Information Technology Committee Sept and October Meetings

The Information Technology Committee (ITC) has met twice so far this academic year. The ITC advises the Vice Provost for Information Technology, who is also the Campus Chief Information Officer (CIO) and executive director of DoIT. The ITC also advises and has a role in approving policies for IT in the broader university community – 70% of IT on this campus is not done by DoIT! The ITC has three student members, currently one undergraduate and two graduate students. It’s worth noting that the ITC is not an entirely technical committee. While certainly the ITC does have technically capable members, most of the technical decisions are left to campus professional staff. The ITC does not dictate that we buy Cisco routers instead of Juniper routers, for example, but focuses more in saying that we need a high speed network available everyone on campus and this is the way we’ll fund it. However, we can and sometimes do ask pointed questions about why one particular technology was chosen, or provide guidance in how to evaluate purchasing options.

The first ITC meeting was in September, and focused largely on just orientating new members to the committee. As part of the process, each member was asked to give a list of “pet projects” they’d like to see the committee or campus take up. The full list is in our minutes, which are online here: http://itc.wisc.edu/minutes/minutes.asp?min_id=522

One thing I am very interested in pushing this year is lecture capture, i.e. recording audio and video of lectures and posting it online. I think it is a terrible waste that so few lectures are recorded on this campus – to use a bad analogy, they’re like an inefficient power plant, and capturing these lectures could produce a lot more value for students, faculty, and the public. I think an ambitious but attainable goal would have 100% of lectures captured in five years.

In a related issue from the first meeting, a member of the committee mentioned “clickers”, which are the devices that a professor can use to have students vote or answer questions during lectures. Clickers are unpopular with students, right? Please let me know if I’m way off base here.

Another issue that we’ve spent a lot of time discussing on the ITC is Moodle, which is a software package that does the same thing as the software behind Learn@UW. If you’re in the business school or college of engineering, you’ve probably used Moodle. I will write more about Moodle in the future, but campus and the ITC is paying careful attention to Moodle as a potential replacement for the current Learn@UW. It’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, and certainly not until next fall, which would only happen in the very worst-case scenario.

The ITC website is http://itc.wisc.edu/, and our meetings are the 3rd Friday of every month at 10am. We have many visitors who attend the meetings, and any interested student should absolutely attend – the chair is very good about allowing guests to participate in the discussion!