Tech advice from the class of 2012

In my 2012 tech survey of students at Salisbury University (my former institution)I asked a new question: "What do you think is the one most important technology skill for a college graduate to have?. My survey received over 600 responses. I may come back to this question in future blogs, but since we are in the month of graduations, I thought it would interesting to see how the seniors 2012 answered this question.

A couple of interesting observations about seniors first. This is a group that spends a great of time online.

How many hours a week to you spend on the internet?

11-15 31%
16-20 18%
more than 20 hours 26%


I also asked seniors which technology tools the used the most.

PowerPoint 94%
Blackboard 95%
Campus library site 72%
Spreadsheets 62%

I did not ask about word processing programs since I was pretty sure that with 99% computer ownership, word processing was pretty universal. So we see that these are students who are on the web a great deal and use productivity tools extensively. So what did they think were most important tech skills college graduate should have?

Well, I got 126 student open ended responses. Almost half felt that all graduates should be well versed all of the programs included in the Microsoft Office Suite. Almost half of the responses focus on the suite or parts of it (Word, Excel and PowerPoint). They think that this is the basic tool set of almost any career, regardless of the field.

The second most often skill noted was the ability to do critical research on the internet. By critical I think they mean knowing the difference between opinion and scholarly research. They phrase it differently, but they seemed to know that not all web content is equal.

The third most often mentioned skill was general computer literacy. Knowing how operating systems work, storing data, dealing with different files and formats seemed to be important. A fair number singled out email use as important.

Several respondents also mentioned that knowing how to type is an important asset. There were many others carried opinions touching on knowing how to effectively use social media and using the web for business networking. Two students focused right in on learning to adapt new technologies.

A summary review and aggregation of responses suggests that the class of 2012 feels that college graduates need to know the tools of business that(or the world of work) focus on the communication of ideas and communication between people. Many are thinking critically about what is good information and bad information on the web. They also think that they should know something about about how a computer works beyond the basics of a particular program.

I know that my sample is small (126) and that the opinions they expressed varied. I think the "take away" for colleges is that we need to acknowledge what students think is important and spend even more time making sure that we provide what they think they need, regardless of the academic discipline. I am not at all suggesting the technology become the center of their education, but noting that they recognize that they are entering a world that requires certain skills and we should too.

How viable are tablets for schools

This is a guest blog from Estelle Shumann, with permission. I think the topic and point are perfect for these times. I see too often that colleges, schools and even individuals think that spending money on technology will fix "whatever ailes them". All too often hardware and software are wasted because little or no planning was done. Thanks Estelle!

The classroom is typically quick to adapt to advances in information technologies. High schools, colleges and universities are among the first places you’re likely to see cutting-edge computers, laptops and other technological equipment. In fact, many are turning cutting edge technologies into accredited online universities.

One technology that’s just starting to make the leap towards widespread use in higher education is the tablet computer. In institutions of higher education, tablets are perceived less as luxury commercial technology than as useful tools with the potential to make education more efficient.

Grandview High School in Jefferson County in Missouri is one high school attempting to increase the use of tablets for schools. A St. Louis Post-Dispatch story from August 2011 reported that the school spent approximately $164,000 to provide tablets and wireless Internet access for each of its 330 students. Grandview principal Matt Zopf said that students would retain the same tablet throughout high school and keep it after graduation.

Once the tablets are in the students hands, there are several ways that this equipment can impact their educational lives. Tablets can be used to take tests or complete and submit homework. Entire online classrooms can be created through different tablet applications, such as Moodle. Textbook software can also be downloaded to the tablets, giving students a digital textbook and cutting down on paper printing.

Although Grandview’s tablet implementation has progressed smoothly, other school districts have suffered different fates. Jennings School District in St. Louis County spent $1.25 million on 2,500 handheld computers. Poor management led to seldom-used tablets and $77,500 in missed rebates, costing the district $300,000 more than was budgeted for the project.

