Information Technology Committee Minutes
Friday, March 20, 2015
10:00 AM-12:00 PM, Union South, Northwoods Room
1. Welcome and minutes Review (Ellen Zweibel)
Minutes of February 20, 2015 approved as presented.
2. Updates – DoIT COO & CIO (Bruce Maas)
The project to complete the separation of the UW and WiscNet is now complete. This was a project
that should have been scoped for 4 years given the complexity, and it was completed in 1.5 years.
Pat Christian and his team of network engineers completed the work with no service impact to the
UW (and WiscNet). Congratulations to the team for their exceptional work.
Bruce and John will meet with the Provost regarding budget reduction recommendations. Campus
will respond after the Chancellor, Vice Provost for Admin, and the Provost review all budgets in
context. There will be a coordinated campus-wide communication in the not too distant future
spelling out the reduced or eliminated services. Any items recommended for reduction or cuts were
taken into consideration in the context of impact to the mission of the University.
Huron has been selected to perform a review of UW-System IT back-office infrastructure to identify
efficiencies. Bruce and John will work with Huron to provide the UW-Madison perspective.
3. Unizin Update, Business Case for Unizin (Bruce Maas)
Unizin is (1) a set of software that supports learning; residential, blended, online, non-credit and (2)
a consortium of 10+ R1 Institutions that control the software services and costs. With Unizin, we as
an institution get to choose software, how it works together and how we use it. IMS Global is the
organization Unizin in partnering with to deliver standards based integration. Bruce has just been
added to their Board of Directors.
Canvas is the first service rolled out for Unizin.
Ongoing budget benefits are estimated at $1m/year system wide by 2020.
Bruce and Steve Cramer will continue to communicate with campus constituencies about Unizin.
3a. Unizin Canvas Pilot Update (Bethany Gordy)
Bethany reported that the current Canvas Pilot is going well. There are 5 faculty participating who
provide feedback weekly. The following points summarize feedback collected to date:
 Faculty love the gradebook which includes time saving features not found in D2L or Moodle.
 Reporting interface is clear and attractive and they like the way statistics are reported.
 At present, 75% think Canvas is a good tool for campus. Opinions have improved over the
pilot lifecycle most likely due to the learning curve.
 Improvements required so content is not created each time from scratch in Canvas, as
Moodle content can be mirrored off something existing.
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March 20, 2015
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The calendar tool can be used to help students manage time more effectively. This is under
comparison against D2L and Moodle by an external instruction technology company
pending analysis completion.
Student feedback will be collected and the end of the semester. Faculty are keeping tabs on student
reactions and submitting as part of their weekly updates. Additional classes will be added in the fall
to include ties to other systems.
Additional details and participant information and be found on the EI website:
https://edinnovation.wisc.edu/uw-madison-canvas-pilot/
4. IT Website Progress (Brian Rust)
DoIT and CIO Website content is being combined to facilitate easier navigation and access. Redesign
concepts are based on input from focus groups and surveys from faculty, students and staff.
Initially services will be those provided by DoIT and the CIO Office. Services from other IT offices on
campus will be included at a later date.
New sections include: a social media feed; twitter feed; system status identified a red, yellow, green;
and an alert space for phishing scams or vulnerability notices. Alerts will be displayed prominently
towards the top of the page if and when applicable.
Current Status: The wireframe is set and coding of the site building will be in Word Press. The team
is currently working on content types and plan to have a prototype up by late summer.
5.
Libraries IT (Ed Van Gemert and Lee Konrad)
Ed reported that while perception may be that people don’t use the library anymore, this couldn’t
be farther from the truth. The library website is the second most used webpage next to the Campus
home page. The UW Library is learning how to tell the story about usage through better analytics.
In an average day there are 1400 users per day in the libraries website, 4.8million users per year,
750,000 requests every day, and 18million user sessions per year. Via the relationship of
technology, there are 1400 databases that provide access to customers daily. The library has
9million physical objects and several million digital objects available. The focus is on discovery and
use to preserve access over time in a sustainable and scalable way.
There are 3 key activities currently being undertaken:
 Working with UW System to get new library application with one instance of a catalogue
and back-office system. Madison is providing the leadership and direction regarding services
to provide across UW. The technical investment may save 7-8 FTE p/year in streamlining of
back-office request processing.
 Visual library services to integrate content from disparate sites for ease of access via Unizin.
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Collaborating across other institutions technologically to share resources. Coalitions are in
progress to discover and make available documents from trusts moving into the public
domain.
Meeting adjourned at 11:50 by Ellen Zweibel.
Attendance
Faculty
Ellen Zweibel (Chair)
Christina Kendziorski Newton
Greg Moses
Rafael Lazimy
Academic Staff
Mike Pitterle
Michael Pflieger
Classified Staff
None
Students
Jason Postweiler
Benjamin Emmel
Non-Voting Members, Ex Officio
Bruce Maas
Provost Appointments
Clare Huhn
Ed Van Gemmert
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Campus Liaison Group Members
Lee Konrad
Alan Silver
Others Attending
Rob Kohlhepp
Bethany Gordy
Brian Rust
Bruno Browning
Jason Fishbain
Bob Turner
James Gerken
Scott Owczarek
Phil Hull
Joanne Jones
Chris Hopp
Mike Litrzkow
Amy Gee
Recording Secretary
Sue Genske