ITC MEETING

September 29, 2003

 

Present:       Jan Fox, Dennis Prisk, Mike McCarthy, Allen Taylor, Mike Dunn, Matt Christian, David Johnson, Arnold Miller, Mike Castellani, Don Combs, Layton Cottrill, Monica Brooks, Frances Hensley, Donna Spindel, Gary Anderson, Tom Hankins, Sarah Denman

 

Review of Minutes:          Approved as Amended

 

COMMITTEE UPDATES:

 

Jan Fox:                Tomorrow I will be attending the Information Technology Forum with the different CIOs from around the state.  The state Higher Education institutions have decided to be proactive.  Last year Senate Bill 131 was trying to consolidate the CTOs office, IS&C, and potentially, WVNet.  The concerns are that two of those agencies are having great difficulties from a management prospective and we didn’t want to be mixed in with that group.  That Senate Bill still has some teeth and there is supposed to be a review of WVNet that is to end in November this year with some type of recommendation. The concern is that WVNet took on other agencies that are still strictly higher education and is supposed to meet our needs quickly; however the other agencies have a political trauma component that is diluting the purpose.  The CIOs are meeting to look at efficiencies as well as look at some governance issues. 

 

I attended the Southern Governor’s meeting last week.  The topic was Higher Education Access and Economic Development.  No one was invited from higher education or K12.  I sent an invitation to other agencies and Sid Morrison from WVU attended at my invitation.  At times there were only 20 people in the audience.  I think we are neglecting educating of the Governor about education and technology. 

 

Don Combs:          I was able to get the quarter million dollar grant to update the Nursing program at Mid-Ohio Valley Center which will include the addition of two new interactive classrooms, one on the second floor of Prichard and the other one at MOVC.

 

Gary Anderson:     We are streamlining the approval process for online courses to get new courses approved sooner.  We are setting up subcommittees to get courses reviewed faster.  All new courses have to go into Vista.

 

Allen Taylor:          From the Minutes of the last meeting we discussed that we were waiting on the legislature for the approval of 1.9 million dollars from capital money to rewire buildings.  At this point only the new buildings, the Residence Halls  and Old Main have been rewired.  Hopefully that will be approved in October, which will allow us to begin rewiring in the Spring.

 

Jan Fox                 The Trade Mission is still on for October 19-21 dealing with Bio-Technology.

 

POLICY 13

 

Jan Fox:                This committee previously approved a Draft of Policy 13.  It was decided that since it was such a critical document, a legal review was necessary.  It was sent to Steptoe & Johnson, Attorneys at Law. 

 

David Johnson:      They had 14 comments, most of which we had already addressed in a later version.  There were four remaining issues, of those, three of them were really relevant and one of them was more of a suggestion.

                            

The original introduction/scope.  Donna reworked it and made it more user friendly. 

 

Another recommendation was the definition of in-load and overload on page 9 of the marked up version regarding faculty compensation.  No where in the document did we define inload vs. overload and they thought it would be good to have that in there. 

 

The big comment was on the Right of First Refusal – It works out two ways:  (1) We can't tell faculty that they own copyright and then tell them they lose it if they don’t want to update it.  We don’t do that in a traditional class.  Our idea was originally to protect the faculty member    (under pg 12) Rights of Ownership.  We have struck the section of right of first refusal.  The department has the right to offer another section, but can't change content.  This makes it comparable to what we do in the traditional classroom.

 

The fourth area was Filing of Copyright.  We didn't set out who had the right to file copyright.  The owner has the responsibility to file copyright.  If there is a joint ownership with University, it is up to the University to file copyright parallel with Policy 9.

 

There were not many other changes made.

A clean version has been provided and is dated 9/24/03.   I presented this policy at Oxford a couple of weeks ago and it went over well. 

 

Mike McCarthy:     Question raised regarding wording on the page with the bullet points, stating professional staff does not have the same protection as faculty because faculty is presumed to have created the course on an overtime basis. 

 

David Johnson:      If staff creates a course, it presumed that it was part of their role of staff member.  Academic exception could apply if you are creating something for a course you are teaching, then it is exempted from the principle of work for hire.  If a staff member creates something for a course they are not teaching, that material is copyrighted, unless he is working as a developer for that faculty member and it is their content they are creating, in which case the university would have a joint ownership.  In the case of adjunct faculty, if they are creating for their class they are considered faculty.  The role you are playing at the time of the creating of the class determines ownership.  If there is a Contract between the faculty member and the institution, the contract is binding.  Department policy supercedes if it is in effect at the time of development.  VOTED AND APPROVED

 

INFORMATION SECURITY POLICY

 

Jan Fox:                History - last January we submitted an Interim Security Policy to have on record with the State as the Marshall University Security Policy.  Our Security Officer is Jon Cutler.  Our Deputy (external) Security Officer is Perry Chaffin.  One of our goals this year is to take the “interim” off.  We have had some issues from the Banner User Group.

