Four major university systems will share online courses, analytics and learning-management software through a cloud-based digital education platform called Unizin, portions of which launched in July. Developed by Indiana University, Colorado State University, the University of Florida and the University of Michigan, Unizin will house everything from homework videos to flipped classroom content to distance […]

Food, yard and animal waste at University of California, Davis is being converted into energy by a biodigester that’s the largest of its kind on a college campus. The $8.5 million facility, unveiled on Earth Day, will provide an annual 5.6 million kilowatt hours to the campus. That’s enough to power 800 California homes, says […]

UBTech open keynote speaker Richard Baraniuk, of Rice University, talked to a full house about an initiative to create a library of free, high-quality textbooks for college courses and how that can impact the debt crisis facing students. His organization, OpenStax, has—at a cost of about $1 million each—published a series of free, peer-reviewed open-source […]

Along with enrollment, public funding and debt, providing health care to employees will be among the top financial pressures on higher education in the coming years, say several campus administrators. Bill Kelleher, vice president for finance and administration at Western New England University in Massachusetts, says health care is indeed one of the biggest components […]

Five years after the Great Recession’s official end, higher ed endowments and fundraising are finally recovering, but there is no rising financial tide that’s lifting all boats—especially smaller ones that depend heavily on tuition. Instead, a new “economic normal” is being keenly felt at smaller, tuition-driven universities and colleges, forcing campus leaders to diversify their […]

A potentially positive higher ed economic indicator is that more institutions purchased student information systems in 2013 than had done so in any year since 2008, according to a recent market analysis by The Tambellini Group. Two of the main reasons given for the 195 purchases were the need to update outdated software and to […]

Next fall, Susquehanna University will begin enforcing a long-standing policy requiring most students to live on campus all four years, officials at the Pennsylvania school say. There was a small protest by students after media coverage indicated the policy was new. But spokeswoman Angela Burrows says the decision was driven simply by new residential units. […]

Budget crunches and crowded courses are two reasons online science labs are becoming more popular in higher ed. Some online labs require little or no equipment, and take up no space on campus. Officials at colleges and universities are seeking ways to move students through the curriculum, but the physical facilities and the number of […]