Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

I am not sure how many you paid attention to a recent e-mail from Justin Harmon about Production Charges. In this e-mail Justin talks about a new charge back model for both print and web services. Since we collaborate heavily on web services, this e-mail is very relevant to ITS. We have had several discussions on this subject with Justin and his staff and we don’t believe this will affect many of the departments who are self sufficient. The departments that require either ITS or Communications to help them on a continuous basis either because they are changing their landing pages and designs too often are likely to be affected. Similarly, if there are new websites that are being created for special projects, there may be a fee. The exact details of when a particular request is chargeable or not will emerge soon and all Web services requests will be routed through a single queue and if the request is chargeable, ITS will be consulted before providing an estimate. I have asked Justin if he and/or Jen can come to one of our staff meetings to talk about this and answer any questions we may have. He has agreed, so depending on their availability I will invite them for the next staff meeting.

One of the positive outcomes of this is that Pat spends a considerable time and aeffort to help maintain certain academic department websites and we think this may not be the most optimal use of resources. Academic Affairs has agreed to help in this regard by asking the department AAs to take more responsibility for this. We will help in training them more and identifying student help where needed.

The other topic that I have been thinking a lot about is Learning Objects. I love the work that gets produced by the Learning Objects group and the idea of using technology to help students understand difficult concepts is very appealing. There is considerable support from the faculty members for this program. I am not sure how many of you are aware that this program is fully funded through grants. Without going into too much detail, every project that this group is working on has a funding source. There are several other grant proposals and other sources of funding that are in the works and many look promising. There is an exciting possibility of collaborating with the Wesleyan University Press which is yet another source of funding that we are looking at.

I am talking to Mike about this in detail. I would like us to take the next year to explore various avenues to support this program and assess where we are at the end of the year…

• develop a long term strategy for supporting the program by seeking long term grants
• explore the possibility of engaging alumni who is willing to support this program
• look internally within ITS to commit programming and project management support
• partner with faculty/students and “look” for opportunities based on what is being taught in the classroom
• look at developing frameworks that reduce the cost of production
• look at gaming interfaces and produce learning objects that appeal to the Nintendo and X-box generation.