Technology has to be invented or adopted :: J. Diamond

ELI has released a new white paper, Learning Analytics: A Report on the ELI Focus Session, by Malcolm Brown, director, and Veronica Diaz, associate director, ELI.

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Announcing the release of Game Changers: Education and Information Technologies, edited by EDUCAUSE President and CEO Diana Oblinger.

The chapters and case studies in this new book were contributed by college and university presidents, provosts, and faculty as well as other stakeholders. The book highlights important higher education issues and explores ways to reach more learners, more effectively, and with greater impact.

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During this free hour-long session, “The Top-Ten Issues in Higher Education IT for 2012,” join EDUCAUSE Vice President Susan Grajek and four members of the research panel of IT leaders that selected the 2012 top-ten list for a lively discussion of the issues and the new process EDUCAUSE used to identify trends such as the consumerization of IT, analytics, and using IT to transform higher education.

Those unable to attend may wish to visit the archives after the event or browse related resources.

Interact on Twitter at #EDULive.

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Just four weeks ago the ELI 2012 Online Spring Focus Session on learning analytics finished. One of the presenters and participants, Christopher Brooks, BSc, MSc of ARIES Laboratory, University of Saskatchewan provided a detailed synthesis of the 2-day session.

The ELI 2012 Spring Focus session on learning analytics was an impressive two-day event with 15 speakers and more than 150 participants from around the globe coming together to share experiences on capturing, analyzing, and making sense of student behavior and evaluation data. Presentations were fast and furious, and the activity on the conference Twitter backchannel (#elifocus) provided evidence of the huge amount of energy being expended in higher ed on the topic of learning analytics.

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Making sure that all students, faculties, and staffs have access to web content is critical in education today. When those individuals have disabilities, access may well depend on what it is that you do as an individual, a supervisor, or as an administrator. "Making Web Accessibility Work for Your Institution Is Everyone's Business," May 31, 1:00-4:00 p.m. ET (UTC-4), will explore different levels of web accessibility practices necessary at an institution.

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For many decades, telephone users served by commercial providers—including campuses—have paid surcharges on their interstate and international long-distance calls. The revenue collected by this “tax,” which was authorized by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), goes into the Universal Service Fund (USF), which has subsidized rural telephone service and certain other equity-enhancing or socially beneficial services, recently including rural broadband Internet. The FCC appears poised to change how USF contributions are collected. A revised USF formula might be very bad, very good, or perhaps inconsequential for colleges and universities. Effective advocacy requires that we understand how different metrics might affect higher education.

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This free hour-long session, “Developing Social Media Guidance,” will describe the social media guidance development process at the University of Pennsylvania including strategies, pitfalls, and challenges in harnessing the power of social media in a way that honors privacy concerns and general sound practices.

Those unable to attend may wish to visit the archives after the event or browse related resources:

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The ELI Spring Focus Session on learning analytics just finished up last week. Simon Buckingham Shum the final presenter blogged about his session. Below is an excerpt with a link to the full blog and resources.

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Tablet devices and the publishing they enable are leading us to reconsider what constitutes a textbook, and they certainly change the landscape of what it has traditionally meant to write and publish one. A new breed of rich-media publishing tools offers an evolving set of opportunities both for the creation process and for the kinds of resources that can be produced. These resources could include 3D charts and tables, interactive maps, continual updates, and quizzes with instant feedback.

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EDUCAUSE manages the .edu domain name space to help maintain its integrity as the TLD for institutions of higher education.

The four .edu policy change proposals, which are now open for comment, are posed to:

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In just one week the ELI 2012 Online Spring Focus Session will begin. One of the presenters, Thomas B. Cavanagh, assistant vice president of distributed learning at the University of Central Florida will present on how analytics can go beyond course development to inform at the instutional level. Below is an excerpt from an upcoming article Mr. Cavanagh is finalizing for JALN, and it will be the focus of his session on Wednesday, April 11, followed by a brief Q&A.

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Program details are now available for the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) 2012 Online Spring Focus Session, "Learning Analytics," April11 and 12. Join us for this online event, where we will engage the teaching and learning community in exploring initial questions around learning analytics.

Highlights include:

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Stemming from a January convening of CIOs, other higher education thought leaders, and business process experts co-hosted by the Center for American Progress (CAP) and EDUCAUSE, the organizations have jointly released a white paper by Robert Sheets (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Stephen Crawford (George Washington University), and Louis Soares (CAP) highlighting the potential of technology to advance the evolution of higher education, "Rethinking Higher Education Business Models." A companion piece to the paper written by Greg Jackson, EDUCAUSE vice president for policy and analysis, entitled "IT-Based Transformation in Higher Education: Possibilities and Prospects," this brief explores the concept of "disruptive innovation" in relation to higher educatio

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This free hour-long session, “Accessibility and Usability: Working Together at MIT,” will explore the successful merging of the usability and accessibility teams in MIT’s Department of Information Services and Technology. Over two years, they have seen fewer projects slip through the cracks. The merge has provided a greater understanding of why the two practices belong together, how this can happen, and the importance of commitment from administrative leadership.

Those unable to attend may wish to visit the archives after the event or browse related resources:

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We've got a new learning opportunity this summer for campus IT staff who find themselves engaging policies that go beyond IT, and for their non-IT counterparts whose work depends on IT. For example: A campus development officer might imagine that fundraising pitches to alumni could be tailored much more effectively if they were based on detailed data from transcripts, but not know quite how to move forward when the Registrar's database managers prove reluctant, on privacy grounds, to feed transcript data into the alumni/development system. An IT security officer, recently promoted into a management position, might have trouble figuring out how to persuade the head of enrollment management that it's a bad idea to collect all students' tweets and publish them on the student-recruiting website.

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