Cost is a big factor in implementing any new technology in education, and tablets are no different. An infographic printed by McClatchy Tribune compares the prices of tablets and educational software over the course of the six-year life-span typical of most college textbooks. For a typical classroom of 32 students, the cost of equipment and annual software upgrades would total approximately $36,000. This figure is almost three times the estimated cost of traditional text and workbooks for the same classroom.

Statistics indicate that tablet ownership among students is growing, especially at colleges and universities. A 2012 study conducted by the Pearson Foundation found that 25% of all college students own a tablet, up from only 7% the previous year. Of those students who owned a tablet, 90% felt that their tablet was useful for educational purposes. Approximately two-thirds of all college and high school students surveyed believed that tablets and digital textbooks would replace traditional textbooks within five years.

The use of tablet computers has encouraging potential for the future of education. Like laptops and other recent technological advances, tablets take the power of computing and wireless Internet access and make it even lighter and more portable. Although cost-prohibitive at the moment, technologies have a way of becoming cheaper with time. As the price tag on tablet computers plummets, so will any major obstacles keeping schools from implementing the use of tablets on a much wider scale.

How do college students use their cell phones?

In an earlier post I noted that in our student surveys running from 2009 to 2012 we saw that the percentage of Smaarrt phones has jumped from 5% (2009) to 70% (2012). As you may have noticed, buying a flip phone is almost impossible these days. I wanted to get a sense for how students are using their phones, besides making phone calls. Here is what 620 students said in March 2012:

- Browse the internet 72%
- Text message 99.5%
- Take pictures/videos 94.5%
- Send/Receive email 62.8%
- Watch videos 55.8%
- Listen to music 60.3%
- Read 28.0%
- Access class materials 53.0%
- Don't own a cell phone 0

There is a great deal going on here. It can be seen the the phone is the portal office and recreation center for most students. Keep in mind that this same survey showed growth in tablet ownership (18%, double what we saw in 2011), but this is not close to the Smart phone ownership numbers. We see that texting is preferred over email, no surprise. I am surprised that 53% of students surveyed use their phones to access course materials, including the learning management system (Blackboard). We only deployed Blackboard mobile in January 2012. I was also surprised that 28% said they use their phones to read. Personnally, I cannot imagine doing much reading on the cell screen. Perhaps this is for younger eyes.

Recreational use is also interesting to note. Taking pictures and videos (94.5%), watching videos (55.8%) and listening to music (60.3%)all show that the phone is for more that making calls and texting. I think these numbers show us how students are using their phones, but they may also show us how to communicate with them and how to shape a message, whether it be educational or informational. Colleges should be taking note as they think about communicating with prospects, creating and delivering courses and course materials, and marketing. The mobile is the device of choice.

Trends in College Teaching and Learning 2012

This has been interesting year in the instructional technology world. Blackboard is still buying much of the competition. The latest being MoodleRooms. You can still use Moodle as your learning management system, but you have to either maintain it yourself or find another partner. Sakai is still going strong as one of the few remaining alternatives to Blackboard. Putting this aside, there are some major trends to watch with multiple vendors in each space. Regardless of the discipline, I think all areas of higher education should be looking at the following to extend their teaching and extending learning is THE major trend. Extending learing beyond the traditional classroom.

First, let me state that I am not talking about making major changes in the content of courses or suggesting that ALL faculty should be pressured into adopting any of the followign trends or technologies. These are personal choices that individual faculty have to make. Here is what I am seeing:

Communication/Collaboration - Collaboration outside the classroom is the biggest change I have seen in over 30 years in higher education. A few years back we have been amazed at the idea of answering student questions in virtual office hours; having students in traditonal classes collaborate online without regard to to time or distance; working with students or colleagues from other universities in real time or asychronous research or class projects; bringing virtual quest speakers into the classroom using Skype or some other free tool; continuing relationships made during study abroad experiences well after returning home with teleconferencing; creating a class or campus research publication with a tool like Digital Commons or a class wiki; having creative writing students share their work with a personal blog; and creating short instructional videos with a cell phone or Flip camera. This list could go on. Notice that I did not mention Blackboard or other learning managment system (LMS) in this paragraph. The LMS has become a baseline toolset for teaching, but any of the tools noted above can be used without the LMS.

