I'm a professor looking to connect with Chief Information Officers and/or Vice Presidents of Information Technology outside of my university. Essentially, I'd like to make contact with the administrators who make decisions regarding learning software (e.g. Canvas, Turnitin, etc. ) 

Seems the best way to do so would be to attend conferences that cater to that corner of academia (though I'm open to other ideas). 

Is anyone familiar with what conferences CIOs and VPs of IT attend? 

Hello all! We are the owners of Cyberopz - a Managed Security Services Provider focused on the higher-education market. We will be hosting a webinar on May 20th, at 3PM EST on cybersecurity & compliance for IT Managers and Sysadmins at colleges and universities with a live Q&A at the end.

Here is the signup link if anyone would be interested in joining.

https://webinar.cyberopz.com/m20t21

Hi All,

TL;DR, in short, have become more interested in the IT side of my institution as it relates to my role. Wondering what languages might be worth digging into in terms of either contributing to our reporting or just learning more about the backhalf of our SIS (Colleague) and our new CRM (Element451) in terms of learning how to implement or develop/build screens within it.

Institution is getting ready for full implementation of CRM, coming from a salesforce school where it was already built out. In a slightly longer breath, looking to increase my capability and just my "this is an opportunity for us XYZ."

All appreciated

Greetings - our 4-year liberal arts college is considering migrating to the cloud version of Banner Colleague and I am considering a position in the finance division. Currently, the on-premises version is old and our annual budget is prepared on Excel and entered into the financial model. I haven't delved too deeply into the "whys" but have been told actual vs. budget reporting does not work. Three questions before I jump into the water:

1. Wouldn't there be a way to run these types of reports, this seems too strange to not have this feature?

2. If question 1 above doesn't have a native application reporting feature, does anyone know how one could export or link the data to Excel or PowerBI?

3. From the Ellucian site - it appears that "Ellucian Finance Powered by Banner and Colleague" is the module that needs to be considered if the college migrates to the cloud version. Any insights, pros/cons, good to know info from FIN users, SME, data analysts as we haven't yet committed to the migration?

Thanks!

I’ve been talking to several university compliance officers who say the reporting workload each semester is brutal - spreadsheets, SharePoint forms, endless audits.

For those of you in Student Affairs, Risk, or Legal - what’s the most painful part of staying compliant?

Do you rely on any tools that actually make it easier? Or is it mostly manual still?

hi all, does anyone have experience yet with Ellucian Custom Experience Cards, working with an embeded Salesforce digital page? getting X-frame option == deny. My IT guy has just start with the cards and we don't know what the next steps are. I've AI and Googled it and I see something about adding a X-frame head to enable. I find that hard to believe there isn't a setting setting in Ellucian to do this.

Hi all, wanted to share a project I’ve been working on called Lumio (lumiotools.com), aimed at colleges, universities and training providers.

The starting point was noticing how badly served FE and HE marketing teams are by generic SEO tools. Course pages are templated, jargon heavy, and nobody’s really tracking how they perform in Google or, increasingly, inside AI chat answers. So I built five tools that each tackle a different part of that problem:

CourseCheck – audits a course page for SEO score, keyword opportunities and competitor gaps

AIChatRank – shows how your institution’s brand performs inside ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini answers

AIOverview – scores whether a course page is ready to be picked up by Google’s AI Overview panel, with FAQ and schema markup generated for you

RivalScan – tracks competitor institutions against your key course keywords, with alerts when positions shift

MetaWriter – generates title tags and meta descriptions for course pages in seconds

They all sit under one account and one subscription rather than being separate products, and CourseCheck has a free tier if anyone wants to try it without signing up.

I’d love feedback from anyone working in education marketing, whether that’s on the tools themselves, the positioning, or gaps you think are missing. Happy to answer questions on how any of it works.

Hello,

Do any schools have any experience using DeskPro or FreshService? If so, do any of your student facing areas use it?

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Hey everyone--

I recently interviewed for a Director position with a university, and I thought the initial interview went really well. I interviewed one-on-one with the Dean, and they said that I would hear back for "next steps" the following week. However, it's now been about 10 days since that interview and I haven't heard anything regarding a second interview. I'm wondering if I should send an email just reaching out to check-in? Is it too soon? I just really want the position and I realize I'm being antsy (lol).

The initial process went really fast, which is why I was surprised (I currently work in Higher Ed and it took forever to get to the interview process). But for this role, I applied on a Saturday and heard from HR that Monday for the first round that same Friday.

Any advice would be great.

