PACAC Response 2
Provost’s Academic Computing Advisory CommitteeRequest for Information
John Campbell
November 1, 2002
About this Document
This document is in response to the Provost’s ACAC meeting of October 29, 2002. Minutes of that meeting can be found at http://www.nau.edu/provost/pacac/. This document specifically tries to provide background information on IT Fees, the Microsoft Campus Agreement, and a summary of the Student Computer Ownership Team’s report.
Introduction
These topics may be considered related by considering what some have called the ubiquitous computing movement in higher education. Proponents, often from distance education or even the open source movement, suggest that when students have access to computing “any time or any place” they are better poised to develop the skills necessary to succeed in the information age economy.
One branch of this thinking claims that students who own their own computer have a different relationship to information age tools than those who use a computer lab. From a social justice standpoint, there was a growing concern about “have” and “have not” students. The movement to require students to purchase computers, however, seemed to stall last year, not only at NAU but also nationally (according to Green (2001), 3.4% of Universities require students to buy computers). Steve Gilbert and others have noted that parents and students took administrators to task on campuses where the computer was a required purchase, but its use was not integrated into the curriculum.
On the other hand, a growing number of schools are trying to offer students who do have computers as many resources as possible. Most schools have wired their residence halls. Many schools (over 40%) recommend students purchase a computer. As you will see below, nine out of 18 of our peer institutions, purchase the Microsoft Campus Agreement Student Option so that students can purchase productivity software at reasonable prices. Hopefully members of this committee will find the information below helpful as they form their own opinions on these difficult, but critical issues.
An Overview of IT Fees
Casey Green's "Campus Computing 2001" survey shows that 66.1% of public universities had an IT fee in 2001. The 2002 report is not yet out, but the trend has increased in numbers of Universities assessing an IT fee.
Fred Estrella sent the following to Sara Bickel, at her request, on September 6, 2002.
IT Fees at Peer InstitutionsInstitution / IT Fee Amount
Ball State / $260/yr Univ. Tech Fee & $100/yr Resident Hall Tech Fee
Bowling Green / Tech Fee part of res hall room rate $92/sem
CSU, Fresno / None specified
George Mason / $42/sem all students; $125/sem res hall for network, cable, local phone
Miami U. / $100/sem Resident Student & $18/sem non-resident
Oakland U. / None specified
Ohio U. / Tech fees by college, range $60 to $125
Old Dominion / None specified (Part of comprehensive tuition fee)
Central Florida / None specified
Delaware / None specified
Minnesota / College Equip & Tech Fee, range $50 to $250/sem
Computer Network Access Fee, range $25.80 to $77.40/sem
Full Computer Lab Access, $61.80/sem
Montana / $6/credit hr/sem
UNLV / $4/credit hr/sem
UNR / $4/credit hr/sem
North Dakota / $50/sem full-time students; $4.17/credit hr part-time
Vermont / None specified
Wyoming / $20/semester
An Overview of the Microsoft Campus Agreement
To understand the Student portion of the Microsoft Campus Agreement (MCA), it helps to first review the main campus license. The parameters of the license are set by Microsoft, but we purchase through a third-party supplier. There are two costs: the license fee and the media fee. ITS pays the license fee for the campus. Our decision to do this grew out of a request from the College of Business and a concern that we had a lot of illegal copies of MS in use and the campus could face a large fine. The media fee is simply the cost of duplicating and packaging a CD that contains the software.
Employees can avoid the media fee by downloading the software from the ITS page. Otherwise the bookstore will sell a set of CD's for $15, as long as you meet the eligibility requirements.
The current Microsoft Campus Agreement consists of Office XP Professional (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Outlook), Office for Mac (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Entorage), FrontPage, and Publisher.
These products can be used at work or at home, but home use is restricted to NAU related business.
Visual Studio is also available, but only for campus use only.
Employee Costs
Ricky Roberts has just finished a competitive bid process for next year's Microsoft License provider. The lowest of the four submitted bids was $46.63 per employee. "Employees" are faculty, part-time faculty, staff, and graduate students.
The cost for the program for the next year is calculated as follows:
(Full-time + (Part-time/3))*unit_price = 2,640 * 46.63 = $123,103.20
Student Costs
Each responder to our bids was also required to submit their price for us to add students to the license. The lowest bid yielded a cost of $26.17 per student. We can add students to our license at any time.
