It's an uncomfortable truth for colleges and universities—cheating happens. And by many accounts, it happens a lot. Although cheating isn't new, technology facilitates it and student culture more readily accepts it. Students may believe outstanding scholastic performance—achieved by whatever means necessary—paves the difficult-to-navigate path to success. Added into this mix is the popularity of online […]
More diverse student populations demand more of the health and wellness services offered on campus today. Colleges and universities must meet the unique needs of veterans, and students who are international, older, recovering from addictions, or who have physical or mental disabilities. Many schools are meeting this challenge by combining physical and mental health services […]
From the earliest days of the modern university, cities have been important partners for institutions of higher learning—largely because universities can bring scholars and students together for creative thinking, while cities can provide the human capital necessary to share innovative ideas with the public. Throughout America's cities, there are examples of universities coordinating urban revitalization […]
Commencement speakers have become another point of financial scrutiny in higher ed, with an annual flurry of students crying foul on both the person selected and fees incurred. Some colleges avoid charges by tapping their own faculty for the task (as University of Chicago has done since 1970). Others pursue prominent speakers willing to donate […]
When a school hears from the FBI, the news is not likely to be good. Two years ago, FBI agents informed Maricopa County Community College District administrators that data from the 10-college system in Arizona had been posted on the internet. With a possible data breach underway, the system's website was shut down immediately and […]
Attending class as a robot There's a new attendance option for online students of Michigan State University's educational psychology and educational technology doctoral program: They can come to class via robot. Instead of sitting in on a stagnant videoconference, the robots allow students to scan the room remotely and feel physically engaged. The robots, from […]
Higher ed institutions are expanding interdisciplinary research activity by hiring groups of faculty from multiple disciplines at the same time. The idea, pioneered by the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late 1990s and sprouting up elsewhere since then, is to formalize the expectation of working collaboratively across the university. It may involve a variety of […]
More than two-thirds of the matches picked up by content-tracking service Turnitin are matches to other students' work. Turnitin checks work for originality by helping identify primary-source and outside content use within that work. While not all the matches are instances of plagiarism, the statistic certainly reflects the degree to which students are sharing information […]
The University of Michigan's very decentralized campus means it has multiple IT departments, numerous technologies and plenty of cloud applications. "We basically use everything you can think of when it comes to the cloud," says Don Welch, chief information security officer. "Colleges here have their own relationships with providers, and their own strategies with information […]
"Security is always a top concern. Other highly regulated industries—such as financial services, insurance and healthcare—have mandatory government regulations to guide them, but it is often unclear to higher ed which data can or cannot be stored in the cloud. I've seen universities adopt a hybrid approach to cloud strategy, where general business information—such as […]
