Tag: Common

  • Carousel Digital Signage Integrates with CrisisGo to Empower Safer School Communities

    Carousel Digital Signage Integrates with CrisisGo to Empower Safer School Communities

    MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA – Carousel Digital Signage announces a new technology partnership with CrisisGo that enables K-12 schools and businesses to deliver emergency alerts and other safety messages to digital displays with immediacy. The integration is enabled through an open API that triggers visual alerts, interactive maps and more to Carousel Cloud digital signage networks via the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), a global standard that supports the digital exchange of emergency alerts and public warnings over multiple networks.

    CrisisGo’s Safety iResponse platform offers a comprehensive suite of advanced alerting software and tools that empower school districts to create safer and more secure learning environments. Its features include real-time alerting, incident management and parent notification, all of which combine to help schools respond to emergencies in an efficient and effective manner. The platform also immediately shares emergency alerts with local law enforcement when police assistance is needed.

    Direct integration of the two software platforms on a common IT network ensures consistent monitoring of incoming triggers from Safety iResponse to Carousel Cloud. Upon recognizing an incoming alert, Carousel Cloud disseminates the active alert as a priority for instant takeover of all  targeted screens. Upon resolution, Carousel Cloud immediately removes the alert and resumes normal operations, eliminating the need to schedule expiration times or manually clear the system. That accelerates the important process of reunification to ensure all students, teachers and other staff members are accounted for and safe.

    “Carousel Cloud’s ability to recognize an all-clear message is a differentiator from other digital signage solutions that we have evaluated,” said Jacob Lewis, Chief Security Officer, CrisisGo. “Carousel Cloud will also recognize the type of event our system is addressing and exactly where the alerts need to go, which could be select screens, schoolwide, or across an entire multi-campus network. This seamless interoperability represents an important step in our multimodal strategy for mass notification, which also includes delivery to all computers and mobile devices that are connected to our software.”

    The CrisisGo partnership represents the latest technology integration between Carousel Digital Signage and emergency alerting platforms aimed at strengthening school safety in K-12 environments. Lewis says that while K-12 remains the top priority for CrisisGo’s integrated solution with Carousel, he anticipates potential expansion into other verticals including corporate enterprise and manufacturing.

    “Our collaboration with CrisisGo represents the next step in our efforts to keep students and faculty informed, safe and resilient across all grade levels,” said Eric Henry, SVP of Business Architecture, Carousel Digital Signage. “Carousel Cloud’s open platform enables clean and reliable interoperability with CrisisGo, and our common integration with the CAP protocol ensures immediate dissemination of important visual alerts that will help school districts keep all campuses safe and secure.”

    About Carousel Digital Signage

    Carousel is Digital Signage Content Management Software that is easy to use, scalable, and reliable. With a deep feature set and strong technology partnerships Carousel gives you the most value in digital signage. Carousel Digital Signage is a division of Tightrope Media Systems. You can reach the Carousel team at (866) 866-4118, or visit  www.carouselsignage.com.

    About CrisisGo

    CrisisGo has been leading the K-12 industry since 2013, setting the standard for school safety. Our comprehensive emergency and safety management platform empowers schools with real-time alerting, incident management, visitor management, threat and behavioral intervention features, and reunification solutions. CrisisGo also offers comprehensive training to equip staff and teachers with handling emergencies. CrisisGo consistently innovates to enhance K-12 security, partnering with educators and administrators to create safe and nurturing learning environments and redefining school safety for a brighter future in education.

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  • The Common App welcomes community colleges

    The Common App welcomes community colleges

    The Common App allows students to submit applications to more than 1,100 higher ed institutions. But until now, none of its members were community colleges focused on granting associate degrees.

    The organization announced a first-of-its-kind partnership with the Illinois Community College Board last week, adding Sauk Valley Community, Rend Lake, Carl Sandburg and Black Hawk Colleges to its ranks. Three more two-year institutions will join next admissions cycle: Lincoln Land Community, Oakton and Triton Colleges.