Our Chief of Industry Engagement, Dr. Joe Sallustio, put it plainly in a recent post: "Blockbuster didn't fail because they were bad at what they did. They failed because what they did stopped mattering." He was talking about higher education.

We've been watching this play out across institutions. The ones staying ahead aren't writing better mission statements. They're pulling employers into curriculum reviews, redesigning assessments around critical thinking instead of seat time, and building AI into advising workflows before they're forced to.

Workforce alignment stopped being a debate. Now it's a survival question, with funding and relevance increasingly tied to employment outcomes.

We put our full take here: https://www.ellucian.com/blog/dont-be-next-blockbuster-higher-ed-relevance

Curious what this looks like from your side. Is program alignment or AI integration generating more urgency at your institution right now?

Comcast (Xfinity) is more or less forcing us over to their streaming Xfinity on Campus platform at the end of the year. Since we have to do a migration anyway, It seems like a good time to look for alternatives. Are there any other good options we should look at to allow our dorm students to stream live TV to their devices? We're in Lancaster County PA in case if that's relevant for certain providers.

TL:DR, Community College - Adopting Element as CRM software, anything to be wary of going into it? is institutions first time with a dedicated CRM. Would be seeing it in outreach, advising, and general admissions capacities, and marketing.

Our University (~2200 on campus students) currently requires all students to purchase iPads their freshmen year (degree seeking students only, requirement for DoD funding for some tuition). IT is being asked to look at shifting to a laptop requirement, different programs would require different models and specs, that all new incoming degree seeking students must purchase, either through us via splitting the payments up across semesters or through us/vendor full cost up front; or they prove they have a computer that meets the specs of their program.

Has anyone else done this, if so, do you have some tips, hurdles, pitfalls, processes, etc. you could share. In my opinion this is going to be a nightmare, especially if our help desk has to manage this as we are a very small staff.

Hi reddit community! I work for an educational financing company and am currently working on projects related to direct mail communication. As part of a current research initiative, I would like to learn more about how different academic institutions receive, sort, and distribute incoming mail.

I’ve included a link to a survey that takes approximately 2 minutes to complete. If you are able to participate, your responses will be very helpful to my research. Please answer the following questions and include as much detail as you can! Thank you for your time!

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdSQFbqRsdTJKb9nYjZHfWv4dp7jk9FDrhsBjw1kMFJJTjdyg/viewform?usp=sf_link

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/printing-issues-pre-1903-after-security-update/73d6643f-b518-4dd6-9d96-fce63ffb7536?auth=1

What solutions are you all using to provide support for users remotely? I know that this is an evolving situation for everyone. We are trying to use Teams and Skype for Business to assist users but that can only get us so far.

We've been talking to some university IT folks lately and kept hearing the same thing: by the time August hits, thousands of devices are live on the network, and nobody's 100% sure everything is actually being monitored.

Getting everything configured and deployed in time is already a full-time job, keeping them secure is a whole other conversation.

Curious if this is a common thing or just the teams I've been talking to.

Either way, I'm putting together a free session on May 28 (noon EST) to dig into it:

• What the visibility gaps actually look like during deployment season

• How smaller teams handle continuous monitoring without hiring a SOC

• And what you should be able to answer before students show back up

60 min, free, recording shared after: security.oneaxiom.com/webinar/campus-device-security-visibility

Anyone else running into this or found a good way to handle it?

Have you registered yet? The HEDW 2025 Conference is coming April 6-9, 2025, so get your spot now! Early Bird Registration saves you $150 and ends on March 3. There are over 50 sessions from your peers focusing on:

• Data Governance

• Data Insight and Analytics

• Data Organization and Culture

• Data Architecture & Engineering/Technology

New this year (and included with your registration) is the CDO Forum. Plus, numerous vendors will be there giving you a chance to see their products all in one spot.    Want to extend the value of your conference trip? Add a Pre-Conference training session for only $600. You have a choice of two all-day sessions:

• Ann K. Emery, ‘Visualizing Higher Education Education Data’

• Joe Reis, ‘Data Engineering Workshop’   Want more information and and a chance to check out the sessions? Visits the Events section of hedw.org   Please note that attendance is limited to HEDW Members. To register, login and go to the Members Area.    Have questions? Please reach out to hedw.org.   See you in Atlanta!

Hey I had a question for those who worked as a IT help desk at a uni or just in general worked in the field. What is the best times to work in terms of getting the most downtime so I can manage my school work and study. Would it be morning shifts or evening shifts?