IT ISSUES & TRENDS,
2015
Faculty Technology Day
Wednesday, August 19, 2025
Top Ten IT Issues, 2015
1. Hiring and retaining qualified staff, and updating the
knowledge and skills of existing technology staff.
2. Optimizing the use of technology in teaching and
learning in collaboration with academic leadership,
including the appropriate level of technology to use.
3. Developing It funding models that sustain core service,
support innovation, and facilitate growth.
http://er.educause.edu/articles/2015/1/top-10-it-issues-2015-inflection-point
Top Ten IT Issues, 2015
4. Improving student outcomes through an institutional
approach that strategically leverages technology.
5. Demonstration the business value of information
technology and how technology and the IT organization
can help the institution achieve its goals.
6. Increasing the IT organization’s capacity for managing
change, despite differing community needs, priorities,
and abilities.
http://er.educause.edu/articles/2015/1/top-10-it-issues-2015-inflection-point
Top Ten IT Issues, 2015
7. Providing user support in the new normal – mobile,
online education, cloud, and BYOD environments.
8. Developing mobile, cloud, and digital security policies
that work for most of the institutional community.
9. Developing an enterprise IT architecture that can
respond to changing conditions and new opportunities.
10. Balancing agility, openness, and security.
http://er.educause.edu/articles/2015/1/top-10-it-issues-2015-inflection-point
Themes of Change
• Inflection Point… 1, 6, 9 & 10
a turning point that results in extraordinary change
• From Technical to Business… 2, 3, 4 & 5
IT architecture, process optimization, service
management, risk management, project
management are efforts to manage the change
• The New Normal… 7 & 8
Mainstream users enter the market place motivated
by the need to solve a problem that current solutions
cannot address
http://er.educause.edu/articles/2015/1/top-10-it-issues-2015-inflection-point
Trends
• The evolution or morphing of the campus IT organization,
in its role as the provider of the IT environment and also
with respect to its role in teaching and learning.
• The increased independence of instructors and students,
using their own tools to form their connections resulting in
custom pathways to achieve learning goals.
• The trend away form large central applications, run on
campus servers, in favor of confederations of apps, many
of which run in the cloud.
http://er.educause.edu/articles/2015/6/six-trajectories-for-digital-technology-inhigher-education
Trends
• The growing importance of interoperability and interface
standards
• The increase in multiple mobile device ownership.
• The capacity of data analytics to proffer custom portraits
of learners and to make predictions and suggestions
based on those portraits.
http://er.educause.edu/articles/2015/6/six-trajectories-for-digital-technology-inhigher-education
Trajectories
• Device Ownership and Mobile First
• The textbook and Open Education Resources (OER)
• Adaptive Learning Technology
• Learning Spaces
• The Next Generation Learning Management System (NGLMS)
• Learning analytics and Integrated Planning and Advising
Services (IPAS)
http://er.educause.edu/articles/2015/6/six-trajectories-for-digital-technology-inhigher-education
Next Generation Learning Management
System (NGLMS)
• 99% of colleges and universities run and LMS
• 85% of faculty use an LMS
• 56% of faculty use an LMS on a daily basis
• 74% of faculty say it is a useful tool to enhance teaching
• 83% of students use an LMS
• 56% of students say they use it in most or all courses
http://er.educause.edu/articles/2015/6/whats-next-for-the-lms
“The LMS has been highly successful in enabling the
administration of learning but less so in enabling
learning itself.”
http://er.educause.edu/articles/2015/6/whats-next-for-the-lms
Next Generation Digital Learning
Environment
• What comes next must be informed by the new learner-
centered model that increasingly characterizes higher
education practice (hence next generation).
• It must be digital, given that digital technology has become a
component of virtually all teaching and learning practice.
• It must be about learning, since learning ties together learner
and instructor.
• It must be an environment, an ecosystem – a community of
learners, instructors, tools and content.
http://er.educause.edu/articles/2015/6/whats-next-for-the-lms