2007 Campus Computing Survey: Focus on Crisis

The Campus Computing Project's Campus Computing Survey has, since its inception in 1994, become an expected part of the academic calendar. Each year, Kenneth C. Green's brainchild illustrates for us the changes in the provision and use of information technology in higher education. In this article, Andy Guess, in Inside Higher Ed, focuses on the 2007 report's findings related to crises and crisis communications. Fewer than half of the reporting institutions have strategic crisis communications plans and only 22.1 percent incorporate cell phone in such plans.

Aside from security issues, the report follows up on trends several years in the making, such as the increasingly widespread reach of campus wireless networks (60.1 percent of college classrooms, from 51.2 percent last year and 31.1 percent in 2004). The number is nearly 70 percent for private research universities and almost 45 percent for community colleges. And while advocates for open-source software (which is free and can be adapted and improved without a license) hope that institutions of higher education will embrace the movement wholeheartedly, IT officers continue to see the benefits mainly in the abstract.

For example, 57.3 percent of respondents think open source “will play an increasingly important role” in campus information technology, but less than a third think it offers a truly “viable alternative” to commercial solutions. One possible area of growth is the adoption of open-source course management software — a potential threat to Blackboard — such as Moodle. The survey found that the proportion of institutions using the package had nearly doubled to 7.8 percent this year, but among private four-year colleges, it was much higher at 17.2 percent.