Minutes - January 8, 2002
2:00 - 3:30 pm - Belk Library 119
Persons Present:
Ex officio members: Jeff Williams (ITS, Chairman), Doug May (ACS), Margaret Yaukey (Faculty Senate)
Voting members: Clayton Cooke (Business Affairs), Kevin Howell (Fine & Applied Arts), Ed Pekarek (Arts & Sciences), Don Rankins (Registrar), Peter Wachs (Student Development), Al Harris (Business), Dick Riedl (Education), Len Johnson (Human Resources), Christen Nechin (Student), Beth Davison (Arts & Sciences), Ed Pekarek (Arts & Sciences)
Guests Attending: St eve Breiner (ITS, Instructional Computing Services), Tom Leonard(Advancement, Charles Kreszock (Instructional Technology), Bryan Estel (Belk Library)
1. Welcome and announcements
Jeff Williams called the meeting to order at 2:05 and greeted the membership.
2. Discussion of November 9, 2001 meeting
Williams asked if there were any suggested changes to the minutes. There were none, so they stand as published.
3. Student Evaluations On-line
Margaret Yaukey raised the issue of whether the practice and/or the results of student evaluations for faculty could be done on-line. Currently, the access by the faculty of the evaluation sheets is controlled by either the department or dean. In either case, the faculty may review the documents or copy them, but the original must be keep in a controlled environment. It was noted that other campuses may be using a practice that allowed students to enter the evaluation on the web, and that information could then be viewed by the faculty. The current practice requires that the department or dean maintain and store the forms for an extended period. It was noted that if the students were allowed to enter the evaluations on-line and outside the class setting, then the participation rate could be greatly reduced. It is probably impractical to use scheduled lab times to provide a controlled mechanism for this practice. Another option discussed was whether the results of the evaluations could be provided on-line using the existing instruments. From a data standpoint, the scanned information could be stored but it would be difficult to associated responses to the instrument since they are not standard. In order to provide written comments, an imaging scanning process would have to be used. This would require more time intensive effort and the access could be more complicated for the faculty. Margaret was going to follow-up with other campuses to see what they are doing.
4. Printing in Labs
Doug May reported the status of printing in the labs since the fee for print was started this semester. He reported that the recycling bins are empty. One of the primary objectives was to reduce waste and this process appears to be working very well. There was a discussion about how well the distribution of vouchers to obtain the media card with the six dollar credit. According to the post office, every box was stuffed with the voucher. However, some students claimed they never received the form. One possibility is that the student threw the form away as they attempted to sort through all the other correspondence in their post office box. May said they would continue to monitor the system and consider what steps to take in future semesters to improve this process.
5. Campus Pipeline/Portals, Status/Directions
Williams opened the floor for comments about the semester startup. He was interested in how well it was perceived by the group given that many changes were made to portal services. The feedback was favorable and the faculty that had used the Campus Pipeline portal to get to WebCT, Web for Faculty or Campus Pipeline resources were pleased. It was pointed out that the tech support group experienced much fewer problems with the WebCT integration than in the Fall. Passwords continue to be a problem since it isn’t currently possible to automatically synchronize them across all systems. Another issue related to quota problems with email. Many email messages contain attachments that cause the space to be exceeded more quickly than in the past
6. Other Business
Mick Kreszock mentioned that the internet gateway charges will be usage based beginning in July. The current algorithm shows that ASU could pay less than last year, but since it is volume based that could easily vary. As a campus, we will continue to monitor and throttle nonessential use as our tools allow. The students continue to use the majority of our bandwidth especially during the evening hours. NCREN3 will help us with our commodity Internet services, but that may be several years out.
A question was asked about central authentication to reduce the problems with password changes. Williams commented that this has been a goal for years and that we are getting closer. Some next steps include using an external LDAP to authenticate Campus Pipeline use and once that is done consideration of making that the authentication engine would be possible. Since the external audit will occur in the near future, the security policy will need to be reviewed, updated and enforced.
No other business was discussed.
7. Adjournment
The meeting was adjourned at 3:30 PM
