November 10, 2020

Academic Information Technology Committee Meeting

Date: November 10, 2020

Location: Held via Teams due to Covid

Starting Time: Members began joining meeting at 1:50 PM.

Attending: Arne Almquist, Derina Holtzhausen, Stefan Andrei, Jennifer R. Fowler, Abdul Wajid Choudhry, Joseph Kruger, Sujing Wang, Frank Badua, Dale Fontenot, Eunjin Kwon, Xing Wu, Reza Barzegaran, Michael Saar, Kenrich Aung, Trevion Wilson, Don Warren.

Call to Order:  2:02 PM.

Approval of Minutes

A motion was made by Dr. Derina Holtzhausen to accept the minutes of October meeting. It was seconded by Dr. Joseph Kruger and carried.

Presentation by Dr. Arne Almquist on the various areas of his division

The reorganization took place in IT with a new division of information management and decision support composed of three units: enterprise services, security services, and compliance.

Two of the IT units were broken off. One of those is Tech/lab support and infrastructure. The division does not include the physical infrastructure of the university, e.g. the servers and data centers.

The division:

• supports all applications cross-campus
• added a new unit called Management Information Analysis
• focuses on state and federal reporting of the data from the university
• does ad hoc analysis
• provides business intelligence to help decision making
• also includes Mary and John Gray Library and supports the computer labs (first-floor lab and the 7^th-floor lab) in the library
• ready to teach a data literacy session: teach students how to better use information resources not just the library
• Compliance is looking at new products in the IT field, particular software, hardware, and so on, and making sure that we meet the ADA standards.

The division can take all these units and use them together to leverage and provide better value for the university and better support for decision-makers for faculty and students.

The data and statistics pages are available for anybody to access those data (https://www.lamar.edu/management-information-and-analysis/data-and-statistics.html). The common data set describes the university and university operations in a standard format that every university in the country uses. We’ve got data from 2014 to 2019 enrollment summaries for the past couple of semesters. It will be updated over time.

We also have a university fact book that tends to follow by a year or two. We get the information from the university which is a historical headcount of hours and headcount in semester hours from the university from the year 2018 all way back to the year 1951.

Publicly accessible version of Tableau tools that allows us to create visualization, easier to understand, and more attractive looking. All sorts of information on enrollment, ethnicity, residency, international students, and gender are filtered: (https://www.lamar.edu/about-lu/dashboards/interactive-enrollment-dashboard.html). 

University COVID dashboard is available (https://www.lamar.edu/return/covid-dashboard.html). We use different scales for Jefferson county and Lamar University.

For the library, we are trying to build “Information Brokerage” which will change the way that we use to provide access.

For Journal, use cost per use to determine subscription ownership versus access.

            We are adding JSTOR which adds a huge number of Journal backfiles to our collection.

We still have access to ProQuest.

Desktop services fall to Director Abdul Wajid Choudhry, network supports services fall to director Patrick Stewart.

Dr. Arne Almquist reports directly to the President, the IMDSC Information management decision support and the management information and analysis are in that administrative line. The library is in academic affairs.

Suggestion to have an organizational chart for SACS credentials and it will be updated, and it should be in the Faculty Handbook.

The restricted areas of the public data are because that particular software package that we use to create visualizations is very expensive on a per user basis, and there should be a license for each person that has access to that.

Goal of current academic year

1: Conduct computer and information technology services for faculty and instructional needs assessment and present findings to Provost.   

2: Review and revise existing committee policies and procedures. 

A motion was made by Mr. Michael Saar. It was seconded by Dr. Arne Almquist and carried.

Suggestions to get input from faculty regarding what would help them because we are in this unprecedented time with pandemic and everything.

 Dr. Jennifer R. Fowler shared the student satisfaction survey document prepared by Faculty Senator.

Regarding purchasing requisition, the steering committee is asking for anything that is campus wide type of an initiative to be brought forward to the committee for review.

Suggestions regarding no online submission systems for curriculums. Lamar is working on cloud services assessing.

Review and update the committee webpage 

Dr. Jennifer R. Fowler is the Faculty Senate Representative

Next committee meeting dates

Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2020, 2:00 pm on Teams

Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2020, 2:00 pm on Teams

New business

Inquiring about library’s printing practices: current printing practices is released to a station and handed out to students. There is a cover sheet put on each printer. As a short test, one of those printers will be separated from the system and be self-released without a cover sheet to see if this might be a more sustainable alternative to current printing practice.

Adjournment

Motion to adjourn was made by Dr. Frank Badua. Seconded by Dr. Stefan Andrei. All members said ‘Aye’. Motion passed.

Meeting adjourned at 3:02 PM.