Information Technology Council

Meeting Minutes

November 20, 2008

Present: Arnold Miller, Tom Hankins, Crystal Stewart, John Cummings, Ronda Sturgill, Lisa Heaton, Teresa Bolt, Monica Brooks, Barbara Winters, Michael McCarthy, Layton Cottrill, Anita Lockridge, Gayle Ormiston, Donna Spindel

Review of Minutes: Approved as amended

Updates:

Arnold Miller: FCC Grant for Telehealth Alliance. Grant is solid, but it is floundering in political red tape. Most of the problem revolves around the fact that the West Virginia consortium itself doesn’t actually have a purchasing arm. We were going to do the purchasing for the group, but the FCC and the USAC folks don’t want to have it that way, causing an impasse. So, it may not happen; it would have been a big coup for us because it would have provided the funding for a great interconnection of the hospital facilities here with connection of the university to Internet 2. We are planning to move to Internet 2 anyway, but the alliance would have made it more cost effective.

From a statewide perspective, they are renegotiating the SunGard master agreement, the agreement under which all of our ERP for Banner software purchase and maintenance and services is held. We have an opportunity to purchase products at discount before the end of the year so there are discussions going on for that also. There is a whole new product that gives a new interface. There are three pieces, the first is enrollment management/recruitment/admissions; the middle piece is the student relationship/management piece that deals with retention; and final piece moves into the Alumni relationship management.

We are currently having a problem with the email system in which students cannot get to their email right now. We have made a general announcement to everyone. We are working on the problem and hope to fix today.

The 10^th Anniversary of Drinko was held and I thought it was very successful and was nicely attended. Thanks to everyone who helped out.

There is a changeover in what you know as the VPN technology, the technology that allows people to get into the core of the system from the outside. That is changing some and you will see information about that when you try to log on. We are getting notices out with more information.

We have a lot of vacancies in Computing Services. We are having a hard time keeping our head above water and the most recent resignation was Terri Tomblin Byrd who has had a major role within the database group. She has moved over to the Community and Technical College as their CIO, so that leaves us with a tremendous hole to fill. We ask for everyone’s patience while we go through this reorganization.

Ronda Sturgill: We completed our first round of re-reviews of online courses and we took 25 of the earliest courses that were developed. I am in the process of getting those revisions out to faculty to make the changes.

Monica Brooks: The most notable thing going on in our area is launching some mini workshops, the first is scheduled the first week in December. We had a special request from a handful of faculty that want to do some hands on training on some Microsoft programs and we are going to accommodate that.

Mike McCarthy: We continue to experience some rather significant performance issues with our electronic health record. This weekend we are going to be deploying a new storage SAN that will substantially increase disk performance. We are not convinced that that will be the ultimate resolution, but the software maker won’t talk to us about the any internal issues until we have this level of hardware in place. The problem is intermittent and difficult to troubleshoot.

There are also some issues with laws prohibiting electronic prescribing of narcotic drugs.

Lisa Heaton: At our last online faculty users group we were able to share the first reading version of IT-5 with the faculty members and get feedback from them about the revisions.

BOG IT-5 Online Course Revision – 1^st Reading

Monica Brooks: This has been a big project to combine as many comments we received from faculty. We have agreed that we need to strip out items that are not of a policy nature that are best practices, guiding principles and also things that are not unique to online learning. There are some items that will always be unique to online learning that we don’t necessarily enforce but we encourage faculty to follow because it helps them have more successful interactive experience with students. It is also healthy for this division to be less involved in the academic issues.

Review of full policy that demonstrates all of the items we did strike out. The policy is numbered and we also provided a clean copy to see what it would look like after the items are removed. The guiding principles for students document is similar to the faculty guiding principles.

Ronda Sturgill: If there are any questions, concerns or comments we welcome them.

Monica Brooks: I would like to see us explore the area under item 7 of the renumbered policy dealing with intellectual property policy. There were a lot of items in this area that are unique to the electronic course environment and content and faculty ownership and university work for hire ownership, but I did not include the items are also in the intellectual property policy itself.

Ronda Sturgill: We need to remove the word “tuition” and change that to “fee”.

This policy will apply to online E-courses since T-courses are in a different realm that do not require our approval for payment. Per Lisa: if it only applies to E-courses, the wording should be “fees” but if it applies to T-courses also, then “tuition” applies.

Many times, the online courses are intimidating to faculty members, so we get them to use the course supplement and then develop a T-course and migrate it into an E-course. If we eliminate the T-course out of this, how does it work with the stipend they would get? If the faculty member chooses for a course to go through the approval process, they are eligible for a stipend.

Donna Spindel: The term E-course is outdated as well as the reference to electronic courses. I think es should be called online courses and maybe make a separate category for T-courses or hybrid courses. Crystal suggests that in 9.2 we strike “tuition” and just have fee revenue from online courses.

