Information Technology Council

Meeting Minutes

January 15, 2009

Present:               Jan Fox, Bob Walker, Ronda Sturgill, Teresa Bolt, Jon Cutler, John Maher, Barbara Winters, Monica Brooks, Allen Taylor, Arnold Miller, Tom Hankins, Lisa Heaton; Layton Cottrill; Gayle Ormiston; Frances Hensley, Karen McComas, Donna Spindel

Updates:

Jan Fox:  I had the WV Broadband council meeting; that group is not progressing as quickly as I would like.  The main topic I wanted to bring to you is that it looks as though there will be an inventory instrument so that all state agencies as well as communities will have access to know what’s available.  (i.e., all of higher education has x amount of bandwidth at these facilities that can do these type of things) as well as community maps to know what services are available in various areas and at what price.

Verizon has a project in the works called SE fiber to the Home.  I assumed this was several years out, but Verizon is trying to sell me the service at home now.  That type of service will change everything, entertainment, internet bandwidth, telephone, etc. 

As part of the Southern Growth Policy group, I am on the Technology committee.  Our topic this year is Energy.  We have an annual report that happens.  The report on energy will deal with state policy dealing with energy issues.  I have sent out invitations to a meeting in So. Charleston on February 16 for the statewide meeting to discuss the West Virginia approach to energy.  If you know someone that you believe is heavily involved in state energy decision making, please send me their names to make sure they are on the list. 

We have been dealing with Intuit, the creators of Turbo Tax.  The president of Intuit is Brad Smith, a Marshall alum.  Dr. Kopp and I have been talking about an interface between Turbo Tax and FASFA (federal form for financial aid and requirement for financial aid and scholarships)  We will be doing some beta testing early in February.  There will be a big press release and kick-off for the project. 

Ronda :           We are going to start this semester to re-review 25 more courses.  We did 25 last semester and we are going to re-review on a 3 year cycle. 

John Maher:     We have a good proposal for the EPSCoR grant.  The University of Arkansas is a very capable partner.  The focus on scientific visualization is an immediate need that we have here in terms of trying to get the visualization space completed at the Engineering Building.  They have a research scientist there who is very capable in this area.  Hopefully if this gets funded, it will all work out with minimal cash match. 

Jan:                  We are part of an 8.6 million dollar FCC grant; our portion is Internet2 of that for health interface.  We have been trying to get the RFP through for a solid year.  We have had the head of USAC here on campus.  I think we are posted.  That puts fiber ring throughout Huntington to connect all St. Mary’s, Cabell, Bio-Tech, facilities.  The Internet2 connection is not there because we are planning to pay for that ourselves because it will give us the expansion for economic development in case the community would need access.  If we use the grant to make the fiber run, we would be so restricted in auditing that we would have no flexibility for our traditional researchers.  It will be very quick for us to run that component.  When we get Internet2 access it opens up a lot of potential to our researchers. 

                         There is a group called WV Health Information Network  (WIN) that has set up the electronic patient record standards for the state.  The group I’m on for this grant, the WV Telehealth Alliance, will be the infrastructure part of that so that we do the hard core connections, the WIN group sits on top and does the actual electronic medical record component.  We will be dealing with them on the security factor. Our test group is a group in Cincinnati called Health Bridge.

                        I have been meeting with a group called Heritage Farm for 6 years dealing with economic development community issues.  We have regrouped and a new group called Technology and Tourism will be dealing with the bad image problem in the area.  We are promoting through the Greater Huntington Portal, really news things.   You will be hearing about ways to collect more good news.  We are working with Google to do a street walking tour of the city, for upcoming events such as the soccer tournament that will be coming to the area.  We need to put our best foot forward to make the community strong.

Arnold:           We are having some bumps in the road with semester start-up.  We are going through a transition and have encountered some undocumented processes that we were unaware of and we apologize for any inconvenience. 

As it stands right now, the E-courses and T-courses in Vista are up, available, and operational, however, some faculty and student rosters have not been fixed.  The real thing that has not been finalized is all the other presences for all the other courses that are not E and T courses are slow in coming across.  The faculty and staff have gotten moved over, but there may be some manual resolves that we will handle today.

