TAG Meeting Notes 3/3

4 03 2011

Just a few quick updates from yesterday’s TAG meeting:

  • We have three new members! Welcome to Dave Dzurec (History), Wesley Wang (Economics/Finance), and Sandy Pesavento (Education).
  • The Classroom Mediation survey has been distributed and is due today (Friday).  There was some confusion reported between the Classroom Mediation survey (which focused on equipment and was distributed by department chairs) and the Knowledge Base survey (which focused on software and was handed out in department meetings visited by TAG members).  Unfortunately, our timing didn’t work out as well as planned.
  • The Identity and Access Management system upgrade is still in progress. User IDs will likely be R numbers, but current email addresses will be carried forward.  You’ll likely be able to log into the my.scranton portal using your email address rather than your R number.
  • We discussed the plan for the email transition and debated how to get the word out about this plan to faculty members.  We recently sent out an email to all full-time faculty via FAC, and Jeremy, Kristen, and Jim will present to the Faculty Senate next Friday (March 11) about the transition plan.  We’re not sure how to reach part-time faculty.
  • TAG members have been visiting academic department meetings, to varying degrees of success.  We’ve gathered a lot of feedback from faculty about their technology needs.  The more specific feedback (e.g., projectors in a certain room not working) can be addressed by IR.  But TAG needs to address some of the larger issues (e.g., how do we get faculty to report problem computers/equipment to Tech Support so that they can be fixed?).
  • Faculty are still concerned about the lack of Mac support on campus, especially for things like antivirus software and uploading files to ANGEL from Safari (though that’s an issue with ANGEL rather than with our IR division).
  • There seems to be a need for discussions with faculty about academic & pedagogical uses of social media tools.  TAG will be looking into this more in the future.
  • There is a reported perception that TAG serves as a mouthpiece for the administration rather than as an independent body – but we’d like to beg to differ.  TAG has been asked by Academic Affairs and Information Resources to provide feedback on technology issues, not to repeat a previously determined message.  And communication between TAG and both Academic Affairs and Information Resources has been two-way rather than one-way.

Thanks to everyone who attended – and as usual, please feel free to address any of these points in the comments!


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Categories : Classroom Mediation, Email, TAG Administrative

TAG Members visit department meetings

7 02 2011

In February and March, TAG members will be visiting department meetings for each academic department. Our goals in attending these meetings are as follows:

  • Make sure all faculty members know about TAG
  • Solicit feedback on campus technology issues
  • Have faculty fill out a quick survey that will help us create a Knowledge Base (a listing of faculty who have tried using different technologies in the classroom, like clickers, social media, etc)
  • Invite faculty involvement in TAG either as a full committee member or as a participant on our TAG-Discussion list

We’ll look forward to seeing all of our fellow faculty members. Be sure to bring us your thoughts and comments on technology on campus.


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Categories : Announcements, TAG Administrative

Guidelines for Faculty Input on Technology Decisions

9 12 2010

Once upon a time, there was a policy that became a Memorandum of Understanding that then became a set of guidelines.  Hopefully, the name of this document won’t change any more, since we think it’s finally done.  Well, for now.

After everyone we talked to universally agreed that an informal approach would be best, we decided to rename TAG’s first drafted policy as the “Guidelines for Faculty Input on Technology Decisions.” They’re posted here on the TAG website, and their purpose is to codify the shared expectations between the faculty and any administrative bodies that are responsible for technology resources on campus.  They’ve been reviewed by representatives from the Faculty Senate, Information Resources, Academic Affairs, and the Faculty Affairs Council.

Since the Guidelines aren’t an official policy, they can’t exactly be enforced – but we hope that they will serve as a useful model both for faculty members interested in providing feedback on technology decisions as well as administrative bodies interested in getting faculty feedback.

Here’s hoping that this language will help improve communication about technology decisions across campus.  Thanks to everyone who gave us feedback, and as usual, let us know if you have any questions.


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Categories : Announcements, TAG Administrative

Faculty Communication with IR: Putting it Down on Paper

29 11 2010

The biggest action item TAG has been working on so far this semester is improving communication between faculty members and IR.  Over the past few weeks, a few TAG members got together and took a stab at codifying how TAG can facilitate faculty feedback into technology decisions.  This isn’t a TAG mission statement, since it’s only one of our group’s original goals, but it’s a way to formalize one aspect of our work.

