ITC MEETING MINUTES
March 28, 2003
Present: Jan Fox, Mike McCarthy,
Matt Christian, Karen McComas, Sarah Denman, Don
Combs, Gary Anderson, Dennis Prisk, Frances Hensley, Tom Hankins, Barbara
Winters, Allen Taylor, Donna Spindel, David Johnson
Review of Minutes: Approved
as amended.
Updates:
Jan Fox: Distribution of CD developed
at Marshall for Biotechnology. CD
contains video vignettes of key faculty members, President Angel, Jerry
McDonald from HADCO and others and includes power point presentations and
information dealing with cancer research, environmental, forensics, etc.
I am the state representative for the Southern Growth
Technology Board. This committee does tremendous
amount of work for Southern Economic Development. I have received a package
from Southern Growth called the “Knowledge Economy” and it is basically a
tool-kit for communities. Howard Aulick, David Ice and I will send a copy to Mike Perry with
the video for his meetings with the community.
If you want to review this, we can set a time up for this group to
review it or if you want a copy of your own, I can get you the information on
how to order it.
On April 1st and 2nd, WVU is having their
State Computer Technology Expo. I am planning
to attend day two. The WVU Provost is
the key note speaker, discussing technology on their campus.
In the material I sent to you yesterday is
information regarding awards. Marshall
University has been a state award winner every year in the NASCIO Recognition
Awards. Matt, Terri and Brad won last
year for our integration with WebCT. The
year before, Arnold won for the Crossroads Grant. The deadline for submitting is April 18. I encourage you to look at this information
and apply for these awards. This is
skipping over the state level awards this year.
Another award is from the
Center for Digital Government. The
deadline for this one is in July.
The 2003 Innovations
Program deadline is April 11.
These awards really give us a showing in the national
market and it is embarrassing and looks bad for the institution if no one even
applies. An institution can submit
multiple nominations and if there are multiple nominations within a category,
the state reviews them and submits one per category.
In other updates, Senator Rockefeller’s office contacted me
last week and we will be having a trade mission in the middle of October. The Biotechnology International Trade Mission
will be centered at Marshall. We will be
seeking approximately 10-20 companies to spend 3 days and will include local
businesses from Advantage Valley and possibly HADCO. We plan to visit local Advantage Valley
locations. If you know of any biotech
companies to include, please let me know ASAP. Senator Rockefeller has a high success rate
for getting companies into the state.
Arnold Miller: I had previously discussed blocking
of spam mail. We now have the list of blocked
sites posted on web site at www.marshall.edu/ucs/systems/domainblk.asp. The problem we have had is there are over
1000 sites we are blocking now, but we still receive a large amount of
spam. We are testing products that may
do a better job at blocking other spam. Blocking
may cause a problem in blocking something that someone really needs to
receive. This group needs to think about
what we are doing and make sure we are comfortable with our procedure. We propose one of three methods of dealing
with things coming in from blocked sites:
1) we capture it and put it on another box and it would sit there for a
certain time period; or 2) we just shut it off and ignore it or 3) we grade it
and pass it on to you and hopefully if you have an e-mail filter, you can set
up your own filter to block at your own PC.
We are looking for input, suggestions and objections for this issue.
Jan Fox: The mailbox issue with the
amount of mail and the size of mailboxes is getting out of hand. We all need to manage our boxes more
efficiently.
Barbara Winters: We are looking at replacing 58-59 of our
highest priced serials with a pay per article basis. If this is cost effective, we may be able to
access articles we couldn't provide in the past. We are going to be testing this with the
College of Science. I will have updates
after testing.
Matt Christian: We are extremely pleased with how the
student government elections turned out this year using Evoter. We had over 900 students cast online
votes. The faculty senate elections will
now be completely online this year. I
have scheduled a meeting with classified and non-classified staff to try to get
their elections online.
Gary Anderson: The Ecourse
committee has approved several new courses including Classics 200 which will be
offered this summer as an Ecourse. This is an extremely popular course and will
be set for high enrollment for both summer and fall.
Mike McCarthy: The LCME Accreditation visit concluded
last week. I haven't heard anything from
them, but the meetings seemed to go well.
They were impressed with the relationship I reported between our IT
staff and the main campus and the strong cooperation we have. They seemed concerned with mechanisms both from
the Library and Information Technology involving user constituency groups in
policy and decision making.
Sarah Denman: We have been working on the
budget. We won't know until 24th of
April exactly how each unit has determined how they would do a 6% cut. If we don’t get the 9 1/2 % tuition fee
increase, we will have to go back and cut deeper. On the 24th we will find out about
that and about peer equity money and research challenge.
Donna Spindel: We have several additional courses in
development including two in English and we are also looking at Art 112 which
should be developed this summer.
EPOLICY REVISION FOR HIPPA
Mike McCarthy: Recommend that we table due to the HIPPA
Security Regulations that were just released.
Mike would like to have a chance to review and digest these new
regulations before reporting. HIPPA
requires that the University have a Privacy Policy in place. Jim Stephens is the privacy officer for the
University and will be coordinating training for those within the University
who come in contact with medical information.
Sarah is concerned about other policies such as
Buckley that protect the privacy of students and others on campus. We all need to be aware of the policy and
know what we can and cannot share. We
also need to stress to our faculty and staff that email is not private
conversation.
