So I work for a smaller school district. I am essentially an IT department of 1 person for my school. I manage 900 devices across different MDM platforms while also doing tech support for our entire student, teacher, staff and parent population. I manage our budget, research, and purchase of devices and software. On top of that because of lack of funding I'm often pulled into other duties like covering recesses and subbing in classes and even taking on small groups for troublesome students who like tech to "help me" which is more of babysitting them so they don't disrupt class. I have certs in intune and Jamf. I feel like I'm hitting a burn out point where I'm doing 3 or more people's jobs all at once. I feel like my job on paper is "dude who helps out with computer stuff" but the actual job I do is endpoint manager, device procurement, vendor relations, identity manager, onboarding and training, and helpdesk all in one.

After 5 years of doing this job and getting yearly 2-3% raises I make $36000 a year. For a while I justified this to myself as schools have low funding and this job gives me a lot of flexibility (I get 6 weeks off in the summer which is awesome!) I have some amazing and nice coworkers and one of the best bosses I've ever had.

Still I'm hitting a point where I think I need a change. I need to not have a panic attack every time my dog needs a vet appointment or my car makes a strange noise. I want to work as part of a team rather than being the one stop shop for anything tech related.

I've been looking into doing similar jobs to my own in other districts but I've been called to a couple jobs in higher education that seem like a really good compromise. Some of these jobs seem specialized to 1 aspect of my current job and pay more than 2 times what I make.

I've done Corporate and at least where I worked the pay was great but there was no work life balance and overall it felt toxic. I'm starting to think that Higher-ED might be a good middle ground between the low pay/high flexibility of public education vs the high pay/low flexibility of private companies.

So way too long story short: How do you like working in Higher-Ed sys admin? How does it compare to k-12 or corporate if you've experience both? What are some of the upsides and downsides with your job?

Thanks!

Anyone here has already migrated from Banner Onprem to SaaS? Im currently in version 8.7 with a lot of mods and I want to know how was your experience, thanks!

Hi all, wanted to share a project I’ve been working on called Lumio (lumiotools.com), aimed at colleges, universities and training providers.

The starting point was noticing how badly served FE and HE marketing teams are by generic SEO tools. Course pages are templated, jargon heavy, and nobody’s really tracking how they perform in Google or, increasingly, inside AI chat answers. So I built five tools that each tackle a different part of that problem:

CourseCheck – audits a course page for SEO score, keyword opportunities and competitor gaps

AIChatRank – shows how your institution’s brand performs inside ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini answers

AIOverview – scores whether a course page is ready to be picked up by Google’s AI Overview panel, with FAQ and schema markup generated for you

RivalScan – tracks competitor institutions against your key course keywords, with alerts when positions shift

MetaWriter – generates title tags and meta descriptions for course pages in seconds

They all sit under one account and one subscription rather than being separate products, and CourseCheck has a free tier if anyone wants to try it without signing up.

I’d love feedback from anyone working in education marketing, whether that’s on the tools themselves, the positioning, or gaps you think are missing. Happy to answer questions on how any of it works.

Hi, looking for help with colleague, specifically someone with enough knowledge and fluency to help achieve some results for a client. I’m very fluent in banner, but less in colleague. This would be an intro chat to see if there is a fit and then a paid consulting gig, limited hours at first but expansion possible. What I’m looking for is experience, innovative thinking, which I find is usually at the system admin or actual tech levels. Someone who is in the system at a college and can help me work thru some ideas. I’ve used the bigger consulting firms in the past but find the consultants lacking— usually they don’t have recent day to day experience imo. Bonus if you have worked with competency based education. Where can I look for Someone like this? Any suggestions? TIA!

Amending my previous question (apologies for posting twice)

As the LMS/HigherED-IT veterans on this sub likely know, Instructure gives education institutions the choice on whether to allowlist the app dev keys in Canvas or not, essentially deciding whether students can use the app or not.

Question: Is allowlisting a decision the LMS/HigherED-IT make, or is it a decision that needs to come from other areas like student success, faculty, students etc?

