Welcome


This blog is dedicated to the topics of Course materials, Innovation, and Technology in Education. it is intended as an information source for the college store industry, or anyone interested in how course materials are changing. Suggestions for discussion topics or news stories are welcome.

The site uses Google's cookies to provide services and analyze traffic. Your IP address and user agent are shared with Google, along with performance and security statistics to ensure service quality, generate usage statistics, detect abuse and take action.

Wednesday, January 4, 2017

Bulk of Tech Budget to Support Online Classes

Most colleges and universities anticipate a big bump in enrollment for online courses in 2017, according to a University Business survey of campus technology administrators.

About 75% of survey respondents said their institutions expected to enroll more students in online classes in the coming year and 60% forecast their schools will add more options to their online programs. As a result, almost half of the technology administrators are looking to build up the online learning infrastructure this year.

Where will institutions be spending their tech dollars? The largest group of respondents (49%) said they’ll be investing in improving academic technologies, such as lecture capture and audiovisual equipment. Of those, 30% plan to enhance technologies that instructors can access from anywhere on campus, while 29% will be boosting tech equipment within classroom and lab spaces.

In response to some campuses experiencing hacking attempts on their networks, 47% of survey respondents will be increasing network and data security in 2017, a big jump from 28% in last year’s survey. Forty-seven percent also intend to put more budget money into cloud computing and storage, up from 30% the prior year.

As students and staff consume ever-increasing amounts of bandwidth, 45% of campus tech administrators also expect to expand their Internet and Wi-Fi infrastructure.