By Lawrence Biemiller. As email and other information services migrate to the cloud, colleges’ information-technology employees are spending less of their time running complex in-house systems and more helping faculty members and administrative colleagues—as well as students—make the most of services provided by companies like Google. That shift puts a premium on the employees’ “soft skills” in communication, relationship building, and project management rather than on technical expertise. More...

By Lawrence Biemiller. Two years after Gov. Rick Perry of Texas called on the state’s colleges to offer bachelor’s degrees that would cost students no more than $10,000 each, two institutions rolled out a joint bachelor-of-applied-science program last month that they say can be completed in three years for not much more than the governor’s target amount. More...

By Lawrence Biemiller. Has your budget for attending conferences been slashed again? Here’s an idea: Send a remote-controlled robot instead. That’s how Bryan Alexander, a futurist and education-technology consultant, attended the Educause Learning Initiative conference, in New Orleans this week. Without leaving his home, in Vermont, he maneuvered a slightly-gawky, two-wheel “telepresence robot”—essentially, an iPad mounted on a sort of miniature Segway—around the Riverside Hilton’s meeting rooms. More...

By Jonah Newman. More than a quarter of a million Chinese students (287,260, to be exact) hold active U.S. student visas, which is more than the number of students from Europe, South America, Africa, Australia, and elsewhere in North America combined. In fact, Chinese students account for 29 percent of all foreign students studying in the United States. More...