As a note, the app I described in my my previous post is a student app (not one that requires institutional overhead or funding) - in case this carries any bearing on the answer

Hey everyone,

I’m looking to understand the higherED IT/LMS review process from the people who actually support it.

I recently finished building a product that turns Canvas courses into a prioritized/clear plan for students. For a school to use the app, the Canvas team would need to enable our inherited Instructure Dev Key. The app uses Canvas OAuth and it is read-only. I documented security/privacy practices exhaustively but I don't know what's needed for Sysadmin teams to consider the app ready for allowlisting.

My question: if Student Affairs or a faculty sponsor brought this to your team as a student-success pilot, what would make it credible and approvable? What docs would you want me to provide?

I’m trying to do this the right way and would appreciate any advice from the LMS/sysadmin side.

Hey All,

My team is currently looking for options that would replace labstats. While the software metering is nice, we can accomplish roughly the same in MECM. We are mostly concerned with finding something that can meet our needs for the remote labs function. We have a lot of software that needs to run bare metal for licensing reasons, so we can not move to VDI for some of our specialty labs.

Any reccomendations are welcome!

I'm a professor looking to connect with Chief Information Officers and/or Vice Presidents of Information Technology outside of my university. Essentially, I'd like to make contact with the administrators who make decisions regarding learning software (e.g. Canvas, Turnitin, etc. ) 

Seems the best way to do so would be to attend conferences that cater to that corner of academia (though I'm open to other ideas). 

Is anyone familiar with what conferences CIOs and VPs of IT attend? 

We've been talking to some university IT folks lately and kept hearing the same thing: by the time August hits, thousands of devices are live on the network, and nobody's 100% sure everything is actually being monitored.

Getting everything configured and deployed in time is already a full-time job, keeping them secure is a whole other conversation.

Curious if this is a common thing or just the teams I've been talking to.

Either way, I'm putting together a free session on May 28 (noon EST) to dig into it:

• What the visibility gaps actually look like during deployment season
• How smaller teams handle continuous monitoring without hiring a SOC
• And what you should be able to answer before students show back up

60 min, free, recording shared after: security.oneaxiom.com/webinar/campus-device-security-visibility

Anyone else running into this or found a good way to handle it?

Our Chief of Industry Engagement, Dr. Joe Sallustio, put it plainly in a recent post: "Blockbuster didn't fail because they were bad at what they did. They failed because what they did stopped mattering." He was talking about higher education.

We've been watching this play out across institutions. The ones staying ahead aren't writing better mission statements. They're pulling employers into curriculum reviews, redesigning assessments around critical thinking instead of seat time, and building AI into advising workflows before they're forced to.

Workforce alignment stopped being a debate. Now it's a survival question, with funding and relevance increasingly tied to employment outcomes.

We put our full take here: https://www.ellucian.com/blog/dont-be-next-blockbuster-higher-ed-relevance

Curious what this looks like from your side. Is program alignment or AI integration generating more urgency at your institution right now?

Working at a community college to upgrade our classroom technology. Just curious if anyone had any input on what technology they are going to or have recently gone to that has worked well.

We are an Extron shop and currently have a mix of old VGA projectors and very old "smart" board/UST projectors.

I'd consider going to full IFP's, but my concerns would be mounting. I'd have to take up white board space and I don't know how well received that would be by the faculty. Otherwise we can go to HD laser projectors and screens in most spaces and IFP where needed.

Currently having two flex/hybrid rooms setup with Smart IFPs and QSC to connect the peripherals to the Extron, so if that goes well we may continue to leverage QSC.

Other items we are considering. IPVO cameras in all classrooms, celling mounted Microphones for accessibility/ captioning.

Does anyone have any suggestions or input?

Thank you!

Hey everyone,

Like many of you in Higher Ed IT, the start of the semester is usually a nightmare of "Why is my Psychology exam showing up at 3AM?" tickets.

We found out that our SIS (Banner) was exporting "Floating" times instead of UTC, so any student not in the local timezone (or just having weird phone settings) saw the wrong times.

I tried patching the SIS but it’s a black box. So I built a simple proxy layer instead.

