Information Technology Council

Meeting Minutes

January 11, 2008

Present: Jan Fox, Ronda Sturgill, Tom Hankins, Carol Perry, Teresa Bolt, Arnold Miller, Gary Anderson, Nat DeBruin (for Monica Brooks), David Johnson, Allen Taylor, Dennis Anderson, John Maher, Layton Cottrill, Sarah Denman, Frances Hensley, Anita Lockridge

Minutes of November approved

Jan: Since we met last, we as a state and as Marshall and the Huntington area received an FCC Broadband Telehealth Grant. It is a pilot program similar to what you see in e-rate for K-12 schools. They pay for 85% of the cost of something for 3 years; the agencies are responsible for 15%. The State of West Virginia received 9.4 million dollars from the FCC to deploy broad band in rural areas for health care. As part of our proposal, makes Marshall an Internet II connection. That was a critical component as we progress with our research initiatives; it provides Internet II connectivity to the major hospitals who would like it. This is a Huntington-centric, Southern West Virginia focus. We are already in a political battle with CAMC over dollars. This is important, not just for medical; it is a piece we have been after since 2001.

One of the things we will be doing for sustainability from our perspective is that our internet needs keep going up as costs is coming down. We hope to take our internet costs and tunnel through the Internet II for quo pricing which is now $25.00 per meg.

We have had meetings with St. Mary’s and Cabell Huntington to make this a hard core, Huntington centric piece. We want to be aggressive, particularly as we go into electronic medical records and as we advance in medical research. Part of what we are trying to do will be training of clinical faculty and there will be a major educational component. Oarnet which is now called OSCnet is in the process of building fiber to AEP, they will have that complete and our connection will go to AEP. This grant and OSCnet building to us brought our cost down dramatically.

From an economic development perspective, as we try to attract major industry, the Internet2 component becomes critical.

We have to bid again, even though we had put OarNet into the proposal because of federal bureaucracy. I assume that Ohio will win this; there are three other rural health grants that were awarded in the state of Ohio, two of which were in southern Ohio that makes a really strong Southern Ohio/West Virginia combination. Instead of being isolated, we are now part of a large network. The FCC Chairman said that the Internet2 portion of this grant was the best of all the proposals.

I will try to do an OpEd piece for the Herald Dispatch so that we can get more exposure for this.

Nat: We used the WSAZ film archives to open a “50 Years Ago Today” video site from the Marshall Libraries homepage that our media technician has used significant clips from the WSAZ archives and posted them online. A lot of it from 1958 is silent film footage; but the teleprompter script appears on the right hand side. We have already gotten a request from someone who saw a clip on Tuesday and recognized someone in the clip and asked us for a copy. We have 6 months worth of clips and text ready to go and it automatically posts at midnight every day.

Ronda: The instructional designers and students have moved to the Communications building and there will be a grand opening in the near future.

Jan: One of the things that happened last Spring on the Board of Governors, Classified Staff had asked for technical training. In addition, they asked for computers for some of the facilities employees in different places who wanted to print out different things such as pay stubs. We are in the process of putting five computers around campus for those staff employees. We have already provided an online training component that goes through Blackboard Vista and Banner.

Allen: There will be an announcement next week, Computing Services worked with the Student Center to set up a computer lab in the Student Center. The Marco’s Kitchen area has been converted into a lab. The grand opening of the 20 unit lab will be next week. We deferred replacement of computers in one of the other UCF facilities and now because of the 10% cutback in UCF funding that will result in the lowering of the number of computer workstations that are available to students. It was felt that the students would have more utilization in the Student Center than some of the other lab locations.

Jan: The President was the keynote speaker, John presented on research, and I presented on education at the Create West Virginia conference. A lot of the focus was on broadband. There was also the issue of community and research. They are continuing to collect information and hope to do another conference. I will send the web link out to this group. The focus was on community development across the state. One of the things I presented was some of the new applications for Second Life and understanding virtual reality in educational research. The link is www.createwv.com

David: We had a brief meeting regarding Second Life and how we want to proceed with it. There will be a meeting with interested parties once the semester is underway to determine what the RFP will look like.

Five new Technology Enhanced classrooms went in over the break. We have a set up in BERT where we can go in and see who is in all the classes and automatically send out messages to the faculty, so we have been sending out messages regarding training availability. We had 4 sessions scheduled this morning.

All of the video classrooms have been tested and are ready to go. We are testing a new Multipoint Conferencing Unit over the next two weeks. Once we get a new MCU in place, the costs are about a quarter of what we are using now and maintenance costs will drop considerably.

In terms of e-course numbers, we have 900 more students than we had last spring. We are over 4,700 right now; I have not done the demographics yet. Per Jan: we are going to add approximately $2.00 more per course for undergrad and $3.00 per course for graduate courses for next fall to deal with the issue of people not being able to go to athletic events; rec center, etc. This will benefit the students with combined loads.

Frances: We are closer to implementing Digital Measures, the faculty database, we have it 90% loaded with faculty information. We are in the process of adding the staff members from the colleges who will be able to work with that database in some way. The next step is to do some training and educating people to the benefits of using Digital Measures for the faculty database. We hope to do that early this spring. It has a lot of potential to simplify the record keeping for faculty members and the ability of the rest of us who have to do reports.

Arnold: I am working to pull together a list of cell phone providers for the move-in since they have changed the policy in the residence halls over giving them cell phones. We now have to put together some sort of program so they will have them available to purchase.

This week we turned on another part of the spam filter for everyone who wants more control over the way they control the spam that comes into the mailbox. The machine will evaluate messages and those at a certain level will be quarantined and you will get a message to look at those quarantined messages. It gives you the ability to move the thresholds around.

