UCSB Projects & Progress 2011
UC Santa Barbara
Projects & Progress 2010
A brief look at some of the things we’ve
been working on this past year.
UCSB Projects & Progress 2010
GauchoSpace Course Management System
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GauchoSpace - Course Management System 5 years of course
management, 3 years branding as GauchoSpace using the Moodle
course management system.
We are very happy with our decision on Moodle. We are currently
running Moodle 1.9.11. We plan to cut over to Moodle 2.x in Fall 2012.
Courses using GauchoSpace comprise 55% of all student enrollments.
Customer Service has been a priority and it has helped the service grow.
We archived 3 years of old course sites for the first time this last
summer.
GauchoSpace has a 700 picture photo gallery submitted by students of
our beautiful campus and community: https://gauchospace.ucsb.edu
UCSB Projects & Progress 2011
COLLABORATE: L&S Instructional Technologies (1 of 3)
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Classroom presentation technologies and network access:
• 30 departmental teaching spaces in 2010-11; 20 more
planned for 2011-12.
• 4 general assignment classroom enhancements plus
VOIP instructor support in 5 more; 11 additional GA
classrooms in 2011-12, including small rooms for
sections.
• Extended campus wireless into 23 instructional areas in
2010-11; 19 more areas planned for 2011-12.
UCSB Projects & Progress 2011
COLLABORATE: L&S Instructional Technologies (2 of 3)
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Worked with Student Affairs to include expanded support
for instructional applications in their identity and security
infrastructure project (first phase rollout scheduled for June
2012).
Deployed a course management support team consisting of
one career staff and 6 half time graduate students to
provide Moodle application support and training to
instructors and TAs, and to develop documentation and
research future enhancements. Along with other
investments, this supported the ongoing increased use of
our campus CMS GauchoSpace.
UCSB Projects & Progress 2011
COLLABORATE: L&S Instructional Technologies (3 of 3)
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Consolidated scheduling and management processes for
Letters & Sciences and Instructional Computing labs, with a
mix of classroom and collaborative learning lab
configurations, and funded additional open hours. 2011-12
goals include enhanced support for language instruction,
and a conversion of a classroom lab into another
collaborative lab.
Continued the conversion of Academic Advising information
and processes to the web.
UCSB Projects & Progress 2011
L&S IT Services
In May, the Instructional Computing unit was merged into
L&S IT Services, in order to leverage resources across the
two organizations, and maximize strategic alignment in the
areas where IC was the primary provider of Collaboratefunded services. (This was in the spirit of campus
Operational Effectiveness efforts, although not a direct part
of that process.) Since one effect of the merger is to locate
several campus-wide services in a College, processes are
being established to ensure effective service delivery using
this model.
UCSB Projects & Progress 2011
Center for Scientific Computing (CSC) (1 of 2)
Joint collaboration by CNSI and MRL, plus ‘Affiliated Staff’ from 6 other
departments and institutes.
Local IT staff can provide best support
Computer Science, Earth Research Institute, Economics
Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies, Chemistry & Biochemistry,
Mathematics and Life Sciences Computing Group
UCSB Projects & Progress 2011
Center for Scientific Computing (CSC) (2 of 2)
Installed new NSF funded cluster of 96 nodes.
•1008 MPI cores
•4 ‘fat nodes’ of 256/512 GB of RAM
•12 M2050 GPUs
•60 TB high performance storage
UCSB Projects & Progress 2011
Operational Effectiveness
The following IT proposals are currently under review as
part of UCSB’s Operational Effectiveness Initiative.
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Outsourcing Student Email
A campus-wide Collaboration Suite
Telephone/VoIP
IT Organization Governance
For more information: https://it.ucsb.edu/groups/itoe
UCSB Projects & Progress 2011
IT Vendor Fair
In May UCSB had a grass-roots organized IT Vendor Fair
featuring 35 different vendors. Over 300 people attended
including IT staff from Westmont College and Santa Barbara
City College.
• Since then, there have been 10 follow-up vendor
presentations on specific products.
• 8 more vendor presentations are in the works.
UCSB Projects & Progress 2011
IT.UCSB.EDU
IT.UCSB.EDU is a launch pad to the information technology
organizations that provide infrastructure, applications, and
services to support academic and business activities at
UCSB. It was officially launched in December 2010, and it
now has:
• 400+ active users, 750 posts
• 17 committees with 350 members
• 7 active projects
For more information: https://it.ucsb.edu/
UCSB Projects & Progress 2011
Campus Calendaring Work Group (1 of 2)
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Meeting since October 2010
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Campus-Wide IT representation
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Charged by IT Planning Group to recommend a replacement
for Oracle Calendar, soon expanded to include campus-wide
Email service
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Asked, in January 2011, by Operational Effectiveness
committee to recommend a product suitable for campuswide collaboration (expanded beyond email and
calendaring)
UCSB Projects & Progress 2011
Campus Calendaring Work Group (2 of 2)
Process:
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Created a set of Fundamental Requirements
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Identified 4 possible solutions that met Fundamental
Requirements
– Google Apps
– Microsoft Office 365
– Microsoft Exchange – Locally Hosted
– Zimbra – Locally Hosted
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Evaluation Groups critiqued each solution and shared with
entire work group
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Deliberations in process
UCSB Projects & Progress 2011
Technology Infrastructure Fee
UCSB is proposing an FTE-based Technology Infrastructure
Fee (TIF) to replace the existing IP Address recharge and
Data Network Surcharge on Business Telephone lines.
For more information: https://it.ucsb.edu/projects/tif
UCSB Projects & Progress 2011
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NEC Telephone Switch Upgrade
We are updating the software and cpus of our telephone
switch and gaining VoIP functionality. Our goals are:
Keep the telephone switch on vendor support.
VoIP functionality is available for the use cases where:
– It provides a lower cost solution, e.g., copper pairs aren’t available.
– It provides a more effective solution, e.g., DTS replacement systems
are no longer available; Business telephone functions aren’t available
from the switch due to distance limits; and VoIP instruments make
moves, adds and changes easier.
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It allows for evolutionary adoption by departments that
want VoIP’s additional features.
UCSB Projects & Progress 2011
For further information about any of these items, please
email your questions to Elise.Meyer@ucsb.edu
Thank you!