Minutes: Academic Computing Advisory Council
Meeting of February 15, 1996
Present: David Philips (Chair), Jim Campbell, Rick Fore, John Hawley,
John Lloyd, Worthy Martin, Kirk Martini, Bill Pearson, Bob
Ribando, Tim Sigmon, Martha Sites, David Smith, Alice Howard,
James Potter (ITC/USD/Training -- guest presenter)
ACSP Review
===========
Basically the process for this year is finished -- letters have been
sent to the award recipients with copies to the Deans. Kathy Reed
congratulates the committee and its responses and comments have been
sent to the academic Deans. David asked if the committee wanted to
try to get some feedback from the recipients.
UCIT
====
They will meet with the President and Vice-Presidents in late April or
early May to present an overview of Information Technology at UVa and
to have some dialogue/discussion. In preparation for that meeting,
committee members are to consider "Problems, Prospects, and Peers"
from their own Department/School point of view -- in particular
committee members are encouraged to contact some of their colleagues
in "similiar" institutions and compare their IT infrastructure and
issues with ours -- Ed Ayers is suggesting a list of questions that
could be used and these will be distributed via email.
Portions of the next two committee meetings will be spent preparing
for this UCIT meeting -- "peer information" will be gathered and
discussed at the committee's March 21 meeting.
Future Meetings
===============
Thursdays, 3:45pm-5:15pm, ITC-Forestry Conferenc room
March 21, 1996
April 18, 1996
ITC Training Program and Options
================================
James Potter (Potter), ITC's Training Manager, presented an overview
of ITC's current User Education efforts including "Short Course"
offerings and some limiting factors (e.g. staff time). Although
course offerings have increased by 40% in the past year there is still
considerable unmet demand as well as a dramatic increase in requests
for special workshops.
With IT playing an increasingly large role in UVA's academic and
administrative life (e.g. Classroom Technology, Electronic Forms,
Information Warehouse, and other restructuring/reengineering efforts),
ITC is trying to find some strategies to meet these escalating
training needs in the future. Possible strategies include: providing
more video/Web training; more emphasis on "train-the-trainers"; using
adjunct (non-ITC) instructors (both volunteer and compensated);
seeking increased State funding through budget iniatives; charging for
some courses/classes to recover costs.
ITC is proposing to group its course offerings into categories which
are currently titled (1) University Strategic Technologies (2) Basic
Informational Sessions (3) Fundamental to Advanced Sessions
(4) Special Requests and Programs -- and would like the committee's
opinions about the proposal to charge an "administrative fee" for
Basic Informational Sessions, and to charge a "cost recovery fee" for
Fundamental to Advanced courses and for Special Requests.
Considerable discussion followed Potter's presentation -- what
topics/courses are considered "strategic" (i.e. are they mostly
administrative? what about research? etc) -- what criteria is used to
decide which topics/products are taught? -- does ITC teach only what
the Help Desk can/does support? or beyond that? -- where would adjunct
instructors come from? (students, outside-UVa, etc).
There was also discussion about what are the "natural lines of
fracture" (or underlying assumptions/principles) that determined the
proposed groupings of courses -- critical factors seem to include:
time factors; volume/demand; "strategic" importance; complexity of
topic. Suggestions were made to : use video and CBT to augment
training; train grad students to be departmental computer resources;
have "mandatory" basic training (computer-related) for students; have
ITC provide staff to support "research tools/software" similar to the
support currently provided for statistical tools/software.
The committee left open the questions about charging fees for courses
(i.e. "nominal"?, "cost recovery"?, sliding scale?, using what
criteria to decide which "grouping" should be charged for?).
Introduction to WWW support issues
==================================
Tim Sigmon outlined the following aspects of resources needed to support
Web usage at UVa:
server software -- most servers have had this software updated now;
disk space -- needed for individual homepages, for course materials,
for student projects, for group projects -- also
places/policies for archiving them; backup issues;
and major capacity issues (disk and CPU);
network bandwidth -- UVa's own network has sufficient capacity for
another year; the overload/deficiences of our external
network provider have been painfully evident recently.
ITC is currently discussing policies/guidelines/directions for
allocating disk space (quotas/limits) for faculty, students, and staff
-- with particular attention to Web support issues. Tim will share
these policy proposals with the committee -- and welcomes their input
into these Web support issues.
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