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Jeffery Young, a writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, explains a new business venture for Internet2, a company providing superfast networks to colleges and universities. Internet2 recently announced partnerships with a variety of new companies in an effort to offer colleges and universities cloud services at reduced prices. The premise behind the new services, called Internet2 Net + Services, is to allow the 235 participating colleges and universities to access cloud services for a lower cost than they would normally receive as an individual institution. Companies involved in the new venture include Hewlett-Packard, SHI International, and Box. While Hewlett-Packard and SHI International are providing special offers on licensing terms and time bought on high-speed computers used through the internet, Box offers storage within the cloud.  The long-term cost savings for colleges and universities using Internet2 Net + Services could be rather substantial. Instead of having to invest in the services permanently, institutions can purchase additional capacity during peak times. Short-term rental of cloud services, at discounted rates, may have real financial impact on higher education, perhaps even enticing some to transition to using the cloud.

This article introduces the reader to the concept of collective bargaining for campus information technology by considering the 2011 announcement of a partnership between desktop computer giant Hewlett Packard (HP) and higher education consortium Internet2. Collective bargaining is not viewed as the norm for higher education where individual colleges prefer to act as individuals, each perceiving themselves as completely unique even among peer institutions, but it has taken root in recent years due to a need to regain control over campus IT services in the wake of a surge in consumer technology use among faculty, staff and students. The cost benefit of collective bargaining is aimed at campus IT consumers but clearly there is a significant benefit for the IT providers as well, in this case, for HP. At the time this article was written, many colleges and universities were struggling to rebalance campus budgets, including reigning in IT costs. Meanwhile, consumer electronics were booming as smartphone sales surpassed standard cell phone sales and laptops outpaced desktop sales, and the war in tablet computing raged between Apple iPads, Amazon's Kindle Fire, and Google's Nexus 7. Students, faculty and staff were walking onto campus with multiple web enabled devices, draining campus Internet services and changing the way campus hardware was used. With more mobile services being used and aging desktop clusters needing to be managed, campus IT had to start thinking about strategies to control its investments. Cloud technologies were gaining in popularity at the time, and this article outlines the ways in which campuses began moving to the cloud to cut costs and to meet evolving user needs. The partnerships described in the article between companies like HP and cloud hosting service Box and Internet2 schools show that there are benefits to the members, but the author also recognizes that faculty, students and staff will likely continue to utilize their own devices and

Garnet, Inc. is an internationally recognized leader in information technology and high tech industries. Their team of researchers and consultants are widely known and accepted for their thought leadership and advice in the private business sector and in higher education. Often, insight from Gartner is considered when making strategic plans for an organization where IT plays an essential role. An annual report on IT issues provides a hit list of topics for CIOs to consider. The Gartner report can be used alongside industry reports from EDUCAUSE and the New Media Consortium to help decision makers understand emerging technology. In this 2014 report, Gartner analysts report on Mobile technology inclusive of both devices and applications (apps); cloud technology, including software as a service (SaaS) models and vendors; and intelligent machines and "the Internet of things", a reference not only to the ubiquitous Internet but also a growing realm of "smart" devices and appliances connected to people via the web.

Ben Showers, the author, admits to keeping the projections optimistic, and avoiding the issues of privacy, protection, and data shadow.The article describes five changes to mobile technology that will influence higher education into the future. The first change is mobile devices as a platform for learning and courses. Currently, mobile applications are more of a stepping-stone to larger course-management sites. In the future, students will desire actual learning platforms on their mobile device. The second change focuses on mobile realities. Augmented reality on mobile devices now allows the digital world to overlap with the real, physical world. Higher education institutions are able to use these new augmented reality technologies to aid students in find resources and information on-campus. The third mobile technology to affect higher education is mobile form. In the future, mobile devices will become more personalized and much smaller. As devices are created within glasses, earpieces, and sensors, higher education will have to adapt to those changes. Mobile scales are the fourth change to mobile technology Showers highlights. Large universities will have the ability to personalize each student's experience, offering an educational concierge service never before imagined. Finally, mobile disconnectedness will influence higher education. As students' lives become infiltrated with information via mobile devices, using the Internet, campuses should offer wifi coldspots. Wifi coldspots will offer students and faculty an opportunity to detach from the online work, taking a break from the academic world. 

