Information Technology Strategic Oversight Committee
(ITSOC)
Minutes
March 20, 2015 10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. SSB324
Attending: James Lyall, Eriks Humeyumptewa, Nick Pistentis, Michael Erskine, Mike Hart,
Diane Watkins, Sheila Rucki, Jeff Helton, Chad Mortensen, Janos Fustos, Chelsey BakerHauck, Morgan Swaney, George Middlemist, Mark Potter
Absent: Kevin Taylor, Patsy Hernandez, Steven DeVisser, Hsin-Te Yeh, John Wiltsie,
Lindsay Packer
Approval of Minutes from January 15, 2015 ITSOC Meeting
Announcements/Updates (15 min)
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Introductions:
o Welcome Diane Watkins, ITS Communications Coordinator. She will bring a
strategic view of all communication, documentation, and branding in ITS and
work closely with MSU Denver’s MarCom.
o Welcome Nick Pistentis, Director User Support Services. Nick will oversee the
HelpDesk and Desktop Support. He previously worked at George Washington
University and the EAB in Washington, D.C., prior to his recent private sector
employment.
o Welcome Kevin Taylor, Director Application Services. Rick has retired and
returned since our last meeting.
o ITS Leadership positions are all filled. We currently have a total of 4 vacancies in
all of ITS. 18 – 24 months ago, we had approximately 30 vacancies.
o Welcome Hsin-Te Yeh from the School of Education.
Redundant Internet connection for campus will be complete on March 24th. This gives
us a huge decrease in risk.
Internet2 Membership. We are in the process of joining Internet2. The primary reason
to join is it gives us access to higher tier services, such as Blackboard, and other services
with not much incremental cost. It also gives us access to a community of research. It
will be very visible.
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ECAR Survey - faculty and students. This gives us a good opportunity to gather
baseline information on perceptions and needs. Working with SGA on how to distribute
to students.
SCCM desktop management software. We are in the process of rolling out to student
computer labs. It helps us gather a lot more information and provide more cost effective
services.
Domain consolidation. The final pieces of clean up were happening last night and this
morning. We have some more things to do next.
Just a reminder, we post all agendas and minutes for ITSOC and the three
subcommittees on our website.
Academic Technology Subcommittee Update (5 min)
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Blackboard notification changes – anytime there’s a system change, an automatic
notification goes out. We have added to the login page instructions to students on how
to configure notifications. We are going to send a message to all faculty explaining the
change and we will set to “digest” mode, where notifications go out once a day. It also
does reporting.
Classroom standard. We have AHEC classrooms, that were implemented in 1999 to
2002 and nothing has been done to them since then (analog, VHS, no wide screen
display). Then we have the new building, the hotel, and the AES building, where we
bring in outside contractors to setup classroom technology. Because of that our
classrooms aren’t compatible. We are trying to develop a standard document for all of
our classrooms. First, we are defining learning spaces. The next step is to consider what
do we actually want as a standard in our classroom. This document went to Faculty
Senate, then the AHEC Media Center, and then to the Academic Technology
Subcommittee. Michael will send the document out to this group next week.
At our April meeting, we will discuss the Rowdy environment. What exactly is out there
as far as developing a website? Chris Mancuso will join us and also Janos to talk about
his experience with the V cloud environment. Eventually we want to replace the
services provided by Rowdy. We need to figure out the services people want and figure
out how to provide it. Janos has been working with the server team on this.
Information and Instructional Technology Policies Subcommittee Update (5 min)
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Mike and Andrea Gonzales have done a lot of editing from the 2009, 130 page policy
document. They are now down to 23 pages. We will review at our April meeting of the
I&IT Policy Subcommittee for possible recommendations.
Enterprise Systems Subcommittee Update (5min)
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Electronic time sheets. We are eliminating paper timesheets, hoping by this fall. This
project came from the Assembly for Process Transformation.
Faculty load compensation (FLAC) Banner module. It was turned on and then turned
off again. We were told some faculty were concerned people could see what they were
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doing. It will be up in a month to 6 weeks. Sheila will mention at the April 16th Faculty
Senate meeting.
Reviewing all Banner baseline changes. We spent last summer and fall documenting
every baseline change made to Banner. Some are 15 years old, Banner is different now.
Every time we do an upgrade, it takes more time to re-apply those changes and is more
expensive. We are in the process of reviewing those. We will likely come up with a list
of things we can eliminate.
Items for Discussion and Recommendation (60 min)
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Student Experience Fall 2015 vs. Fall 2013. By the beginning of the next semester nearly
all systems and services that students interact with will have been upgraded/changed in
the last 2 years.
o Teaching and Learning: Learning Management System (LMS) consolidated and
using Quality Matters framework – complete. Three years ago, we had two
learning management systems, MyCourse and Blackboard. They have been
consolidated and upgraded. ETC is using the Quality Matters framework. All
courses get a template.
o Teaching and Learning: Collaboration Suite (Office 365) with email, calendaring,
chat, storage, SharePoint – complete. Office 365 is far more than email and
calendaring (i.e. SharePoint, Lync). How do we put a road map to that? How do
we start deploying to campus in a structured way?
o Retention/Graduation: Student Success Collaborative Advising Platform –
Spring/Summer 2015 (Pilot) – Demonstration. For the last 6 months, we have
been working with the EAB (Educational Advisory Board) implementing their
Student Success Collaborative. This will bring change from the advisor’s
perspective and hopefully the students’ perspective. They have a tremendous
amount of data from us, taken over a 10 year span. They do a lot of analysis on
that data and provide predictive information (institutional analytics) dashboard
for the institution. The system shows dashboard level data for deans and chairs.
It is live data daily. James gave a demonstration of the Student Success
Collaborative which is an advising platform that may replace BRM. BRM has
served some faculty for student related notes and this does that, too. BRM was
used by admissions for the purpose of recruiting. Recruiter will be doing that
and will no longer be done by BRM. Another area that uses BRM is the
Academic Success Office and it is yet to be determined if the SSC will work for
them. Ned Muhovich will pilot the SSC next month. They will be looking at
undeclared majors, in particular. One of the things that the EAB has suggested is
that there may be a student view available. Students pull information from
report we generate.
o Recruitment: Ellucian Recruiter – March 2015. Recruiter is a big deal in
automating the admissions process.
o Retention/Graduation: ConnectU Site changes – April 2015. That site is going away
completely and will be replaced with a new site. The ability to change this site
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was limited as we are using Luminis, which is out of date and can’t be upgraded.
For the past 6 – 9 months, we have worked on technical changes that will get
away from Luminis. This should be complete by mid-April.
o Retention/Graduation: DegreeWorks – new and transfer students will start to use
beginning October 2015. There was a revision to the schedule: incoming
students this fall will be using DegreeWorks for spring advising. We will roll it
out in October and maintain in parallel with the CAPP environment. We will
start with incoming students and work back to current students during the next
couple of years. There will be a tremendous amount of work, including the
clean-up of the course catalogue. We are ultimately phasing out CAPP.
o Teaching and Learning: Virtual Desktop “proof of concept” – Demonstration.
Virtual desktop demo by Mike Hart. Different types of environments are set up
differently. You can save on OneDrive and back-up on your desktop at home.
o Teaching and Learning: Virtual Server Instances “proof of concept”. There has
been a long standing need for those that teach each semester that they want their
students to have experience at the server level to learn server management. We
are currently looking for testing. Mike may reach out to this committee looking
for people to test.
Next Meeting May 15th. We will move a week earlier to May 8th, 1:30 – 3:00 p.m.