Provost’s Academic Computing Advisory Committee
Minutes for November 17, 2008
November 17, 2008 PACAC Agenda
- Sustainability
- e-Learning budget needs (Don Carter)
- Green solutions - what works and what's already been adopted (John Campbell)
- Recommendation for subcommittee (Angie Golden)
- Report on CEFNS academic computing infrastructure - Eck Doerry
- Update on student email system - John Campbell
- University calendars - John Campbell
- Other business
Meeting Minutes
Attending: John Campbell, Tom Carpenter, Don Carter, Joe Collentine, Eck Doerry, John Eastwood, Fred Estrella, Angie Golden, Jill Koelling, Casey Machula, Georgia Michalicek, Pattie Odgers, Lori Poloni-Staudinger, and Chih Tu.
Sustainability
e_Learning Budget Needs
Don Carter reported some e-Learning initiatives that he has funded in the past need to be supported in another way due to recent budget cuts. Some examples are software applications such as Elluminate, used for web conferencing, and TurnItIn which is used for marking papers. Don said both products have increased in cost. He reported that NAU ran 10,000 papers through TurnItIn last year, and the cost went from $15,000 to $45,000 because ofthe increased use. Blackboard Vista has an annotation feature that could be used for similar purposes and a grademark tool could possibly be developed in-house, but TurnItIn’s database for comparing papers would still be much larger than anything developed at NAU.
John Eastwood voiced concern saying research needs to be done to determine the number of hours it would take faculty to do this in another way.Angie Golden asked John Eastwood whether his college would support him if he requested they continue to use TurnItIn. She stated that the Nursing Department would have lots of trouble without Elluminate, and even though TurnItIn has been beneficial to her, Nursing may not want to use and support that tool due to the low numbers within her department who use it. Don said about 200 faculty use it altogether. However, he has not been promoting its use due to the increasing cost, and he expects that trend to continue. He reported there are other products the e-Learning Center supports for approximately $75,000 total in software licenses.
Angie informed the members that this is about sustainability beyond learning spaces. She said Don’s group has graciously continued with these licenses, but faculty might not get new products if he has to
continue to sustain the old ones. She said recognition of the situation and solutions are needed, and PACAC is in a good position to form a subcommittee to look at this.
Eck Doerry said it is his understanding that employees are supposed to cut travel costs and a conferencing system like Elluminate could be supported by more than the academic side for that reason; it seems clear many university meetings could be attended online. John Campbell stated more thought needs to go into the decision process because we now also own a Microsoft product called Live Meeting as part of the Exchange product purchase made for email, although Live Meeting is not yet ready for use on campus. Eck suggested a group could meet and systematically compare all products now in use at NAU for conferencing.
Fred Estrella shared that the NAU leadership meeting held in the conference center over the weekend looked at cutting travel expenditures as a potential savings for the university. He said that the question was also asked as to how we can spend money to save money. Therefore, if we were to invest in Elluminate to cut down on travel for conferencing, it could be expanded to the entire enterprise. However, he thought looking at it from this perspective right now might seem a bit daunting. He said the current priority should be for academic use. He suggested PACAC move quickly to make a recommendation to the Provost for a product before the holiday break to ensure it is considered in this year’s budget expenditures.
Green solutions – what works and what’s already been adopted
John Campbell said the topic, “green solutions,” was a mistake. He did, however, wish to address the bigger picture concerning software licenses. He said the best Information Technology Services (ITS) can do is to get more people to participate in a common buy. When ITS can key serve software over a network, using a distributed network license in which all who use it share the cost, it saves money. He mentioned the Virtual lab that ITS brought up with IT Fee funding as one example.
Cooperative buying helps graduate students cut costs. ITS pays $40,000 a year for the SPSS statistics package and gets back about $15,000 in collections from other departments. John said this really helps because ITS would not be able to pay the full $40,000 and they can then offer the best possible price to everyone who needs to use SPSS. Other examples include the JMP license which is purchased cooperatively by various departments, and Forestry purchases a site license for ARC View, and then makes it available to the entire campus.
John continued by stating the biggest expense for ITS is the Blackboard Vista license at a cost of $170,000. He said the department is currently looking at various new strategies during this time of budget cuts that will allow them to continue paying for the course management system. He noted, no fee is currently charged to students for Blackboard Vista classes.
Fred Estrella said one possible strategy is to use the Student IT Fee which the President used over the past few years to install a wireless network across campus. Fred said this would be the only way ITS could replace the state budget item currently used for Blackboard Vista, and it has been used for this purpose previously since it is truly an academic program. He said the last time budgets were cut he lost twenty-one employees out of his organization and ITS is currently stretched too thin to function with a further loss of people.
The following information was shared about the Student IT Fee in the course of discussion:
- Currently collect $3/credit hour with a $72/year cap
- More money collected when enrollment goes up
- Fifteen percent taken for student financial aid
- One million dollars collected last year
- IT Fee goes specifically toward students as part of original PACAC guidelines
- Used some to install wireless on AWC campus in Yuma
- Distance Learning used some for Adobe Photoshop software in computer labs
Eck Doerry said the Provost asked the colleges to look at restructuring within their departments. Everyone is going to be evaluating current efficiencies. He asked whether there is some inefficiency between the e-Learning, Distance Learning, and Information Technology departments. John Campbell said the library should be included in that list also. Don Carter said there is not much duplication between these departments with the exception of the help desks. The e-Learning Help Desk which was created to support Blackboard Vista was originally aimed toward faculty pedagogy, but has become more technology-oriented. He also reported that only Distance Learning is doing faculty grants for Blackboard Vista courses now; the e-Learning Center no longer funds that.
