How Colleges Can Do More for Learning with Less Money

Higher education administrators are facing the challenge of supporting enhanced learning opportunities for students in an era of funding cuts and rising costs.

Much like what is happening in the federal government with technology budgets, education leaders need to develop ways to leverage innovation in an era of “doing more with less.”

Despite these challenges, some universities are being highly proactive by embracing new innovations that foster “limitless learning” to a broader audience of students in online environments.

However, there are still areas for improvement.

A recent study found that, while organizations in industries such as banking and retail are making major investments, 50 percent of educational institutions stated that they aren’t getting enough money to fund all the mobile initiatives and required backend investments.

When organizations do make the required investments, it directly translates to better educational services and successfully addresses students’ rising expectations.

Thankfully, there are new solutions that help higher education institutions of all sizes to reduce their capital and operating expenses while expanding the bounds of education, including better learning environments, greater staff collaboration, as well as support for business-critical administrative services.

The solutions also allow IT teams to be more strategic, better manage the range of devices, information and applications that students use throughout their day and develop more sophisticated assessment and learning platforms.

One university is serving as a case study for how to effectively embrace cloud-based mobile innovations that allow this “limitless learning” for students. Driven by senior leadership, this university made transformational IT decisions that enhanced growth from 3,000 to more than 70,000 students in distant learning environments.

The president of this university understands the importance of innovative technology as being central to the next evolutionary step in higher education. He often challenges other colleges and universities to embrace distance learning to not only enhance enrollment numbers, but also to equalize educational opportunities for all.

By taking this approach, the university has more than tripled in size and is the largest provider of online higher education in New England, one of the five largest in the country.