The cost to add students to this year's license is calculated as follows.
(Fill-time + (Part-time/3))*unit_price = (13,246 + (6,661)/3)*26.17 = $404,753.94
Under the MCA, students are not allowed to download the software and must purchase through a provider (typically the bookstore). The media charges are usually about $7.00, so purchasing the complete bundle would cost about $40. Of course, schools can charge back whatever they like: Ohio State, for instance, charges their students $99 for the bundle.
One way of stating the above is that we can broker a group purchase for students of these key Microsoft products for $40. Without our help, the same products cost students about $280. Another view, however, is that students would be assessed the IT fee each year and thus continually pay for the license even though they might upgrade only once or twice during their academic career. Assuming two upgrades in a 4 year career, this works out to be around $130 versus $560. Students who never upgrade still come out ahead: $118 ($40 + 3*26) versus $280.
The above analysis, of course, is subject to many assumptions; the two most important being that there is an academic reason to recommend standard software packages, and students would otherwise have a difficult time acquiring these packages.
Our Peer Institutions
Searching the web for “Microsoft Campus Agreement” (or calling in some cases) yielded the following results on which of our peers are providing the Microsoft Campus Agreement (MCA) to staff and students. The list of peers is from NAU’s Planning and Institutional Research’s web site (http://www.nau.edu/pair/PEERinstitutions.htm).
Peer Institution / URL (or phone number) / MCA for Employees / MCA for StudentsBall State / http://www.bsu.edu/web/ucs/mscafaq/ / Yes / Yes
Bowling Green / http://www.bgsu.edu/offices/its/microsoft/license_agree.html / Yes / Yes
CS Fresno / http://www.csufresno.edu/ait/mssoft-s.htm / Yes / Yes
George Mason University / http://itusupport.gmu.edu/mslicense.asp / Yes / No
Miami University, Ohio / http://www.units.muohio.edu/mcs/other/microsoft/eligible.shtml
/ Yes / Yes
Northern Arizona University / http://www4.nau.edu/its/swat/software/MSLicense.asp / Yes / No
Oakland University,
Rochester, MI / IT Help Desk: 248-370-HELP (very confused) / No / No
Ohio University, Athens, OH / http://www.ohiou.edu/software/overview.html / Yes / Yes
Old Dominion University / Could not determine… / ? / ?
University of Central Florida / http://www.cstore.ucf.edu/accessories/camp_agree/ms_agree.html / Yes / Yes
University of Delaware / http://www.tsc.udel.edu/purchase/inst_order_sw.html / No / No
University of Minnesota, Duluth / http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/software/ca/CA3Accept.student.htm / Yes / Yes
University of Montana / Talked with Vicki Pengelly (406) 243-2405 / No / No
University of Nevada, Las Vegas / Talked with help desk: 702-895-0777 / Yes / Yes
University of Nevada, Reno / http://computing.unr.edu/FAQs/licenses.html / No / No
University of North Dakota / Talked with help desk: 701=777-2222, transferred to Carol / Yes / No
University of Vermont / http://www.bsad.uvm.edu/student/mscampus2.asp / Yes / Yes
University of Wyoming / http://uwadmnweb.uwyo.edu/infotech/Services/Sales/Software/default.htm / Yes / No
Notes: University of Delaware participates in the MS Select program but does not appear to be a MS campus agreement site. Oakland University’s web site was so unhelpful I called their help desk—where a student worker had a difficult time with my question. University of Montana is considering the Campus Agreement, impetus coming from their College of Business. UNLV help desk stated that the administration of the agreement was split between two entities—which was odd (nothing was obvious on their web site). University of North Dakota stated that NDSU did have the student option. University of Vermont seems to have implemented MCA college by college and not universally. The University of Montana indicated their College of Business had also initiated an early contract.
References
NAU Microsoft Campus Agreement Overview: http://www4.nau.edu/its/swat/software/MSLicense.asp
This site explains our implementation without the Student Option.
Microsoft Campus Agreement . http://www.microsoft.com/education/?ID=CampusAgreement
This is the full agreement. It explains that upon graduation students will have perpetual license rights, but otherwise the software should be deleted. Notification is done at the time the software is purchased.