The article gives a basic explanation of a few useful technologies to be used within an academic setting. First, a case is built for how technology can increase engagement and learning within the classroom, whether on-ground or online. Then the use of the internet, cloud computing, and multimedia are described. The authors highlight audio (podcasts and live chats), video (simulations, films, streamed videos, and screencasts), and blogging as multimedia options to be added to the classroom. In addition to multimedia, classroom learning can occur in a more mobile fashion. Many of the previous methods mentioned are use on desktop, laptops, and tablets. More and more students are utilizing their smartphones to access academic information. BlackBoard and eCollege both offer smartphone applications, which allow students and professors to access their course management sites through their phones. iPads are mentioned, but academic uses for these devices are yet to be determined. Finally, some institutions are offering degrees through Facebook, the social networking site. The Global MBA and The University of Whales in England, both offer MBAs through courses taught using Facebook. The article nicely summarizes a few technologies to be used within the classroom to enhance the students' experience. While the list is limited, and already out of date a few months after publication, the notion of using technology in the classroom to create a more dynamic experience is conveyed. The conclusion is a call for more research and study into making technology more effective within the classroom. 

The authors collected data from first-year students at the University of Illinois in relation to their iPad 2 use in academic and non-academic settings. The intended audience is librarians and faculty members interested in incorporating tablet technology in the classroom or other learning environments. The study results found the iPad 2 to be helpful to students when searching the internet, viewing course management pages, and utilizing apps in connection with course materials. The students also used the iPad 2 to listen to music, watch videos, use social networks, and Skype. After using the iPad 2 for one week, the students made suggestions for new apps that would helpful to them. The student suggestions included a campus map app, a contact info for faculty app, an app to help in selecting future courses, and an app to help monitor grades.  The authors concluded that tablets, specifically the iPad 2, have a lot of potential to improve teaching and learning methods within higher education, however, there is much progress to be made. While the drawbacks to the tablet are somehow limited (no keyboard, need wireless connection, etc), the number and scope of apps need to be increased. Students expressed interest in using apps in connection to academic work, but most of those apps have yet to be created. 

The author of this opinion article is a professor of educational technology and distance learning at the University of Alaska. This article describes the significant implications of the new version of the internet, also known as the "semantic web" for education. Three areas the author believes will be most affected are: knowledge construction, personal learning network maintenance, and personal educational administration. This information would be most helpful to senior-level administrators in higher education who make large-scale decisions regarding their college or university's technology. Under Web 3.0, the author predicts that personal learning networks (PLNs) will be built primarily around subjects, instead of services. The author goes on to describe how personal learning agents will identify relevant information from any source that is accessible and provide information on exactly what students and faculty desire to learn. The semantic web makes it possible for the internet to become an effective and focused information resource that can be tailored for specific content area objectives.The semantic web has the potential to challenge traditional ideas about the institution providing all of the knowledge to students by itself and instead connects information between institutions. The author anticipates that at some point, institutions will describe courses and degrees semantically, to help their own internal functioning, but with the effect of making many parts of education somewhat comparable across institutions. This article encourages faculty, staff, and students to join the discussion about semantic web in order to help Web 3.0 developers shape a tool useful and connected to the higher education environment.

The New Media Consortium is an international research project developed by practitioners and educational technology visionaries, established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large influence over the next five years, both in education and globally. It is important to note that a previous Horizon Report (2009) has been frequently mentioned in other articles and websites related to current educational technology trends. In the 2012 report, the one year or less prediction focuses on mobile apps and tablet computing being the most prevalent, with increased utilization by college students. The two to three year forecast includes game-based learning and learning analytics, explaining that the ability to tailor educational activities as content becomes easier to manipulate with the benefit of education becoming more open to change. In four to five years, the authors emphasize gesture-based computing and the "internet of things" or objects producing their own information will both have a significant impact on education. The group expects that educational trends influenced by these technologies will be collaborative learning, working in teams, and a shift towards more challenge-based and active learning. This article provides a helpful summary reflecting the expected realities in higher education and in the larger society, acting as a guide for educators to follow technology trends, challenges, and relevance for teaching and learning.

This video was posted by Illinois worknet to acquaint education stakeholders with some of the technological advances being developed to address the challenges currently facing higher education. The short comings of what is available today include inability to support personalized learning; lack of educators skilled in the application of technological tools; constantly changing products; adaptability, appropriateness and validity issues; cost; and meeting sate standards. Technologies are now being designed and produced, to address those shortcomings by providing opportunities for personalized and student-centered learning experiences that are engaging, meet individual student needs, convenience, learning pace, and combine both online learning and face-to-face interaction. These hybrid models are being created in the short, mid and long-term horizon. Right now students have access to countless free applications. In two to three years, the article predicts that there will be an increase of learning analytics that collect and translate large amounts of data, as well as personalize the learning environment. In four to five years, it is expected that there will be gesture based computing and the Internet of things. The Learning Registry (LR) and the Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC) are technologies being developed to provide effective learning tools that provide filters for finding, interpreting, organizing and retrieving data. While the LR is currently in use, the SLR is in its pilot phase, and was introduced to five schools in the United States. The ultimate goal of these technologies is to use learning analytics that use rich data streams to inform and create personalized learning experiences and pathways.

