III. Institutional Commitment: Faculty and Staff Engagement

Recommendation 3: Appropriate incentives and support should be established so that faculty and staff are encouraged in the creative use and application of information technology for teaching, research, and service. Promotion & Tenure

Action 6. The Deans in each school should ask their faculty policy committees to review tenure and promotion guidelines to see whether they discourage creative activity involving the application of information technology, and refine these guidelines as necessary in a manner consistent with the mission and standards of excellence of the school.

To foster a better understanding of the role of IT in scholarship, the Associate Vice President for Distributed Education will host a symposium in late Spring 2000 for academic decision makers from all campuses, including department chairs, deans, faculty council leaders, chairs of academic affairs committees, chairs and members of promotion and tenure committees, and chancellors and vice chancellors of the regional campuses. Presenters will include faculty and administrators from institutions who have challenged traditional tenure and promotion guidelines, IU Faculty Council officers, and top IU administrators. The symposium is intended to broaden the understanding of scholarship and publishing in the digital age, with a view to updating the language in the promotion and tenure handbook.

Fellowships and Development Grants

Action 7. The University should review its current systems of faculty fellowships and staff development grants, with the aim of expanding these to offer financial support for the design, development, or innovative application of information technology to teaching, research and service, including the use of information technology in creative activity and the design of instructional materials to advance learning.

The provision of grants and fellowships to support faculty in the use and application of information technology has been a high priority in the implementation of the IT Strategic Plan. The current strategy is to provide this support in a focused way in specific areas rather than in a very general and unfocused manner. Efforts have also been made to identify external sources of funding and support. The following initiatives demonstrate a variety of approaches to expanding the University's program of grants and fellowships for exploring the use of IT in teaching and research.

Ameritech Fellows Program
With a $1M grant from the Ameritech Foundation, IU has established the Ameritech Fellows Program that will award grants to some 60 faculty over five years whose projects demonstrate best practices in the use of information technology in teaching and learning. Faculty fellows chosen from all IU campuses will disseminate their expertise across the University by sharing their experiences in University-wide symposia and in a teaching and learning Knowledge Base. For a full discussion of the Ameritech Fellows Program, see Action 26.

The High Performance Network Applications Program (HPNAP)
This program was established to assist IU faculty, graduate students, and staff in developing innovative network-based applications for research and teaching that require high performance local, regional, or national advanced networks. The Program aims to significantly and qualitatively accelerate the evolution of the next generation of these applications and research tools at IU. The applications developed through this initiative will provide considerable competitive advantage to the University in the areas of teaching, learning, and distributed education, and in new collaborative technologies. To date, 19 grants, totaling more than $400,000, have been awarded to IU researchers in the arts and sciences, business, and education. A further call for proposals under this Program will be made in early 2000. (See also Actions 27/28, 29/31, and 34.)

Other programs
UITS staff provide support for several University and campus programs that encourage innovative use of information technology in teaching, research, and service. Examples include the Network for Excellence in Teaching (NET) program at IUPUI and the Faculty Development Series on Learning Technologies at IUB.

Staff and Faculty Support

Action 8. Schools across the University should be encouraged to provide more resources for maintenance and training for departmental and school computing environments. They should work creatively and in collaboration with UITS to train, retain and distribute knowledgeable individuals to maintain distributed server and desktop systems (UNIX, NT, MacOS, etc.). Action 10. The University should continue to support the efforts to educate and certify IT professionals in needed functional areas of the profession. These programs should be expanded to reach a wider University audience, especially on the IUPUI and regional campuses.

Action 16. To support existing and emerging faculty initiatives in basic skills education, the University should explore the use of IT to aid in the teaching of these basic skills.

Action 23. UITS should work with Human Resources and other IU departments to explore ways of using teaching and learning technologies for the training and development needs of IU staff and faculty. Also, Human Resources should develop actions, in cooperation with UITS and other units, to improve staff access to (and use of) technology training.