    When the Common App launched 50 years ago, it offered high school students a streamlined application path to 15 private institutions. Since then, hundreds of others have signed on, most of them fairly selective four-year colleges and universities. The new move raises a question: What do open-access institutions, which accept all students, stand to gain from joining the application platform?

    Brian Durham, executive director of the Illinois Community College Board, said most importantly, it boosts their visibility.

    Starting this year, the Common App is partnering with the Illinois Board of Higher Education to support its direct admissions program to eight public universities in the state. As a part of the partnership, eligible high school students who apply to any college through the Common App will be notified of their direct admissions offers from these universities. Durham wants those students to receive notice about their local community college choices, too.

    “We want to make sure that community colleges are seen as an option on that list”—even “potentially a first choice for students,” Durham said. “It’s ultimately about exposing them to that as an option.” He added that students who gain admission to universities sometimes realize later that “they can’t afford it, or it’s not right choice for them.” This way, if they come to that conclusion after filling out the Common App, they’ll know which community colleges are “right there” and ready to serve them.

    Research suggests the move could offer community colleges an enrollment bump. The National Bureau of Economic Research published a paper in 2019 that found that institutions that joined the Common App enjoyed on average a 12 percent increase in admissions compared to the years before they joined, according to an analysis of Common App data from 1990 to 2015.

    Durham hopes that eventually all 45 of the state’s public two-year colleges offer a Common App application route in addition to their in-house application systems.

    A Decade-Long Effort

    Jenny Rickard, president and CEO of the Common App, said that the organization has been working toward representing a broader swath of higher ed institutions for a decade.

    In 2014, the organization stopped requiring member colleges to use a “holistic admissions” process—assessing students beyond test scores—in order to open up the platform to more institutions. The Common App also got rid of its requirement that applications include essays and recommendations. Then, in 2018, the organization launched a new application for transfer students applying to four-year universities.

    All those moves “opened the door for us to be able to welcome two-year and four-year public institutions into the membership,” Rickard said. She noted that, as of the 2022–23 application cycle, 77 percent of current Common App members admitted over 50 percent of their fall first-year applicants, a sign that the organization has moved away from serving only more selective institutions.

    The Common App also set a “moonshot” goal in 2023 to substantially increase its applicants from low- and middle-income communities, Rickard said. The organization aims to bring in 650,000 additional applicants from those backgrounds by 2030.

    Rickard said teaming up with community colleges is the organization’s most recent step toward diversifying both its member institutions and its applicant pool.

    “Bringing a greater diversity of college and university members into the Common App helps us pursue that mission, and it also helps students from all different backgrounds be able to see the great diversity of institutions in the United States and the world,” she said. “Most students go to more open-access and less selective institutions,” yet too often “we focus on the places that nobody can get into.”

    Durham agreed that the move could expand the Common App’s “footprint,” given applicants to community colleges are disproportionately low-income and first-generation students.

    “More underserved students are naturally going to go to community college for all the reasons we know: affordability, location,” he said. So, working with community colleges offers the Common App a new “opportunity to reach those students.”

    Steps for the Future

    As much as Durham would like to see more community colleges join the Common App’s ranks, he believes the platform will need to change to serve community colleges at a larger scale.

    Currently the platform is designed for high school students, he said, but many community college applicants are adult learners or attend college part-time. Those types of students are more likely to enroll directly at a college rather than find themselves on the Common App platform like high school seniors applying to multiple institutions with guidance from college counselors.

    “How do you get a 34-year-old guy who wants to go into welding to go through that application?” Durham said. For now, he expects participating Illinois community colleges will maintain their own “parallel” application systems “until we can work that out down the road.”

    Rickard acknowledged the organization has work to do to optimize its platform for a more diverse set of institutions. She hopes that onboarding this initial cohort of community colleges will help the Common App figure out its blind spots.

    “We know that we need to learn more about how our platform can continue to evolve to meet their needs more effectively,” she said.

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  • Common App adds first community college members

    Common App adds first community college members

    Common App is adding its first ever community college members, the organization announced in a press release Thursday. 

