Academic Initiatives and eLearning

Abstract

The IT students that graduate today will be the IT industry’s employees and possible customers tomorrow. Today universities can lower costs by joining academic initiatives that allow them to leverage limited educational funds more efficiently while still providing a high quality education. One reason that these initiatives exists is that they can help companies get students interested and aware of their products. Some companies don’t do this and it will in the extension lead to students becoming used to other systems that are more widely available to them at schools and on the internet and habits are hard to change. The academic initiatives available differ in quality, implementation and availability. Today there is a very limited amount of material and research to be found on what differs between them, and how they can be improved. One of the most promising parts of the solution that is provided by companies like Sun, IBM and Microsoft is eLearning. These companies provides some of the most mature solutions to be found on the market today and will be used as examples throughout this paper. The problems that still exist can be solved in several ways and some of the methods of improving quality and availability will be presented. Companies without an academic initiative that involves online courses will benefit from reading this paper by gaining insight in what will be expected from a functional perspective, how to avoid common pitfalls and thereby helping them succeed in their own academic initiative efforts.