Information Technology Council

Meeting Minutes

October 16, 2008

Present: Jan Fox, Crystal Stewart, Ronda Sturgill, Allen Taylor, Mike McCarthy, Gayle Ormiston, Tom Hankins, Lisa Heaton, Karen McComas, Anita Lockridge, Matt James, Frances Hensley, Donna Spindel; Layton Cottrill

Jan Fox: We won’t be discussing the Sharepoint policy today. We will be discussing online course policy.

Review of Minutes: approved

Committee Updates:

Jan: Friday, a week from tomorrow, is the Drinko 10 Year Anniversary. We plan to have an informal celebration for those who contributed and hope to have more contributions for the next 10 years. This is truly a “thank you” celebration. On Saturday, the building is open to the public for readings, tours, refreshments for the Huntington community.

I was appointed to the WV Broadband Council, an 11 member voting committee that reports to the Governor dealing with state broadband issues. There are issues with education and K12 and expansion with a lot of the projects. I will try to keep this group up to date as thing progress. There are actual real dollars involved with that committee. We have allocations; there will be personnel hired, so it’s not a committee without finance. This is good from an educational perspective, a research perspective, and an economic development perspective.

A week ago Friday, I was in Louisville for a cyberinfrastructure meeting. We are looking for collaborative partners for a special EPSCoR round 2 grant for cyberinfrastructure coming up in January. You have to have an out of state partner, so we are trying to partner with Kentucky. We also want to form partnerships especially in the areas we have some weakness, such as bioinformatics. We were having issues with having enough NIH and NSF faculty in certain areas to go for certain grants. We are trying to take advantage when dollars are on the table.

Ronda: We are reviewing the first 25 E-courses. The review will take the oldest online courses first. The review will take place in November. Faculty members have until the first of November to get their templates in and ready for review. We do not evaluate the content of the course, we leave that up to the academic department. We are encouraging departments to review content, but we are looking at how the course is set up. Is it easy to navigate through, as well as, a whole list of criteria?

Allen: We are in progress of implementing a FCC grant. We have the final draft for bids to send out and we are expecting it to go out with a bid opening early next year.

Networking has gone ahead with the normal lifecycle replacement of wireless access points. They have done some trials over the summer and were waiting for a draft of the newer, higher bandwidth standard 80211N. It is still in draft but we feel comfortable with our vendor, (CISCO) that anything we invest in now will be software upgradable. So Networks is beginning the upgrade of those around campus. We have done tests at MUGC and here and are expanding the wireless security access with some new products and they will be installing those over the next three or four months. Before mid-spring semester we would expect to be with the higher bandwidth WiFi service.

Jan: I just sent you the Educause Core Data reports. Those are excellent reports for national IT data. You won’t see a lot of libraries incorporated in these models. 900+ universities responded to that report. We do wonderful on that report except in one area. Our number one area that we fall behind is connected teaching classrooms. Per Allen: We have been working on this since 2001. We have had requests from COLA they want to spend their own departmental money to augment a TECI room. We are in discussion with the Registrar as well. Several levels of TECI rooms complicate the scheduling options that the Registrar might have. If we create several levels of rooms the faculty member can specify what level they want. This issue is ongoing and is still our number one concern.

Mike: The deployment of the online health record is complete across all of our clinical departments. We’ve been tackling some performance issues related to some internal designs of the AllScripts product as well as some hardware configurations to improve performance. Per Jan: I want to thank the Medical School, they did a fabulous job. It is a tough project. I got a call from the Governor’s office under the WV Health information network; they want to make Huntington the head for doing online records. Much credit goes to Dr. Grethen Oaley who spearheaded the entire project.

Matt: The students love the new web site.

BOG IT-5 Online Course Revision – First Reading

Ronda: The changes are highlighted. Since we sent this out we have had several changes including – we want to omit 35.2 because it repeats the last sentence in 20.1. We want to take out “tuition” and leave it as “fee revenue”. We need to remove the word tuition for the entire document. Per Jan: we charge every online student an additional $2.00 per credit hour to allow online students admission to campus events. These are not state dollars, it’s a totally separate financial.

13.2 is an addition to the policy. We need to make it clear that if there is no revenue coming in (0 credit hours) there will be no payment.

35.1 needs revision – needs to be separated to clarify and make clear the issue of the $2.00 fee.

We also need to clean up the definitions regarding E-course and T-courses relating to fees and tuition.

Gayle: On 35.2 and 20.1, the term “should be used” regarding money coming back to the departments is a concern. Per Karen: there is concern regarding who makes the decision in the colleges of whether E-courses are developed. Chairs and deans make the decision. Donna: In 20.1, revenue is used by academic units. We went back and forth researching to find something written on how funds are to be used. We couldn’t find anything. E-course revenue should be used in ways that encourage online course development and use of multimedia in the classrooms. We re-wrote that and put it in the policy because we seem to be in a position where we were being asked to be specific about how these funds were to be used. There was a question from the Deans concerning how strict the “should be” really is. Layton feels that the policy should be silent and should not constrain deans and chairs on how the funds should be spent, especially in tight times.

Jan: In terms of history of in-load - Herb was worried because colleges wanted computers but they were spending their fees on other things. It was a financial issue. Anita is also concerned that colleges and departments will come together wanting money for computers.

Gayle: I am concerned that if there is additional revenue it should be shared and the money put in a pool of funds for recycling of computers and life cycling of computers. A portion of the funds that goes to departments should go to a desk top replacement plan; it may not be a popular idea, but I am interested in improving the lives of faculty. This will be a hot topic

Lisa: On 32.2, the courses are reviewed every three years; this was changed from every two years.

Ronda: On 8.1, the last sentence is confusing for some. Right now you can offer T-courses without going through review if you don’t receive a stipend. Per Lisa: on MUGC campus there are 70-80 T-courses. We pay close attention to course evaluation information.

Jan: We need to question all the historic assumptions that led to this policy.

It is agreed that after this group approves the policy it will go directly to the Board of Governors. The Policy path will be changed in the document to reflect the change.

No final changes have been made today. We will redistribute with comments

Higher Education Act

Jan: On page 2 it addresses illegal downloading – we have everything in place for restriction of peer to peer. We are seeing some institutions go to places like Ruckus networks. Ruckus is a subscription service that some institutions pay into and all the students have access. If our purpose is education, what are we educating? If they leave here, what have they learned? Unfortunately, those intuitions that use Ruckus are still on the top 25 so it has not restricted illegal downloads at those institutions.

Emergency notification issue – When we had power outages, Communications sent out multiple texts. The first text went out okay. They thought it didn’t go out and they sent multiple texts. We were blacklisted by the telecommunication providers and we are in the process of getting back on white lists.

E-learning authentication, on page 7. There are some requirements certifying that the person in every experience online is actually who they are. This is being relooked at nationally.

The next time, we will look at the SharePoint Policy and have the second reading of the Online Course Policy.

There is an NACUBO issue with agencies who have financial aid credit cards red flagging people who are changing addresses to steal from the system. Since we are considered a financial institution under some guidelines, we are now under this “red flag issue”. Part of the FTC requires some written identity policy. Jan, Anita and Layton will get together to discuss this. Per Layton, we need to clarify if we fall into this category. Per Layton, it is not clear if we are caught in that net yet because we technically do not issue cards.

Adjourned