Monica Brooks: T-courses are not always indicated on the course schedule and the online committee may not know what courses are T-courses. Tracking of T-courses and hybrid courses may be something that will need to be considered in the future.

Arnold Miller: I just want to remind the group that this is listed as the first reading so we are not taking a vote today. We want to get all the issues on the table to be addressed.

Layton Cottrill: Under 7.1 does anyone think that paragraph is inconsistent with the last sentence in 7.3? Per Gayle: that last sentence is to apply to non-faculty and if that’s true, it needs to say that.

The other issue is regarding the intellectual property policy of the university. All product or intellectual property that is developed by any employee of the university, whether faculty or staff, is the property of the institution. This group needs to consider that in light of the course development fee that is paid to faculty members to develop E-courses. We may want to have Dr. Maher look at this to see if he agrees. There seems to be conflicting language in this section as it relates to development vs. work for hire. If you receive a fee to develop an online course, where is the logic that the university does not the right to utilize that intellectual property that it paid you to develop? How is that any different than the patentable project or idea that the scientist is paid to develop that the university owns?

Arnold Miller: The work is created at a point in time or the work changes over time, but at some other critical time it turns into something that is mutually owned and could be clarified by saying that at that point in time, it becomes jointly owned. If the faculty member wants to take it and develop it on their own, or go away from the institution that and any derivative work from that is theirs to work on but the university retains whatever it is at that one split point and we have the ability to create our own derivative works from that. Essentially it is two streams of a derivative work going in both directions.

Gayle Ormiston: The only difference between the classroom course and its content from the online course is the mode of delivery and the amount of work that goes into rendering a class for a different mode of delivery.

Lisa Heaton: When we teach a classroom class, we are not required to leave our teaching notes and power point presentations when we leave the institution, we take them with us. Those materials are things we create and take with us. My understanding is that the stipend is not for content, but is a compensation for the technology skills that the typical faculty member would have to gain and learn in order to create a course.

Layton Cottrill: We need to make a conscious decision that we are going to transfer the universities interest. If you are going to do this, understand what we are doing; that we’re giving up a valuable right that could be licensed, that could generate income. I think we ought to be consistent and we need to be clear.

Donna Spindel: My understanding of the existing policy is that the universities claim to the course content doesn’t kick in unless a faculty member markets the course content for which they were paid to develop. The university has not rejected its claim to course content, it simply says “if you try to market it” the university gets a percentage of the profit.

SharePoint Guidelines – first reading

John Cummings: This is designed to put some type of framework around how we deploy Sharepoint on campus. Its use has started to expand dramatically both on the public facing content as well as the internal side, as various groups pick team sites and start to store documents. We need to get a framework around how we provision that and what the guidelines are. The highlights are that we are targeting this deployment at departments, groups, colleges and schools. Right now it is at the exclusion of individual users and students. Students will have similar space as part of the live@edu product which is currently in pilot.

The other key elements that we needed to define were what types of resources would be dedicated to new sites as they were provisioned and how we would recover those sites if they become orphaned as well as how to recover costs if users began to exceed standard amounts of storage space. Looking at what is being offered both commercially and at various institutions that offer this, the offering we came up with was a 2 gig storage space with a cost recovery model that prices it at an additional gigabyte at $10.00 per month. The $10.00 per month would be to offset the cost of disk utilization.

Mike McCarthy: Suggestion that we be less specific about the version referred to in the document.

Email Protocol for Deceased – first reading

Arnold Miller: This is a procedure we are proposing in the event of the death of a student, faculty or staff as a way to avoid some embarrassment related to their identity out there in the world. The purpose is to let the world know that the person is deceased. This document refers back to the University Retention policy.

Layton Cottrill: In No. 2 on the second page, suggest that we delete the second sentence because it may not always be true.

Lisa Heaton: The third item on the second page to specifically say that the person is deceased, it seems insensitive. The wording needs to be more generic. It is suggested that we use the same message as we use with students that the account is no longer available with contact information for further inquiry.

Arnold Miller: For student email, the content will eventually be expunged and the account deactivated. In the case of faculty/staff there will be personal stuff in there and if they haven’t taken the time to separate things out, it will be seen by those reviewing the account if it is necessary. As a general rule, no one will see it. If a request is made, the dean, VP, Provost and Layton will make the decision as to access to content.

We may need to review IT-5 Retention Policy for wording.

IT Security Policy Introduction

Arnold Miller: IT-2 is an information security policy that we wrote several years ago. It was made parallel to the existing state IT Security Policy. The state has since updated their Information Security Policy. It has a lot of other things in it and there are things in it that are in conflict with ours. The state IT policy attempts to do a lot more control of desktops, phones, content, etc. The state policy is more along the lines of a corporate policy. Real question to the group is does their security policy supersede ours? Does the Board of Governors insulate us from that in some way? Do we need to make our information security policy follow the state IT policy? Layton will have to review the policies.

adjourned