Getting Beyond the Vicious Cycle of Outdated IT

By David Raths, Campus Technologies

Before 2009, the IT leadership team at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, KS, was stuck in a vicious cycle of falling behind on technology infrastructure replacements, squeaking by with patches and maintenance on older systems. Without a dedicated funding stream, IT floundered — and faculty, staff and students had low expectations of what technology could bring to the campus. Something as simple as video streaming in the classroom was difficult because of poor network infrastructure. Flash forward to 2017: An ongoing and sustainable infrastructure rebuild, including working with cloud and hosted vendors, is reshaping the culture within the IT group and the perception of IT on campus. How has the department made this transition and had such a great impact?

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2017/10/26/getting-beyond-the-vicious-cycle-of-outdated-it.aspx

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from Educational Technology http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/?p=33221

Online Platform Teaches Dying Languages To Save Them From Extinction

By Holly Brockwell, Gizmodo UK

There are heaps of ways to learn languages online, from intensive tutored courses to fun cartoony apps. You can even learn made-up languages, like Dothraki, Klingon and Esperanto – a fact that must be somewhat frustrating to Inky Gibbens, founder of the Tribalingual platform for dying languages. Gibbens is half Buryat – a subgroup of the Mongols – and set up the platform when she realised that the Buryat language of her maternal grandparents is classified as endangered by UNESCO. A language dies every two weeks according to the UN, with half of the current 7,000 languages expected to be gone by the turn of the century.

http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2017/02/online-platform-teaches-dying-languages-to-save-them-from-extinction/

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from Educational Technology http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/?p=24219

New Coding Bootcamp Guarantees Jobs for Gradates

by EdSurge

Online learning company Springboard is launching its first data science bootcamp, the Data Science Career Track. The course, which costs between $4,800-$6,000 depending on payment method, promises graduates a job upon completion or a 100 percent refund. (According to Springboard, 50 out of 50 tracked graduates found jobs within six months at places including Amazon, Pandora and Boeing.) The self-paced course takes about 8 to 10 hours a week and runs for around five to six months. Through weekly mentor meetings and 24-7 teaching assistants, students learn skills such as statistics, Python, SQL and Hadoopfor. Springboard also pairs students with a career coach to help with interview prep, resume writing, and building connections to employers.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-01-05-new-coding-bootcamp-guarantees-jobs-for-gradates

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from Educational Technology http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/?p=22356