On the advice of IR, we’re thinking of calling this document a “Memorandum of Understanding” rather than an official policy, because we’re not sure that it’s appropriate to send through the whole University Governance structure.  However, we’re still thinking of sending it to the Faculty Senate Academic Support committee for review and discussion (Jeremy and Kristen will be meeting with Jack Beidler to get his thoughts on this move).

We’d like to hear feedback on this draft of the document.  Please let us know what you think about the text as well as if/how you’d like to see it implemented on campus.  Thanks!


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Categories : TAG Administrative

Response to Survey Comments: Top Faculty Concerns

17 11 2010

At the start of the Fall 2010 semester, the Technology Advisory Group (TAG) sent out a survey to the faculty to elicit feedback about technology on campus.

While it focused on how faculty prefer to communicate about technology, the survey concluded with two open ended questions: “What are the improvements you’d most like to see regarding the implementation of technology on campus?” and “Is there anything else TAG should know about your technology needs?” In response to these two questions, faculty members submitted a combined total of 92 comments, many of which revealed deeper technology and communication issues than the rest of the survey indicated.

TAG would like to address as of these issues as possible.  With help from Jim Franceschelli of IT Services, we identified and responded to the most common and/or important concerns that were raised in the survey comments:

  1. Communication Problems
  2. Outages and Notifications
  3. Customer Service
  4. Classroom Mediation
  5. Classroom and Computer Lab Maintenance
  6. Faculty Computers
  7. Mac Support
  8. Data Storage and Backup
  9. Email Capacity

These responses are meant to help faculty feel informed about how technology decisions are made on campus, but also to continue the conversation about faculty technology needs.  If you have any reactions or feedback about these issues you’d like to share, please either comment directly on the TAG site, email us at TAG-members@royallists.scranton.edu, or talk with a TAG member from your college.

The full text of the faculty survey comments have been posted to the TAG website in PDF format.


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Categories : Classroom Mediation, Email, TAG Administrative

Meeting Notes 11/11/2010

11 11 2010

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.

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Categories : Classroom Mediation, CMS and University Website, Email, TAG Administrative

TAG Meeting set for 11/11/2010

5 11 2010

TAG has a scheduled meeting coming up next Thursday, November 11, at 9am.  Here’s what’s on our agenda:

1) Update on action items from our last meeting

2) Discussion of feedback from the English department (regarding the phone directory, the CMS, and TSC customer service)

3) Email and calendaring transition – how do we spread the word to faculty?

4) New proposed policy for TAG

5) Classroom mediation – how do we get more feedback from faculty on what technology they need/want in their classrooms, before Thanksgiving?

As usual, we’ll be posting notes after the meeting. Looking forward to seeing everyone!


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2010 Faculty Questionnaire – Results

28 09 2010

As you’ll all probably remember, a few weeks back TAG ran a survey of all University faculty, with a goal of figuring out the best way to communicate with faculty about their technology needs. We finally have gotten to sort through all the results, and we’ve put together a basic summary report (PDF).  More intense statistical analysis is on the way.

Some of our key results (see the report for more details):

  • We got 121 survey responses as of September 10 – which is about 30% of the faculty.
  • Communication about technology updates is regarded as either “very effective” or “somewhat effective” for 85% of our respondents.  Contrast that with ~30% who complained about communication problems, and we are left with the conclusion that communication exists, but is largely ineffective… perhaps people don’t even know when they’re being communicated with.
  • “Email to all faculty” floated widely to the top as the best method for communication with our respondents… we should feel more comfortable sending emails to all faculty.
  • Many people use the my.scranton portal as at least one way in which they access their University email, followed closely by Thunderbird.
  • There were many written comments reflecting specific problems with communication, technology, and customer service.  A full list of comments can be found in the report.  As a way to address these comments, TAG and IR will be writing up reactions to the “top 10” issues described by faculty survey respondents.

Thanks so much to all of the faculty who responded to the survey!  Let us know if you have reactions to the results, particularly the comments.


