OIT News & Important Dates

Student Academic Planner – “MyPATH”
Students can plan out all their courses over a period of five years. Furthermore, when it is time to register for a new semester, a simple click of a button will automatically register students for their courses according to their Academic Planner. The name of the online academic planner is “MyPATH”.

Moodle & Oasis
Various integrations are being developed to simplify and automate some tasks between Moodle and Oasis. This project will be completed before May 1st of 2023.

Luther Rice Alumni Portal  (Completion estimated in 2023-24)

It is the vision of the administration to create an Alumni Portal to provide a two-way communication network between our active students and our Alumni who wish to help, assist, mentor, and or otherwise interact with our Luther Rice students. Similarly, the portal will provide a networking mechanism for alumni to connect with each other.

Recommendations

Antivirus:

Free Antivirus = No protection.  You must pay for a quality product. You need not spend more than $40 per year.  This CIO recommends Webroot SecureAnywhere. The cost is approximately $35 per year for one computer. We also recommend PC Matic.  These products can be used independently (either one) or in conjunction with one another.  Using both products together is a solution for strong, dependable protection.

Computer Health  / Speed up your PC

PC Matic will ensure your computer is running optimally. You may have seen commercials on television for PcMatic. Our IT department has used PcMatic for more than a decade and can assure you it is a top-notch product. It can really do amazing things to restore the speed of your slow computer.

Cybereason RansomFree

This is a new product to help protect your computer against ransomware.  I do believe that Webroot and PcMatic do a great job at protecting against Ransomware.  However, Cybereason RansomFree is designed specifically to defend against ransomware.  It is a free download for personal use.  You can download it from www.cybereason.com.

Windows 10 Operating System

Windows 10 is a good OS. It is important to keep it fully updated.

Personal Backup Solution

We also recommend Carbonite Personal Backup to protect your personal computers.  Hard-drives do fail!  Computers are subject to corruption.

Laptop Brand Recommendation

We have used DELL computers for over 20 years. We have used HP Servers and computers for more than eight years. We highly recommend either Dell or HP for your personal computing needs.  Our rule of thumb is that the average person should not spend less than $300 or more than $550 for a laptop.