Provost’S Academic Computing Advisory Committee

Provost’s Academic Computing Advisory Committee Minutes for November 24, 2003

Attending: Kathleen Smalldon (for Claudia Bakula,) Annie Becker, Don Carter, John Campbell, Galen Collins, Fred Estrella, John Hagood, Jerry Hughes, Tom Knights, Barry Lutz, Matt McGlamery, Larry MacPhee, Jay Thompson (for Margaret Moore,) Georgia Michalicek, John Placer, Ricky Roberts

Announcement: Don Riney has accepted a position with Arizona Western College in Yuma, AZ and will no longer be on the committee. Nick Lund will be contacted to see if there is a replacement.

Old business: John Hagood spoke with Calvin Eckel, Chair of SCACAC and the legacy roster system will remain available. John Campbell added that all values found in the legacy roster system will be duplicated in the new Peoplesoft system before the legacy roster system is turned off.

Minutes of last meeting: Minutes of the last meeting were corrected in paragraph three, under the subtitle Technology Literacy to reflect that the issue of assessment for technology literacy is still on the table.

Reports Technology Literacy Subcommittee Annie Becker reported the subcommittee met on Friday, November 21 and realized they did not have an implementation plan for the Technology Literacy Goals in their report. They then decided that it would be best to bring Pam Eibeck back into the process to determine whether she wanted them to work on an implementation plan. This would inform the subcommittee of whether faculty are supportive of the goals and also avoid any unnecessary work if an implementation plan from the subcommittee was not needed.

Discussion included:  Faculty concern for bolting on extra requirements when they are meeting needs in individual programs  More evidence in ResNet of increased need for technology literacy with student machines being turned off because they are infected with viruses  PACAC support for informing faculty of need for technology literacy  Learning Assistance Center being utilized more to teach technology skills  Recognition of huge gap between technology savvy students and older students who need to acquire skills  Admissions request of John Campbell to answer questions in Educause Survey to develop Guide to Evaluating Information Technology on Campus; responses to this survey were reviewed by members of the committee as well as others on campus and forwarded to Admissions in December. It can be viewed at: http://www2.nau.edu/provost/pacac/fy03/findings.htm.

PACAC Minutes for November 24, 2003 – Page 1 Barry Lutz informed the members that the Faculty Senate has decided to take responsibility for the diversity curriculum beyond the Curriculum Committee and anything similar that is university-wide. Jay Thompson also shared that the School of Forestry found all the Technology Literacy Goals developed by the subcommittee to be important to their curriculum and they are currently making decisions on where to include them.

VISTA Don Carter reported that 15 faculty members have accounts on the VISTA system and that it will be up to him to guide them to try things out. He said that Fred Estrella, John Campbell and he met with WebCT at the Educause Conference in early November and could sign an annual contract with them which would cost $87,000. Fred Estrella clarified that with an annual WebCT VISTA lease, there would be no value left in the contract at the end of the year and if they switched in mid-year to a perpetual license, there would be no savings. In the meantime, the cost of a perpetual license could go up. Don Carter added that the contract for technical support would cost an additional $130,000 which would be needed for the transition and migration of courses.

IT Fee John Campbell reported that the difference in an IT Fee is that it would be assessed of all students (as opposed to a fee for Health Services or an Athletics Fee.) If implemented, John said the spending of an IT Fee would be subject to student control. He reported he will be working with Claudia Bakula of the Cline Library and Marc Lord of Distributed Learning Services to develop a pie chart of how the money would be disbursed, as the politics of the fee warrant.

Fred Estrella informed the committee that the other state universities are looking at charging various fees but an IT Fee is not being considered. He said all three universities may end up with a different rate of tuition and fee structure. He also reported that there had been interest for participation shown by ASNAU and The Lumberjack due to computer lab closures but the direction that NAU will take is not yet known; the President’s Cabinet has yet to make a decision.

Online assessment project John Campbell reported that Evala’Jack had been replaced with a new web-based tool created by Brian Sawert’s team and that the School of Forestry, College of Education and Distributed Learning Services were all participating in the pilot project for Fall ’03 classes. He said it is an ITS managed system and the goal was to have it open for all colleges to use during Spring ’04 or at least by next fall. Anyone interested should contact Cynthia Conn in the Office of Academic Assessment.

John also reported on several other projects in Academic Computing as follows: 1. SCORER is being replaced with online reporting of Scantron bubble sheets used for tests. a. Faculty will now receive email and will download *.pdf reports from a Web site.

