West News - eBriefings
In this issue:
San Juan College Holds 5th Annual Free IT Conference
San Juan College is leveraging its talent and strategic partnerships to foster innovation and community collaboration for the San Juan area and beyond. Top local and national industry professionals will provide an updated look at technology at the 2009 Technology Leadership Conference, hosted by the Office of Technology Services in the SJC Little Theatre. To register and review the online brochure and press release, go here.
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Chronicle Reports on San Juan MicroLectures
Online services manager and Sungard course designer for San Juan College, David Penrose, is featured in the March 6th issue of The Chronicle of Higher Ed. The article covers his 60 second microlecture format that is gaining popularity and boosting online enrollment for San Juan's occupational safety program.
PDFFiles/San Juan College/60 second lectures.pdf..pdf
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Missouri Campus Uses Electronic Textbooks
Northwest Missouri State University is making a leading technology move to extend cost savings and simplicity to its students. This spring 4,000 students will be reading e-textbooks via mutliple delivery methods. The university is providing ready-to-go pre-purchased and pre-loaded electronic readers, or students can opt to have their textbooks loaded on their laptops at the school bookstore, or download to their ipods.
The e-readers have interactive pop up quizzes, keyword search and on-screen note taking ability. Northwest estimates that a textbook-free campus will save them $400,000 a year. More...
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CSN College of Southern Nevadas new Data Center continues to obtain national recognition
The data center at CSN has been redesigned and revitalized to improve performance and save CSN money. The redesign has drawn national attention by numerous higher education institutions, vendors, and local gaming casinos. Numerous higher education institutions, businesses, and vendors have personally flown into Las Vegas to visit the state-of-the-art facilities at CSN. They are all interested in the concept of consolidation, costs savings, and the high performance that is being demonstrated by the new configuration and facilities. In addition many other vendors and businesses have had CSN IT leadership join in national forums to share their expertise and experience.
By investing in a new data center, and utilizing virtualization technologies, power usage in the data center has dropped significantly. Before the implementation of the new technologies at CSN, servers were pretty much a one use device. Each device had its own power supply or supplies and fans. These servers generated a lot of heat and used a lot of electricity. So far CSN has moved over 55 servers from single unit machines to new technologies. The college has reduced the number of power supplies from 110 down to 18. The kilowatt usage hours has dropped from 72.5 kilowatts/hour to 13.04. Cooling has also become significantly more efficient as the heat that was previously generated by the old machines has dropped in the data center. The costs savings in electricity alone is estimated at $51,800 annually.
In summary, the most important aspect of the new data center is the access and convenience of information to faculty and students. Prior to the changes in the data center the uptime of all systems was around 65%. The new data center has already achieved a sustained 99% uptime performance level, while making CSN more environmentally friendly and cost conscious.
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Sustainability Report Available Through AASHE
AASHE, the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education just released a digest that comprises news stories and resources. The goal of the report is to serve as a standard reference for what institutions are doing what to advance sustainability in higher education.
The full 230-page report includes over 800 stories on higher education institutions that are leading the way to a sustainable future. It is organized into 24 chapters spanning education, research, campus operations, administration, and finance. The full report can be accessed and downloaded at http://www.aashe.org/publications/digest.php
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CSN Online Gaming Program was a Good Bet!
The college of Southern Nevada introduced a new online casino management degree program. Development of the new program was a collaborative effort between CSN’s Office of eLearning and the Division of Workforce and Economic Development, SunGard Higher Education, and Las Vegas gaming industry experts. The results were quite favorable. (Full Story)
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Data Encryption a vital Component of Information Security
Most educational administrators are aware of the increasing concern over data security. This is not a surprise considering a recent report by a non-profit agency reported a 69% increase in data breaches in the first half of 2008, compared with a similar period in 2007. As a prudent business practice and precautionary measure to protect data, we believe that data encryption is vital to further protect data no matter where it ends up. If data is encrypted it is protected from being misused when and if data on a disk, flash-drive, laptop, or PC gets in the wrong hands. As part of this prudent business practice SunGard Higher Education has started a data encryption process with our employees to ensure all laptop and desktop equipment they use have encryption installed. We strongly advise all our clients to incorporate a campus wide encryption process for all their desktops and laptops. For further information please contact your onsite CIO and/or General Manager.
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Three CIOs to Present at Educause - National Recognition for some of our Clients
- Bob Paulson, Donna Liss, and Elliot Kimbrough will all represent their institutions at the 2008 Educause conference in Orlando on Oct 31, 2008. Along with President Dr. Marsha Drennon at State Fair Community College they will present how they have been successful on recruiting and retaining top IT professionals in rural areas. Donna Liss is CIO at Truman State University, Elliot Kimbrough Executive Director at Lincoln University, and Bob Paulson is VP of IT at State Fair Community College.
Other National Recognition
- University Business features State Fair Community College in May, 2008 article entitle ‘Driving the Data…Applying business intelligence is helping community college leaders reach their Goals (Full Story from UB Magazine)
- College of Southern Nevada’s new Data Center continues to obtain national recognition (Full Story)
- Truman State University presents at 2008 Educomm in Las Vegas (Full Story)
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