Information Technology Services User Satisfaction Survey 2007
Indiana University - Bloomington
Open Text Responses (Edited)
Indiana University Center for Survey Research
This text file includes responses to the final question of the UITS survey: Are there any additional comments you would like to make about University Information Technology Services?
Identifying references have been removed from this document and replaced with [IRD]. Case IDs have also been removed from this document. Responses are grouped by sample: Faculty, Staff, Graduate Students, and Undergraduate students.
Faculty
The biggest problem I have is knowning where to go to find an answer to question. I can rarely navigate to the same place twice.
The teaching classrooms need to have microphones. HPER 13, in particular; It is hard for me to speak loud enough in such a long room. I have checked one out, and that worked well but it would be most convenient if they were just built into all the class rooms. Thanks for your consideration. Other than that, I have yet to make use of all the many wonderful features that Uits has. But thanks for the continual upgrades.
The Oncourse CL system needs to be made cleaner and less cumbersome for students to use, especially those using it at a distance. I can't tell you how many problems I've had with using it as a distance ed tool. My IU students are resigned to it, but don't like it. My non-IU students keep asking me why we don't use another, more user friendly system and they, quite honestly, loathe it. Instead of moving toward greater transparency, where the system becomes more intuitive in its design, Oncourse seems to become more clumsy, with far too many screens for students to click through to get to where they need to be. I find the system fatiguing to work in--something I never thought I'd say, after over a decade of web-based instruction, about the technology.
Obviously I do not make a great deal of use of UITS services. In terms of computer technology support, I rely on HPER Technology Services rather than UITS directly. I am very satisfied with HPER Technology Services.
The recent upgrade to MDSS is timely, needed, and appreciated. Communication about the upgrade process and subsequent problems (with sftp, for example) was not very good. Direct email answers to my inquiries was very good. I would like to see more transparency in the way that MDSS operates, in terms of the services it provides and does not provide, the problems it experiences, etc. Many units such as mine rely completely on MDSS, yet we don't have a clear idea of exactly how the data is protected, whether there is a disaster plan in place, whether any modeling of potential threats has ever been done along with procedures for recovery, etc.
Several of our researchers need to transfer large amounts of data very quickly. I am told that the current campus infrastructure does not allow fast enough transfers between the massive data storage system and their personal servers.
This survey was very long. A progress bar or an estimate of how long it was going to take is called for. I nearly quit before I got to the research computing section. I do not teach and am not a student, so several sections were not applicable.
7-Zip File Manager provided by IU is not able to unzip the files (.hqx) from the DNA sequencing facility (Biology) and I had to buy WinZip to be able to do that. Perhaps some improvement could be done on that program.
The only real complaint is the FIS system. I don't use it in my new position, but when I used it the prior three years it was the most outdated, slow system. It looks and behaves like something out of the '80's. I know that security is needed but that SafeCard nonsense is ridiculous. [IRD]
This survey was way too #@$%* long !
Here's an incomplete list of areas where UITS needs to concentrate more effort: - Moving to a Google Search appliance for web search was a very good thing. The people who
configured it apparently know very little about it, or purposefully configured it in such a way to return useless results. Searching directly on google.com yields more accurate results about IU pages. - The name space for UITS related websites is a complete disaster. iu.edu, indiana.edu, uits.iu.edu, uits.indiana.edu, etc. UITS sub-groups have their own websites, sometimes hosted as http://www.indiana.edu/~groupname. The name space needs to be consistent. When these groups migrate their pages/links, they need to work and not be broken. - The webmaster(s) that create the "standard" UITS web page layout must still be stuck in a 640x480 mentality. For example, the font size at http://storage.iu.edu/ does not scale appropriately for different screen sizes. The red on yellow/white is a terrible contrast. - The Knowledge Base has lots of useful information and it is nice to see that UITS sub-groups are starting to link to specific relevant entries. However, doing generic top-level searches directly from http://kb.indiana.edu/ can yield far too many results. Use the keyword 'wireless mac' as an example, which returns 3 pages of results. This is too overwhelming for most end-users
users really should have an option to choose their email user-name FOR FREE
The major problem I have is with the IUwebmail during peak use hours. Noon and 5 pm. During these times, it is almost impossible to quickly access my email account and I cannot send attachments that contain data from other labs because of the long lag time.
I think a seperate designated server area (correct term?) should be set aside for faculty and Staff use ONLY so that student use of the IUwebmail system does not impede Faculty and Staff use.
Wish I knew more about what is offered.
UITS staff are amazing!
to broad the covering of wireless service
Overall the technology I have used has functioned well.
Please improve (or scrap) Oncourse CL. Also, IUCAT is improving but is there any way to further improve the interface? I still have to go through multiple authorization screens to access the database.
Electronic access to the library is absolutely fantastic.
Since I have many good experiences with UITS and such bad ones with CITO, perhaps UITS can take over CITO completely? It's really odd that I have to rely on CITO for some stuff and UITS for others. They should be all one unit.
The format of some of the questions on this survey were was incomprehensible, hence I could not respond. In general UITS has been helpful. Telephone support is up and down depending upon who answers the phone.