PACAC Minutes for November 24, 2003 – Page 2 b. Conversation with one faculty member apprised ITS that now faculty will have to pay for printouts in their own departments. 2. The SPAM Assassin tool will be going through a second iteration. 3. Electronic portfolios are still being discussed.

Software Testing John Campbell said there was a request made for more involvement from faculty when ITS develops new software to be used on campus. Barry Lutz informed the group that SPAM Assassin was a good example and stated that while ITS does a good job of evaluating the capabilities of a new software program, feedback from the end user is missing. He asked, “Is there a place where faculty could pretest and provide feedback to ITS?”

John Campbell suggested a mailing list targeted to faculty who want to be part of the testing. Members of the committee recommended that ITS seek faculty volunteers. John Hagood recommended that an email be sent out asking for volunteers to sign up for the mailing list notifications. John Campbell suggested ITS make a general announcement on Gary Fox first to see if that gathered enough volunteers. Barry Lutz volunteered to inform Department Chairs of the mailing list if requested.

Email use policy John Hagood posed the question as to whether or not the use of email should be required of faculty. He said that this was part of the discussion last year in PACAC, being prompted by the HR510 policy which was brought to the Faculty Senate. However, the Faculty Senate minutes did not reflect that any action was taken on HR510 and he currently does not know where it stands. He suggested that PACAC find out what email policies have been implemented by other universities.

The discussion on this topic moved to a discussion on whether or not the university is providing capabilities that would be consistent with any requirements. John Campbell reported that 38% of the mail coming into NAU is currently SPAM and that is expected to increase to 50%. Matt McGlamery offered that his team in ITS could not guarantee delivery times of email messages due to the growth of the amount of email and the virus filtering capabilities that have been put in place on the mailgate server. He reported that a year ago, ITS added a second mailgate machine and that we now have three. He said, if a ResNet virus takes over machines and turns them into SPAM machines, then the mail gateway can get overrun by SPAM. Also, when one mailgate server needs to be taken down, it eliminates 1/3 of the campus resources for email; today’s email environments are very resource intensive.

Matt discussed the trade-offs of preventing SPAM in the first place in order to speed up mail delivery. Matt reported that 55,000 messages with viruses were captured last year and 82,000+ are expected this year at NAU. Annie Becker asked about government controls and Matt said many SPAM and virus emails come from overseas over which U.S. laws would have no control. John Campbell asked if a subcommittee should be formed to work on these issues with ITS. When he asked what the expectation is for

PACAC Minutes for November 24, 2003 – Page 3 delivery of email, Barry Lutz responded that it has to be almost foolproof to meet time deadlines. Fred Estrella commented that no one can guarantee the delivery of email because SPAM can overwhelm the system at anytime. He said there has to be a directive to help regular business messages to get through but filtering can prevent some legitimate messages from reaching their destination also. He said the university needs to take action on this issue.

Annie Becker offered that other universities are already filtering email. She said it would be important to keep faculty informed of what is being blocked. John Campbell asked how many faculty are not using NAU as their email provider. Barry Lutz said that faculty need alternative email addresses in order to discuss politics, etc. John Campbell told the group that this complicates filter rules.

John Hagood said the central issue here is to determine how faculty can advise ITS when tough decisions like this have to be made. Larry MacPhee, Galen Collins, and a person from CBA through Annie Becker volunteered to assist ITS with these decisions. Fred Estrella thanked PACAC for their help with this problem.

John Hagood summarized the two issues at hand. 1. Matt McGlamery was invited to initiate an email to those who volunteered to help. 2. A gentle email policy that could lead to a stronger policy in the future will be explored. 3. Other volunteers will be sought if this initiative goes forward.

Possibility of centralizing IT support John Hagood informed the committee that the President’s Restructuring Plan mentions centralizing IT support. Ricky Roberts informed the committee that there is no ongoing proposal; there is only discussion at the cabinet level. Ricky said the current situation on campus is a semi-distributed IT staff with 70 IT liaisons performing various tasks. ITS is the first level of support for colleges that don’t have IT staff and the second level for those who do. Ricky described the situation as complicated saying that ITS wants to be part of the discussion on centralizing support and would provide consultation as schools and colleges merge in order to determine what eventual IT staffs would look like.

Fred Estrella said ITS does not want the university to think that ITS can support additional areas without a dialogue. He also stated that ITS can and will continue to be a resource.

Next meeting John Hagood asked for members’ Spring semester schedules to be emailed to him so he can set meetings for February, March, and April.

PACAC Minutes for November 24, 2003 – Page 4