"Tuning the blend" is a phrase that educators hear a lot these days. It refers to finding the correct balance of online activities and face-to-face instruction in hybrid--or blended--courses. Finding a mix that meets the needs of both faculty and students requires experimentation, experience, and constant tweaking. And, as with coffee, the same…

Successful web portals help users stay informed, in touch, and up to speed. They are also a telling window into the efficiency of one's institution. To develop a cutting-edge portal takes planning, communication, and research. In this article, the author presents and discusses 10 keys to portal success: (1) make critical info visible; (2) make the…

Blended learning has become a meme. While mixing online instruction with face-to-face time is not exactly new, momentum for hybrid learning has been building ever since a Department of Education meta-study in 2010 quietly announced that traditional education simply does not stack up. In that study, online education was determined to be more…

Air-traffic controller might be a relaxing second career for anyone who's coordinated IT operations at a large research university. Just ask administrators at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. As at most big universities, IT operations on the academic side are decentralized on a major scale. When a faculty member in one of Michigan's 19…

Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill plans to launch an online-only MBA program this July. The school has forged a unique partnership with 2tor, a for-profit company led by John Katzman, the same person who founded "The Princeton Review." Katzman has become an educational reformer of sorts.…

The Forest Hills Local Schools board in Ohio had always been supportive of a 1-to-1 program, but it simply did not have the resources to buy every student a computer. The district had some laptops available, but only enough for about one out of every five students. So, when a teacher wanted to integrate technology into a lesson, the machines had…

Institutions already cater to the technology needs of students. According to the 2008 Campus Computing survey, 60 percent of colleges and universities offer pervasive or near-pervasive wireless; computers are as ubiquitous as water bottles; course management systems have become one-stop shops for class content; few classrooms lack projectors; and…

In this article, the author talks about telepresence, a combination of real-time video, audio, and interactive technologies that gives people in distributed locations a collaborative experience that's as close to being in the same room as current technology allows. In a culture that's still adjusting to iPhone-size screen displays and choppy cell…

According to a 2000 community college study by Miami Dade College (FL) President Emeritus Robert McCabe, 41 percent of students entering community colleges are underprepared in at least one basic skill area. A three-year study of community college students, published in 2009 by the National Center for Education Statistics, reported that 41 percent…

As influenza activity throughout the United States continues its gradual rise, H1N1 in particular has been the risk-management topic of the season for most colleges and universities. Among the questions being asked: Can one continue operations in the event of a campus closure? What if a faculty member is too sick to teach? What if students refuse…

The easy availability of both web-based communication tools and classroom internet access presents teachers with myriad ways to engage their students in projects with kids all over the globe. Two teachers--English teacher Hagit Goldstein in Israel and Spanish teacher Allison Baugher in the US--were connecting students through an online classroom…

Technological innovation is driving fundamental changes in all aspects of our lives. This is especially true of digital content, as our use of e-books, downloadable music, streaming television and movies, and online social networks has exploded. However, the explosive growth in our use of digital content seems so far to have eluded many of the 50…

Given a blank slate, what should the 21st century college classroom look like, and how should it be operated? Answering those questions is the idea behind setting up "incubator classrooms," spaces dedicated to trying out new technologies and new ways of teaching and learning. By incubating new ideas, faculty members and IT staff discover which…

Using data to track and manage student enrollment is steadily becoming a standard practice on both two-year and four-year campuses. Data mining enables colleges to create predictive models for identifying behaviors that put students at risk for dropping out, flag students who engage in these behaviors, and help identify practices that work in…