Technology Advisory Group

Another month, another TAG meeting.  We had a packed agenda today and did our best to at least touch on each issue.

New member:

• Anne Marie Stamford, Assistant Provost for Operations, has joined the committee as a representative for the academic administration.  Anne Marie was invited to join after we realized she was dealing with some of the same questions as TAG (e.g., how to get feedback from faculty on technology issues). Welcome, Anne Marie!

Follow-up on survey results:

• The results from our 2010 survey on faculty communication have been posted to the TAG site, both summarized and in full.
• Jim, Jeremy, and Kristen drafted up responses to the “Top 9” major concerns from the survey comments.  TAG members have until Monday to make any edits/suggestions.
• What’s the best way to distribute these “Top 9” responses to faculty?  On one hand, we want to get the information out quickly rather than holding it back – and some of the issues (i.e., requesting new computers) are time sensitive. On the other hand, we do want people to actually consider and respond to the “Top 9,” not just ignore them as tl;dr.  Our current plan is to post them (individually) to the TAG site, and then send out an all-faculty email with the first response on communication, and links to the next 8 responses.  If we don’t get a lot of feedback on the other 8 responses, we can also send out updates on the next 8 posts at regularly spaced intervals (e.g., 2x/week).  Jeremy and Kristen will coordinate this with Anne Marie.
• Sending email to all faculty that includes non-scranton.edu links is somewhat of an issue. IR wants to make sure that people are very cautious about what links they click on, in light of the many recent phishing attacks.
  
• Anne Marie suggested that some of the “Top 9” responses would be of interest to staff.  She will share them with the Data Technologies group.
• More detailed statistical analysis of the survey results is on the way.

Catalog

• There are several reasons why faculty feel strongly about having paper copies of the catalog (e.g., ease of advising, being able to bookmark/make notes, concerns about monitor sharing…).  This seems to be a major issue mostly in CAS, where most faculty are advisors (unlike in PCPS and KSOM, which have professional advisors).
• We posted a PDF of the catalog to the TAG site.  Anne Marie has 10 printed copies of the catalog in the Provost’s Office if anyone wants one, and she will look into printing enough copies of the catalog for all advisors next year.

Feedback from English Department

• Teresa brought feedback from the English department on three main issues: the need for a print copy of the phone book/directory, recommendations for a WYSIWYG editor for HTML code (for the CMS), and difficulty with TSC customer service.
• In general, TAG will respond to faculty feedback like this by 1) posting a summary of the question, with a response from TAG, to the TAG site and 2) emailing the faculty member directly with the response.
• Kristen will coordinate with Teresa to get responses to these concerns posted to the TAG site.

Soliciting faculty feedback

• There are several issues on which faculty feedback is needed, including the CMS (per Anne Marie), classroom mediation (per Jim), and faculty areas of technology interest/expertise.  What’s the best way for TAG to gather this information? Our communication survey was useful, but didn’t hit all faculty.
• TAG will work on assigning liaisons from TAG to each department.  Liaisons could visit February department meetings to solicit feedback from entire departments.  They’d also be able to let faculty know that TAG exists and talk about how we can be a resource.
• To assign TAG members to departments, Cathy will work on dividing PCPS departments between herself and Kevin, and Jeremy and Teresa will work on assigning CAS departments between them, Tim, and Kristen.  Neither SP or Sufian were in attendance, so we will ask them to choose KSOM departments.  Jim and Anne Marie will send Kristen specific questions on which they need faculty feedback.

Email and Calendaring change

• Campus email will be moving to Microsoft Live@Edu.  To smooth this transition, TAG has offered to help IR communicate with faculty about the transition.
• Since this is a big issue, we’ll have a meeting sometime after January specifically dedicated to the email issue.  By then, we should have some test accounts so TAG members can identify potential faculty concerns.
• We discussed describing the change as a benefit rather than an annoyance – while faculty will have to learn a new interface, they’ll get a much larger quota and along with other new features. We also need to communicate to Google fans that, while Gmail was considered, IR did have valid reasons for choosing Microsoft.

TAG Policy

• A few TAG members drafted a policy for codifying how TAG interacts with IR and facilitates faculty feedback into technology decisions.  We’d like the rest of the TAG members’ feedback on the draft policy, with an eventual goal of passing it up to the Faculty Senate Academic Support committee.   We’ll post the policy on the TAG site next week after all members have gotten to review it.
• Cathy pointed out that the policy does not address all of TAG’s original goals – so we need to be clear that the document is not a mission statement for TAG but instead a single policy that defines one aspect of TAG’s goals.

Other points of discussion

• We discussed the idea of visiting Dean’s Conferences in order to spread the word about TAG, but we agreed that checking in with the Faculty Senate would be best before approaching the Deans directly.
• Cathy and Kristen will meet after Thanksgiving to start working on aggregating classroom technology resources for faculty.