Enjoy this succinct, two-page summary of a concurrent session from SCUP's 2010 annual conference. You'll be reading a 50-page set of such summaries that until very recently were only available to SCUP members and others who attended SCUP-45 in 2010. We've left the page open for you to "How Do Smart Meters Make a University More Intelligent?" Just click on the image below.

With the help of SmartSynch, the University of Mississippi (UM, or Ole Miss) has embarked on an ambitious energy-management pilot. SmartMeters transmit data on individual buildings’ real-time energy consumption, providing analysis capability that is yielding granular understanding of buildings’ efficiency levels and occupants’ utilization habits. Social media is being used to disseminate the data transparently, engaging the campus community. Financial reward programs will drive deeper engagement and more behavior change. Dashboards will facilitate comparisons and analysis, with the insights leveraged to inform policy decisions and intelligent building design. The program’s educational and societal value will be compounded when graduates spread its philosophy and practices far and wide.

What are the implications of student response system availability on the design of learning spaces? This resource helps to answer that question.

An open-ended student response system is an electronic service or application that lets students enter text responses during a lecture or class discussion. Open-ended systems give faculty the option of collecting such free-form contributions from students, in addition to asking the true/false or multiple-choice questions that conventional clicker systems allow. Such tools open a channel for the kind of individual, creative student responses that can alter the character of learning. The great strength of open-ended student response systems may be that they create another avenue for discussion, allowing students to join a virtual conversation at those times when speaking out in live discourse might seem inappropriate, intimidating, or difficult.

The "7 Things You Should Know About..." series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

We agree. This particular series is great, including such core resources as:

Freeman A. Hrabowski is president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and one of the more renowned college or university presidents in the US. He's no stranger to SCUP, having been a panelist in SCUP's first virtual event, SCUP's 1999 satellite telecast: "Creating Tomorrow's Learner-Centered Environments: Today." That webcast, BTW, is available for viewing on SCUP's YouTube channel: www.youtube.Plan4HigherEd.

Hrabowski will kick off SCUP–46 with the Sunday evening opening plenary address on July 24, near Washington, DC. We have a couple of updates on his recent activities, below:

• TIAA-CREF has announced that Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, President of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has been awarded the 2011 TIAA-CREF Theodore M. Hesburgh Award for Leadership Excellence. Dr. Hrabowski was selected by an independent panel of judges based largely on his work to increase the representation of minority students in science and engineering and create an institutional model of inclusive excellence.

• Hraboski was recently interviewed for The Washington Post:  

Problem: College students of all backgrounds struggle in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses at a time when the U.S. needs to increase dramatically the number of graduates in these fields.

Solution: Group learning in introductory courses supports student success and increases interest in pursuing STEM majors, with the long-term goal of increasing the numbers of students who graduate in STEM majors and pursue graduate studies and careers in these fields.

Strategy: Ten years ago, we examined how we were teaching our introductory science classes, with the goal of improving the academic performance of students. A 200-plus lecture hall does not work for everyone, and does not necessarily encourage student engagement with the work and each other.

Current Cites, is one of the most consistently high-quality email newsletters SCUP scans for you. First published in 1990, it is nearly as old as SCUP Email News. 

A team of librarians scans the literature for information technology resources and studies that inform academic library leaders. They select and annotate the best 8-12 each month, and send those annotations as an email newsletter. The same content is available on the Current Cites website and as an RSS feed.

The January 2011 issue covers topics that include: 

• How a library system changes its networking and reduced networking costs (but probably increased management costs);
• A study on how library patrons search for articles which has implications for how many article databases libraries need to subscribe to;
• The creation of regional repositories of legacy print collections;
• How students and scholars from different disciplines use digitized and virtual materials differently in their work; 
• A Cornell University internal study about how its print collections are utilized or circulated (or not);
• And more.

Yes, more than half of us (personal prediction) will be using tablet computers in two years. The best known tablet computer is the iPad. University Business magazine's Tim Goral reviews tablets: What they are, where they are, and so forth, in an article that you should read if you want to be sure that you fully understand the phenomenon:

What makes it different? First, it isn’t a computer in the traditional sense. That is, it’s not like a laptop with command-line capabilities that can be tweaked and modified to your liking. The iPad’s closed environment device doesn’t invite tinkering. It uses a flash drive, rather than a conventional hard drive; combined with new, lighter battery technology, that brings the weight down to about 1.5 pounds. A touch-screen interface eliminates the need for a stylus, and if you need a keyboard, a near full-sized virtual keyboard appears at the touch of an icon. And at just a half-inch thick, it is easy to carry anywhere.

“Our office of information technology surveys students regularly and has found that while 90 percent of students own laptops, they don’t often bring them to class,” says Ernst. “They generally don’t want to lug them around. The iPads seem to fit a whole different niche. There are huge advantages in weight, ease of use, and instant access. Just push the home button and it’s instantly on.”

How can a degree program, general education program, or other course of study make substantial, widely appreciated improvements in who learns, what they learn, and how well they learn it? Under the right circumstances, such improvements are possible. What follows are suggestions, some counter-intuitive, that increase the chances of their being successful and sustained.

