FACULTY SENATE UNIVERSITY COMPUTER & ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS COMMITTEE MINUTES



MINUTES OF MEETING OF MARCH, 2001.

APPROVED: April 10, 2001.

PRESENT: R. Sailer, M. Eisneberg, N. Sims, J. Dubach, G. Foreman, M. Wingertsman, G. Hough, M. Hanley, E. Cutting, J. Kunkel

Joe Kunkel called the meeting to order at 12:30 PM.

I: Approval of the minutes of February 7, 2000 was tabled to a time definite, the April meeting. IV.A.1-3 was corrected to read "Win2000" instead of "WinME."

II: Announcements.

A. Schedule Change: The scheduled meeting of April 3 will be held on April 10th.

B. Faculty Senate: The Official Faculty Senate Membership List was presented. The Chair will make a new list reflective of actual membership. An inquiry as to the status of Kenny Lou was made. Also discussed was the possibility of a Student Affairs representative on the FSUC/ECC.

C. UMass Digital Library: There is a 5-campus initiative with various committees and groups working on this. There is a digitalization group, a reference group, an information literacy group, the latter modeled after the Merlin project at UMass. The advantage of the digitalization is that old and fragile documents can be scanned and made available to the public. The DuBois materials will be made available as copyright issues can be addressed.

D. Streaming Video Support: This is not currently a priority for OIT. OIT could do it but only has experienced an occasional passing interest in it. Cost is not an issue, but faculty interest is.

E. UMass On Line: The RFP for a learning management system has been released. 50-60 vendors have expressed an interest. A concern was expressed about a rumor that only Internet Explorer will be able to access UM On Line. There is also specific language in the RFP about disabled access.

III Old Business:

A. Resolution to abolish OIT fee -- update & discussion.

  1. Student opinion appears to oppose the mandatory fee.
  2. Earlier issue of access to modem pools and email no longer is issue, access to electronic resources is.
  3. Optional fee predates 1980.
  4. Faculty need students to have an UMAccess account.
  5. UM-Boston has a mandatory fee.
  6. Curriculum fee is de-facto tuition, but remains on campus unlike tuition which goes to the state.

B. Laptop Mandate -- update & discussion.

  1. There is no money in the state budget to pursue the issue of laptops, the IT TaskForce itself has no money to meet next year -- hence the issue is expected to go away.
  2. Discussed were examples of mandatory computer usage at other institutions. At one location, it was described as a "disaster" with most of the computers used for email and games. Concerns were mentioned of bored students using laptops to play games in class. At Bentley College, the mandatory ownership took three generations of students to be effective, the first just used them for email, the second used WebCT, and now they are integrated into the curriculum.
  3. The issue of FACULTY access to technology was discussed at length. Computer displays are viewed as a chokepoint with faculty fighting over their use. Also need to use class time for setup of devices. A suggestion was made to do a survey of what type of computer(s) are in faculty offices and who paid for them.
  4. It was felt that the Board of Higher Education might act if it knew the extent of the faculty computer gap. Students often have newer and better machines than the faculty do.
  5. Query: Can OIT get a list of how many faculty members have a computer? Since OIT bills the departments for the network ports, it may be possible to develop some data from that. Also Clara Kildare is the new EdTech Person, maybe she could do a survey. If the survey came from the Faculty Senate, it probably would get opened.
  6. Software Licensing was also discussed as a related concern. The MHEC "Big Buy" is in place but no one knows about it. Also it may not be that good a deal. Software site licensing still is an issue of concern, particularly for student use. It was felt that some sort of a 120 day license for student home use is needed in specific instances, for what is the use of a student-owned computer if it doesn't have the necessary software?

C. A motion to adjourn was made and passed.

Respectfully Submitted,

Ed Cutting