Inside Higher Ed had piece on Jan. 6 about what developments we are likely to see in Higher Ed technology this year. It will be interesting to see if these trends impact WVU.
The Year Ahead in Higher Ed Technology
What happens when tough economic times combine with fatigue across the campus community hyping the latest “killer app,” and the growing intolerance of disruptions to services occasioned by security-related activities? I think the intersection of these three realities represent the most important challenges for campus information technology leaders in 2009.
We have not seen three years of negative economic growth since the birth of the Internet. We are one year into the global recession and the crystal-ball gazing under way on most campuses is not producing rosy scenarios. Chief information officers at most universities are closing in on “core” operations as they respond to cost cutting requirements after more than five years of marginal growth.
CIOs are portfolio managers. Like their counterparts, CIO portfolio management is really about meeting three goals: operating effectively, satisfying customers, and selectively engaging in innovation (R&D). In the sort of three-year downturn that most experts envision, tough decisions will be required to perform strongly in all three of those areas.
For many university technology leaders, the emergence over the past couple of years of Web 2.0 technologies represented a confluence of maturing underlying technologies combined with the rise of what we asserted was the first really promising set of mass collaboration tools. Here we were sitting on the precipice of the long promised “transformational” potential of technology to the education enterprise — and then the economy tanks.
In reality, the economic downturn is only one reason that the campus community is less enamored with Web 2.0 tools than most of us technologists. For many across the university the rate of change in introducing ever more exciting technologies has left them, to put it diplomatically, breathless. In reality, the hype over Web 2.0 is only the most recent instantiation of the long held view that we technologists are amusing ourselves and the rest of the campus to death, forever one gadget or applet away from the ultimate breakthrough.
Finally, whether it is the latest Facebook virus, botnets instigated from far flung corners of the world, or the now predictable “urgent” security fixes from our favorite vendors, there is a real sense across the campus that the “bad guys” are winning the war. What was simply a nuisance that could be solved with a bit of end-user education and throwing some hardware at the problem has emerged into our own full fledged war on the forces of evil on the Internet. Like recent international conflicts, most on the university campus are ready to conclude that we have neither a strategy for winning this war nor an exit strategy.
Combined, economic blues, end-user fatigue, and a growing sense of collective vulnerability to the forces that would seek to harm us has the campus technology community facing its biggest set of challenges in 25 years.
Against that sobering backdrop, here are my top 10 IT trends for higher education for 2009:
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