FROM THE DIRECTOR'S CHAIR
Those of us in WITS hope that all new and returning members of the Willamette community had an enjoyable and productive summer. From our perspective, it seemed all too short. Every August, I write that it was a busy summer for WITS, and this year was no exception. The WITS staff was occupied again installing, upgrading and generally making improvements to the systems and services we provide to the campus. You probably won’t notice all the changes, but overall technology should work better for you in the coming year.
Under the direction of Mike Army, new network wiring and switching equipment was installed in the part of the Kaneko Building occupied by TIUA, bringing the entire building up to current standards and making it much easier to manage. At the other end of campus, WITS staff completed the installation of telecommunications and network equipment as part of the renovation of the old Salem Public Library, often called the Carnegie Building, for use by the College of Law. This building marks the beginning of the migration to the new Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) telephone system for the campus. Though you should notice almost no differences when calling people in the old Library building, all their phones operate with an entirely different technology than those using the campus' conventional system. The remodeled space also includes a new “Hearings Room” which will double as a seminar room and which includes the technology for digital presentations, voice amplification and recording. The “Hearings Room” is now one of the most high-tech spaces on campus.
With the beginning of the construction of Ford Hall, fiber optic and telephone lines running through the construction site had to be removed, rerouted and reconnected. It sounds simple, but it involved a good deal of tedious work. We also continue planning for the technology that will be installed in the new building. Along with the work on Ford Hall, WITS has been involved in renovation of Kresge Theatre. At this stage, the main work for us has been in planning for rerouting the cables that feed the building as well as moving the major interior ones to prepare for a new telecommunications closet. The other major construction project requiring WITS involvement this summer was the renovation of the old Terra House for Beta Theta Pi. Again, it required lots of moving and reconnecting.
Working with the Facilities crew, a generator was installed to support the campus telephone switch in the event of a power failure. WITS also installed a small satellite telephone system which should enable us to maintain some level of communication with the outside world in the event of a major disaster. One of the lessons from Hurricane Katrina is that both the normal land line phones and cellular phones become unusable very quickly. Satellite phones are one of the few viable alternatives.
The Network Services team was very active this summer working on a number of critical background projects. A new disk array was installed that increases the total amount of central storage we can offer to more than 9 terabytes. (That’s 9,000 gigabytes.) It may seem like a huge amount, but with the increasing number of large media files being produced and stored at the University, we’ll probably outgrow it in a few years. The computer that controls this array was also upgraded and the capacity of the tape system we use to backup the data stored on the array was increased as well.
The Operations team has obtained additional document cameras for instructional use, new data projectors for the carts WITS takes to classrooms, a few new digital cameras for loan, and upgrades of some of the computers available for loan. All the computers in the Language Learning Center were upgraded. We also installed new computers in the teaching stations in several classrooms, as well as the notebook computers used by the faculty in Olin for instruction.
The summer that will be most noticeable to the campus and one that involved many WITS staff was the conversion from Blackboard to Sakai for the University’s course management system. We had outgrown the version of Blackboard we owned and an upgrade was going to be extremely expensive. Therefore, we began looking for alternatives and selected Sakai. Sakai is open-source software being developed by a community of programmers drawn primarily from universities around the globe. Typical of many of the installations of Sakai, we will give it another, more meaningful name, specifically Willamette Instructional Support Environment or WISE. The new course management system is an improvement in at least two ways. It has many more features than Blackboard and is much more extensible so we can easily customize it and incorporate new applications. An important new aspect to the implementation of WISE is that WITS will automatically generate skeleton course sites for every class and populate them with rosters that include the ID pictures of the students. Cheryl Cramer, who has been doing a wonderful job leading the conversion effort, is offering training classes for any faculty interested in learning more about WISE and is available to answer your questions. If you have not previously used a course management system, now is a good time to give it a try!
Another major project for the User Services group this summer was the implementation of a new remote support system. With this system, a computer user requesting service from WITS will be invited to connect to a web site (help.willamette.edu). A small temporary application will be downloaded to the user’s computer. This application allows the WITS support representative to see the screen of the user’s computer and, if the user grants permission, to allow that representative to take control of the computer. This system will help WITS staff resolve your problems much more quickly and effectively no matter where you are in the world.
WITS staff along with others have been investigating a variety of technologies for recording class sessions. Choosing among the alternatives turns out to be a very complicated decision and we’re still working on a selection. However, we hope to have a system that will be installed in a few classrooms that will make it very easy for an instructor to record a class session and have it automatically uploaded to a web server for later presentation. Right now, it is AGSM that is driving this effort since they want to be able to have class sessions available to students whose employment may make it impossible for them to attend certain classes. However, there may well be many other uses for such a recording system. We will be able to record invited speakers and offer their presentations on the web. Faculty who have many students who must be absent to travel to an off-campus activity would be able to ask students to view the recorded session before attending the next class. Student in-class presentations could be recorded for later review. The possibilities are endless. Related to a classroom recording system, we have also obtained a limited license for a system that allows instructors to present their classes in real time over the internet. Warren Binford in the College of Law used this system to hold classes that included students who were placed in internships all over the country. If you are interested in presenting your class sessions to students who are only accessible over the internet, please contact your WITS User Services consultant and we will work with you to analyze your needs and find a solution.
The Administrative Computing group has been working along with Institutional Research to implement a new application from Datatel called DataOrchestrator. This software extracts information from the Colleague database and places in an entirely new set of tables and files that are specifically designed to make reporting easier. One of the real problems with any transactional database, such as Colleague, is that it tends to be very difficult to generate reports from it, particularly when you are looking for higher level, summary information. We think that the move to DataOrchestrator is a major step in the right direction in making it easier to generate analytical reports.
If there’s anything WITS can do to help get your fall semester off to a good start, please let us know. We’ll try our best to help.