IT Forum « Technology Advisory Group

Desire2Learn Day – April 24

14 04 2014

Reposting an all-faculty email from CTLE/IR:

Dear Faculty,

Please join us for
Desire2Learn Day
Brennan Hall, Room 509 (Rose Room)
Thursday, April 24, 2014

Several sessions for faculty members will be conducted during the day, as outlined in the schedule below. The highlight of the day will be the lunchtime forum for faculty Desire2Learn – More Than Just a Course Management System.

Desire2Learn is a next generation learning solution, addressing key challenges related to learner engagement, retention, and outcomes. Its design and functionality represent a shift from the simple course management capabilities of an LMS, to a highly pervasive, perceptive, and personal learning experience. Come learn about the advantages of using Desire2Learn for your teaching, and some of its key features, from Desire2Learn representatives.

Also hear about the “real-life” experience of one of our own faculty members, Dr. George Gomez, who is using the D2L learning environment this semester.

You must register by April 16 for the lunch/presentation here (select IT Forum).

All other events on the schedule below are available on a walk-in basis.

10:00-10:30 AM D2L Open Office Hours – come and ask any questions you have about Desire2Learn

10:30-11:00 AM Using Wiggio & Blogs in Desire2Learn

11:00-11:30 AM Incorporating Panopto video into Desire2Learn

11:30-1:00 PM Lunchtime Presentation: Desire2Learn – More than just a course management system. Registration Required. Deadline is April 16, 2014.

The following afternoon sessions are open to both faculty and students.

1:15-1:45 PM Desire2Learn Mobile apps (Binder, Assignment Grader)

1:45-2:15 PM Using Notifications in D2L

2:15-2:45 PM Social Media in D2L

2:45-3:30 PM D2L Open Office Hours – come and ask any questions you have about Desire2Learn

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Tags: Desire2Learn, IT Forum, tutorial, workshop
Categories : Angel and Desire2Learn, Announcements, Technology Training, Tutorials

IT Forum on WordPress – Slides

18 11 2013

Last Thursday, IR staff members Joe Casabona and Phil Erb gave an IT Forum presentation on WordPress and its use on campus. A certain TAG co-chair and WordPress devotee completely missed both the event announcement and the event itself (*blush of shame*) but hopes to make amends by sharing the presentation slides:

November 2013 – WordPress (.ppsx)

Many thanks to Phil and Joe for their work on several academic WordPress sites, including the Library’s public and staff blogs, the history department blog, the new Aquinas site, and, of course, the TAG site.

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Tags: blog, IT Forum, wordpress
Categories : Announcements, CMS and University Website

IT Forum on MOOCs

26 08 2013

The first IT Forum for Fall 2013 will be on MOOCs and Evolving Information Technology. I’ll be there and will try to post notes and slides afterwards. Here’s the official announcement from IR:

MOOCs and Evolving Information Technology

The IT Forum for September 19th, will be held in Brennan 509. It will begin at 11:30 a.m. and lunch will be served.

Information Technology (IT) continues to evolve at a rapid pace creating opportunities for change and sometimes challenges to be dealt with. This session will focus on the current IT trends and their impact on the higher education IT landscape. Further, the presentation will drill down to examine on-line education and the emergence of MOOCs discussing how/why institutions decide to adopt these teaching/learning paradigms to achieve student success. The session will allow time for questions and answers.

To register for the IT Forum go to:

https://ssbprd.scranton.edu/appprd/uis2.log?f=yiaevnt.event;
or go to my.scranton.edu, on the Home Tab, select University Links. Then in Events and Facilities, choose IT Services Training and Event Registration.

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Tags: IT Forum, moocs, teaching
Categories : Announcements, Online courses, Technology Training

Scranton.edu 3.0 – Responsive Design

23 05 2013

At Tuesday’s IT Forum, staff members Lori Nidoh, Val Clark, and Matt Wren from PR and Joe Casabona from IR gave a joint presentation on the new design templates for the University website, which will go live in July.

The new designs are responsive, meaning that they’ll automatically adjust to the screen size of whatever device you’re using to view them. See slides (.ppsx) from the Forum presentation for a comparison of old vs new.

More specific information will be coming out for CMS users, but one of the more immediate changes that will need to be made is to banner images (e.g., on department pages or on faculty pages in the CMS that use the standard templates). The new designs are wider than the old (1280 x 361 pixels vs. 780 x 180 pixels), so properly sized images will be needed. You can pick a photo from the Photo Gallery, but you can also use your own image as long as it’s sized – see instructions in the slides (.ppsx).

