Dive Brief:
- Wayne State University, more than one year into a successful rollout of the Academica web portal, is now looking to expand the reach of the communication-focused platform, first through Michigan’s Merit Network.
- Campus Technology reports the cloud-hosted Academica allows users to create streams, linking people with similar problems or interests, and a feedback stream gave IT staffers a chance to track issues with the new system when the legacy platform was retired last August.
- Longtime Wayne State CIO Joseph Sawasky now leads the Merit Network, and he will shepherd the portal through a second launch, this time with IT leaders across the state, and the university hopes other higher education institutions adopt it, too.
Dive Insight:
Academica expands to meet demand as necessary, thanks to Amazon Web Services’ elastic cloud. It has provided a consistent, reliable service since it became Wayne State’s only portal. The communication feature lines up with a push for more engagement across higher ed. Students performance is said to increase with engagement with their institutions. In keeping with this theory, instructors are experimenting with in-class communication tools that let students answer each other’s questions in real-time and give faculty insights into content that should be reviewed or taught differently in the future.
A recent study about social media use in a massive open online course found more evidence for the positive effects of this extra engagement, though it found there is such a thing as too many options. As colleges encourage communication, limiting the number of platforms on which to engage may be key to having the most meaningful impact.