This article addresses plagiarism detection process, and how to verify student work without resorting to a third party. One of the negative consequences of prolific Internet usage by students is the unfortunate problem of plagiarism, a problem that is even more common in distance learning and online classes. Most learning management systems (LMS) have a plagiarism detection service (PDS) designed to check submitted work. In most cases, The most common method of verifying suspicious student work is through a third party because the LMS does not have the capacity to carry out huge scope searches on student work that might have been copied from other documents in the world-wide web rather than from sources on one small campus. Carrying out such an investigation on campus requires the ownership of a web crawler. Colleges that do not own one rely on third parties, and as a result come under criticism and face charges for violating student intellectual property. In this paper the authors describe a PDS design that requires only limited but the most vital information of the original work, be submitted to a third party thereby circumventing the problem of intellectual property charges. The college system can then carry out a conventional search, while the third party runs the content against other sources from the web. Two important questions to consider when designing a PDS are whether the student submission will be archived, and if the information will be deleted after producing a report.

The author of this article is a writer for University Business, an online higher education publication. The article summarizes how lectures can not only be recorded digitally but also streamed live over the internet, with minimal effort by participants. Lecture capture systems (LCS) give the ability to slice and dice archived recordings into more manageable and meaningful segments. The author shares how as some lecture capture solutions have changed to software or web-based platforms, the definition is being stretched to include content faculty are producing at home, or even recordings of hybrid class sessions capturing both the in-class and online activity. Users see a partitioned screen displaying the presentation material and video feed, along with navigation options. Although video of the professor is thought to enhance distance learning sessions, it is usually skipped when the result is not interactive. In some situations, a video is used to display a demonstration, as often happens in medical classes. The author stresses that the audio is extremely important and if it is not great quality, it reduces the usefulness. Editing can be done to add title slides, remove dead time, or eliminate lessons that might have made sense during class but could be considered meaningless afterward. Long lectures can also be broken into shorter segments for students to use as study guides. Overall, the author suggests that faculty should keep the student as a user in mind when developing content. A helpful checklist is provided for administrators who are considering how to implement lecture capture: What is the institution's goal for having a lecture capture system? What needs are evident through observation of faculty? How involved will the IT staff have to be in training and using the system? Can faculty members operate it themselves? Will the system integrate with a course management system? Is the system scalable? How scalable does it need to be? Or is portability better? Wha

The authors of this article work for the Center for Teaching, Learning, & Technology at Washington State University. They looked at learning management systems and how currently they do not accurately capture what students have learned. Both authors discovered that the majority of assignments that make up students' experience with the higher education curriculum do not ask them to think, but to recall lectures, text, or both, which may be why LMS are designed to reflect this idea. They examine the concept and perception of a learning environment from the classroom to the internet and their relationship to views of teaching and learning. Examples and research, including an example of a Web 2.0 pro-social effort, are used to demonstrate the difference between the current state of teaching and learning, and an emerging vision. The authors refer to Educause Center for Applied Research, Morgan's (2003) study. Morgan reports, faculty were gaining, at least one key principle of good practice from LMS, increased feedback to students (Chickering & Gamson, 1987) through the use of the online gradebook. According to Morgan (as cited by Brown and Peterson, 2008) this was an outcome that "alters" faculty relationships with students and students with their own work. The authors predict that the successful LMS application of the future will be a gradebook that accommodates shifting ways of receiving feedback. The authors believe that a successful gradebook will be recognized as a communication tool that allows faculty and students to have a variety of communication options (faculty to student, faculty to groups of students, etc.). They point to the instructional challenge of guiding the tool discussion toward issues related to outcomes and what quality performance looks like. The authors refer to the LMS of the future capturing not in our learning about, but in learning "to be". Faculty are seeking a place for students to learn and operate which complements student im

Since the year 2000, the higher education information technology (IT) organization EDUCAUSE has published a top ten list of issues identified by a selected panel of higher education IT professionals. The 2014 report is different because, for the first time, members of the organization were invited to rank the issues in a survey conducted after panelists had assembled lists themselves. Because of this change, the resulting data sets can be evaluated across institutional types, as defined by Carnegie Classifications, and compared to determine what differences exist for IT issues across the institution types. This data set is important when investigating emerging technology trends and assessing research from various entities such as the New Media Consortium's annual Horizon Report.