My TechDecisions

Higher Ed

Central Arizona College Invests in Crestron Gear, Mobile Furniture for Collaborative Classrooms

January 22, 2015 Jessica Kennedy Leave a Comment

Central Arizona College was charged to craft collaborative rooms for students to bring their own devices while leaving instructors’ teaching undisturbed. The college answered the charge by investing in mobile furniture, Crestron AirMedia and Crestron Fusion RoomView technologies. Now, these classrooms enable students to move around and reconfigure the classroom, support students’ variety of devices, and maintain teaching familiarity and comfort for instructors.

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5 Access Control Tips To Keep Your College Campus Safe

January 19, 2015 Jessica Kennedy Leave a Comment

Even though card keys might be old-fashioned for access control solutions, they are still a popular security item on today’s college campuses. However, colleges should still consider revamping their access control solutions and strategies. Five key access control tips include: investing in mobile access solutions, electromechanical key systems, relying on a campus card office for assistance, insuring your network and looking to the Cloud for more data storage.

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5 Tips to Keeping Your College’s BYOD Control in Check

January 12, 2015 Jessica Kennedy Leave a Comment

BYOD is a common expectation of today’s college students. But what happens when students abuse it, or when a professor or administrator loses control of what students do on the network? Xirrus’s Bruce Miller says that this is a common struggle in today’s higher education institutions, and that colleges should consider keeping network access under control. Five major ways colleges can keep their BYOD access in check is by covering use cases, deciding how much control a class needs, bringing in a third party, getting granular with control and upping the in-class engagement.

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UMass Lowell Making Learning Leaps with Lecture Capture Initiative

January 8, 2015 Jessica Kennedy Leave a Comment

When students started struggling in an enhanced calculus class back in 2005, Randy Tyndall and his team wanted to install a solution to help. Their solution of choice was a lecture capture system by Echo360, which enabled professors to capture lectures and computer demonstrations on a single screen for students to view after class. Lecture capture has also upped active learning among students, encouraged flipping the classroom, deepened distance learning, increased student retention rates and made it easier for professors to archive their lectures.

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Coastal Bend College “REVELs” In Learning Success with Pearson

January 1, 2015 Jessica Kennedy Leave a Comment

With digital learning on the rise, Costal Bend College invested in REVEL, an immersive learning, online-based platform for students to supplement their classroom learning. Professors like Karl Clarkare using REVEL to assign videos and reading assignments to students, and have direct, digital communication with students if they are struggling with a certain topic. Students can use REVEL to complete additional assignments, and to check their understanding of course material with quizzes and simulations. REVEL is purchased on a per-class basis.

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UMass Lowell Improves Students’ Academic Success with vLabs and Zero Client Devices

December 18, 2014 Jessica Kennedy Leave a Comment

UMass Lowell recently installed vLabs and zero client devices to enable students to access lab assignments without actually going to the lab. vLabs is an app-based feature that enables students to access lab work through a portal; zero clients are server-based virtual devices that run like a PC, but take up less space than a computer. Combined, this solution has cut back on energy costs in UMass Lowell’s labs, and saves its commuting students time. The university’s IT team says it has also improved students’ academic success and makes the university stand out as one of the only colleges in the Northeast that has this solution.

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