Technology Advisory Group

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?