SPECIAL REPORT
of the
UNIVERSITY COMPUTER AND ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS COMMITTEE
CONCERNING THE BOARD OF HIGHER EDUCATIONS
SUPPORT OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN HIGHER EDUCATION

           The rapid growth of information technology (IT) and pressures for its use in education necessitate a substantial investment in learning and infrastructure by the University Community.

            The current state of pedagogy on our campus that includes IT depends upon the equipment available in existing classrooms, the internet connectivity of our community, and the training of our faculty and students in taking advantage of IT.  Application of available technology in teaching is often avoided due to the heroic efforts needed to assemble the equipment in our less well equiped classrooms.  The slow increase in the number of well equiped classrooms is a bottleneck to the general faculty's progress in developing pedagogy.

            While the Committee recognizes that revenue issues may dictate the rate at which IT can be applied broadly within all the disciplines that need it, it believes that the current focus on existing IT programs does not address the broader objectives which the Board of Higher wishes to address in encouraging promulgation of IT on the State's higher educational campuses.  The Committee urges that the current emphasis on maintaining support for the focused IT programs on our UMass campus be broadened to include an emphasis on increasing the number of IT-ready classrooms available to the general university community and providing a revenue stream that will provide appropriate computer equipment for all faculty and students who need them.

            We particularly need to emphasise that the appropriate hardware needed by each faculty, and the students they serve, may not be consistant with a common solution for the entire campus.  A flexible approach to providing the technology to different disciplines must be combined with an understanding that all disciplines must be served by any mandate to increase IT.  Some teaching pedagogy may require substantial investments in university owned and maintained equipment such as digital projectors and information servers.  Improvements in requisite equipment may put unreasonable pressures on some economic segments of our student body which may call for special mechanisms to maintain equity.

            Therefore, the Committee recommends that the Faculty Senate adopt the following resolution which was passed by the Committee on April 10, 2001:

 

WHEREAS

            The need for information technology (IT) infrastucture has become fundamental to the advancement of the academic enterprise and the current structure has resulted in:

(1) inequities, including that not all faculty have access to

a) desktop or laptop computers,

b) training in use of computers,

c) classrooms equiped for IT;

and

(2) inequities to students across the University, including

a) unequal IT resources based on discipline,

b) unequal access to IT based on housing, and

c) unequal access to IT based on financial need;

BE IT RESOLVED THAT

             The students and faculty of every discipline of the University community should benefit from planned improvements in IT infrastructure.

MOTION That the Faculty Senate endorse the resolution passed by the University Computer and Electronic Communications Committee that would provide all disciplines of the University community with improvements in information technology.