For decades, academia has been hampered by what appears to be preference for opacity and obfuscation. In an article published in this magazine three years ago, "The Vocabularies of Higher Education" (Gaston, 2014), the author lamented the welter of terms and acronyms that has accumulated over many decades, particularly within the current…

Every U.S. state and the District of Columbia maintain a system to collect and store education data. These systems vary widely in their scope and sophistication -- and, by extension, in their ability to provide information that can guide decision-making. Most states have developed statewide longitudinal data systems, which establish formal…

Agile software development methods are widespread in industry, and there is a wealth of academic research and practitioner publications currently available from this perspective. With the rise of Agile within companies worldwide, it is increasingly important for information systems education to keep up with this trend to ensure curriculum and…

Data plays a starring role in promoting educational equity, and data-driven decision making begins with good state policies. With the recent passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and a proposed federal rule to address racial disproportionality in special education, states will shoulder increased responsibility for eliminating…

IRIS is a new Current Research Information System (CRIS) developed by Cineca to upgrade and replace two previous solutions that have been used by Italian universities in the last 10 years. At the end of 2015, sixty-three Italian institutions are using IRIS. One of the main components of IRIS is DSpace-CRIS, an open source solution that can also be…

Access to student health information, such as immunizations, screenings, and care plans for chronic conditions, is essential for school nurses to fulfill their role in promoting students' health. School nurses typically encounter barriers to accessing health records and spend many hours attempting to retrieve health information. As a result,…

In massive online communities of creators (OCOCs), one of the core challenges is to encourage users to learn to create original contents using basic components. Recommending the right learning components at the right time is critical for improving user engagement and has not been fully studied due to the unstructured nature of online communities.…

Information systems capstone projects aim to prepare students for what they will encounter in the industry after graduation. Corporate application development is often a complex endeavor that requires coordination between related products. For example, software development in the mobile application sector may require a coordinated parallel…

During the current period of rapid technological change, business students need to emerge from their introductory course in Information Systems (IS) with a set of fundamental principles to help them "think about Information Technology (IT)" in future courses and the workplace. Given the digital revolution, they also need to appreciate…

Learning has transcended into a life-long endeavor in the information age. It is no longer restricted to confines of formal classrooms. Consequently, a student is not restricted to traditional learning resources like teachers, textbooks or printed content. Digital resources available on the Internet form a very significant component of…

Physics bachelor's degree recipients work in all kinds of professions--science writing, medicine, law, history of science, acting, music, healthcare and more. Since very few of these employees have the word "physics" in their job titles, it can be hard for new graduates to know where to look for jobs and how to find other recent physics…

Despite the strong relationship between geography and education policy, educational research tends to draw from other fields of inquiry such as economics, political science, and history. This special topics collection centers the usefulness of geography and place in educational policy research. The introduction explains the rationale for the…

New technologies are changing the ways that children navigate, find places, make and use maps, and explore the world. This is the geospatial revolution. Children live in a world of rapid technological innovation bringing new opportunities for cognitive development in school geography. Geography learning is an important component of primary school…

When an organization's need for technology changes, users expect solutions to provide sophisticated and complex functionality regardless of the size of the organization's budget or available resources. In exploring candidates for filling software needs for nonprofit organizations, one of the best tools is the request for proposal (RFP). This case…

The Total Learning Architecture (TLA) program sponsored by the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative seeks to develop a set of policy and standards defining the process for developing a "learning ecology," where multiple services and learning opportunities (of various modalities and points of delivery) can be managed in an…