These four actions naturally group together under this heading. The major development in this area in 1999 was the establishment of a four-year, University-wide licensing agreement with NETg (National Education Training Group, Inc.), the nation's premier provider of computer-based IT training systems. This agreement will make more than 600 computer-based technology courses available to IU students, faculty, and staff over the next four years. NETg courses provide a range of information, from answers to computing questions to skills training. NETg's modular nature means that faculty will be able to incorporate discrete courses, tasks, and learning modules into their course curricula. Computer users at IU will be able to use NETg courseware to troubleshoot questions on such issues as creating a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation or editing an Excel spreadsheet. Users will also be able to use NETg courses to complement classroom training, to acquire new professional IT skills, or to pursue certification in Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, and other applications. In essence the NETg products mean that IU can now offer training on demand at any time or any place to members of the IU community. To broaden the accessibility of NETg modules, UITS staff are developing the architecture for delivering NETg via the Web, and for linking to its modules from the UITS Knowledge Base, with a target date of mid-March, 2000.

Information technology training is a very high priority and UITS has an extensive IT Education Program that offers a wide range of classes at IUB and IUPUI and which has won many awards. During 1998/99 a total of 1,563 classes were given under this Program on both campuses to a total of 26,768 participants.

Software Support

The first major University-wide license agreement that UITS negotiated was the four-year, $6M Microsoft Enterprise License Agreement (MSELA) signed in 1998. This agreement makes nearly all Microsoft software – the most popular and widely used in the world – available on a non-exclusive basis to all IU faculty, students and staff at work or at home, on Apple or Windows platforms. The MSELA has been an overwhelming success. Though not even at the half-way point of the Agreement, over 200,000 copies of Microsoft software have been distributed throughout the University at a total estimated value of over $30M. Virtually all parts of the University have been affected by this Agreement. In addition to the MSELA and several other agreements negotiated in 1998 (Symantec, Corel), UITS added another University-wide agreement in 1999 following negotiations with StarDivision, Inc. This agreement makes available StarOffice 5.0 for Sun Solaris and Linux operating systems to all students, faculty, and staff.

Unix training
UITS has developed a certification course in "Unix System Administration" which certifies departmental staff to manage these sophisticated systems. This course draws people from local communities and outside Indiana. Also offered is an "Advanced Unix Environments" training course that prepares departmental IT professionals for the system administration class. UITS offers this class at IUB and will teach it on the IUPUI campus as demand increases.

Faculty Development Workshops
The IUB Teaching & Learning Technologies Lab (TLTL), in conjunction with the School of Continuing Studies, sponsored an extensive series of faculty development workshops to train faculty in the use of IT tools and encourage faculty to exchange information about the application of information technology to teaching and learning. Delivered via the Virtual Indiana Classroom (VIC) network, these workshops were available to faculty on all campuses. Similar programs are offered through the IUPUI Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL). The teaching staff in the TLTL and CTL are UITS employees.

Space for UITS Staff

Action 9. Specific action should be taken to locate improved workspaces for UITS staff at IUPUI, and to bring UITS staff at IUB onto campus, thus making them more accessible.

With the support of the State of Indiana, IU began planning for the Communications Technology Complex (CTC) at IUPUI which will house UITS and related academic programs including three of the IPCRES Laboratories. Building architect is Robert A. M. Stern of Robert A. M. Stern Architects of New York. A program plan for the building was finalized and preliminary planning work has begun. This building will be situated on a premier site at IUPUI on the corner of Michigan and West Streets. When complete it will become the center of IU's telecommunications infrastructure and the home to IU's Network Operations Center which also manages the Internet2 Abilene network, the TransPAC network, and a number of other advanced networks. This building will not be completed until around 2002. In the meantime, in early 2000, UITS will relocate the IUPUI Support Center from its current inconvenient location to renovated facilities in a more accessible location on the 2nd floor of the Education/Social Work (ES) Building. The Center's improved location will mean it can better serve students, faculty, and staff.