Academic Technology SubcommitteeMinutes

February 13, 2015, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m., SSB 330C

Attending: Mike Hart, Michael Erskine, Kevin Taylor, Lee Taylor, Jeff Loats, Peggy O’Neill-Jones, Eric Dunker

Absent: Claire Hay, Letitia Pleis, James Lyall, Patsy Hernandez

Procedural Items

1. Approval of Meeting Minutes. Jeff moved to approve. Eric seconded and they were unanimously approved.

2. Welcome New Membershipa. Diane Watkins. She is the new ITS Communications Coordinatorb. Kevin Taylor is the Interim Director of Application Services.c. Representative from the SOE. d. Michael Kolb from CFD.e. Liz Kleinfeld from the IRC.f. New membership was a recommendation from the ITSOC.

Announcements/Updates

1. Online SRI Pilot Project. There is a SRI Task Force to determine if our current SRI process should be online or paper based. It’s been in existence for 15 years. Unfortunately the process developed is also 15 years old. It’s become a bigger struggle, as there are more and more online courses. They have been looking at many companies, but the most popular company that does this replace the technology piece with a tool called EvaluationKIT. Response rate for online courses is 18%. If we want to turn on additional features, we can do that. You could restrict course access, remind people weekly, there are lots of different features. They are looking to simplify the work that Ed Jacobs is doing. It won’t impact existing processes. Online based training is free. Jeff recommends we move forward with this, seconded by Eric.

2. MSU Denver Sites Server. There are critical patches needed that require a shut down. Jeff moved to go forward with this. Eric seconded.

3. Blackboard Learn Upgrade. Two releases each year – April and October. April brings new things in and October brings in patches. Every time you add a patch, it requires an outage. Blackboard Learn upgrade includes recording from webcam which is a quick way of recording videos. On April 15th, turning off legacy APIs which require 4 to 8 hours of downtime. Jeff moves to recommend. Peggy seconded.

4. Email notification. Students are complaining that there are too many notifications from Blackboard. “Individual Message” is what we use now. We are looking at going to “Daily Email Digest”, where emails are only sent out once at the end of the day. Benefits – early warning – faculty can go to it and set triggers. Only send in digest mode. When the number of emails are reduced to once a day, the system performance should improve. Faculty announcements would not be impacted. Only system triggered events. Both faculty and students can switch back but they would need to know how to do that. Move default from “individual message” to “daily email digest”. We will send a message out immediately. Give faculty language that they can send to students regarding changing the setting. Wait until the spring semester and then make it a default at 1 a.m. Blackboard recommends doing in the evening hours. Jeff moves to approve sometime after midnight at the end of the semester. Notification will go out to faculty that the change is coming and could include information for them to send to students. Peggy seconded.

Items for Discussion/Recommendation

1. Learning Spaces: Definitions and Standards. We are going to share this document with a lot of committees and groups. Michael encourages you to read it and give feedback. It defines what we call the various learning spaces. Base Standards – everything we’ve seen on campus. The goal is to determine what should be in all of the classrooms by default. Should there be specialized things for specialized departments? We did our best from the past 2 years of data to determine cost, including shipping and installation. We could send an email to faculty that this is what’s in the classroom or have that information on a website. Received this data from survey of faculty. How are classes supported? Specialized Standards for Learning Spaces: Teacher Ed has things unique to them. The Music Department does as well. Go to each department and ask them what should be the standards for their rooms. Deprecated Standards: things we want to see go away.

a. Tables, chairs and walls need to be addressed before technology.b. An instructional designer and new learning space person working with the library.c. Faculty that uses specific techniques should have rooms that accommodate those

techniques. d. Doors should be opened so teachers can see what the learning looks like in that

room. e. Walls should be made to write on all the way around. They are putting sliding

plexiglas walls in the library that you can write on. They also have a discovery wall which is an open classroom.

f. We also have rooms where the screen comes down over the whiteboard.g. Recommend developing innovation classrooms. South campus would like to be a

test lab. Jeff will put together a recommendation statement. h. How can we recreate as a virtual classroom?

Potential Items Pending Discussion

1. Distributed antenna system.

2. Website Support. Get Chris Mancuso or someone from his office to talk to us at our next meeting in April.

3. Office 365 Committee set-up. We have had many inquiries on the new features. Will send out a request for faculty/staff/students asking what features do they want.