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InCommon is a nonprofit group that offers software to colleges and universities with a shared standard allowing for secure single sign-on. Vendors collaborate with InCommon, allowing for seamless transmission of information from one college to a variety of vendors. Using InCommon allows institutions to streamline their different online services, simplifying the process for all users. The software is free, however, a $700 registration fee is required, in addition to an annual fee of $1,000 to $3,000 depending on the size of the institution. The real costs are associated with switching vendors compatible with InCommon and adding enough servers to back up the entire system. If a server goes down, all of the single sign-on services shut down as well, so reliable and back up servers are required. While InCommon certainly offers a useful product, colleges and universities have been reluctant to join. The initial cost of joining, switching vendors and updating servers can be very expensive. The University of Georgia, for example, has decided to use proprietary software, instead of InCommon, to save on cost. Other institutions are waiting until important vendors, such as Blackboard, join InCommon. Without key vendors on board, the costs cannot be justified. Even though InCommon has not been adapted on every college campus, the organization doubled its membership numbers every year between 2005 and 2010.  

Gordon Friedman, president of the non-profit National Laboratory for Education Transformation, employs metaphoric prose to portray the relationship between technological advances and faculty inertia that has hindered the advancement of higher education into the twenty first century. He uses the term cloud to refer to the virtual, server-based world, and fog to depict the technological apathy and bureaucratic red taped nature of higher education that refuses to tap into the data mine available through technological systems. The cloud offers a transparent and cost effective way to systemize institutional operations. Friedman clarifies that what he advocates is not mindless extrapolation of data, but rather a shift to embrace the reality of twenty-first century students, who exist in a world where their personal data is captured by the various web applications they routinely patronize. Unlike these applications that use captured data to construct the essence of their customers, higher education remains an impersonal enterprise that does not utilize the existing data to design a more personal learning process. To Friedman, online courses, digital curricula components and apps are not sufficient, because unlike the cloud, information flow is one directional. This article is directed at higher education institutions. To lift the fog, Friedman states that colleges ought to adopt three principles of the cloud namely: identity formation and management whereby students develop a sense of ownership through the maintenance of their own identities; social networks and learning communities where learning is student centered and self paced; and data mining and assessment faculty collect and use student data to monitor the teaching and learning process.

This authorless opinion article from the Chronicle of Higher Education is a report on the technologies that enhance student-learning process in 16 Higher Colleges of Technology (HCT). The colleges employ the use of many advance technologies to foster student independence and the development of life-long skills. Rather than rely on just online course, these HCT's employ the use online learning tools and classroom technology to offer more than 3000 online courses, and other ICT applications such as online social networks, podcasts and management systems. The article furnishes a list of the major applications ranging from online learning tools and management systems, to anti-plagiarism and social book-marking applications. Classroom technologies include smart boards, virtual classroom applications, touchscreen computers, cameras and streaming servers. Strengthening the utilization of innovative technologies to strengthen teaching and learning are technology departments in each of the colleges. The intended audience of this article is the higher education community.