We finished the approval to purchase three new products to tack onto Banner. One product is the Web for HR interface that is similar to the web for faculty and web for students. Theoretically, in the future we will be able to do time reporting there directly and PARs will be easier. The Web for Finance adds some other features to help you look at budgets and expenditures without having to go through Banner forms. The third product is the Banner Extender product that allows us to put the core process in place that will tie scanned documents back to items in the Banner database. It isn’t the full blown product for the entire institution, we have enough licenses to handle pilot projects and give us an idea of how we could expand.

Super Saturday is tomorrow at South Charleston.

We moved from an old mail list server to a new installation that gets us one step closer to closing out another generation of computers on campus. Those of you who are list serve users will notice a few changes. If you have any problems, please see the documentation.

For the next meeting, I will be bringing a few changes to our charges; we need to adjust a few things.

In connection with the cutbacks we are going through analysis of UCF facilities, lifecycles, usage, budget, etc, so we can come up with the most efficient service that we can. With the cutbacks, we will either have to extend the lifecycles or lower the number of stations we offer.

I hope to finish the log retention policy for the next meeting.

The upgrade to the Portal/myMU did not happen over the holidays due to unforeseen problems. The implementation of the new portal will not happen until we can figure out what actually went wrong. Per Jan: this will affect e-voting and the forced passwords. I have already spoken to the SGA group.

Another thing I am working on, along with the Assistant Deans’ group, is the online training program for advisors so advisors will have a resource of common items and a course for new faculty members who need to know the advising process.

John: The FCC Grant has changed the whole outlook of the EPSCoR program in terms of some of the feedback and information they are providing to their short loop evaluator process. Here in the state they are entering the third year of their EPSCoR funding and one of the concerns of cyber infrastructure. That will have to be addressed in a concrete form for the next round of funding in the proposal that will be submitted in October of this year and for addressing auditor’s reports. I will probably be asking for some input from you folks to describe how you see changing things, what’s going to be implemented, etc. Jan suggests a meeting with the researchers.

I had a contact from Mary Hunt Lieving of the Benedum Foundation regarding a meeting with them. I would be happy to go to the meeting in Flatwoods.

E-Course Policy

Ronda: I took a look at this from a faculty perspective and the main issue I want to open up for discussion is that we don’t have anything in there about adjunct faculty are compensated (20.1 faculty compensation).

David: When we talk about overload and in-load, it doesn’t really mean anything for an adjunct, yet we do have adjunct that are teaching online classes. Should they automatically be paid at a per head rate? Or if they are teaching with a contract, does that money go back to the department? In some areas adjuncts are paid just as if they were a full time faculty teaching as overload, per head and the money doesn’t go to the department. We just need to clarify that in the wording of the policy.

Sarah: In the definitions, we have never defined “faculty”, so that’s the first thing we should address. When you talk about compensation, there are several areas where it addresses faculty. 22.1 also talks about faculty and load. I have to approve overload for part-time faculty every semester because of what is defined as what they can teach and if they go in excess of those hours it’s called overload and I have to approve it. There are also staff who teach online courses. They are not full or part time faculty but they are counted as part-time faculty when they teach for credit.

Layton: We don’t want to set ourselves up for a grievance based on arbitrary and capricious process that allows one faculty member to make more than another in performing the same duties. The policy has to be consistent one way or the other.

Jan: Request that this be taken back to the online committee for this issue and see if there is anything else that needs changed or clarified. I would like to get a clean review.

David: Once we have the list of all the various things we want to look at, I would like to sit down an prioritize which ones we want to attack first because I want to be careful to take it in increments rather than try to review the entire policy the way we did the last time. Per Sarah: do we actually change the policy or do we come up with an administrative procedure for implementation of the policy which is a totally different thing. We need to be flexible enough to respond to procedural issues. Jan prefers a procedural change rather than a policy change.

Ronda and I will look at clarifications that exist in other places.

Telecommuting Policy

Jan: I need to clarify one thing before we begin; we created the Telecommuting Policy out of ITC which is why there are two links to the old policy and the HR policy that was taken from the ITC policy and abbreviated and taken to the Board of Governors. This policy is an issue particularly with the MU Advance group because it doesn’t say anything about faculty in the policy. Before we go any further, we need Layton’s guidance since it is really an HR policy, do we take it back to them with or suggestions or take it back to the actual policy group? The current policy is a BOG policy.

Layton: The policy was too restrictive. We will get the recommendation out of the committee, we’ll send it to HR and then to the Policy Review Committee.

Sarah: One of the issues related to faculty and it is a really sensitive one, is if you have a faculty member who teaches only e-courses, is that telecommuting?

I received the first request this semester, through a dean, from a chair, from a faculty member, wanting to negotiate for next year to telecommute as a faculty member – teach all online courses; virtual office hours; 10 meetings via video; never stepping foot on campus or in the state. We need to say whether we will or will not allow it.

Layton: As of yet, we are not a primarily e-course university. According to our mission, we still stress the student experience. I can make a good argument that, yes, in some circumstances for your specialist who I can’t get any other way that it is fine to go online. I can also make a good argument that it’s necessary for the appropriate operation of the institution that you as a faculty member be present on campus to interact with colleagues and student body. Would I like for you to have that discretion? Yes. Do I want it to be the norm? No. I think we would get kick back from the state if we made it available.

Jan: Layton will contact Jim Stephens to see if there isn’t anything else that hasn’t worked that may need modified. The Advance group will also have input because their issue come with pregnancy and leave for spouses to be involved with maternity leave. The amount of catastrophic leave should also be addressed. For next time, we will have this for further review.

Sarah: At some time in the future, I need to meet with Jan and David to discuss Gilbert and the Southern Mountain Center and future technical support.

Adjourned