USC’s Web-based Classes Go Mobile

THE University of Southern California has added a mobile component to its Web-based courses. Students who are taking online classes toward master’s degrees in social work or education can now use smartphones or tablets to stay on top of their work.

To do so, they have to download an application created by 2tor, an educational software provider that also works with online programs at Georgetown University and the University of North Carolina.

Julie Row is working on a master’s in social work at USC from her home in New Jersey. Most days, she uses the mobile app on her Android phone once or twice to check in and keep up with classes.

That’s about on par with how other students
use the app, 2tor officials said. Nearly half of
the social-work students at USC who down-
loaded the software use it 10 times per month
for more than five minutes at a time; about a
quarter of the education students have done
the same.

AOL decommissioned nearly 10,000 servers and saved itself $5 million along the way to winning an Uptime Institute contest designed to show the high cost of running inefficient or underutilized IT equipment.

The contestants could move workloads to newer, virtualized equipment or into the cloud. Each had to provide documentation, such as work requests, recycling receipts and photographs, to verify what they had done.

AOL decommissioned 9,484 servers last year, or about a quarter of its servers worldwide, Uptime said. Its savings included $1.65 million in energy bills, $2.2 million in OS licenses and $62,000 in hardware maintenance costs.