 

Arnold Miller:        To date no one has been asked to sign the Confidentiality Agreement which is item 6.5 of the Security Agreement.  There is an objection to the webpage link inserted into the document the person signs.  The implication was that we could change the webpage link information after the document had been signed.  When I inserted the link into the document I meant it as a link to an example of the owner list.  I am proposing some clean-up of the document and that in 6.11 we need to add to the definition of information owner as being a person or a group within the institution who is ultimately responsible for the application and the data related to that application.  For example, the Banner group has identified the Registrar as the owner of various subsets of information; Admissions is the owner of another subset; and HR is the owner of another subset.  The problem is that we have bunches of other stuff all over the place and we need some sort of default owner until we can get everything cleaned up.  My suggestion is that we need to add something in there like “in lieu of defined owner, a “default” will be the owner.  We need to establish this default owner.  Back in section 3.4.1, we have said all IT assets including hardware, software and data are owned by Marshall University unless accepted by contractual agreement.  The Confidentiality Agreement really needs to refer to a specific owner. 

 

Sarah suggests adding to the list of definitions for information owner.  Even thought we state elsewhere in the document every piece of information will be assigned an owner.  The Chief Information Officer is suggested by Sarah and Layton as that owner.

 

Layton raises the issue of Security regulations under HIPPA.  Mike McCarthy says we currently have a Privacy Policy in place and we have until 2005 to come up with a solution for modifying that policy into the Security Policy. 

 

Arnold Miller:        3.2.2 is my attempt at grandfathering and “childrening” in, everything that comes along in terms of “all information resources regardless of medium will be used, maintained and disclosed and disposed of according to law, regulation or policy”. 

 

Jan Fox:                The Governor's Office has a listing of every Security Officer for all of Higher Education.

 

Arnold:                  It appears that one of the things we left out of this document is some classification of the data and some classification of usage of the data.  The Disaster Recovery Plan defines data in some classification.  We need to decide the levels the different types of data fall under.  We have to decide how many levels to create and importance to the university in bringing that information back on line.  Different classifications are business critical; essential; necessary; and desirable.  We have to set out a time limit for targeting to bring back each type of classification.  Between the owner and the custodian they will decide what level of security needs to be placed on each piece of data.  It is agreed that the group will review the document before the next meeting and begin reviewing at the October Meeting. 

 

Layton Cottrill:      The current Board of Governors would be very interested in this document. 

 

Jan Fox:                Please share this with all of the areas you represent to get as much input as possible.

 

 

VISTA

Allen Taylor:          The Gartner Report issued in 2002 addresses academic ERP.  The campus edition of WebCT is currently being used here at MU. 

As we were doing our planning for the next step in on-line course delivery, the Chancellor decided to divert funding from SatNet to help MU, WVU and Fairmont State in licensing Vista Enterprise Edition. 

We began the Vista project in mid April with a planning committee looking at IT course management and learning management with the help of funding from the Chancellor's Office.  The Chancellor is kicking in about 5 million dollars over next 5 years.

This project began looking at moving the existing WebCT content onto Vista. 

We begin a pilot program of 12 faculty members doing training over the summer. We began with 500 students in 10 courses. 

As expected, we ran into a variety of problems.  We have worked through most of the problems and are using service packs to work through remaining problems. 

 

Feedback has been positive. 

 

Jan Fox:                The committee needs to be aware of policies that need to be reviewed by this committee; and strategy, which Allen will be dealing with in the IT Strat committee.  This product gives us an ability to own the market.  We already have an on-line RBA that is progressing and others in the state are not keeping pace in the market.    

 

Allen Taylor:          One of the biggest IT initiatives was to get an environment that could expand to meet the size of Marshall.   Its architecture is multi server based.  It has fail-over capability. We plan to have half of the courses on Vista before the Spring term, continuing to run in parallel with some courses in Campus Edition and some in Vista during Spring Semester and continue to convert the other half during the Spring Semester.  We have sat down with Donna and Gary as well as Matt and David on what we have in terms of resources to do that.  It looks doable at this point.  We think that by the time Version 3 rolls around, some of the things from initial planning meeting will be doable with that product.

