capital they produce. Some faculty, with varying support and success, are moving course materials--and sometimes courses themselves--to the Internet to reach wider audiences.…

The commoditization of low-cost hardware has enabled even modest-sized laboratories and research projects to own their own "supercomputers." The authors argue that this local solution undermines rather than amplifies the research potential of scholars. CIOs, provosts, and research technologists should consider carefully an overall…

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…

Most large enterprises now have some type of portal to organize their internal information services. Few, however, have the long history of the SPIKE project at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. Originally developed during the 1994-1995 school year, SPIKE was an intranet information portal before the term "information…

Virtually every academic department in an institute of higher education requires Web presence as a critical component of its information technology strategy. The problem of how to leverage the World Wide Web and build effective and useful departmental Web sites seems to have long been solved. Yet browsing academic Web sites from around the world…