    The seven new partner institutions are all members of the Illinois Community College system. Four of them—Sauk Valley Community, Rend Lake, Carl Sandburg and Black Hawk Colleges—are joining the platform immediately; another three institutions, Lincoln Land Community, Oakton and Triton Colleges, will join next admissions cycle. 

    Common App has a few members that technically include community colleges, like Miami-Dade College in Florida, but those institutions also offer baccalaureate degrees. The new members offer associate degree programs only. 

    In the press release, Common App CEO Jenny Rickard said she hoped the move would help promote college access and ease struggling community colleges’ recruitment efforts. 

    “To close the gap in low- and middle-income students applying, we need to expand the types of institutions students can connect with,” she wrote.

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  • Building common ground in higher education

    Building common ground in higher education

    Welcome to year four of the “Beyond Transfer” blog on Inside Higher Ed. We’re humbled by and thankful for the lively and passionate community this has become. We continue to be impressed with the levels of readership, the exemplary work that various authors describe, the connections that are made as people respond to one another’s work and the dedication to students that jumps off the page. We begin 2025 feeling truly grateful to all those working hard every day to ensure fair treatment of students and their learning. Thank you for all you do.

    Each year, we kick off the “Beyond Transfer” blog with some reflections on what we’ve learned from you and all our partners on the ground and what that means for the year ahead. We are excited to welcome Sova’s new partner Marty Alvarado to this endeavor. Marty has a long history of leading impactful transfer and learning mobility work, and while she’s new to Sova, her insights have long guided our work.

    In 2024, Sova’s transfer and learning mobility team was far-flung and working deeply in many contexts. As a result, we begin 2025 midstride on a variety of fronts:

    • In states: The Sova team is embedded in truly consequential transfer and learning mobility work in several states. This hard, on-the-ground work includes facilitating state-level, cross-sector leadership tables, providing technical assistance for institutional collaborations, supporting implementation of legislatively mandated reforms and serving as a thought partner to state agencies and system offices in diverse political and governance contexts.

    The new year is a time when people reflect on the year that passed and make commitments for the year ahead. This year, we thought we’d play on that theme by sharing some reflections on the past year and what that means for our team’s commitments in the year ahead.

    You may have heard that Merriam-Webster’s 2024 Word of the Year was “polarization,” which Merriam-Webster defined as “division into two sharply distinct opposites; especially, a state in which the opinions, beliefs or interests of a group or society no longer range along a continuum but become concentrated at opposing extremes.” For anyone who lived through the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the selection of this word of the year probably comes as no surprise.

    This led us to reflect on a hard lesson we have learned through our transfer and learning mobility work, which is that this, too, is a space that can quickly lead to polarization. So often, we hear blame placed on receiving institutions for not taking enough credits or on sending institutions for not preparing students well enough. We see examples of administration pitted against faculty for control over decision-making related to transfer credits. We even see the needs of transfer students held up against the needs of students who started and stayed at an institution. Sound familiar?

    So our first commitment for 2025 is to practice the art of depolarization. What do we mean by that? In many ways, this feels like a recommitment to values we already hold, but (being human) sometimes don’t fully live up to. We will welcome hard conversations. We will actively listen, with the goal of building understanding and empathy. We will begin hard conversations with a reminder to honor the perspectives and expertise of all present. We will focus on the human dimensions of change, which includes recognizing that people bring the beauty of their identities and experiences to the work alongside fear of loss, discomfort with conflict and differing styles. We will actively find ways to include all participants. We will transparently document differing perspectives. We will avoid overgeneralizations and stereotypes. We will remember that we work with educators who care about students and welcome being invited into collaborative problem-solving. And when we fall short of these recommitments, we will be open to others holding us accountable.

    Another commitment we have for 2025 is the work of finding and expanding the common ground. This too flows from an interest in depolarization and our shared conviction that common ground exists but can be easily drowned out amid the din of partisan hostility.