 

                             We have found a number of faculty and a number of courses that are beginning to offer learning management outsource.  That is where the text book or the course is being offered in a learning management senerio off campus.  Some of those involve sending student data off campus which could be a security problem under FERPA.

 

Jan Fox:                One of the issues we will have to deal with on a state level is the issue of when 3 institutions are sharing courses, sharing faculty, or you have a student taking courses from all three institutions.  How do you credential that student?  What is their institution of record?  How do you pull the degree together?  How do you do transfer credit?  How do you deal with financial aid?  There are some real nasty things being dealt with on the state level.  From a university level, if we have all courses with a piece in Vista, what can we do with learning communities?  What can we do with Gradebook differently?  There are things we can do very strategically that will take input from this committee on whether we go that direction or not. 

 

Sarah Denman:      We are already dealing with the issue with shared degrees and shared programs where the courses and FTE are shared, the FDH is shared, the student chooses the institution granting the degree. 

 

Allen Taylor:          It is the Chancellor’s vision that the three institutions can actually host this type of activity for other schools.  In reality, this product cannot do that easily now; however, by the end of Version 3, which is mid next year, it will be easier.  There are still a lot of issues in terms of integrating to various systems.

 

Jan Fox:                I am concerned that the matter of shared objects will become an issue. 

 

Gary Anderson:     What we are going to have to consider is that Vista involves a lot of sharing of course content, but then we get in to the intellectual property ownership issue.  So we are going to have to find a middle ground that lets us use the materials efficiently but that the faculty members are all comfortable with in terms of the sharing of intellectual property.

 

Sarah Denman:      We have done a statewide review for Biological Science Curriculum.  They are going to bring a group of faculty together statewide to look at what should be the common learning outcomes.  They are preparing a menu to choose from to meet those learning outcomes.  There may be some institutions that would like to meet that outcome, but don’t have the ability to do that and would like to pull from something at another institution.  This gets into a module sharing issue.

 

Jan Fox:                Another aspect we need to think about is personnel training.  Pcard training could be done in WebCT.  Certifications could also be handled online.  It goes beyond the academic realm.  We need to be creative; this is a good way to bring money into the campus.

 

Allen Taylor:          When looking at the potential for Vista, a big component we considered was cost reduction/cost avoidance.  We identified certain functions such as DNF repeat letters, andgiving gradebook access to parents electronically. Another function would allow the migration of costly people-time in the course evaluation process.  

 

There are a number of things that have to be worked through between now and next Spring but we are on track, well within the scheduled guidelines of our secondary schedule. 

 

IT STRATEGIC ACTION PLAN

 

Jan Fox:                Looking ahead to the North Central report, we need to review and renew our Strategic Plan.  We need to decide as a group what needs to be included in this plan.

 

Allen Taylor:          The Strategic Plan group worked on the plan prior to Dr. Angel’s arrival and it was re-examined in the 2010 Report.  In IT Strat we began revising and updating it last year; however the budget problems hit and everyone was tied up with budget issues.  We plan to redraft the Plan in a written form this year. 

 

We have reprioritized the Technology Enhanced Classroom Initiative.  We have given Sarah an estimate on what it would cost to do a 5 year plan doing 75 classrooms per year.  MU was rated down on the last evaluation of the most wired campuses. 

 

Allen agrees to send a list of the working groups and the members of those groups to Sarah so that she can make sure there is a good representation on each committee. 

 

 

WIRELESS POLICY

 

Arnold Miller:        Previously we passed a policy called the Telecommunications and Authorization Policy.  Telecommunications oversees the data and telecommunications network on campus.  The cost recovery policy is included in that policy.

 

The other policy was called the Telecommunications and Networking Infrastructure Policy.   Even though you have given us the authority to oversee the infrastructure, we  want to get specific on wiring issues and the issue of wireless technologies and their use on campus.  We have found departments going to local stores and installing their own wireless systems, not realizing that they have opened up their port to anyone driving by and allowing them access into the university network.  We need to set a policy for setting up wireless systems.  We would like to put together a wireless policy for the ITC to pass the word down regarding this security risk.

 

Allen Taylor:          In our deployment of wireless we use VPN.  A department wanting wireless needs to go through telecommunications for the package that goes through VPN.  The use of Marshall VPN for business purposes needs to be encouraged.

 

ADJOURNED.