Features Education

In the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, Angela Copeland and her colleagues at the Toronto Public Library knew that, while they couldn’t change the situation everyone was in, they could offer a tried-and-true comfort: books. Copeland, the library’s director of digital strategy and CIO, accelerated the organization’s plan to create digital access cards for […]

It’s said that everything is bigger in Texas, and not simply because its 268,500 square miles make it the largest state in the continental U.S. There are big hats, big trucks, big plates of barbecue and big high school football stadiums where almost 20,000 fans can cheer their team on. And there’s a big fiber […]

It’s a jewel in Western Massachusetts, the quaint but progressive city of Northampton and its outlying areas. Just a couple of hours west of Boston via the Mass Pike, it’s got a rich culture as well as Robert Frost rural splendor. Also close to five prestigious colleges, there’s no shortage of budding brainpower. The challenge […]

It doesn’t get any better than this on a Saturday night for the students working in the University of Oklahoma’s Security Operations Center in Norman: a bag of Doritos, a can of Red Bull and hours spent monitoring for computer alerts—the first step in stopping the bad guys. Three students are working as Tier 1’s […]

Albert Stadler remembers the day in 2019 when he got a phone call from nearby Crowder College. It had been hit by a crippling ransomware attack. In no time, Stadler, then the CIO at Missouri Southern State University, was on his way to help assess the damage. Stadler’s reputation as the “go-to guy” in the […]

Ask Avery Ma what he envisions in classrooms filled with young students and he might answer that he sees them swimming with dolphins or frolicking with whales—even if the classroom is in arid Arizona. Making this happen won’t require thousands of gallons of seawater or scuba suits and flippers for teachers and students, not with […]

Angela Neria first arrived on the Pittsburg State University campus as a freshman from a small town in Missouri. Crossing the Kansas border to continue her education, she cultivated interests in technology and business and met her husband, all while earning three degrees. Now, as the university’s CIO, she hopes to help other students have […]

In 1987, just months after becoming Hidalgo Independent School District’s lone computer coordinator, 22-year-old Adrian Garcia surveyed the IT landscape and did what had always felt like second nature: he dreamed of making things better. At a time when 10-megabyte Compaq Desktops were considered state-of-the-art and the internet was still the niche domain of plugged-in […]

A hacker has just released the cryptolocker virus into Schenectady County Community College’s database, and the clock is ticking. If successful, the virus will encrypt all of the institution’s files and hold them for ransom. While it’s never actually happened, this is the type of scenario CIO Antoine Harrison has to prepare for every day. […]

Walking through the green campus of Muhlenberg College, CIO Allan Chen sees students race across the campus from a contemporary dance class to an introduction to neuroscience class. Since joining the liberal arts institution in 2015, Chen has always appreciated the way the Allentown, Pennsylvania-based college encourages students to dictate their path—a mindset it also […]