DRAFT
Information
Technology Council Minutes
1/26/04
Present: Jan Fox,
Gary Anderson, Dennis Prisk, Allen Taylor, Arnold Miller, Jody Perry, Jon
Cutler, Mike McCarthy, Tom Hankins, David Johnson, Sarah Denman, Frances Hensley,
Donna Spindel, Mike Castellani, Monica Brooks, Don Combs, Layton Cottrill
REVIEW OF
MINUTES: Approved
COMMITTEE UPDATES:
Jan Fox: There are huge things happening at the state level. When the original CTO, Sam Tulley was there, there was an issue of bills to higher
education for services of the Governor’s Office of Technology. These bills are in the range of $16,000 a
month to Marshall University.
Historically every Chancellor has decided that the bills were not
appropriate and have returned the bills.
We have before us over a half million dollars of bills that we have been
billed to higher education. This is an
ongoing issue because we didn't receive any service.
Another issue is with
the Secretary of Education and Arts. When
David Ice was there, and the practice has has
continued under this administration, they have put in money annually at the
legislature that covers the cost of lattas. Since that money is covered centrally, we
have not seen the 20% shared service cost.
Evidentially, on this next generation of bills, this 20% cost reappears
even though it is a double charge.
I am chair elect of
the State ITC which governs all CIOs. I have a meeting every Friday afternoon and a
meeting in Charleston the last Wednesday of each month. The issues are intense. The CIOs have
prepared a White Paper called WVNet II that takes control of WVNet back
up to education. Since we run 80-90% of
the traffic on that, we don’t want the silliness to happen. There are other issues out there, for
example, the state did not bid some contracts and that has caused e-rate
problems. There are hundreds of
thousands of dollars being lost. The
white paper could go before the HEPC at the February meeting.
Sarah
Denman: We had semi good news
about the Governor’s budget about some possible money for libraries that could
help work towards a digital consortium.
Allen
Taylor: The report to the
Governor’s Office of Technology is due the end of this week. We are also about
to renew the Microsoft Campus Agreement this week.
We are having Vista
meeting daily with WebCT Technical Support on the problems we have had the past
couple of weeks. There are still a few
minor problems outstanding. Both nodes
are now up and running. We have been
running over 300 concurrent users consistently which is what we expected. There
is a
Arnold
Miller: The
Network invoices were sent out in December, and we are collecting the fees
now.
The Banner performance
issues we had during the first two days of class and late registration were
substantial. Since that time we have
researched the product and have tried to resolve those issues. We made many changes to the system
itself. The problem is very illusive and
not evident until there is a very sizeable volume on the machine. Once it starts to slow down, any additional
processes slowed it down more. We are
continuing to work to identify what caused the problem. We may need to have a "lets hit
Banner" day to see what it will do with a load similar to those
encountered that first day, before the next registration. That will not be a trivial thing to arrange.
We still have another list of items to work on.
Donna
Spindel: There are over 2000 students just in
completely on-line e-courses, and that doesn’t include the T-courses. We are offering close to 50 e-courses now. There are about a dozen courses in
development now.
Sarah suggests that
this would be a good time to have an article in the Marshall Magazine about
Vista and a discussion with students using the online courses. We may want to discuss the RBA on-line
program as well as discuss the diversity of courses that a student may want to
take just to be taking a course.
Jan Fox: The other market we
are trying to pursue is the blind and vision impaired.
Sarah
Denman: We are working with
Clark Egnor to market to English as a Second Language so those students could
go online and do some courses in their own country before coming to this
country.
Jan Fox: We are submitting an
NSF proposal that sets up all dual credit courses in the state on-line.
Anderson: Last fall we did online Lab Safety training for
chemistry labs. This semester we have 20
Chemistry labs as well as 40 Biology labs online.
Jan Fox: We need
to look into using Vista to track training of employees.
Monica
Brooks: We have the
Copyright seminars next week. There will
be three seminars running at different times.
We have had a good response from the faculty.
The PLT (Public
Library Technology) program is now underway.
The first class is running; Library Organization and
Administration. This class has been
taught for the past 4 years. We have
actually had to turn people away. We
are also planning professional developments and training for public
librarians. This is way to reach
librarians for professional development.
Mike
McCarthy: We have now a number of electronic full
access journal titles accessible to MU, WVU, and eight other colleges in West
Virginia paid for through the Biomedical Research Infrastructure Network
Grant. Barbara Winters was very helpful
in obtaining these journals.
Don
Combs: Last fall we received
a quarter million dollar grant. Through
that grant we have been able to upgrade the Nursing program in
David
Johnson: As a follow up on Vista
numbers; there are 13,328 enrollments in WebCT between the Campus Edition and
Policy 13 did not get
before the Faculty Senate in January.
They pulled it because some of the people in the Executive Committee had
questions. It will come up again on
February 9 at the Executive Committee meeting.
The questions they had involved the Intellectual Property rights. The Senators needed more time to read the
policy.