We’ll post more information as we get it – in the meantime, please let TAG know if you have questions about the redesign.

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Tags: cms, department websites, faculty websites, IT Forum, responsive design, university website, website
Categories : Announcements, CMS and University Website, Upgrades

Updates from IT Forum and IT Matters

1 03 2013

Just a few updates from recent Planning and Information Resources events and publications – PIR staff, let me know if I missed anything!

February 2013 IT Forum: PIR Tactical Plan

At the February 14th IT Forum, CIO Jerry DeSanto and AVP Robyn Dickinson gave a presentation (slides) on “Information Resources in Transition… Adding Value… Making a Difference” in which they discussed PIR’s progress on their 2010-2013 tactical plan and the thinking behind the 2013-2016 tactical plan. Robyn introduced the four parts of PIR’s vision: 1) Professional expertise, 2) Seamless technology environment, 3) Promote sound business practices, and 4) Enhance the learning experience. Points of particular interest for faculty members:

PIR will support innovation in teaching & learning by expanding lecture capture use and capabilities, exploring learning management tools, refining long-term plans for classroom technologies, and working with colleges (via deans and TAG) to identify and meet faculty and student needs.
PIR will be looking at big data and analytics in higher education – e.g., using analytics to attract students but also to measure learning.
IT will be addressing BYOD (bring your own device) trends as students and faculty access University services using a large variety of consumer devices/products.
PIR will be working on improving business practices and project management, not only in PIR itself but across the university. On the faculty side, we’ll see more information in the IT Service Catalog about what services are available (and how quickly).

IT Matters: Spring 2013

The Spring 2013 issue of IT Matters is out. Highlights for faculty members:

OIT staff completed upgrades to Brennan 228, 312, 314, 500, 502, and 509 over intersession (yay!). St. Thomas 207, 212, and 311 also got upgrades (yay!).
Google Chrome will be installed on University computers through KBOX (Tim has been waiting a long time for this!). There will be an IT Forum on Google Chrome on March 14th.
Remote Desktop Assistance is now here – using Viewfinity, Technology Support Center staff can share your desktop (with your permission) in order to help you resolve issues over the phone.
The Mobile Device Support Center has been updated with more documentation for Windows mobile devices.
IT Services and the Library set up some self-serve book scanners so that students can scan pages from articles or books to a USB drive or Google Docs or email.
Connie Wisdo has some notes on Footprints that show how you can log your own tickets (p. 1, 12).
Phil Erb wrote up an explanation of Active Directory and what it means for users (see p.6).

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Tags: active directory, brennan hall, BYOD, chrome, footprints, IT Forum, IT Matters, learning analytics, remote desktop assistance, service catalog, stt, Tactical plan
Categories : Announcements, Classroom Mediation, Upgrades

State of IT – Notes from September IT Forum

3 10 2012

Last week, CIO and Vice President for Planning Jerry DeSanto presented on the “State of IT” at the semester’s first IT Forum. His talk provided some really interesting insight into how CIOs strategically plan for the future – see his slides (in pptx) for more detail.

Some of the trends that Jerry discussed:

Consumerization – consumers bring their interest in technology to the workplace, and increasingly they’re also bringing their own devices (BYOD) to the workplace as well. For CIOs, this means a shift to supporting a wider variety of devices, with less depth of support for any one device/platform.
Cloud services – as we use more cloud computing services, we rely less on the computing power of our desktop computers. Thin clients let users access software from the cloud, so you don’t have to be at a specific workstation to use certain software.
Security – cloud computing raises a lot of issues in terms of security and data management – e.g., who owns the data? Is it secure? Is it exportable? Terms of service become very important. IR is working on some additional security initiatives, like two-factor authentication (for high risk data users), forced password changes, and guidelines for remote access (under development) – that is, how to safely work with restricted/confidential data from a non-University device.
Teaching and Learning – lots of new developments here – MOOCs, learning analytics, software licensing…
Network – The redundancy and reliability of the University network have become increasingly important. At the same time, there are increasing demands on the network (video streaming, gaming…). Our network just underwent a huge upgrade – our bandwidth is now 500 Mb, as compared to 50 Mb back in 2008.
Big data – corporations are increasingly leveraging data about their consumers to make decisions and to get a competitive edge. We might start seeing some of these techniques used in higher ed.
Business continuity – disaster recovery is really important. We have a good on-site data center, but we need an off-site backup as well.
Workforce and services – soft skills are becoming as important in IT as technical skills. As more software-as-a-service tools become available, there’s less need for home-grown solutions.