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Meeting Summary 9/23

23 09 2010

TAG held our second meeting yesterday at the Library. While only a few of us were able to attend, we did make some progress on a few issues.  Here’s what we came up with.

Scheduling:

  • Doodle seems to work as a scheduling tool for the TAG members who attended the meeting or shared feedback via email prior to the meeting.  We’ll continue using this tool to schedule future meetings.

Post-Survey Discussion (which also involved discussing the TAG website):

  • The survey confirmed that communication is an issue. But how do we tackle this?
  • One TAG member pointed out that 79% of survey respondents self-identified as “Innovators” or “Early Majority.”  Did we miss the not-so-techy faculty entirely? How do we gather feedback from them?  And were the self-identifications correct, or did faculty overstate their technological skill?
  • One of the clear survey results was that faculty preferred communication via email.  Jim noted that the Provost’s office is really good about releasing any emails IR needs to send out to faculty.  The tricky thing is to figure out what email people want to see – and faculty basically want to see email that is relevant to their specific needs, and that’s it.  If IR emails too frequently, faculty might start ignoring their emails.
  • One possibility for resolving the email problem – IR emails could be very short and brief (e.g., you will be affected by an outage in this specific way at this time), but include a link to “click here for more information” that would lead to a post about the outage on the TAG site.  Faculty could then comment on the post, and TAG can add more information/detail/explanation about the issue as it becomes available.  We agreed this is worth experimentation, since using analytics we’ll be able to tell whether or not faculty chose to take advantage of the link.
  • Another possibility would be to try to “train” faculty to go to the TAG website whenever they have a technical question.  But there might be confusion here, since IR is trying to “train” the University to call the Technology Support Center help line with any technology questions.
  • If we keep a running set of explanatory posts on the TAG website, we can just link to a post whenever a faculty member has a question or concern that we’ve discussed before.  This might save us time in the future.
  • Some of the survey comments indicated that there has been some miscommunication between faculty and IR.  In order to clear up these miscommunications and explain any nuances, we discussed the possibility of responding to comments with explanatory posts on the TAG site.  We need to be careful, though, not to be apologists for IR – just try to evenhandedly provide background information that can help faculty understand the complexity of the issues.

Other discussion points:

  • Communication with the Senate — We did check in with Jack Beidler, chair of the Academic Support Committee, who said that we can meet with him (or report to him via email) if/when we have concerns/information to share.
  • Catalog — Jeremy summarized the Faculty Senate’s comments about the catalog at their last meeting.  The Provost’s office will print some paper copies, which will likely resolve faculty concerns for the present.  That said, we’ve heard some feedback about the catalog that should probably be shared with the PR office or Registrar’s office.
  • Phishing – we talked briefly about one of the last phishing attacks to hit the University.  IR found out about the attack immediately, and the Information Security office blocked the site right away.  However, this doesn’t protect faculty who might be checking their email from off campus.  The big message to share with faculty is that IR will NEVER ask for personal information.

Action items:

  • SP and Sufian will do more detailed analysis of the survey results.
  • Kristen will post the PDF summary of survey results.
  • Jeremy and Kristen will sort out “top 10” major issues that came up in the survey comments.  Jim will help us come up with explanations/discussions/feedback for those comments, which we’ll post to the TAG website.
  • The next time IR has a need to communicate with faculty about a technology issue, Jim will check in with either Jeremy or Kristen. We’ll set up a TAG post to start gathering information/explanations/comments about the issue, and then IR will send out a brief email with a “click here for more info” link to the TAG post.  We’ll experiment with this style of communication and see whether the TAG post can help clear up some faculty questions and concerns.

Outstanding questions:

  • When we hear feedback about the CMS (including catalog design issues), with whom should we share it? Faculty Senate? PR?
  • How do we reach the 60% of faculty who didn’t respond to the survey?
  • Group purpose — our stated goal is “advancing, promoting, and propagating technology at the University.”  Do we need to have  more formal conversations with the Senate about what our role is?

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TAG Meeting 9/22

7 09 2010

We’ve just scheduled our next TAG meeting for Wednesday, September 22 from 1pm-2pm in WML305.  We’ll primarily be discussing the results of our survey, but let us know if you have other agenda items to suggest.


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Categories : TAG Administrative

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