Fred Estrella provided a historical perspective. He said some of the larger universities have the Chief Information Officer (CIO) report to the Provost, and the library falls under the CIO. As the CIO at NAU, Fred reports to the President. He said Distance Learning was well-established as its own entity, totally separate from all other departments on campus, which is the direction Fred Hurst continued when coming on at NAU and began developing more online courses. This provided clear delineations as Fred Hurst became a Vice President. The e-Learning Center is totally under the Provost’s area and is concerned with instructional technology.
The possibility of an online course fee was mentioned by members, but Fred Estrella reminded the group that Blackboard Vista is used by the entire student body, not just Distance Learning students. John Campbell mentioned the gradebook, one course for every class, and all eReserves in Vista as examples. Fred said the integration of these systems comes from ITS, pulling grades from Vista into PeopleSoft, for instance. John also mentioned that ITS has been cost effective with this integration by using the database administrators in the administrative computing area of ITS to provide for these type of integrations.
Recommendation for subcommittee
Angie Golden said looking at Elluminate is a smaller piece of the whole sustainability issue than she had intended to bring to the attention of PACAC. However, it is imperative due to the timeline needed for the renewal of the contract. She asked for a consensus of the committee to move forward quickly. A Collaborative Video/Web Conferencing subcommittee was formed and the following individuals volunteered to participate: Joe Collentine, Eck Doerry, Chih Tu, Don Carter and Matt Minister of ELC, and John Campbell and Georgia Michalicek from Academic Computing. Don said he would speak with Marc Lord about Distance Learning participation.
Angie said she would table the larger sustainability issue for new technology until spring semester at which time another subcommittee would be needed.
Report on CEFNS academic computing infrastructure
Eck Doerry reported on his work with the College of Engineering, Forestry, and Natural Sciences Technology Committee. He said there were funding failures within the departments for computer labs, shared servers, and when a disk array died, they had to come up with $20,000 to replace it. The committee was tasked with discovering how academic computing within all departments was funded and how to make it more efficient.
They decided to conduct an inventory of all computer labs in the college. A course fee structure was in place in Engineering, but did not exist in Natural Sciences and they had difficulty coming up with enough money to replace computers in their labs. A survey of all instructional technology used across the college (not including faculty desktops) was conducted using a data template that all lab managers were asked to fill out. Questions such as how many workstations were in the lab, what classes they were used for, what software was installed on lab computers, and how the lab was funded were included. For many, funding was a big blank, and the committee discovered there was no strategic plan.See the CEFNS Academic Computing Infrastructure documents on the PACAC web site at under Information, for more detail.
As a result, the committee recommended thin client technology wherever possible. Eck said he is impressed with the virtual technology as it decreases administrative costs dramatically and is more functional than in the past since network speeds are much better. He said the labs are filled with dumb terminals and a virtual machine is provided from one server for each of the thin clients. A student enters the lab, inserts a card into a computer,and that determines what they will see. They might see a Windows or a Linux machine. He said a Macintosh thin client is still being worked on.
The cost-savings come in the reduction of software costs, IT staff costs to maintain the lab, and replacement costs since a thin client can probably last eight years instead of using the three-year replacement strategy. He said the college has now implemented course fees to support thin clients, and instead of having to reimage all the computers in a lab, they only have to maintain one server. He did caution there are certain limitations for thin clients, however; high-end graphics don’t display very well on thin clients, and you can’t plug in a bunch of peripherals.
Discussion followed and questions from members were answered as follows:
- W. A. Franke College of Business also uses thin clients
- Money to switch to thin clients in Engineering came from course fees that have always been charged to students
- Fifty percent goes to general college account
- A dumb terminal (or thin client) costs $250 and then attach the monitor
- Re-equipped an entire lab for about $15,000
- Second phase: readjust class fees in all departments to distribute costs fairly
- Came up with system to go through every room in Engineering and counted IT equipment, including projection systems
- Then determined cost and replacement cycle
- Set annualized IT cost for every room
- Looked at course schedule for the year to determine how many sections each unit teaches in that room and divided costs accordingly
- Now, budgets can be projected
- Received well by chairs and some units will raise or reduce their course fees
Angie said she looked forward to having a system where classrooms were available as a resource on campus since Nursing has no rooms in their building that can be used for lectures. She said she is sure the CEFNS documentation could be used as a model for the entire campus, and Karen Pugliesi wants PACAC to participate in this discussion in the spring.
Update on student email system
John Campbell reported that students were currently voting on their choice for a vendor to use for email and he would be making a recommendation to Fred Estrella based on their vote. Students who participated had to fill out a fifty-two-feature-survey before they were allowed to vote. He reported that to date, Google was winning.
He said Microsoft and Google came to campus to present to students. Both are giving free services to universities because they want to gain market share. He reported students will be able to receive many more services than they did with the legacy Dana email system. This also means that some things in the course management system will now be out there in the cloud. Students will have an NAU address and the vendor will provide lifelong accounts for students and alumni.
The new email system for students will be announced in December and will be implemented sometime in the spring.
University calendars
Oracle Calendar will no longer be used as of December 31, 2008. This will provide for a large cost savings for ITS. The old calendars will be archived somewhere on the web, and all university employees will use the Microsoft Exchange Calendar beginning January 1, 2009.
John Campbell said the ITS team working on email and calendaring was able to demonstrate how they can now go into class feeds to put all classrooms in the email Exchange calendar using iCal. Faculty may be able to import class schedules into their calendars, holidays can be subscribed to, and the Academic Calendar could be another feed. John said he would address this topic again at another meeting when more time is available.
Other business
The Collaborative Video/Web Conferencing subcommittee will meet in person, and PACAC will come back together in January.
PACAC Minutes for November 17, 2008 – Page 1