By Lauren Williams. The editors of University Business are proud to announce this year’s Readers’ Choice Top Products. Campus leaders from across the country have seized the unique opportunity to nominate the products they are using to operate their institutions more efficiently and enhance students’ experiences. UB’s Top Products award program has seen substantial growth in nominations and winners in just its second year. Our editorial team carefully considered the quality and quantity of nominations in choosing the final list of honorees from hundreds of insightful testimonials that were submitted. More...

By John Warner. In one of his final posts of 2013, political blogger Andrew Sullivan noted that it was the year journalism “surrendered.”
The tipping point for Sullivan was the announcement that Time magazine has internally reorganized so the newsroom reports directly to the business executives, tearing down a wall that has existed since the inception of the free press. Read more...

By Barbara Fister. Joshua Kim started the year off with a challenge to examine our assumptions. Here are some of mine about the purpose and nature of academic libraries, in no particular order.
Learning how (and why) to explore ideas independently is an important goal of higher education, and libraries enable and inspire that kind of learning. A corollary to that assumption is that when we explore ideas, we are willing to have the information we encounter change our minds. An enigma wrapped inside this corollary to an assumption is the notion that people want to have their minds changed. Wayne Bivens-Tatum questions that notion usefully, suggesting information literacy is an "unnatural" activity. Read more...

By Joshua Kim. What are your edtech vendor hopes and wishes for 2014? Here are a few of my own:
Hope #1. That Higher Ed Decision Makers Insist That EdTech Vendors Get More Transparent in Their Pricing:
Do you know how much your school is paying for your LMS, your lecture capture system, your e-mail, your media management platform? Can you quickly compare prices across different vendors?  
The answers to all these questions is most likely “no”. Read more...

By Joshua Kim. Our IHE community may disagree on many things, but the one thing we seem to agree on is the wisdom of our own thinking.
Read the pieces on Views, Blog U, and the Comments on IHE and you don’t get the impression that our community suffers overmuch from self-doubt.
We seem to understand how to judge quality in higher ed.
We appear to know exactly why costs are high (or not high), why faculty have too much (or too little) power, and why too many (or too few) PhDs remain underemployed.
We know what makes a great course (online, residential, or blended), and how we should (or should not) measure learning. Read more...

By Matt Reed. Snow days for the first couple of days back after vacation are an odd treat. After the October storm a few years ago, I’m relatively content with any storm that leaves the power on. The unexpected time has given me a chance to work on some longer-term writing, which is nice. It has also forced me to deal with the mixed blessing that the appearance of writing on a laptop is indistinguishable from the appearance of goofing off on the internet. Read more...