There are several projects we are working on.  We are moving forward on the pilot project of the Microsoft Live exchange labs project and it looks like we will be able to get the pilot med school students up and running on that so they will get Exchange capabilities for student population and it will be almost totally transparent for the addressing of email in and out so it appears that we will be able to allow students to retain their marshall.edu identity to be routed to the Microsoft Live product.  Calendaring may be possible, but it is a policy decision at this point if we want that to happen.  Jan suggests that we set access levels the same as we do in the faculty/staff product and we should put a list together for the next meeting.

John Maher:      Want to thank everyone for getting the connection to MURC fixed.  The direct fiber, Ethernet run has corrected the power issue with that connectivity as of January 30. 

Barbara:           Next Tuesday we will be opening up DL402 for the Inauguration, it will also be on the plasma screen downstairs.  I have contacted the Parthenon to get the word out. 

                        We are very happy that we are working with David Pittinger and the Writing Center to provide a synergy between the Writing Center and Reference so students have access to both at the same time.  The Writing Center “Outpost” hours will be Monday through Thursday 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. beginning January 26^th and will be located in the Legal Collection area of Drinko Library.   We are working on an Information Commons/Discovery Commons for this building so that we can tie more into the student experience in this building.   

                         Thanks to the Ezre grant, we have been able to add access to the suite of Elsevere, Sci-Tech journals and we are going to be adding access to 2000 journals.  We will be doing a press release and orientation sessions around campus to let everyone know what we have. 

Anita:              We are trying to get feedback from the campus on any kind of revenue enhancements or expense reductions and good ideas for changes.  The process is not clear yet, but will be an agenda item for the SR VP meeting.

BOG IT – Online Course Policy

Monica and

Ronda:             From the last revision, we cleaned up the document somewhat.  Ronda, Donna and I had a quick conversation before the meeting and noted that we omitted T-courses.  If we could talk about how we could proceed with that.  Do we need to put those back in? Ronda does have a stipend model for a formal T-course review and offering.  From the managerial side, T-courses have always been a sore spot for the people who pay the bills because we do not receive any revenue for the offering of T-courses.  We pay a development stipend and the faculty who participate in that aspect of the development do receive $3,000 to develop the course.  The intent of that was to get people to teach a hybrid course initially and then convert that into an E-course. If they go from T to E they get an additional $1,000 stipend.   Donna is in favor of retaining this to encourage people to try online courses.  I don’t see any loss to keeping this in the policy to keep this option open to faculty. 

No objection to putting T-courses back into the Policy – voted and approved

Donna:           On 5.1 refers to fixed rate published by the FDCOME committee.  In the interest of clarity and consistency could we add a statement (drawn from 6.2) that says how that fixed rate is determined? Layton thinks that the President should be added to both 5.1 and 6.2. 

                         Item 3.1 refers to, in the next to the last sentence, any remuneration for distribution will be negotiated on a case by case basis.  Could we state who is going to be engaged in those negotiations just to clarify?  It is clarified that it is between the developer and the department.  Per Gayle:  if there is a negotiation of remuneration for distribution between the department and the faculty member, the question is who will pay for it?    Per Monica:  we already have the stipulation that if a faculty member leaves, we have to get in writing the approval to offer for at least one semester, so we could delete this part and refer to the Intellectual Property Policy.  Gayle and Layton will review the policy after the changes are made to make sure the wording carries through the document, is consistent and complies with the Intellectual Property Policy. 

Gayle:             Clarification of 5.2 needs to be clean.  Content vs. course issue. Agreed to delete the first two sentences.  We need to replace “course” with e-version, section.

Jan:                  We need to have a definition section so we don’t have to keep revising the document.  Tom Hankins feels that the word “distribution” also needs to be defined.   

Monica:          Confirmation – Definitions are going back in.  5.1 and 6.2 will be revised to include Provost and Presidential approval.  We are deleting the first sentence of 5.2.  We are making sure that wherever “course” appears, it is changed to “E-course”.  T-courses are going back in and we need to make sure we define “distribution” appropriately. And in section 9 course fees will also need to address tuition.

