Watching preschoolers play on touchscreen devices makes it clear that the future college students of America are of the connected generation. Unfortunately, I fear today's teaching methods are ill prepared to embrace this new type of learner. Higher ed must embrace game-like learning just as progressive Silicon Valley companies have, or risk bored, disengaged, unprepared […]
No one would deny that college students spend a good part of the day with eyes locked on their mobile devices, scrolling through social media feeds. Despite that clear trend, just 30 percent of financial aid professionals reported using social media to provide financial literacy content to their constituents, notes the "2016 Financial Literacy Trends […]
An institution's enterprise resource planning (ERP) system drives many of its core processes. ERP software allows students and faculty to access key information, and staff to automate previously manual tasks. It is critical for administrators to make their other programs, such as payment technology systems, integrate seamlessly with the software that governs so much on […]
As we speculated last year, the shift to the use of families' Prior-Prior Year (PPY) financial data on the FAFSA has come to pass. Starting in October of 2016, the FAFSA will be available for students to complete for college enrollment in the 2017-18 academic year. This shift has far-reaching implications not only for timing […]
A siloed approach rarely works for any effort on higher ed campuses, much less student success and retention. Yet five years ago at Manhattan College, located in the Bronx in New York City, academic assistance was handled individually by each of the institution's five schools. "Then the college implemented a Center for Academic Success and hired […]
At Juniata College in Pennsylvania, students took Arabic for the first time last fall by enrolling in a course at Gettysburg College via video conference. Amherst College students, meanwhile, can major in architectural studies by taking classes at four neighboring colleges. And at Cabrini College near Philadelphia, students from five institutions researched viruses last summer […]
When considering recruitment and enrollment goals at Carroll University, located outside of Milwaukee, it is not about the number of times contact is made with a prospective student—it is about the number of quality contacts. "We want to have two-way conversations so we can understand our students better," says James Wiseman, vice president of enrollment. […]
With a student population of over 40,000, managing scholarship applications and processing supporting documents was more than a daunting task for the financial aid team at the University of Ottawa. The Canadian institution had been using an obsolete online system, which did not support the automation of supporting documents and created a burdensome student application […]
Digital signage has come a long way in the last decade, and is increasingly utilized in higher education. Universities are an ideal place for digital signage, offering a variety of different venues for unique content including dining facilities; faculty and staff offices; faculty, staff, and student lounges; health clinics; gymnasiums or sporting arenas; theaters; classrooms; […]
Imagine being several years into a hardware-based, enterprise Voice over IP phone system installation and still in the first phase of the implementation process. That is exactly the troubling situation the University of Advancing Technology, located in Tempe, Arizona, found itself in spring 2015. "The system was expensive, difficult to configure and had a clunky […]
