Benchmarking

The submission date for this year's Core Data Service survey has been extended to March 19. Eligible campuses are encouraged to complete the survey by this date to ensure access to the updated database service later this spring. Find out more on the EDUCAUSE Core Data Service website.

From time to time, EDUCAUSE partners with the Center for Internet Security (CIS) on the development of new benchmarks. Below is an announcement regarding some new CIS activities.  Please consider participating.

Note: EDUCAUSE Institutional Members receive a 50 percent discount on the fee they pay to become members of CIS. 

The Center for Internet Security(CIS) is beginning work on several new benchmarks and would like to invite the members of the higher edducation community to participate in our consensus process.

For those of you new to CIS, we are a not-for-profit, end-user group that develops security guides, which we call benchmarks, by bringing together teams of experts who discuss security recommendations made in a draft.  These teams work via teleconference and email lists to reach consensus on the best security recommendations for a particular platform.  This process has proven very effective at creating detailed and useful benchmarks, while providing excellent opportunities for all involved to interact with their peers.

The UK's Higher Education Academy is carrying out a pilot e-learning benchmarking exercise, and my institution is going to be participating come October. The idea is to capture an overall picture of e-learning provision at Cambridge. The first phase will be fairly low-key, but intensive, and will involve desk research, reading reports on teaching and learning, and talking to people. The next phase will require us to raise the profile of the e-benchmarking project, and to decide on a framework and tools to help us capture the data we need.

This will be a new project for me, so I'm curious to learn more about e-benchmarking approaches and how other institutions (in the UK, and elsewhere) might be going about it.

In an interesting development, the HEA has required all institutions participating in the pilot to maintain separate e-benchmarking blogs (as a sample, try the Institute of Education and the University of Strathclyde), and there is a collective e-benchmarking blog hosted at the HEA which seems to contain some good introductory material.

This 53 minute recording provides coverage of the 2005 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference Session entitled A Successful Tool to Create Positive Change: Result of an IT Risk Assessment and Benchmark at Scandinavian Universities.

This 43 minute presentation by Brian Hawkins provides coverage of the 2005 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference Session entitled EDUCAUSE Core Data Service.

The deadline for completing this year's Core Data Service survey has been extended to March 27. Eligible campuses are encouraged to complete the survey to ensure access to the updated database service. Read the FAQ.

Data for fiscal year 2004-05 is now being collected for the Core Data Service database on campus IT environments. Eligible institutions should complete the Core Data survey by March 14.