About IT

Technology at Roanoke College

Almost 1500 student, faculty, and staff computers are connected by a campus network with a gigabit backbone and serviced by a 45 megabit connection to the Internet. In the residence halls students directly connect to the network and are serviced throughout the rest of campus by a wireless network covering classrooms, the Colket Student Center, and the Fintel Library.

Thirty servers with over two terabytes of storage provide email, file storage, and web pages for students, faculty, and staff. Students log onto the MyRC portal to check email, pickup class assignments, check the dining menu, search the library catalog, or register for classes to name a few of the tasks.

Faculty make extensive use of technology in classes using either the Blackboard online system to distribute materials to students, one the nine computer labs to teach students how to use new programs, computers in the Biology, Chemistry, and Physics labs for collecting data, or one of the media classrooms for presenting a lecture. The College plans to outfit all classrooms with instructor computers and media projection units by the year 2009 and all new classroom buildings are completely outfitted with technology classrooms. The faculty are also constantly experiment with new technologies such as tablet PCs, classroom electronic response systems (clickers), and ePortfolios for students.

In order to keep the students up to date with the latest technology the college provides new versions of Windows and Microsoft Office as they are released as well as antivirus software for the student's personal computers. The campus firewall and three layers of virus protection protect the students from viruses and filter out 120,000 spam email messages a day.

Students are often seen surfing the net on the back quad on sunny days or working on projects together around their laptop in the library.

As a partner in the local community the College assists in providing Internet access for the City of Salem, Salem City Schools, and the Lutheran Synod office as well as serving as a test bed for new technologies such as mesh wireless networks and broadband over power line networks being developed by local companies.