News: The Invisible Computer Lab - Inside Higher Ed - 5 views
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Only 10 percent of colleges have begun phasing out their physical computer labs, even though the vast majority of students now own laptops, according to the Campus Computing Project. A full two-thirds of respondents to last fall’s survey said they had decided not to phase out their labs. Yet all of the technologists contacted by Inside Higher Ed agreed that virtual computing labs are bound to emerge to supplement physical computer labs across higher education, and some even suggested that the rooms where students currently tap away on campus-owned computers will eventually yield to the virtual kind.
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Well before the term entered the popular lexicon via a recent Microsoft advertising campaign, “the cloud” was transforming how college students interact with their coursework.
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In a virtual computing lab, students log in via a secured website and choose from a library of “images” — virtual desktops outfitted with different versions of various programs. The selected image then appears as a window on the student’s own computer desktop, at which point students can open a program and begin working. They can save or print their work just as though the program were running on their own hard drives.
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We will be releasing our own virtual lab infrastructure later this semester. CLC is making that happen now.
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I know IST has been doing it for several years. They had a lot of technical problems, which I hope they have (and we can) overcome. It did give students access to a lot of high end software that they couldn't have otherwise. I'll be curious to see how CLC's solution affects lab usage patterns.
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Not sure how interesting this is other than example of approaches to computer lap alternatives
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I assume we would need a laptop or a netbook program at PSU to make this really work, but as you all know, I a big fan of the idea of phasing out physical computer labs.
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I'm not sure we would need a laptop program. Our own survey numbers point to close to 100% ownership by students as it is. In the short term, remote application services would not be able to replace the labs. We would use this service at first for very specialized software that a relatively few use. The number of students using our labs is staggering ... I now have numbers broken down by College and the students in the Liberal Arts are the largest population. Something we should look more closely at.
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I'd love to see those numbers, and to start putting some meaning behind them. What are the patterns of usage in different disciplines/colleges? I think some of it comes down to software needs, but also instructional styles, how technology is utilized in a discipline, college culture, and how affordances of labs match up with those things. I'm not sure the answer is so much reducing computer lab seats as much as understanding what people are doing and building spaces with that knowledge.
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If the CLA is the biggest user of the labs and much of what students are doing is printing, it would make sense for us to initiate a move toward paperless teaching and learning. If we are able to use the iPads for faculty after the pilot in ENGL, then perhaps we can fold that into a larger initiative.