Category Archives: IT Tips

It seems like every week we hear about another security breach at a major company: Apple, Target, Home Depot, TJ Maxx, etc. With more and more of our personal data being stored in cloud databases, how vulnerable is our personal information? And how worried should we be about our students’ information in our Student Information System and Financial Aid systems? The short answer is, it depends on your cloud provider. When set up properly, cloud systems can be more secure than your PC at work or at home. Let’s look at how these big breaches have occurred. Naughty pics of celebrities were taken on their iPhones and uploaded to Apple’s iCloud. Apple’s database didn’t have a weakness; the celebrities’ passwords did. They were too easy to guess, and they were the same as on other applications that may have had weaker security. So use strong passwords with at least 8 characters, with a combination of upper case and lower case letters, numbers, and special characters. Don’t use the same password for everything. Yes, it’s hard to remember a lot of different passwords. The solution is to have a password manager application which stores your passwords to different websites.

Attracting students to your school is harder and more expensive than ever. In fact, it requires 50% more marketing budget to get the same number of enrollments that you had in 2008, according to recent research by Velocify, evaluating cost-per enrollment at publicly-traded proprietary schools. If your school competes for students, it is more important than ever to get every bit of value out of your marketing dollars by ensuring your admissions team is optimizing all new student inquiries. To make sure your admissions team is operating at their very best, here are three of the most important habits of successful enrollment counselors: 1. They follow up The first habit is to simply follow up. Make sure you are following up with every inquiry. While this may seem basic, a staggering 66% of prospective students reported they have experienced a “no response” from a school they had expressed interest in, according to a recent study jointly conducted with

Whatever the reason a student chooses to walk away from an education – the statistics are clear: too many are dropping out. For educators, there’s nothing more discouraging than witnessing the lost potential of students who will never gain the knowledge, skills and confidence that come with earning a degree or lay the crucial foundation that prepares them for personal and professional success. The economic impact on the student – and on the college, university or vocational school – is great as well. Students who fail to finish a degree suffer from lower future incomes (up to half a million dollars) and are more likely to default on loans. High dropout rates not only erode the reputations of educational institutions and cause undue hardship on instructors, but directly lead to lower revenues and may jeopardize government-backed loans. Early Warning Systems (EWS) Work Using predictive analytics and automated data processing (or “machine learning”), Voyant can mine the vast amounts of data collected by FAME to uncover patterns of historical behavior. For example, do first-time post-secondary goers over the age of 20 drop out more often than ot

Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome - What's with all these different web browsers?There are now several good browsers to choose from. If you have a Windows PC, it came loaded with Internet Explorer (IE). For that reason, it is the most widely used browser. In fact, Microsoft got into some legal troubles a few years ago by monopolizing the browser market. Some web sites, like the Department of Education, were designed specifically for Internet Explorer, and don't play well with other types of browsers. And this is a shame, because they are missing out on some nice features included with other browsers. There have been several versions of IE over the years. If you are still using IE version 6 or 7, you should definitely upgrade to a newer version of IE right away. Those older versions of IE have a lot of security flaws, making you more susceptible to viruses and malicious web sites. Not only that, thes

BYOB is a good way to have a party. But BYOD is no party if it’s not set up well. What is BYOD? It stands for Bring Your Own Device. It’s the current trend in many work environments where people are bringing their smart phones, iPads, Kindles, iPods, and other personal electronic devices to work. If a company has no policy or does not prevent it through technical means, people can connect their devices to their PCs or to the company’s internal WiFi network. This is a major information security risk because it can allow confidential data to be copied to a device, and enables hackers to connect to the company’s internal network via a device’s wireless interfaces.Instead of forbidding those devices, here at FAME we have decided to take the issue head-on and set up a safe way to give those devices Internet access without endangering our internal network. We have set up a WiFi network in our office that connects di