PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 24, No. 20, May 5, 2005

Board seeks feedback on campus technology

By Sharita Forrest, Assistant Editor
217-244-1072; slforres@uiuc.edu

Got suggestions about information technologies that would help you – and others in the campus community – with teaching, research or other responsibilities?

The members of the Information Technology Advisory Board want to hear them.

ITAB is a 34-member committee comprising faculty and staff members and students from across campus that advises the chief information officer, Pete Siegel, and Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services on matters such as the types of technologies needed on campus, technology-related policies and spending priorities.

ITAB is a primary route for faculty and staff members to have input on current needs and future directions for campus computing, and has many non-technical members who can offer advice on how computers can help people with their work.

ITAB works collaboratively with the Student Information Technology Advisory Board, a committee of 22 undergraduate and graduate students that focuses on students’ technology needs. Jan Novakofski, a professor of animal sciences, chairs both organizations.

Siegel said ITAB’s members have been instrumental in shaping information technology initiatives at Urbana, including CITES’ strategic plan and the campus network upgrade, addressing users’ problems with the Illinois Compass online learning management system, and developing and implementing CITES Spam Control, the centralized spam-handling software that is being phased in now.

“One of the things that ITAB is great at is saying, ‘Here’s a whole bunch of things we’d like. Let’s look at the costs and prioritize them,’ so that we know that the investments we’re making are really the ones that faculty need. They focus a great deal on things like how to simplify the lives of the faculty and students,” said Siegel, who created ITAB 4 1/2 years ago on the advice of Chancellor Richard Herman, who was then provost.

Last fall, ITAB provided Siegel with a prioritized list of information technology initiatives for the campus. Second on the list, after Illinois Compass, was installing and upgrading classroom technologies. According to ITAB’s recommendations, 75 percent of classrooms on campus currently lack computer capabilities and, at best, have aging overhead projectors.

“Right now we have a mix of classrooms with sophisticated technology and classrooms with very little,” Novakofski said, and added that ITAB is advising CITES and the campus administration on the costs and benefits because learning technologies significantly influence students’ educational experience and the professional development of faculty and staff members.

In smaller classrooms, systems without computers could be installed for significantly less than the cost of full-scale systems and still provide improved instructional technology, said Novakofski, who recently received plans for various setups that could be installed this summer and was impressed with how quickly CITES had responded to ITAB’s recommendations.

“This is the reason that I’m excited about ITAB: I see ideas that we talk about, the input that we have, converted into something that benefits the faculty, students and the campus very quickly,” Novakofski said. “CITES and the provost are very responsive to the things that we find important, and the advice that we give is acted upon and followed up very thoroughly and very efficiently.”

In the recommendations that ITAB gave to Siegel, the board suggested that some portion of future tuition be directed to a renovation and renewal program for classroom technologies.

ITAB and SITAB also suggested that the campus increase funding for instructional
computing sites on campus. Toward this end, CITES and the UI Library are exploring the creation of a learning commons, a space where students could work collaboratively and could access information resources and staff members to assist them with technology questions and research strategies.

Sometimes it can be perplexing for students to figure out exactly whom to contact – CITES staff members or Library staff members – when they are having problems conducting online research, Siegel said, and the learning commons would help demystify those situations.

“The idea has gotten a lot of enthusiasm from the students,” Siegel said. “I’m hoping we’ll have a plan put together over the summer that we can start to implement in the fall.”

In addition, ITAB is considering various means – such as a needs-assessment survey, town hall meetings and focus groups – of getting feedback from the Urbana campus community later this year on information technology needs on campus, now and in the future.

“The question is not what should CITES be doing or their department be doing, it’s what does the faculty member need to do their job?” Siegel said. “We really want people to look at these opportunities from the perspective of, ‘What do I need to be effective in my teaching, research and work with the community?’ Their most important community may include faculty members at other universities, and they want to know if the UI can build tools that will allow a colleague from another university to sign on to the system without jumping through a lot of hoops. Should we have an infrastructure or a service to do particular things? Once we know something is a priority, then we can sort out where it gets done and how the specific services get rolled out.”

ITAB will be exploring various options over the summer to determine the best avenues for communicating more broadly with the campus community and will probably implement those strategies this fall.

Siegel and Novakofski encourage members of the campus community to contact them or ITAB members about technology issues, including feedback on improving existing technologies and ideas for new technologies.

ITAB is one of several groups that advises CITES on technology issues. Other advisory groups include the Educational Technologies Board, which promotes effective use of learning technologies for on-campus students and nontraditional learners; the Research Computing Advisory Committee, which focuses on the needs of researchers, especially those who have large computational or networking requirements, and the Senate Information Technology Committee, which focuses on the policy ramifications of information technologies.

More information on ITAB, including a list of members, and CITES’ initiatives, is available on the chief information officer’s Web site.

High-speed network to link UI campuses
The university recently approved the establishment of the Intercampus Communications Network, an expandable, high-availability communications network using fiber-optic cables that will connect the UI campuses in Urbana, Chicago and Springfield.

The university relies on short-term contracts with various commercial sources for its intercampus electronic communications. The new network will both increase capacity and reduce unit costs through a long-term lease of dormant fiber, known as dark fiber, that already is in place in the ground. The dark-fiber infrastructure can provide access to 500 times as much bandwidth for just three to four times the cost of commercial communications circuits.

The ICCN will provide the increased flexibility required to meet the unique needs of a large university system. Many peer institutions, including universities in Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin are constructing similar networks.

Pete Siegel, chief information officer at CITES, said the new network will provide the framework that will keep the university on the cutting edge of technology and “connect us to the wider world of innovation, including Internet2 and the National LambdaRail (NLR), an experimental next-generation infrastructure likely to form the basis of the next Internet.”

“The ICCN is one in a series of networking improvements that will clear the way for individuals seeking high bandwith and superior quality communications for innovative research and teaching programs, including high-performance computing, digital libraries and other data repositories and Web-based services that exploit digital media,” Siegel said.

Chester Gardner, vice president for academic affairs, said: “In its 20-year lifetime, the network will grow and be used in ways unimaginable to us today. The ICCN will enhance network reliability for business applications and will stimulate creative uses of networking among the campuses and the outside world.”

Jesse Delia, interim provost of the Urbana campus, said the ICCN’s potential for positive impact is enormous. “The ICCN will allow researchers to share their innovations in realtime
– from genomics to computer science to the fine arts. We will be better able to form practical partnerships with Illinois industry and to reach out to Illinois communities.”

Officials from the three UI campuses will conduct the network implementation initiative. Stan Yagi, assistant chief information officer for information technologies at CITES, will coordinate the project, which is scheduled for completion during the 2005-2006 academic year.

For more information and updates on the project, visit www.cites.uiuc.edu/projects/iccn.

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