Mobile Apps - This is a really new space and largely undeveloped in my view. It has great potential, but the jury is still out. At the very least though colleges should have a campus level mobile strategy that includes a smart phone hehicle web site and access to the LMS. I have said before, ALL of your student prospects from this point on will likely get their first impression of your campus on their phones. The view had better be good and easy to navigate. I have to say that the Blackboard Mobile Learn product is easy to deploy and gets the job done in a flash. Your students can access their class pages and see grades, assignments, and even turn in an assignment all from their phone. Now that 70% of current undergraduates have smart phones, this is the bare minimum that a college can get by with. The next step is access to your student administrative systems. Within a year some basic access to grades, financial aid status, admissions application information, and perhaps bill payment will be expected. I would look for apps that can help student researchers to collect data, take photos, record audio interviews, and other data collecting activities. Speciality apps that can do all sorts of things will be available in short order. After all there are over 600,000 Apple apps already out there.

Big Data - This is the latest buzz phrase in IT referring to lots of data, as the name implies. Applied to higher education, I think big data refers to data warehousing and/or analytics used for decison making and of courses research. Here campuses have options. For analytics are their a host of analytics tools and dashboard type applications. The key question here is "what do you really need?". Most vendors are selling very slick user interfaces with green, yellow, and red lights and other cool do-dads. Frankly, I have not seen a campus use these to date. Most could do just as well with timely automated reports. I have not found a President whop really wants to look at an Admissions dashboard. Collecting lots of data and creating useable data models for decison IS adviseable, but it can be done in may ways. My advice, is to generate questions first and then find the data to answer the questions. I would also take a look at constituent relationship software like Sales Force for Higher Education (CRM) or Blackboard Analytics. Of course there are other products out there as well. Again, I suggest thinking about what you need and how you want to see it before buying. This will help you leverage your big data about potential and current students to make decisions, communicate, inform, and intervene at just the right moment. On the research side, things are even better. You can create virtual computing environments in a flash for on campus applications and you can rent space and computing cycles in the cloud for a very low price. Just for an example, chack out Amazon and for smaller storage needs drop box. More on research tools later.

Communication, mobile, and big data are the hot items right now for higher education technology, in my view.

Digital Devices and College Students 2012

Each year I do a technology survey of our students to see what devices they own and how they are are using technology. The 2012 survey had some interesting findings. I have written about the rapid growth in Smart phone ownership (now at 70%). I looked further to see what other devices students own. Here is what I found in the March 2012 survey of 616 students.

iPad 11.7%
Tablet(other) 6.0%
Netbook 3.1%
iPod (traditional, Nano, etc.) 58.8%
iPod Touch 43.7%
eReader (all brands) 17.4%
Flip or other video camera 26.8%
I don't own any of these 8.8%


We see a couple of interesting trends. The number of tablet computers has doubled over the past year. Netbooks never got traction and are probably not going to go anywhere. Virtually all students own an Apple portable music player. With the iPod Touch at 43% we have many more additonal wifi ready devices. When added to the many more Smart phones on campus and the almost 100% laptop ownership, we see some heavy new loads on the existing wireless network. We have more devices now than we do students.

The number of eReaders has increased with the percentage of readers jumping from 9.3% in 2011 to 17.4% in 2012. Again, another wifi ready device. Cameras ownership has dropped a few points from 30.2% in 2011 to 26.8 this year. With most Smart phones including a digital still and video cameras, these numbers will probably continue to drop. The percentage of students reponding that they "do not own any of the devices" dropped notably from 36% in 2011 to 8.8% in 2012.

So in additonal to the now ubiquitous laptop and cell phone we are seeing more decices in general with some students owning 3-4 wifi ready devices. The next question is, how are they using these devices? Is it for educational or recreational purposes, or both. More news coming next time.

Colleges going mobile?

