I can’t believe that today is the last day of September! Where does the time go? It was approximately 35 years ago that I came to this country. I arrived in JFK on Sunday, Sep 10th, totally lost. When I was about to leave, a relative of mine asked where in NY I was going to “is it Manhattan island?”. Of course, I knew my Chemistry and Math really well, but not geography! I had no clue. I was waiting at the airport for an Indian grad student from Hunter College to pick me up, except no one was seeking me. After a long wait and nervousness, another Indian person looking for someone else from my flight asked if I saw “a dark Indian guy with glasses”. I said to myself, “that would be three quarters of all Indians in the flight”. Then he asked me who I was waiting for and when I told him, he could not stop laughing “Vasu is happily watching football in his apartment!”. It turns out that the telegram I sent before I left, which was strategically sent just a couple of hours before my flight on Saturday, was addressed to his Hunter College address on a wekend. I later found out that telegrams were not as reliable here as they were in India! Of course, now those who arrive from India are so savvy that they become my GPS! Sometimes I get irritated (sorry) and take an alternate route.
Before I get carried too far… As you may know, Wellesley’s first ever MOOC, Introduction to Human Evolution, taught by Adam van Arsdale, opened last Wednesday, September 25th. It is an important step for our grand experiment. Adam worked extremely hard to make this happen and edX staff keep telling us how he is a natural and this is one of the courses that have gone through very smoothly, including the opening day. Many of us have been watching some of the early discussions with enthusiasm. I have watched several of the videos and looked at the problem sets etc. They are really cool! The diversity of students in terms of the many dimensions of the data collected – gender, highest degree, the location etc – are fascinating. There will be more to come…
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In case you have not heard yet, we released “Wellesley’s Quick College Cost Estimator” on Wednesday morning. This is the brainchild of Professor Phillip Levine in Econ department. With just six fairly simple and straightforward questions, you get a good first approximation for the best estimate of what a student’s family is expected to pay to go to Wellesley. Though we don’t have a daughter, I could not resist the urge to check it out and as a parent of two sons (one is still a senior in College), I was pleasantly surprised to see the expected family contributions for various combination of the numbers. Of course, this is due to Wellesley’s generous Financial Aid policy. I strongly urge you to check this out.
This is a collaboration project that we can all be proud of. Yes, it had the usual pain points of meetings, revisions after revisions, and last minute integration of design and programming. But all these don’t matter, because, you forget all of that when you look at the final product, how much it is being used, all the press we have gotten so far and the feedback. Here are some viewpoints from the press:
There are many more, but these give you enough viewpoints.
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Though we had an excellent start of the semester, there were two nagging issues we needed to solve. One had to do with the print management software called Papercut and the other had to with Macs in classrooms. The first issue was related to one of the unusually busy printing season – first two weeks of the semester. In addition, we are now using multi function devices for printing and in order to support them, we needed to move the print server to Windows server, the only supported platform. The Mac issue had to do with the way we have been reusing the computer names and how this “confuses” the active directory, resulting in the users not be able to login to the domain. Notice that both of these problems are related to Microsoft backend technologies. Just sayin’…
Thanks to the teamwork by LTS staff and their hard work, both of these problems seem to be under control. Another case that illustrates that no matter how hard you work to avoid these problems, the real field testing happens only when our faculty and students are here. This is why the best strategies are one that allows us to be prepared and solve the problems quickly. We can never rest saying “we have tested everything and they work”. No, they don’t, sorry!
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Yesterday (Sep 3) was the first day of classes at Wellesley. As far as LTS is concerned, we seem to be off to another good start. We have been able to see that most of the students have connected their computers to the network. Our students brought more Macs than Windows machines – 67% Macs 33% Windows so far. We also should have a pretty good handle on the Smartphones that they are bringing in. My guess is that the Droids will be more than iPhones based on what I saw during the orientation. No, I was not spying on them – we exempt them from Cisco NAC, so the students were bringing theirs in for that!
Some of us also met with the new faculty and presented to them the range of services we support and fielded a lot of questions. They were duly impressed and a couple compared our support to the institutions they come from & mentioned how impressed they were about our faculty support. I also heard from two parents who mentioned how clear all instructions were on LTS website! LTS staff should consider this as an endorsement of the hard and creative work that they do! Way to go!
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