So there are lots of challenges ahead for Jerry and the IR division. Jerry has given TAG some questions he has about campus technology needs – we’ll be talking at our meeting today about how we can get input from the rest of the faculty. (More notes to come.)

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Tags: big data, BYOD, cloud computing, IR, IT Forum, learning analytics, moocs, network, security
Categories : Announcements

Event Management System

22 03 2012

At today’s IT Forum, Andrea Mulrine from Development showed a demonstration of event management system RegOnline. RegOnline is a web-based service that provides online registration and attendee tracking and reporting as well as tools like customizable event websites, customizable registration fields and questions (e.g., t-shirt size, dietary preferences), invitation and automatic reminder emails, automatic name badge creation, credit card and payment processing, etc. Judging from the demo, I was impressed – it looked like a pretty sharp but user-friendly tool.

Andrea is the chair of the Event Management Committee, a subcommittee of IMAC (Information Management Advisory Committee). The Event Management Committee, which included representatives from IR, Development, Alumni, the Library, CTLE, and Finance, reviewed seven event management products and recommended RegOnline as the product that would best serve the needs of the University. Today’s demonstration offered a chance for the broader University community to provide feedback on the product.

At this time, there’s no budget set aside for a product or service like this. Pricing is volume-based, so the Event Management Committee’s next step is to gather information about how many departments on campus need something like this and how often they would use it.

I’d like to find out if there is a need for this kind of tool among the faculty, so if you think you, your department, or a committee/group that you serve would be interested in an event management service, please let me know:

What events or type(s) of events** you would use it for
Approximately how many events per year you hold
Approximately how many attendees your events have

I’ll put our feedback together and send it along to Andrea. Thanks, all!

**At this point in the process, the Event Management Committee is thinking big, so send me anything you’re thinking about. Some past or recurring faculty-driven events that occurred to me: Biology Dept Pig Roast, MELUS, disAbility, Ready to Run, Education for Justice trip to the 9/11 memorial, guest speakers…

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Tags: event management, IMAC, IT Forum
Categories : Announcements

IT Forum on SkyDrive and Office Web Apps

10 02 2012

There’s an IT Forum coming up at the end of the month that might be of interest to faculty. Here’s the announcement:

IT Forum

February 23, 2012

11:30 am – 1:00 pm

Brennan Hall, Room 509

The IT Forum for February 23, 2012 will demonstrate many of the features within the Live@edu environment, including SkyDrive, and other highlights available to the university community. Outlook Live, our new email program, is just one of the “apps” included in Live@edu. On-line versions of WORD, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, or web apps as we refer to them, allow all Live@edu users to create and share documents, “in the cloud” with anyone we choose. Faculty can create on-line projects for students, who can then view and edit those projects. All users can collaborate on any issue with anyone having a link to a particular document or file. Storage of pictures, personal files, or anything else can be stored within the 25 gigabyte storage area that all users receive. Uploading and downloading from SkyDrive is fast and easy. All this is available to all Live@edu users, from anywhere in the world, on any device that is internet-connected.

Registration Required. To register: University Links tab > Events and Facilities box on left > select link for IT Services Training and Event Registration.)

Lunch will be served and prizes will be given. All members of the university community are encouraged to attend and learn more about Live@edu.

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Tags: IT Forum, Microsoft Live@Edu, microsoft office, SkyDrive, training
Categories : Announcements, Technology Training

IT Forum on Data Security

16 10 2011

Announcement from IR about an upcoming IT Forum:

Classifying, Handling, and Securing University Information

IT Services will conduct an IT Forum on Tuesday, October 25, 2011, at 11:30 a.m., in The DeNaples Center 405, dealing with classifying, handling, and securing University information, both electronic and paper. The discussion will focus on, first, classifying our information into easy to understand categories. Secondly, how to properly handle that information in our daily routines. Finally, we’ll discuss how to secure that information.

October is CyberSecurity Awareness Month and this forum should bring attention to the threats we face each day, with the use of electronic devices. We’ll also discuss the benefits of using Identity Finder, and the SANS Security video training available, as well. Registration is required.

To register, go to: https://ssbprd.scranton.edu/appprd/uis2.log?f=yiaevnt.event .

Lunch will be served.
Prizes will be given.
Jack Williams, IT Trainer, will give the presentation.

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Tags: identity finder, IT Forum, Nation Cyber Security Month, security
Categories : Announcements, Security, Technology Training

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