    We know that transfer touches many learners—in fact, likely more learners than we previously thought. New data from a survey of a nationally representative sample of Americans, conducted in a partnership between Public Agenda and Sova for “Beyond Transfer,” found that four in 10 respondents tried to transfer some type of credit toward earning an associate degree, bachelor’s degree or certificate. Moreover, those respondents shared that their credit transfer journeys took many forms, including seeking credit transfer for military experience, work-based learning and dual-credit courses in high school. Despite their different journeys, many shared the common experience of credit loss, with 58 percent of respondents indicating they had lost some number of credits when transferring. These data points demonstrate there is a large and diverse population of mobile learners that we should bring into the conversation to build awareness of the high incidence of transfer and generate support for policy action.

    While there are many contentious issues in higher education—including how to improve affordability and how to address ballooning student loan debt—transfer is an area with bipartisan support that, if we can improve, can generate downstream improvements in other areas, such as completion and affordability.

    In the same Public Agenda survey, respondents of all political backgrounds expressed strong support for a variety of policy ideas intended to improve credit transfer. Credit mobility and transfer might well be an issue around which Republicans, Democrats and Independents prove they are capable of agreement and joint action. Improving transfer stands to offer a triple bottom line for learners, institutions and taxpayers:

    • For learners: Recognizing more of their hard-earned credit is the fair thing to do, and research makes clear it will also advance their success by increasing retention and shortening time and cost to completion.
    • For institutions: Public appetite for transparency and accountability clearly cuts across political identities, and institutions would be well served by paying attention to this growing appetite and its relationship to the ongoing decline of public confidence in the value of higher education.
    • For taxpayers: Maximizing the credits earned for students will ensure taxpayer dollars are used to best effect.

    As we dive into 2025, we’ll keep working to dial down the finger-pointing and blaming, cut across silos and divides of our own making, and expand the common ground that already exists on transfer. We hope you’ll join us in finding ways to come together across multiple fronts—within institutions and systems, with government and policymakers at all levels, with accreditors and associations—to serve our students. They deserve it.

    Want to share your commitments for 2025? Please send your thoughts to [email protected] by Feb. 15. We will synthesize your thoughts and reflect them in an upcoming post.

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  • Common App data shows 5% jump in first-year college applicants

    Common App data shows 5% jump in first-year college applicants

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     Dive Brief:

    • First-year Common Applications are up 5% year over year, with over 1.2 million prospective students submitting the forms for the 2024-25 application cycle as of Jan. 1, the company said Thursday.
    • First-year applications ticked up across both institution types and student demographics, but some groups saw accelerated growth. Common App found disproportionate increases among students believed to be from low-income households and those who identified as underrepresented minorities. 
    • Applications to public institutions grew by 11% year over year, outpacing the 3% growth seen at private colleges, Thursday’s report said. 

    Dive Insight:

    Applications from prospective first-year students have steadily increased since the 2020-21 application cycle, Common App found. 

    That’s despite the challenges that have thrown aspects of college admissions into tumult, including the botched rollout of the updated Free Application for Federal Student Aid during the 2024-25 cycle and the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2023 ban on race-conscious admissions.

    Roughly 960,000 students used the Common App portal to submit over 4.8 million applications during the 2020-21 cycle. In the 2024-25 cycle, over 1.2 million users submitted just under 6.7 million applications.

    Prospective students can continue to apply to colleges through the month and beyond. But a majority of applications for the following fall semester are traditionally submitted by the end of December. 

    The number of colleges first-year prospects applied to ticked up slightly between 2020-21 and 2024-25, but remained between five and six institutions. 

    Common App found disproportionate application growth among students from low-income households. The portal does not directly collect household income from applicants, but researchers used students who were eligible for fee waivers as a proxy. Application rates for that group increased by 10%, compared to 2% for their counterparts who weren’t eligible for the waivers.

    Moreover, applications from students in ZIP codes where median incomes fall below the national average grew 9% since the 2023-24 cycle, compared to 4% growth from those in above-median income areas, Common App found.

    The company also saw more applications from minority groups underrepresented in higher education, classified by researchers as those who identify as Black or African American, Latinx, Native American or Alaska Native, or Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander.

    As of Jan. 1, 367,000 underrepresented applicants used Common App to submit first-year applications. But their numbers are growing at a faster rate than their counterparts.