• Don't implement a change strategy by delegating each part of it to a different stakeholder—this recommendation for faculty, that one for the information technology unit, a third for administrators, a fourth for the assessment staff. Instead, work with a team composed of people from all those groups and more.
• Simultaneously upgrade content, deepen learning, and improve the program's ability to attract and retain a variety of students.
• But in doing so, take your time.
• Use technology as a lever for change, but slow down. Don't leap from one hot technology to the next.
• Find ways for faculty and students to save time.

Before elaborating on these suggestions, I'll explain why they allude to time so frequently.

We've seen a lot of reporting coming out of this year's EDUCAUSE conference. In this report, Joshua Kim says that this year's conference felt different than previous events - and that the Gates Foundation is the reason. Below, some language from this brief report. Here's a link to the Next Generation Learning Challenge website. Planners need to pay attention - this could be a major turning point in, for example, online learning.

This EDUCAUSE Conference has felt different from all the rest, and the reason I think is Gates Foundation Next Generation Learning Challenges. This is the first EDUCAUSE Conference that I've attended where there is a real feeling of confidence that information technology can be the lever for structural change in our higher ed system.

The real power of the Gates Next Generation Learning Challenge is not the money, although that helps, but the ability to focus the problems in higher education around a defined set of issues. Gates has us all speaking the same language. In talking with Cameron Evans (Microsoft), Ray Henderson (Blackboard), and Don Kilburn (Pearson), the conversation kept coming back to the role that their companies can play in addressing the issues that have been identified by Gates.

Leadership from technology, LMS, and publishing companies are now all focused on utilizing the power of their companies to work on the specific issues that the Next Generation Learning Challenges are designed to address.

We all know by now that with the higher ed realm leadership of Mark Milliron, the Gates Foundation is investing big in our future. Here's an interview with the person who is directing the educational technology push to be announced yet this fall, in partnership with EDUCAUSE and others:

Q: You’ve teamed with Educause, the college IT group, to start a program called Next Gen Learning Challenges. Describe the project.

A: What we envision is a multiyear, multiwave program, where every six to 12 months we issue a new set of challenges. And we’ll issue a set of challenges this fall around shared open-core courseware, around learning analytics, around blended learning, and around new, deeper forms of learning and engagement using interactive technologies. There’s a big gap between R&D and high-impact solutions at scale. We’re trying to participate in some of the effort to help those most promising solutions get across that chasm.

 

Q: What are the big challenges you see in online education?

A: Breaking down this division between online education and education. Increasingly, we’re bringing digital assets and digital experiences into the traditional classroom or at home. One of the big challenges is the reunification, if you will, of online learning with offline learning. And creating these blended contexts, which, based on the U.S. Department of Education meta-study and other work, seem to be the place where it’s not an either or, it’s trying to figure out how to do the best of both.

Secondly, given some of he conversations in Washington and other places around for-profit education, there’s a real danger that we overlap the actions of the bad actors in the for-profit sector with all of the for-profit sector, and overlap all the for-profit sector with all of online learning in general and all strategies that might be different and innovative. There’s a real risk that in looking at some bad actions within the for-profit sector, that we take a step backwards from some of the innovative strategies that institutions are using.

The lecture capture market is estimated at $50M/year in higher education and is likely to triple over the next 6 years. That's a lot of money to be spent, and a lot of lectures captured. Now, as it so often does, the higher education IT community has created an open-source alternative. But can universities save money with it?

“If you look at research on the total cost of ownership for servers running applications, about 80 percent of total cost of ownership is from ongoing management and maintenance,” says Michael Berger, director of marketing at Tegrity, which offers a hosted lecture capture service that starts at $10,000 for 250 hours. “You can make it do just about anything you want,” says Burns, of Panopto. “But you have to put a lot of quarters in the slot.” This is especially true, the providers say, if you want to deploy it in a lot of classrooms.

Such is the refrain of the commercial establishment. But Hochman, the Matterhorn project manager, says that while it does cost money to build and maintain the open-source system, the price is not unmanageable, even at scale. He also says that although the commercial companies do add a lot of value by being able to troubleshoot errors quickly, the members of the OpenCast community are hardly slouches, and can advise on a problem in a pinch. And it is only a matter of time, he says, before some entrepreneurs make a business out of providing stable support to Matterhorn users, like Moodlerooms has for Moodle users.

John Bielec is vice president for Information Resources and Technology and CIO at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He reviews what he sees as continuing or accelerating trends, from "the move from assets to access," through "more choice" and "ubiquitous personal mobility, to the "EDU App," and, finally, to intense product competition. 

The biggest disruptive technological force over the past decade has been the move from “assets to access.” One no longer needs to own assets—data centers, servers, storage, or applications—to take advantage of high-tech services. Access to the internet is all that is required, with resources and applications a “click” away. Institutions, corporations, and even governments are busy following the lead of the consumer accessing new applications and moving as quickly as possible to the “cloud.” Interestingly, many university departments across the world have not yet adopted these “new realities” and still struggle in today’s resource-constrained environment, delivering e-mail, web-based services, and other homegrown applications as they have done since the late ’80s.

 Pay close attention to the "EDU App" thing. If you do not use "Apps," you probably cannot understand how their use is quickly changing the substrate of the learning world. You may read this: "This year will see a new launch of smart phone apps. With more and more institutions reacting quickly to heightened student expectations, the result will be a veritable smorgasbord of app choices where students will load up what they need and reject the rest" and really not know why it is important. But it is!