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What IT Directors care about

By Fiona Strawbridge, on 30 October 2016

IMG_7849I heard about the Campus Computing survey for the first time at Educause 2016 – but this survey has been around since 1990 – before, I suspect, the term e-learning had even been coined. This is a survey of CIOs’ (IT Directors’) perspectives on e-learning, amongst other things and I was intrigued to find out what they thought, so went to hear about it from Casey (Kenneth) Green, the Founding Director of CampusComputing.net. I haven’t managed to find the actual survey report, so what follows is a bit patchy, but in essence, CIOs’ have ‘great faith in the benefits of e-learning’, but Learning Analytics keeps them up at night.

Their top five priorities are:

  1. hiring and retaining skilled staff;
  2. assisting academics with e-learning;
  3. the network and data security;
  4. providing adequate user support;
  5. leveraging IT resources to support student success.

The trouble with learning analytics:

CIOs are consistently bothered about their institutions’ ability to deliver learning analytics capabilities and cited concerns with:

  • the infrastructure to deliver them;
  • effectiveness of investment to date;
  • sense of satisfaction with what has been delivered

There was a general sense that their ‘reach exceeded their grasp’ in this area.

What we do vs what we buy:

An interesting observation was that CIOs’ rating of services and facilities that are bought in or outsourced was higher than of those that are developed in house. ‘What we buy works better than what we do’.  Which is perhaps unsurprising, but rather depressing. The service that CIOs were happiest about was wifi!

If I manage to get a link to the report or presentation I will link to it here.

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