Feature

Students, faculty, and staff turn to campus help desks when their work has come to a standstill because technology isn’t behaving as they think it should. IT support centers at colleges and universities across the nation are ditching paper and turning to software solutions to help get frustrated users back on track more effectively and efficiently.

At the Rochester Institute of Technology (N.Y.), biomedical photography students are using videoconferencing technology to show their work to audiences in Wales. A librarian is providing tutorials to students at satellite campuses in Eastern Europe. And researchers are holding meetings with project sponsors hundreds of miles away.

In old-school lecture halls, the rooms would be outfitted with a single projector in the back and a single screen in the front, while large numbers of students quietly listened as the professor spoke. But as the standard lecture experience has become dated, the audiovisual needs of classrooms have evolved to support group study and collaborative, team-based learning. Mark Valenti, president and CEO of The Sextant Group, an audiovisual consulting firm, puts it this way: “We’re basically seeing the beginning of the end of the lecture hall.”

An effective chief information officer can be a bit like a superhero, but without the visible cape. Protecting information and ensuring the population can go about its day-to-day are all in a day’s work for these administrators. This spring, we talked with five campus CIOs to hear what is keeping them up at night and getting them revved to go in the morning. While we heard bandwidth is an ever-growing need (it’s like a teenager on a growth spurt), we also heard good news about the ability to use technology to inform the culture and learning of an institution.

Imagine thinking thousands of thoughts at the same time. What if each thought was one piece of a really big problem—a problem now solvable in hours or days rather than years because of this simultaneous thought process? That’s what high-performance computing (HPC) does.

The campus student center may once have been the place students passed through on the way to their next class. But these facilities have evolved into bustling destinations that foster campus culture and community.