Although personally, I have had great help each time I contacted UITS personnel, I have responded to most of these survey questions in reference to the project I am working with this year: Indiana Reading Academy Project. In the fall semester we registered over 600 teachers across Indiana to participate in an online 2-semester course in conjunction with a partnership with the IDOE and Reading First. It was a nightmare getting teachers accepted into the itaccounts system. Even though we had spoken to people at UITS, they still did not understand what was going on and the teachers' feedback was similar in that they were not being helped in the steps to follow to get an itaccounts or any of a variety of their tech difficulties. Granted, many of these teachers were stretched to their technological-max point, however, there were so many problems such as teachers who had been in the IU system before but did not have a password--or know their password. We need to get together next summer and work this out so that everyone is on the same page. Due to the difficulties in itaccounts, 130 teachers dropped the course! There has to be a better way to handle this (from both sides). [IRD]
I could use more space in my e-mail inbox. Even with auto-archiving, I do not have enough room. I have phoned UITS about this and been told I have the maximum size allowed.
Oncourse CL is in need of signnificant improvement. The interface is confusing and the usability is poor. I am an expert in usability, and have observed numerous problems and complaints about CL. The worst part of CL is the Discussion tool (part of Message Center). It is awful, and impairs our distance students who MUST have a good discussion tool. The interface to the discussion tool is literally baffling to DOCTORAL and MASTERS students in order to do simple things such as find a post, edit it (impossible), or make an attachment to a post. The Oncourse CL discussion tool was so bad that students preferred to use Discus Pro in my class last summer. The discussion tool actually has a serious bug. Sometimes the bottom part of the display fails to show, and so you don't know what to do. If you click refresh, then it will "suddenly" appear. But why do you need to click refresh to make it work at all? But in general the discussion tool is simply awful. Simply awful. Really bad. Not OK. Hello? Fix it!!! The CL interface is very difficult and next to impossible to use in 800x600 resolution on laptops with small screens. You really need a 17-inch or higher display in 1024x768 to read and navigate CL. The real problem is the windows-within-windows concept that forces awkward layouts and excessive scrolling within small windows -- Onestart is similarly impaired. Those programmers with their 21-inch monitors probably don't notice. But the thousands of users who have smaller display devices that must be run in lower resolutions in order to simply READ the screen are screwed. Make Oncourse work on my cell phone, and then you'll get it right--it needs to scale up and down for different size displays. For a humorous, embarrassing and sad example of the problems created by this interface design, see: [IRD] On a positive note, the ability to form projects in CL is excellent. This has been very helpful for creating research groups.
Have some refresher sessions for faculty who have been here a while but have not been in the loop about newer developments, rather thank workshops that teach only the cutting edge technologies.
Maybe more classes to teach us how to use Internet resources such as Cute writer and software of this sort. Thank you and have a great weekend coming up.
I've stopped bragging about IU's IT to my colleagues at other universities, in large part because they just don't believe things are as good as I say. And I continually discover new things and improvements that make my life easier and my work more productive and effective. Are there areas for improvement? Sure, but they seem to be addressed routinely, so my concerns rarely go unaddressed. Keep up the great work!
I experience difficulty providing a solid evaluation or feedback because I am not aware of all that IT provides to professors in the school of education. Sometimes there are things that the school of education staff provide that may limite my interaction with IT directly. It would be nice to know how off campus access to files on the U:drive would be possible. These sorts of questions are probably easy to answer, though, I have not pursued the answers.
The print quota for faculty at STC's is unreasonably low considering the demands of teaching and research, which require printing at the main library and other campus locations at times.
I wish there were an easy way to download basic software/upgrades on my office computer without having to contact my CITO representative.
very impressive institution in terms of technology services. Would be nice to have a six wall CAVE in Bloomington with 4K projectors.
The computer Support Services are a godsend. Thank you!
It would be nice to be able to submit pink enrollment verification rosters online.
I might be useful for UITS to poll faculty on issues such as voice mail or OnCourse to determine desired features instead of going to a new system and telling the faculty that this is what they will now use. The first version of new oncourse was not useful, yet UITS told us all that we had to go with it (and then opt out). The new voice mail, although probably powerful, is another good example. Who conceived of this?? The most commonly used options are at the end of a long list of possible options (I know them now), and it takes more options to simply listen to a voice mail and delete it than it did before. Bottom line, get input before telling the campus to change, and then solicit input and consider it after making a major change.
As indicated above, the one real problem that I have encountered is the new oncourse system. Last I tried, there were still serious problems for example with the gradebook and it's also extremely user-unfriendly. I even took a class and still have trouble managing some functions. The old system was just perfectly fine. Any chance we can go back to some of the old features? (Sorry to be so defaitist.)
Please increase our server size for email folders. Please increase the timeout period for reminders while using Outlook Web Access. The setting is for every 10 minutes or so and unless something is forthcoming it is very disruptive and slows home-based web access. Great job intergrating voicemail with email. I love this feature.
I strongly dislike the new voicemail system.
The continuous changes in Oncourse are very annoying. I prefer to have a system which is not perfect, but I can handle. We found very difficult to have access to the computer facilities for calculation. Although the staffs are very helpful, the system is not useful. Our jobs spend a significant time in the queue to be purge at the end of the month before they even started. This happen so many times that we decide to get our own computers for calculations.
telephone advice very variable in both content and particularly in tone. Some advisors very good at thinking through possibilities. others both both abrupt and too inclined to give up, or go for some crude solution.