CampusCE Welcomes the University of Delaware OLLI

CampusCE welcomes the three campuses of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Delaware to its growing community of lifelong learning programs. The campuses at Wilmington, Lewes & Dover have added the CampusCE EMS Version 6.0 to administer the membership, registration, payment and marketing tasks, to improve internal operations and increase constituent awareness.

The University of Delaware is one of the earliest and largest lifelong learning programs in the country and was originally founded as the Academy of Lifelong Learning and the Southern Delaware Academy of Lifelong Learning. The UD OLLI is currently a program of the Division of Professional and Continuing Studies, and has over 2,100 active members.

CampusCE adds San Francisco State University OLLI

CampusCE welcomes the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at San Francisco State University to its growing lifelong learning community. CampusCE will provide an Education Management Solution that enables web-based management of membership, registration, payment and administrative services.

SF State strives to provide the most intellectually stimulating and supportive community for lifelong learners in the Bay Area. SFSU OLLI has greatly expanded its course offering over the last year and has increased its membership to 701 – an all-time high. CampusCE is looking forward in supporting SFSU to reach its goal of 1,000 members and achieving its second million dollar Bernard Osher endowment.

CampusCE Welcomes Pennsylvania State University OLLI

CampusCE is pleased to announce the addition of Pennsylvania State University OLLI to the growing CampusCE Lifelong Learning Community. Penn State OLLI will use the CampusCE EMS Version 6.0 in order to manage membership, registration, payment and administrative tasks associated with serving over 1,000 members. CampusCE would like to congratulate the Penn State OLLI in receiving its second $1,000,000 Bernard Osher Foundation Endownment.

The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Penn State is a nonprofit, membership organization that offers noncredit courses, trips and social activities to adults in the State College, Bellefonte, Penns Valley, Philipsburg and Surrounding areas. CampusCE is looking forward to supporting the instructor volunteers that are the heartbeat of OLLI at Penn State through its unique volunteer voucher capabilities.

CampusCE Partners with 360Training

CampusCE is pleased to announce its revenue sharing partnership with 360training.com, a multi-national e-learning pioneer, focused on delivering high quality compliance, licensing and workforce education online. The CampusCE EMS will be used as a platform to publish 360 training curriculum in fully configurable and customer branded web catalogs to take advantage of the automated registration, conversion optimization and payment processing integration tools inherent in the CampusCE EMS, introducing CampusCE customers to over 6,000+ Licensing, Compliance and Career Training courses.

CampusCE Partners with AdReady

CampusCE is pleased to announce its partnership with AdReady to provide a powerful digital display advertising platform, enabling higher education marketers to successfully reach and convert digital consumers. In tandem with CampusCE’s EMS automated registration, payment processing and conversion optimization tools, the CampusCE | AdReady partnership provides a fully integrated front-end for getting the most out of your institution’s digital presence.

Why IT Innovation is Essential in Education

via Campus Technology So who cares if the people who patch the servers disappear from campus? Honestly, even IT people don’t care that much about these mundane operational tasks. That’s not the concern. The larger issue is that IT departments in general, and CIOs in particular, can and should be playing a strategic role in the future of universities for the next decade if universities themselves are to meet their own missions.

It’s a cliché to say that technology is changing our lives, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Many of us believe GPS, Google, and a strong cell signal are basic human needs. Our personal lives have been transformed by social media (if you don’t believe it just ask any politician)). And many of us require constant assistance from our Android or iPhones just to navigate our daily professional commitments.

Despite this, the ways in which we create and distribute knowledge at the university utilizes tools that would have been familiar to scholars in the Middle Ages. Classroom lectures, books, and printed journals are still the dominant tools of our trade. [Continue Reading at Campus Technology]

Is College (Finally) Ready For Its Innovation Revolution?

via The Atlantic If a college student today stepped into a time machine and traveled back to Plato’s Academy of ancient Athens, she would recognize quite a bit. Sure, it might take some time to master ancient Greek and the use of stylus on wax, but she would eventually settle into a familiar academic routine. Senior scholars across a range of subjects like astronomy and political theory would lecture, pose questions, and press answers to a small group of attendants. Junior attendants would listen, answer, and defend responses.

That a class in 2011 resembles a lecture from 2,300 years ago suggests that two millennia of technological upheaval have only brushed the world of academics. Some professors use PowerPoint, and many schools manage their classes with online software. But even these changes don’t fully embrace the potential of Web, mobile, and interactive technology.

“The present resistance to innovation [in education] is breathtaking,” Joel Klein writes in The Atlantic this month. The former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education was writing about public high schools, but he might as well have been talking about universities. Despite college costs rising faster in college than any institution in the country including health care, we have the technology to disrupt education, turn brick and mortar lecture halls into global classrooms, and dramatically bring down the cost of a high quality education.

Entrepreneurs like to say there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. Is education innovation that next big idea? [Continue Reading at The Atlantic]

Higher Education and the New Media Reality

via Campus Technology As a cultural anthropologist and researcher in the modern discipline of digital ethnography, Michael Wesch likes to ask the big, complex questions: How do we find meaning and significance in the digital age? How is technology affecting society and culture? How are social media changing teaching and learning practices? But as a teacher, an associate professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, he likes to ask his students one small, simple question at the start of each year.

“I ask, How many of you do not actually like school?” he said. “Almost invariably almost half raise their hands. Then I vary the question slightly. I ask, How many of you do not like learning? And I get no hands. These are people who like learning, but they don’t like it to be institutionally created for them. Clearly something’s wrong here.” [Continue Reading at Campus Technology]

Low-Hanging Fruit No. 1: Portability

via Higher Education Management Higher education in the 21st century is increasingly characterized by student mobility and flexibility. More than half of today’s college graduates, not to mention those who never graduate, attend two or more institutions on their degree journey.  Yet most degree programs are written “from the bottom up”.

Faculty members craft the sequence of courses, from basic to advanced, as if the student were going to be in the same institution for his or her entire career. That curricular structure leads to heavy discounting of credit for transfer students with learning achieved in other settings. Specifically, institutional transfer policies and general-education requirements pose enormous obstacles to including all learning on one transcript and counting that learning towards the degree. [Continue Reading at Higher Education Management]

Teaching With the Cloud

via CampusTechnology Kuglin emphasized the ease-of-use of these tools and used them on the spot to assemble an ad hoc, cloud-based tutorial, complete with an audio file.

“These are tools that live outside the campus,” Kuglin said. “Where is all of this content? It’s actually in a data farm out in San Francisco. It’s not on this machine. I can go to any of your machines, and as long as you are connected, I could continue doing this presentation. I don’t need my laptop anymore, just a device that’s connected to the Internet. We need to get used to that idea.”

Kuglin lead his audience through several presentations created in the cloud with SlideRocket. “Those of you who are responsible for your online learning environments are already beginning to see a new model emerge here,” he said. “The cloud-based presentation package is surpassing and supplanting the PC-based, PowerPoint world. This is a huge, huge step forward.”

“Teachers need to stop saying ‘hand it in’ and start saying ‘publish it,'” he added.

To the inevitable question from his audience about objections raised by campus IT about the security of the cloud, Kuglin said, “I understand that it’s an issue, but we cannot continue to hide behind the safety issue, not if we want to offer competitive educational services. The old paradigm was university computer, university employee, university network. Boom, boom, boom; we’re secure. But the old days are gone.” [Continue Reading at CampusTechnology]