Gayle:             3.1 first two sentences – Lisa Heaton will assist in the re-writing of this section.

Lisa:                Guidelines should also be reviewed.  Per Gayle:  Guidelines should have some input from the department and colleges for curricular purposes.  The Guidelines should also be posted on the Academic Affairs website. 

Changes will be made and new version will be reviewed again at next meeting – voted and approved

Displays in the Library – First Reading

Barbara:           We thought we had a written Guideline for displays in the Libraries and it turns out that we didn’t.  Something just came up where we are being asked to staff an exhibit for the Teach-In on Global Warming on February 5^th.  We are being asked to take materials supporting an environmental point of view.  We feel that we should present materials on all points of view.  We needed something in writing to provide us a way to refuse and decline exhibits.  This will be a first reading and the Librarians will be concurrently reading this document.  Per Jan:  we want to be pro-active in case something comes up. 

Lisa:                 On page 3, number 1 states name of institution that needs to be changed. 

Red Flag Rule

Jan:                  Bob Walker had brought to our attention an issue with “red flag rule” we thought we wouldn’t have to deal with this because we are an educational facility but it looks like we may have to deal with this from a policy perspective.  What we found from Kalamazoo on the Educause site is that they felt that they had to deal with it.  After Jon and Bob have presented this we will decide if we need to progress further.

Bob:                 This is part of a more broad based requirement by the FTC.  They have taken the stance that Higher Education Institutions are more like banks rather than just an educational institution.  We give out loans, we offer payment plans, we have declining balance cards, One Card, etc.  We actually handle money and operate more as a banking institution in their minds.  There is a lot of policy that they have been writing that actually pertains to us that we don’t believe should, but we have to go along.  We have to create a “red flag rule” which means we have to try to put policies in place to mitigate identity theft.  What the red flags are for is if certain things start happening and it looks like someone is trying to steal an identity or looks like someone has stolen an identity and is trying to use that identity to gain some type of financial advantage, that we have red flags that will flag the account and allow us to notify the actual account holder that this is happening and to put a stop on the account.  To be honest, after meetings with the FTC, they were presenting it not as an IT solution but rather as a procedure.  There will be some IT involved with Banner; there will be some need for a reporting mechanism to review internally and notify students.  I am working with Perry Chaffin and Barry Beckett to develop a policy that will be put out to the departments that are really student/customer facing and have them draw up their procedures to go along with the policy.

Layton:            Has the FTC identified Higher Education as being subject to the terms?  Per Bob:  they have identified us, but they have put off the enforcement of it from November 1, 2008 until May, 2009.  I would like to see something from a larger institution or from NACUBO.  Time is an issue because we actually have to have Board approval before May 1. 

Jan:                  The question for the committee is, since this is not directly an IT policy, should we be involved?  It is Agreed that this committee does not need to be involved.

Arnold:            This will affect us a lot in the computer side with the problems we have with any sort of intrusion that can now potentially fall into this category so we may need some input.

IT Security Policy

Jan:                  Originally, we were required to go point for point down the State IT Security Policy and say how we were responding.  I think we do not have to do that now.  As we do our own IT Security policy, are there places in your areas that need to be incorporated as we go through the Policy definition and scope that would be helpful for one Policy for IT Security? We want one encompassing policy. 

Jon:                  A lot of our staff is not aware that we have an IT Security Policy or what it contains or covers.  We need to incorporate an awareness aspect into this to remind folks of their responsibility.  It will be an ongoing process.

Jan:                  This will take a while to create and to do it right.  We will be doing the awareness to get that in place.  If you need anything added for your areas, please bring them forth. 

Arnold:           One area we may want to look at is HIPPA there are areas in several of the colleges that deal with HIPPA regulations that someone needs to decide if we are going to include that.  Per Jan:  an example would be if the Rec Center needs to inquire into a student’s health status for an exercise or program, what policy do we have in place regarding what they can and cannot ask and where would they store that information?

Adjourned