Per Jan: a HIPPA list serve has been created and information will be shared when
we receive new
information.
Jan Fox: I spent a couple hours
with the CIO of WVU discussing various issues. At WVU they have an issue with
students going directly to the FBI complaining about other students for
stalking or hate mail, etc. and the FBI have then asked to come in and look at
email. We usually handle such issues on
campus without involving the FBI.
Mike McCarthy: The good news about the HIPPA Security
Regulation is that they do not take effect until April, 2005. The bad news is that they are very detailed
and encompassing. I am working on a
briefing for the regulations that I will share at a later meeting. It was agreed to
table this discussion.
EPOC - WEB OVERSEER POLICY - FIRST READING
Matt Christian: On behalf of EPOC we want to present 3
recommendations to the policy regarding oversight of
the web site.
1. We need a restatement of the policy regarding people leaving and not notifying us. This creates security issues.
2. The External hosting policy has made it easy for people to purchase domain names and post sites regarding Marshall University outside the university web servers.
3.
Root-level site policy.
This is probably the most important issues. We truly have an out of control root-level
domain name. This causes management
issues with over 300 root level sites.
We need to work out a way to streamline and eliminate some of these
sites.
Jan Fox: Before we approve this
policy, we request the term “departments” be changed to “units”and provide definitions of various designations of
the overseer and technologists, and provide explanations of procedures. The policy should set out rights and
privileges of each person. We need to be
more diligent in monitoring what is on the web page. The overseer needs to take
responsibility to make sure content of web page is accurate. Deans also need to be aware of what is on
their college's web pages. It was agreed to hold the vote until next meeting.
Matt Christian: Content Management will make it
easier to manage page content and assigning responsibility for content review
and maintenance. We are
working now to prepare our sites easy conversion to content management. We are now using a staging server for
publishing. We are looking at Omni
update and the Microsoft product. Dennis
can send any questions we may have out on the Cornell list serve to find out
what other universities are doing.
Sarah feels that the web sites need to be put under
the same yearly scrutiny as the university catalog. We don't want incorrect information to make
us look bad.
Matt will run the product
that reviews broken links and send reports to each unit.
STRATEGIC PLANNING UPDATE
Allen Taylor: We have reviewed the 39
initiatives we had identified in the tactical plan as part of our Strategic
Action Plan in 2000. That document is currently
under revision by a group within ITStrat that is looking
over the document and reprioritizing the items in keeping with the budget
issues. Since the last report on the 39
items, there has been major progress on the top 10.
The wiring project was put into a capital request,
but was not passed by the legislature. However,
during the following session on the budget it could possibly be passed. Senator Plymale has been very helpful in
trying to get that through. We have
explored options for financing the wiring and have found that Verizon Credit Corp
may provide a way for leasing the wiring.
We will meet with Ed Gross next week to discuss it further.
Other initiatives have been set back such as
lifecycle a replacement plan for faculty and staff desktops as well as centralizing
software purchases.
We have a working group in ITStrat
who has for the past year been reviewing software needs on campus, but the lack
of feedback has been frustrating to the group.
Budgets and funding issues have this group up on hold for now. The group continues to review and look ahead
at software and possibilities for providing requested software.
One of the issues brought up was the ability to fund
MAC OS updates for the 200+ Macintosh computers we have in COFA
and Journalism.
Other things that came out of that group were client
software for controlling spam, firewall software, and intrusion detection. Those will be reviewed with new products that
are emerging. I will say that those of
us who have been testing Office 2003, which will be released late summer or early
fall, have noticed a much improved junk email spam control.
The Microsoft Campus Agreement has been renewed for this year. Antivirus protection
has to be renewed in June.
A new working group has been formed for account
retention and email policies. The group
will also address size of email attachments.
There are 56,000 accounts on system now.
We need to set guidelines on when we terminate inactive accounts.
Jan Fox: Retention becomes a
liability, especially with the Patriot Act.
A review by the FBI can be costly and legally binding. The idea of time becomes a critical issue
from a legal standpoint.
Allen Taylor: The other working group on core
competencies has been expanded to address not only students, but faculty and
staff as well. We decided since
that group had been stagnant for some time due to faculty senate issues, to split
the group. There will now be one group
for students to interact with faculty senate to shore up what we expect of
incoming students and graduating students.
Frances wants to be included in student group. Monica will take on the faculty side. Jim Stephens will take on the staff side.
The Vista project has been approved. We have scheduled a planning meeting with
the provosts on April 8, 9, and 10 to define the scope of the project. The meeting will also include WVU and
Fairmont. Our cost will be $70,000 up
front + $26,000 per year for the next 5 years.
The remainder of money will be picked up by the Chancellor as part of
the elimination of the satellite network.
We plan to have it for conversion during the Fall term of 2003 with up and
running by Spring 2004.
TEACH ACT
David Johnson: The Teach Act was signed into law in
November. It justifies fair use,
copyright and on-line learning. http://www.marshall.edu/itc/teach_pres.ppt Essentially, if faculty used audiovisuals in
class, they can now use them in on-line courses. If materials were marketed for the digital
world, they are excluded from use. The
Act protects digital rights management. We
must meet guidelines and have the rights to use material before distributing
materials for class or online. If the
material was marketed for education in a digital format, we can’t distribute it.
Don Combs: The
School of Extended Education is now a CLEP testing site.
Meeting Adjourned.