While direct mail and phone remain strong methods of courting donors, advancement offices face the reality that younger alumni may not even have a landline or use a checkbook. More than 1 in 5 online donations were made on a mobile device in 2017, according to research from the Blackbaud Institute for Philanthropic Impact. In […]
When it comes to space utilization, what is one aspect that higher ed institutions may not necessarily be thinking about but should consider? "Current trends in wellness combined with the space efficiencies of shared spaces over private offices and labs should lead to common facilities that optimize access to daylight, fresh air and connection to […]
Eight prominent universities—including University of Pennsylvania, Duke, Emory, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt and others—were hit with separate lawsuits in August 2016 alleging the institutions mishandled their employee retirement plans. While the institutions fight those lawsuits, experts have predicted the complaints are just the first of many to be filed against colleges and universities that sponsor 401(k) […]
Recent highly publicized cyber attacks have spurred a growing public awareness of the risk that sensitive personal information might be accessed by unauthorized third parties. It is not as well-known that the industry sector with the highest number of breaches is higher education: since 2005, higher education institutions have been the victim of 539 breaches […]
The Association of American Medical Colleges projects that the United States will be short nearly 95,000 doctors within the next 10 years. That shortage is projected to be most acute in Southern states. In response, private medical schools—even institutions hundreds of miles away—are looking into opening satellite locations on the campuses of public universities. Barbara […]
Have you ever made a call with a soft phone? You have if you’ve ever Skyped or used FaceTime. It also means you’re on the cutting-edge of phone communications. Sean Jameson, chief technology officer at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, knew it was time to upgrade campus phones when he realized the traditional cable-based […]
Academia’s cyber preparedness (or lack thereof) has received less media attention than that of certain retailers and financial institutions, but nonetheless the cyber risks confronting universities are pervasive and alarming. Consider recent breaches suffered by educational institutions. At the University of Maryland, an outside source gained access to a secure records database that held 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 […]
Eight years ago this month, Seung-Hui Cho, a senior at Virginia Tech, shot and killed 32 people and wounded 17 others on campus before committing suicide. In the aftermath, Aradhana Bela Sood, senior professor for child mental health policy and professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, was named to […]
If “the medium is the message” as Marshall McLuhan so famously proclaimed in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, then what is the message of contemporary distributed learning? One can only wonder what McLuhan would say in 2014. Yet, as far back as 1967, McLuhan predicted that “the little red schoolhouse is already well on […]
