Thursday, March 27th 2008
Patrick Sutton


This morning I participated in a discussion on the use of the electronic application in admissions and enrollment management. Romesh Fernando from Mount St. Mary’s College articulated his views on the use of the electronic application.

Mr. Fernando explained to a group of 40 or so admissions officers how he buys lists of student names, complete with fields such as GPA information, degree of choice, and email address, and then plugs this information into a 3rd Party software used for contacting students.

Wednesday, March 26th 2008

Patrick Sutton

This morning at the AACRAO conference in Orlando, about 60 registrars, admissions directors and administrators from both public and private universities attended a break out session on the use of the "Constituent" Relationship Management system. A show of hands measured the attendance at around 70/30 public/private.

Tuesday, March 25th 2008

Today at the AACRAO conference I had the opportunity to hear Darcy Hardy, the Vice Chancellor of the UT TeleCampus speak on some internal measures that can be taken to improve the quality of online course production and delivery.

With experience in the online learning industry that stretches back to the 1980’s Dr. Hardy is surely one of the pioneers of online learning. Dr. Hardy opened the session with two provocative questions, delivered to the receptive audience in a firm tone:

Monday, March 24th 2008

Patrick Sutton

March 21st, 2008

Patrick Sutton

Making news today was the conclusion of a year-long saga involving MIT and James L. Sherley. After a 12 day hunger strike last year, Shirley filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The claim was dismissed by the EEOC based on the fact that it was submitted late, but the EEOC maintains that there was no merit to the claim regardless.

The FTC has settled with ValueClick for $2.9 million this week, and has settled with Adteractive and Member Source Media. This does not mean that its investigation into shady lead generation practices is over. On the contrary, the FTC plans to be more vigilant.

422 Group has released its newest version of the Continuum 422 CRM, "a constituent relationship management product for colleges which incorporates enrollment management analytics, electronic campaign and event management capabilities, as well as adaptive workflow rules to automate and personalize interaction with constituencies," according to an article on TMCNet.

As a result of the recent credit crisis, many students are now worried that they won't be able to qualify for college loans. Many experts remain optimistic, saying that the recent crisis may only help students in the long run by prompting them to search for lower-cost federal loans instead of the private loans that many have been relying on until now. Some students opt for private loans since private loans applications are less intimidating then lengthy federal loan applications; although rates can be up to twice as high on private loans than federal loans.

As the Internet becomes increasingly audio-visual, it is now necessary that strategies be devised in order to make videos and widgets more search engine-friendly. Technology is being developed in order to extract keywords from these online sights and sounds in order to fully optimize the experience. The challenge is finding the best way to do so. DMNews.com reports that speech recognition technology may be utilized since the content found in rich media files first need to be translated into text, thereby making the material searchable.

According to article in today's Chronicle of Higher Education, three former academic officers filed a lawsuit against Kaplan University defrauded the U.S. government of some $4 billion.

Yes...billion.