Latin America. The CIO is an executive who is commonly under a lot of pressure and this situation is very clear in educational environments. The increase in educational costs, entry of new technologies, increase in student fees and especially the skills to which students must have access, are elements that put network administrators in situations of great pressure.
A number of organizations have published this year, diverse surveys on topics that concern CIOs, including Educause and Gartner and so through a survey, learn more about new technologies within campuses and how CIOs are allocating their resources to serve them.
Are they worried about the Internet of Things? What is its relationship to disruptive forces such as competency-based learning and online teaching?
Not surprisingly, one of the biggest concerns of the CIO in the range of his influence is that of a breach of network security. This fear, combined with the growing demand for Wi-Fi and high-bandwidth activities like video, has made campus IT infrastructure a strategic priority for CIOs. Improving mobile access and BYOD is the second most mentioned priority.
What's surprising, especially on college campuses, is that only 19% of CIOs are designing an Internet of Things (IoT) strategy as a strategic priority. Most CIOs are handling the concept as part of their BYOD and regular network infrastructure planning. A considerable part, 28%, will address it in the future or feel that it is not important enough to be on their list of priorities.
Almost all of the schools surveyed offer online courses, although only 17% have more than a quarter of their subjects available online. IT staff have an active role in online education and providing technology online and often advise directly on content creation. All but 16% of CIOs are involved in the online curriculum.
Competency-Based Learning and Network Analytics
Most CIOs are involved in the emerging field of competency-based education (CBE). The concept allows students to advance at their own pace, using technology to assess how far the student has progressed and being subject to be directed to content that complements their achievement as needed. Nearly all CIOs (97%) see the role for the growing tech classroom. This model makes extensive use of video classes and one-to-one class reservations.
CIOs involved in higher education are well synchronized to Network Analytics. They use analytics to manage the user network experience (67%), plan network capacity (67%), and to provide feedback capabilities to students (33%). Several of the IT directors among those who have not yet taken advantage of network analysis commented that they plan to do more with network analysis over the next year.
What is the role of the CIO like in higher education?
Higher education CIOs see their increasing role on the business and strategy side, much more so than on the curriculum side. While fundraising is important for schools, this is not an area that CIOs can actually contribute. As more traditional IT functions are outsourced to the cloud, the role of the CIO is in the transition to an innovation leadership role.
As Paige Francis, CIO of Fairfield University stated, "My role is to make our school synonymous with innovation by fully integrating mobility, accessibility and safety to continually support our teaching and learning environment."
The Higher Education CIO survey was conducted by Extreme Networks.
*Column written by Vala Afshar, CMO of Extreme Networks.
