In attendance: Asamoah, Blood, Branthoover, Brzycki, Chiarulli, Dadson, Donley, Giever, Janosko, Kemp, Kornfeld, McCoy, McDevitt, McElroy, McFerron, O'Neil, Onyett, Pagnucci, Pankaj, Reed, Sherwood, Smith, Yost.
Excused: Balint, Gruber, VanWieren, Yuhas.
Absent: Gillham, Woodland.
Guest: Todd Cunningham.
Proceedings:
Approval of Minutes from the December 3, 2008 Meeting.
The minutes were approved with corrections.
Co-Chairs' Report:
Financial Report
Rick McFerron provided this report:
| Balance in SAP: | $34,182.83 |
Membership
No changes in the membership. The co-chairs will contact Dean Scott regarding the vacant Northpointe representative.
Announcements
Dolores Brzycki will serve as the ACPAC representative to the Web task force.
Rick announced the C-CUE Student Technology Forum to be held 20 Mar 09 at Edinboro University. This information should be shared with students who may want to propose a presentation and vie for the $1000 in prize money.
Rick indulged the committee by promoting the Community University Studies (noncredit classes) program.
Standing Reports:
Report from the Virtual Environments Coordinating Committee (Onyett)
Rick McFerron reported that a committee has been formed to coordinate IUP-related activities in virtual environments such as Second Life. The committee is working on a Constitution and Bylaws that would position it as a subcommittee of ACPAC.
Report from the Web Task Force (Brzycki)
Dolores Brzycki reported that the web migration effort is beginning to turn to administrative units. Training is being resumed. Gian Pagnucci has agreed to serve as the ACPAC representative to the Web Task Force in the future.
Report from the Student Computing Subcommittee (McDevitt)
A draft of a student survey will be sent to ACPAC soon. The number of reported RIAA violations has risen lately. Cause is unknown. There have been discussions about behavior problems in the public labs and the residence hall labs. AOG and TOT are working with campus police and others to address this.
Report from the On-line Learning Subcommittee (Brzycki)
The provost has sent out the e-mail message announcing the Moodle decision. Detailed plans for the Moodle implementation are being developed. OLC will serve as an extension of the Moodle implementation team. The concept of a master course is being developed. This may help ease difficulties for instructors preparing for a new term. Production Moodle is scheduled to be available in April 2009. Conversion of courses from WebCT will be an automatic process that the instructor will initiate. It is expected that some faculty members will use the Moodle platform for Summer online classes.
Report from the Emerging Technologies Subcommittee (Onyett)
This subcommittee will meet in a few weeks. Under consideration is: blogging, on-line testing technology, clickers.
Report from the Student Operations Group (Pankaj)
The method for reporting race and ethnicity is changing. The International Office has increased responsibility to track permanent addresses of international students and is seeking tools to assist in this. IT Services is leading a project to mask Social Security Number. There is a way to determine if a student has accessed EZ-Pay for those occasions when students report they did not know they had a bill. (full report).
Report from the CIO office (Balint)
Todd Cunningham reported on behalf of Bill Balint. An RFP for a student information system was issued for the 7 PASSHE schools with outdated systems. 350 blogs were requested this semester. There were about 600 help desk calls during the Winter Session (not all directly related to online classes). Bill is attending the PASSHE LMS Task Force meeting. This task force is currently addressing the Content Management System for learning management systems.
Funds Review Subcommittee (McFerron)
The ACPAC Innovation Forum will be held in conjunction with Research Appreciation Week. The date of the forum is 15 Apr 09. Awardees for 07-08 will be notified. The subcommittee will meet prior to the next meeting to review proposals for the 08-09 ACPAC fund. Proposals are due by 13 Mar 09. While the original announcement suggested awards will be made by 1 April, it is expected a recommendation for awards will be presented at the 8 Apr 09 meeting.
Reports from the Action Teams:
PRS Team -- McFerron, Convener
Todd Cunningham is negotiating with Turning Technologies regarding the technical concerns of their PRS product.
Training/Professional Development Team -- Pagnucci, Convener
No report.
Qualitative Research Tools Team -- Giever, Convener
A final report was presented to ACPAC (report). It included a recommendation to adopt NVivo as the standard qualitative research software. Procurement will proceed. The use of this software should be evaluated annually.
The following motion was approved:
ACPAC accepts the report from the Qualitative Research Tools Action Team and endorses the recommendation to adopt NVivo as the standard qualitative research software. This action team is disbanded. (motion: Giever; second: Onyett).
Digital Repository Team -- Sherwood, Convener
Fedora and DSpace are available in a test environment for the team to investigate. Fedora requires selection of one of many optional front-ends, hence more research at the outset.
Open Source Software Team -- Sherwood, Convener
ACPAC has endorsed guidelines brought forward by the action team. TOT will respond formally to those guidelines. Ken will meet with IT Services to discuss any concerns.
New Business:
Operating systems
A question was raised about the PC operating system. More investigation is needed, but it is not likely that the university will change operating systems until Summer 2010. Candidates would be Vista or Windows 7.
Meeting Time
After some discussion, it was agreed that Rick would ask ACPAC members to respond via e-mail to suggested new start times for future ACPAC meetings.
Old Business:
E-mail quotas
Although funding would have to be identified, there is general agreement that an increase in e-mail quotas would be useful for faculty. ACPAC has requested that IT Services investigate the costs associated with increasing all faculty mailboxes to one GB as well as two GB. Todd Cunningham will work with the IT Services staff to determine the approximate costs and report back to ACPAC.
IT Service Levels in Colleges
Regarding commonality of the desktop, TOT will respond to that issue once it is certain what operating system will be adopted. There was discussion on the broader issue of variations in service. Dean Asamoah suggested that the college technology committees have a role in setting service levels. This matter will be forwarded to AOG for comments and consideration.
Recommendations for Improving Internal IUP Communications (Sherwood)
IT Services will respond to the document brought forward by Ken Sherwood.
The meeting was adjourned at 5:18 PM.
Next Meeting: March 11, 2009
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Prepared by J. R. McFerron.