TAG held its first Fall 2012 meeting today.
1. Membership
We welcomed three new faculty members to TAG!
- Tara Fay , Biology (CAS)
- Kim Daniloski, Management/Marketing (KSOM)
- Katie Iacocca, Operations and Information Management (KSOM)
We did a quick review of what related committees and projects TAG members are serving on this year:
- Kristen: Mobile Apps, Luminis
- Jeremy: lecture capture, pedagogy group
- Dave: Code of Responsible Computing committee
- Jim: Code of Responsible Computing committee, IRAC, among many other IR teams and projects
- Eugeniu: IRAC, IMAC, among many other CTLE teams and projects
- Teresa: LMS Work Group
- Tara: LMS Work Group, pedagogy group (and testing clickers)
- Paul (in absentia): IRAC
2. A few miscellaneous announcements
- Katie mentioned that Brennan Hall is working well this year. Thanks so much to all of the IT Services staff who worked on Brennan’s classrooms this summer!
- Kristen is working on moving the TAG website to the University’s local WordPress instance. That will make it easier for TAG members to log in and add information.
- TAG meetings are in a 50 minute time slot this semester, so we’ll try to keep meetings snappy and do more of our announcements and information sharing via email.
3. Information Resources Advisory Council (IRAC) representative
Last year, Dave and Paul served on IRAC as faculty/TAG representatives. This year, Dave has agreed to co-chair (with Jim) a committee tasked with reviewing and updating the Code of Responsible Computing. Since that will be a significant project, Dave is stepping down from IRAC. Kevin volunteered to join Paul as a second faculty representative.
IRAC’s agenda this year will include the service catalog – a list of what services IR provides, where/how those services can be provided, what the expected turnaround time is, what IR’s responsibility is for each service, etc.
4. Departmental websites and the CMS
At the end of last year, we started discussing the issue of departmental websites. [See the follow-up post for more details on this discussion.]
The big question: Who has responsibility for creating and updating content on academic department websites? After a discussion of faculty concerns, we came to a consensus that the faculty would likely be willing to contribute content, but the CMS interface wasn’t user-friendly enough for faculty to be able to use it easily, especially if they weren’t using it on a consistent and regular basis. Katie suggested a model from Rutgers – faculty were responsible for updating content, but they did not have to post directly to the CMS. At regular intervals, a window would open for faculty to submit changes to certain types of information – e.g., each July, departments could add new faculty info and images. Each September/January, course information was updated. The centralized system seemed more efficient and got rid of inconsistencies.
Next steps: Our PR representative (Lori) was unable to make it to today’s meeting, so Kristen will get in touch with her to see if that kind of system might be possible for PR. Jeremy will get in touch with Anne Marie in Academic Affairs to find out if there’s a possibility for staff support with the CMS and to get an update on the status of the web profile project from last year. Katie will look for some of her records from Rutgers that might help us. The rest of the faculty were asked to compile a list of what kinds of departmental information are needed and how often each type would need to be updated. We can share this information via TAG-Discussion or TAG-Members. Kristen will post a compiled list to the TAG website.
5. FERPA considerations for cloud computing
We didn’t get to fully discuss this, but Kristen asked that everyone take a look at the FERPA post and think about how to share/clarify this information for faculty.
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