I have written about tech mobility before. Most recently, I wrote about the "Bring Your Own Device" culture that is rapiding growing on college campues. I am in the middle of doing our annual student technology survey. In less that 24 hours I have had about 550 responses to the web survey. Trends are already developing and they show interesting results. These trends show an amazing shift in the tools that students are using to work and communicate. The speed of this change is what amazes me. Here is some early data, since the survey is still open:

Smart phone ownership:

2009- 5%
2010- 36%
2011- 48%
2012- 70%

This is consistant with national data, but is truly amazing. The shear speed of this change is uprecedented and presents challenges and opportunities for colleges and universities. If we are not already creating mobile web sites and adding apps to connect our Learning Management Systems to the web, we should have done this yesterday. Can students see a campus map; find out what is for lunch; see their academic schedule; check their email; see what their homework might be for a given class; or view the bus schedule and bus locations on their mobile device?

Smart Phone ownership by vendor:

2011- iPhones 8.7%
2012- iPhone 36.6%

2011- Blackberry 11.1%
2012- Blackberry 5.1%

2011- Android 19%
2012- Android 25.5%

The Apple iPhone has made a huge surge in just one year. Blackberry is fading, as the market news suggests and Android has lost some ground. In our area Verizon has the best 3G support (soon to be 4G), so this could be a factor, coupled with the recent availability of the iPhone with Verizon. It could also be that students are consolidating their music, email, web surfing, texting, and photos on a single easy to use device.

The last factoid discovered so far is the expected increase in the ownership of tablets:

Tablet Ownership:

2011- 7.6%
2012- 18.1%

The 18.1% is still fairly modest, but noteworthy since the devices have only been on the market for two years. We are seeing more mobile devices per student. I think this will have an impact in areas that we cannot yet imagine on college campuses. Stay tuned for more College Tech Trends for 2012. If you want to learn more about college trends take a look at the the New Media Consortiums 2012 Horizon Report.

Next generation of ERP systems for colleges and universities

Our campus went live with the PeoleSoft (now Oracle) suite of products in 2003 and 2004. Like most campuses we had our bumps early on. After all, ERP systems change the culture, not just the technology. As we sit in 2012, I have to wonder what will come next for College data management systems will look like. The current systems, although only few years old, are already old looking and their functionality does not satisfy new and growing needs of campuses. If current leaders in this market space don't adapt, I think we will see new players, soon.

Here are a few things that I think need to be in the next generation of ERP systems:

1. The ability to customize the look and feel of pages needs to be building. Now, adding branding, chaginging fonts and the location of data boxes is hard or not possible. This makes the current systems look almost "legacy" like when compared to other interactive web sites. Campus portals for example, should be able to be consistent with the universtiy brand and "moderized" as needed, without effecting functionality.

2. Mobile is here and is not going away. Just as campuses need to develop a strategy for presenting their image on mobile devices, ERP providers need to format pages for mobile devices. It is early in the game, but pushing this task off to third party vendors adds to campus expense. Since we know that mobile will not go away, vendors should have plans to build this into to the base product. BTW, I do not think that all of the ERP functionality needs to be in mobile format. Starting with the parts of the system that students and faculty deal with would be great. Back office staff will likely continue to do their work in the back office.

3. Security needs to be easier to manage. For the past several years we have had to dedicate almost one entire FTE to managing security and provisioning. We have since automated this process ourselves and reduce this time to about 10% of an FTE. It can be done.

4. Reduce the anumber of third party tools that are needed for reporting, refunding, electronic payments, eTranscripts, admissions applications, judical management .... . The list goes on. These are all areas where many campuses are using third party solutions with, again, more cost for products, integration isses and personnel costs. Not all functionality can be built in, but if someone can build a product with most of this, they will be the new leader in the market.

5. Build in things like a work order system (in Financials), an event room scheduling system, and maybe even HR contract automation. This would be real "value add". Again, the new leader will have most of these.

6. Lastly, think hard about a cloud solution. Data centers are expensive to run and staff. Many small or medium size colleges would probably like to phase out most of their data center activity over the next 5-10 years. It has to be affordable, secure, and with great service levels and tools.

Off the soap box for awhile. The College ERP market is getting dated fast. This is a problem, but a great opportunity for the next big thing. Check out WorkDay for a glimpse of the future. They work only with HR and Finance, but the model is here.