    Among students in underrepresented groups, first-year applications grew by 13% since last year, compared to the 2% growth for the others. 

    Latinx and Black or African American candidates drove much of that growth, showing year-over-year increases of 13% and 12%, respectively.

    However, it appears that students are reconsidering their application materials following the 2023 Supreme Court decision. In June, separate Common App research found a decrease in the number of Asian, Black, Latinx and White students referencing race or ethnicity in their college essays.

    Thursday’s report also found more first-year students including standardized test scores in their applications, up 10% since last year. The number of applicants leaving them out remained unchanged year over year.

    “This marks the first time since the 2021–22 season that the growth rate of test score reporters has surpassed that of non-reporters, narrowing the gap between the two groups,” the report said.

    That’s despite interest slowing in highly selective colleges, the type of institutions that have historically most used standardized test scores in the admissions process.

    Applications to colleges with acceptance rates below 25% grew just 2% in 2024-25, Common App found. That’s compared to the between 8% and 9% increases seen at institutions of all other selectivity levels.

    Just 5% of the colleges on Common App required test scores in the 2024-25 application cycle, a slight uptick from the 4% that did so the previous year. 

    COVID-19 pushed many institutions with test requirements to temporarily waive this mandate, and some ultimately made the change permanent.

    But others returned to their original rules. And reversal announcements continue to trickle in, including one from the highly selective University of Miami just this past Friday. 

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  • A Common Mistake Academics Make With Their Personal Websites

    A Common Mistake Academics Make With Their Personal Websites

    How often is your name mentioned on your website? For some academics, the answer is 0. I’ve looked at hundreds of personal faculty and scientist websites. A common mistake people make is forgetting to include your name.

    Hi, I’m Jennifer van Alstyne. Welcome to The Social Academic, a blog about your digital presence in HigherEd.

    Subscribe to The Social Academic blog.

    The form above subscribes you to new posts published on The Social Academic blog.
    Want emails from Jennifer about building your online presence? Subscribe to her email list.
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    Does your website show up when someone Googles your name?

    An overhead view of a person working on a laptop. They have the Google Search page pulled up and are starting to type in their search query.

    When you type your full name into Google, does your website show up on the 1st page of results? A personal website should show up high in Google Search results because it often has the information people are most looking for.

    But your website won’t appear in search results if you’ve forgotten to include your name. This is a common mistake for academics who make their own website.

    Why do academics make this mistake? They work hard to create a website to better share their research. Self-promotion often feels strange for professors and researchers. It might feel wrong or unnatural. Because of this, you might have forgotten to include your own name on your website.

    The people who make this mistake often include their name in their

    But they then forget to include it on other pages of their website like in their bio, and on their Research or Publications pages. Have you forgotten to include your name?

    Subscribe to The Social Academic blog.

    The form above subscribes you to new posts published on The Social Academic blog.
    Want emails from Jennifer about building your online presence? Subscribe to her email list.
    Looking for the podcast? Subscribe on Spotify.
    Prefer to watch videos? Subscribe on YouTube.

    Scavenger Hunt! Find your name on your website

    An open laptop with the word Website written on the screen with a bunch of arrows pointing to the right.

    A good way to see if your name appears on your website is by searching your site in Google.

    To do this, type this into the search bar: site:YourDomainName.com Your Name

    For example: site:JenniferVanAlstyne.com Jennifer van Alstyne

    When I perform this search, it shows that my name appears on most pages of my personal website. Try a search like this to see how often your name appears.

    If you find your name doesn’t appear much on your website, this is an easy change you can make to your website to improve how people find it. Any small change to improve your personal website is a good thing!

    Best of luck with your website project. Want professional help with your website project? I’d love to help.

    Including your name on your website is a best practice for SEO

    Scrabble letters that spell out 'S' 'E' and 'O' stand facing the camera on a shelf. SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization.

    Search engine optimization is a method for improving, or optimizing your website to rank better in search results. In this case, the keyword people are searching for online is your name when they want to find information about you.

    Discover how search engine optimization (SEO) can help your website in my YouTube live with Patrick Wareing.

    Personal Website How To’s The Social Academic

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