ITC meetings always start off with a half hour of so of “roundups.”. In December, we talked about
-the search for a CALS CIO (Chief Information Officer) – mostly just that they were looking for someone, not much on what they’d do.
-The standard update on the lawsuit between Desire2Learn and Blackboard. The reason we care is that Desire2Learn makes the software behind Learn@UW, and if D2L lost that lawsuit the consequences could be that we’d have switch software behind Learn@UW. The lawsuit has been going on for a couple of years, and to be safe the UW developed contingency plans in case we had to switch. This wasn’t a complete waste of time – we’ve actually got a lot of colleges that prefer our backup option. Thankfully, we’re done getting these lawsuit updates as D2L and Blackboard announced a settlement.
- A cooling upgrade for the data center. More on that in the January report
- The ITC has a representative on the Campus Planning Committee, so we get standing updates from the CPC
- A security update. You may remember an incident earlier this year in Chemistry, in which social security numbers were inadvertently exposed (and likely weren’t exposed, the hackers were just using the computers to share movies, and probably never even knew there were SSNs on the machine. Still, the UW assumes that they were and acts accordingly). The concern is that we’re approaching having to spend upwards of a million dollars with software to try and defend against all of this, and it is only getting worse.
- The UW is looking at “Digital Measures” - http://www.digitalmeasures.com/ It is an online course evaluation system (ie replacing the scantron thing we fill out at the end of the semester) with some fancy reporting tools. We’re supposed to see it at a future ITC meeting, so I’m trying to keep an open mind. (There’s something to be said for better processing of this data, but once upon a time ASM managed to put it all on the web, so it can’t be that hard to do)
We then moved on to our big agenda items. The first topic was the start of reorganizing the libraries on campus, and reinterpreting the role of libraries. This might be something we’d like to discuss further, and other committees have mentioned, but the gist of it is that the libraries will be moving away from specialized libraries and collections, and towards a more centralized functional system.
Our next discussion item was titled “Reflections on a snow day” – this was about a week after the December campus closing. Some things we talked about:
- the University’s website was nearly crushed by the spike in load, as people were trying to get information about the closing. In the future, we’re going to go to a stripped-down version earlier.
- We need to clarify what it means for “campus to be closed”, particularly in regards to things that don’t physically need campus. For example, there was a lot of ambiguity for assignments that might have been due on that day. As much of the submission of homework/papers/projects is electronic, a snow day doesn’t matter. Similarly for virtual classes that meet electronically – there was no need for them to be cancelled, at at least some of them “met” as normally scheduled.
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