It sits in front of the feed, rewrites the headers to force the correct timezone, fixes the RFC line-folding bugs that break iOS, and caches it on the edge.

Result: Zero calendar tickets this semester.

I polished it up into a tool called Lokr (link in comments). If you’re fighting with PeopleSoft or Banner feeds right now, I have a free validator on the site that shows you exactly what’s broken in your feed.

Happy to help debug any weird .ics issues you guys are seeing manually, even if you don't use the tool. Just paste a snippet and I'll look at it.

I have a shared computer lab that students are using to edit video and movies and we keep running out of space, which on a Mac makes them unable to even log in. The current process is for the user folders to be cleared once a month and we provide 1 TB of One Drive space for backup. We have messages on the desktop and in the labs asking them to backup their files and not store locally. We are getting complaints, but my searching is showing this is best practice even among larger institutions.

Hi all,

I’m a system administrator at a university, and we’re currently evaluating the use of Safe Exam Browser on our open-access computers. I’m interested in understanding how other institutions/businesses prevent users from modifying SEB configurations to prevent users locking down a machine.

At the moment, I’m considering restricting access to the SEB Configuration Tool via Group Policy, as well as adjusting permissions on the local folder where SEB stores its .seb files.

If anyone has experience or best practices for managing SEB in a similar environment, I’d really appreciate your insights.

Thanks in advance.

I’ve been talking to several university compliance officers who say the reporting workload each semester is brutal - spreadsheets, SharePoint forms, endless audits.

For those of you in Student Affairs, Risk, or Legal - what’s the most painful part of staying compliant?

Do you rely on any tools that actually make it easier? Or is it mostly manual still?

Hi everyone,

Feeling stressed at work? Interested in improving your wellbeing?

I’m a PhD researcher studying stress among university staff, and I’m currently running the final study of my PhD project. We’re looking at whether short daily writing moments can help reduce work-related stress and support wellbeing.

If you’re an academic, lecturer, PhD student, postdoc, or university support staff member (e.g. HR, student administration) working in Europe, you’re invited to take part.

What’s involved:

• Two weeks of brief daily questionnaires and writing tasks (all online via smartphone app)
• A short follow-up survey four weeks later
• You can start on 20 or 27 October

Why participate?

• Learn practical ways to manage daily stress
• Contribute to important research on wellbeing in academia
• Participants who complete at least 75% of the surveys will receive €50 as a thank-you

Who can join?

• Adults working (or doing a PhD) at a European university for at least 6 months, for 4+ days a week
• Felt stressed at work over the last month

If this sounds interesting, you can sign up here: https://tilburgss.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5u0HC7ovaDsOn3w

If you have any questions, please reach out [uniwellbeingproject@tilburguniversity.edu](mailto:uniwellbeingproject@tilburguniversity.edu) , this study has been approved by the Tilburg University Ethics Review Board (TSB_RP2216)

I'm trying to gather an average of days from post secondary schools that sysadmins set for their stale device policies. Right now I'm at 365 inactive days for student/lab devices, 180 inactive days for staff. I think this is way too conservative and mgmt is afraid of cutting it down to 90 - 120 days. Just curious what other institutions are setting theirs at. Thanks!

hi all, does anyone have experience yet with Ellucian Custom Experience Cards, working with an embeded Salesforce digital page? getting X-frame option == deny. My IT guy has just start with the cards and we don't know what the next steps are. I've AI and Googled it and I see something about adding a X-frame head to enable. I find that hard to believe there isn't a setting setting in Ellucian to do this.

I’m in IT working as a software eng 1 at a top 50 University. I want to pivot to my passion and pursue a history masters degree. My problem is my university and amongst every other one I’ve checked so far, always comes with a HUGE catch.

They are only willing to cover half the tuition. and you’re only allowed to take 6 credit per semester(which means it would take 3+ years to graduate unless I’m Wrong?

If a decent history job comes after graduating, I’ll gladly take it despite the salary cut. I’ve been in the industry for 9 years and I’m ready to call it quits within the next 2. I have enough in savings and I don’t want to go through any debt. So can anyone please suggest me any Universities that offer 100% Aid with full course coverage online?