West Virginia Virtual
Learning Strategy Committee is working to identify how institutions will be
sharing courses. I should be able to
bring back more information at the next meeting.
INFORMATION
SECURITY POLICY - Vote
Arnold
Miller:
Voted And Approved.
WIRELESS POLICY
– Vote
Arnold
Miller: This is the second reading.
There
are no changes since the last time other than a couple of grammar changes.
Per Frances: Clarification on number 2 on page 2 of the
policy points. Private wireless points
in dorms and offices, does not include cell phones. There are issues regarding placement of
towers and this point addresses those issues.
Voted and Approved.
Request for Policy
for Accessing Electronic Records of Deceased Faculty/Staff/Students
Jan
Fox: There is an issue
of both email and Audix messages. This
is not just a technical issue. We need
to look at the issue from a privacy standpoint.
Jon
Cutler: The system has a locksmith ability that can grant
administrative privileges to a department to retrieve records of a deceased or
incapacitated person. We want to make
sure we are following proper procedures for retrieving and releasing
records. If the records were paper
records in a file cabinet, they would be turned over to the Dean of the
Department. I have discussed this with
Jim Stephens and he has sent me links from other institutions to see how they
handle these situations.
Layton
Cottrill: If the institution wants access to any form
of communication of the deceased faculty that was used for educational
purposes, the information is not protected by any statutory right of privacy
because is deemed to be Marshall’s property. If a faculty member was still
teaching courses, we need to be able to retrieve the records immediately, and
there would be no problem because the material was for educational
purposes.
Personal
stuff is a different issue. If the
deceased faculty/staff/student’s legal representative requests the information
we really do not have any power to withhold it.
Whether we release information to a person depends on the legal status
of the inquirer.
Regarding a deceased
student whose parents want email records and V drive records; we first need to
decide who owns the information and who would be allowed to obtain it. Per Arnold:
Electronic Resources ownership is set out in the Use and Abuse Policy in
the Student Handbook.
HIPPA Policies
Mike
McCarthy: We are not requiring
the ITC take any action on these policies.
We are just asking you to look over for them for possible use on the
main campus. Per Jan: please review and see if we need to follow
same type of regulations.
Sarah
Denman:
Nursing and Health Professions will
also need to follow these regulations.
Mike will take responsibility to work with Nursing and Health
Professions and Social Work. Jim Stephens and Jon cutler both serve on our
HIPPA committee.
Proposal From BOC Committee To Move Away From Social Security Number
as Identification Number
Jan Fox: This is a pressing
issue. For some period of time we have
been looking at moving away from the Social Security Number as the student
ID. The BOC has made a request for a
proposal for a new ID card that could be used beyond our campus as Debit
Card. The ID number would not be printed
on the front of new ID card for security reasons.
They have made a
recommendation on how to change the ID number. As a normal function of Banner it
will create an individual ID number.
There were issues where we wanted to create an alpha-numeric number, but
our card swipe readers cannot accept alpha-numeric.
Another issue is data
going from Marshall to the HEPC requires a unique number that does not appear
anywhere else in the entire higher education system. Marshall has been assigned 901 as designated
beginning number, but Banner will generate a new number beginning with 9.
Per Allen: When we
moved to Vista we moved to a single sign on.
One of the things that has come up with Vista being a
multi-institutional, is even if MU generated their own unique accounts and
passwords, it would be difficult to coordinate that with other schools. Although a numeric ID may be cumbersome to
remember, it will eliminate duplication of ID numbers at other
institutions.
Jan Fox: We need to look beyond
what we are doing now. We do not want to
have to reissue numbers and recard later. The new ID
numbers will be for students, faculty, and staff. We need to broaden our scope to think about
the faculty and staff issues. There are
some training issues here.
The Social Security
Number will be stored as a previous ID and will be moved out of the ID field
after 6 months. It will then be moved to
the SSN portion of Banner. We would
still be able to search with the SSN after that 6 month period,
it would not be purged, just hidden.
The BOC recommends
that the MU ID number not be put on the front of the ID card due to security
concerns. It could actually be put on
the back of the card in a small area.
There is concern that there will be a problem with students remembering
their number if it isn’t on the card.
The BOC recommends
that the institution carefully consider potential impact on this project of
House Bills to amend sections 5A-8-21 and 17A-2A-7 of the West Virginia Code.
Adoption of the Recommendations. Voted and Approved.
Allen
Taylor: The goal would be to have these cards ready for Orientation in
April/May. The ID number would be used
for logging onto the computers and Vista.
The system will have to be in place because it affects the log on.
Jan Fox: The issue of Third
Party Contracts was pulled from today’s Agenda.
There are direct costs to the institution to do a course such as faculty
salaries. The indirect cost function for
third-party contracts does not work for on-line courses. For example, for third party contracts that
are T or E course, the library computing fee is waived and only sixty-seven
cents per credit hour goes to support any of the technology. We need an on-line Third-Party rate.
ADJOURNED