Retention is one of those numbers higher education leaders tend to review to determine how effectively the faculty reaches the students. Historically black colleges and universities were created because students found it difficult both to get into “neutral” colleges and graduate from them. That latter part sounds like they were created in part to solve…
A statement by a faculty member to the effect of, “There isn’t anything our IT people can do to resolve this problem. The web application is overloaded,” puts the people running the application on the defensive. The problem turned out to be resolved with changes to the local browser environment (remove all the installs of…
Summize provides a great way to troll for what people are saying. Beyond just searching for a term, it provides RSS feeds for terms. I follow several, such Blackboard and WebCT. The WebCT one netted me the following tweet: annoyed with how clunky webct can be at times – it had to have been designed…
Mashable has an interesting article about why Twitter persists despite frequent performance issues: “Less is more. Simplicity is power.” By providing little more than an API, upon which numerous others have built tools, it doesn’t so directly compete with other services. I wonder if perhaps this is the right approach for a learning system? One…
Image via Wikipedia Apparently the official launch of Firefox 3 is tomorrow. So we get to look forward to 4+ months of students and faculty members asking why Blackboard Vista doesn’t recognize Fx 3 as supported. Every week’s call with Blackboard will have the conversation: Us: Is it supported yet? Bb: Not yet. We are…
Edupunk is “Do It Yourself” in education or instruction technology. Free or at least cheap tools suitable for classroom use are so ubiquitous, the faculty have plenty of alternatives to the monolithic “enterprise” LMS. If edupunk was a boat, then what would it be? A bamboo raft? This is not something new. My mom conned…
Be more secure! Upgrade today. Want better functionality? Upgrade today. Save a developer! Upgrade today. The save a developer thing is the impetus for this post. The upgrade today mantra annoys me. Software rarely spends enough time in alpha and beta cycles to to identify all the issues. People have been so burned by using…
The modest proposal of having students help teachers learn to dance makes an interesting point. Suggesting the learners do not want to learn is an easy way to avoid the real problem. I hear from higher education faculty, students are unmotivated and fail to see the importance of learning. I hear from academic technical support…