Rules for using MCA at home: http://www.microsoft.com/education/?ID=StudentMedia
This document describes the rules for using these products as a student or at home. The following section appeared worth quoting:
Some institutions choose to recover the cost of student licenses and/or media through technology or enrollment fees. The use and amount of such fees is solely up to the institution's discretion.
Students DO NOT own the license or the CDs, rather they are authorized to use the licensed software and media pursuant to the terms and conditions of the license(s) granted to the institution for the term of the institution's agreement. To help facilitate this communication, download the Campus Agreement Student Acceptance Form or School Agreement Student Acceptance Form.
Summary of the Student Computing Ownership Team (SCOT) Report
A complete record of the SCOT activities can be found at http://www4.nau.edu/scot/ (this includes President Haeger’s press release changing the requirement to a recommendation).
Current Data
While we don’t have extensive survey data, Gary Fetter was able to give me the following breakdown from his team’s effort to supoprt ResNet. From the calls they’ve made this year we’ve seen the following (some discrepancies exist due to visiting the same machine more than once).
· Laptop Machines: 122
· Desktop Machines: 243
· Macintosh: 7
· Windows: 357
· Number of Viruses: 56
· Windows 98: 165
· Windows NT/ME/2000/XP: 203
· Maintosh OS8.6/9: 7
· Macintosh OSX: 0
· Linux: 0
While there are rumors of 486 machines with minimal amounts of memory in use by students, we haven’t run across one yet in our ResNet support efforts. Certainly there may be a few among the non-traditional statewide population, but even there the numbers are probably decreasing rapidly. For the past three years, at least, hardware has been ahead of software and Gary assures me that the vast majority of machines in ResNet would be capable of running Office XP.
Selected SCOT Issues and Recommendations
The following are selected points from the report. The minimum hardware and software standards follow in their entirety.
· Over 80% of incoming freshman have computers already. Owning a computer creates a different, and richer, relationship with technology. Thus 20% of our students are getting a second-class experience. [The numbers now are well over 85% of all students, not just freshmen.]
· A key component of SCOT would be to assist students who can’t afford a computer through financial aid and computer loaner programs. About $500,000 in financial aid was identified to be retargeted toward this effort.
· Computer ownership for computer ownership sake is not a worthy goal. A computer requirement should be tied to faculty led curriculum changes resulting in a well-defined computer literacy requirement.
· Before faculty could be expected to expand the curriculum to include technological components, the faculty themselves would need to have rich faculty development opportunities.
· The number of instructional designers available to the faculty would need to be increased to assist faculty in creating core data rich courses.
· The Academic Computing Help Desk and Learning Assistance Center would need additional staff to handle the increased load.
· If open labs are shut down because we expect every student to have a computer, then students will need a way to get their computers fixed as soon as possible when they break. Other schools have on-site repair facilities (through a vendor) or loaner programs to keep students up and running.
· NAU should phase in the program starting with Freshmen and then confirming that proposed first-year strategies are viable for 50 UC101 faculty, 8 selected gateway course faculty, 40 FYE peer mentors, etc.
SCOT 2001 Minimum Hardware and Software Recommendations
Recognizing that these recommendations will change from year to year, the following were recommended in the SCOT 2001 report. (These recommendations are essentially capturing the same recommendations we make informally to students or parents who call and ask about bringing a computer to campus.)
Minimum Software for a PC
Note other software (especially browser plug-ins) will also be available from the NAU software web site or from the Internet.
· Microsoft Office 2000 Professional [primarily Word, Excel, and Powerpoint] (hopefully available through the campus Microsoft Campus Agreement)
· Email client (available with OS or from NAU’s software web site)
· Internet Browser (available with OS or from NAU’s software web site)
· Acrobat Reader (available from NAU’s software web site)
· Network Associate Antivirus (available from NAU’s software web site)
Minimum Software for a Macintosh
Note other software (especially browser plug-ins) will also be available from the NAU software web site or from the Internet.
· Microsoft Office 2000 Professional [primarily Word, Excel, and Powerpoint] (available through the campus Microsoft Campus Agreement)
· Email client (available with OS or from NAU’s software web site)
· Internet Browser (available from NAU’s software web site)
· Acrobat Reader (available from NAU’s software web site)
· Virex Anti-virus (available from NAU’s software web site)