ACADEMIA

John Campbell, Purdue University's associate vice president for teaching and learning technologies, has been appointed a scholar-in-residence with the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, a community of higher education institutions and organizations committed to advancing learning through information technology innovation. As associate vice president for teaching and learning technologies, Campbell led efforts to implement a course management system for 70,000 students on four campuses, enable a common audience response system for more than 300 classrooms, initiate a high-performance computing classroom project to integrate supercomputing into the undergraduate curriculum, create a digital learning collaboratory in a partnership with university libraries, and secure more than $5 million in external funding to support learning and technology initiatives. John Campbell EDUCAUSE is a national association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. During Campbell's one-year appointment with EDUCAUSE he will be testing whether analytics can be used to improve student success as measured by retention and graduation rates. "I'm excited that Purdue can play a leading role in determining whether analytics can contribute to academic success and retention," Campbell said. "We'll put Purdue on the forefront of finding ways to help students succeed." EDUCAUSE comprises more than 2,100 colleges, universities and educational organizations, including more than 200 corporations and 16,500 active members. Diana Oblinger, EDUCAUSE vice president and director of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative program, said that Campbell will lead the effort to apply analytic techniques to enhance education. "John brings an impressive breadth of institutional experience and a national perspective on advancing learning technology," Oblinger said. "This will help not only IT leaders and professionals, but higher education at large, in the critical application of analytics to our core mission." During Campbell's one-year tenure as scholar-in-residence, the Teaching and Learning Technologies area of Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP) will be lead by Ed Evans, who was most recently the interim executive director of ITaP's infrastructure area. Gerry McCartney, Purdue's interim vice president for information technology and CIO, said that a better understanding of the efficacy of technology in the classroom has direct benefits for students. "At Purdue, like all universities, we are committed to the success of every student admitted, and technology tools can help us help our students," McCartney said.