I had committed to be with my colleagues at the campus center a couple of days ago to welcome the first years’ and their parents. For reasons we don’t need to go into here, it was not on my calendar, so I was able to go there only for a few minutes. The place was buzzing with the usual excitement with the first year students, parents and relatives and it did cross my mind that I probably read some of their applications! Though there was a lot of activity, my colleagues told me that though our “stress phish” was very popular and were gone mostly by the time I arrived, there were not that many questions at our table. Phishing has become such a big problem that we are spending inordinate amount of time resolving them and we are out there to increase the awareness.

How times change! There was a time when questions like “How do I get connected to the network?” brought so many of the students and parents to our desk. But, thanks to the advances in technologies as well as the hard work by our staff of planning ahead and being prepared has made many of these to be non-issues. We vastly simplified the wireless guest access and we saw a significant increase in the number of guest wireless connections and to the best of our knowledge, no one needed help. That’s pretty good!

I accompanied a couple of my colleagues to talk at the new faculty orientation. I heard from many of the new faculty afterwards at a reception in the evening how useful the information we provided was. But more importantly, some faculty, who have taught in other institutions were pleasantly surprised by the suite of support services we offer. One of the faculty members, coming from an elite institution which shall go unnamed, asked “how do I get the keys to operate the audiovisual equipment in classes?”. We politely said you don’t need any keys for that around here!

In a later post, I will identify where our collective organizational efforts will be directed in the coming year. One of them is to offer better support for the faculty members and  their research students who are engaged in high end computation or big data in some fashion. One of the new faculty members was pretty excited about this and will be talking to us about this in detail. This is a very difficult area that many IT organizations avoid because of the complexities involved. However, this is in line with our goal to support the academic mission of the College and we want to try to do a better job such as helping purchase the appropriate hardware, budget properly for maintenance and think about replacement (this is much harder to do than one would think), offer some best practice guidance for system management and backup. Yes, backup!

Many of these systems are either not properly backed up or not backed up at all. We ourselves learned a hard lesson last Spring, which I won’t go into details here. We have purchased a very easy to use backup system with a lot of storage for supporting this initiative, so we are looking forward to achieving this goal.

LTS staff are helping Smitha Radhakrishnan and Yu Jin Ko get ready for their MOOCs – Introduction to Global Sociology and Shakespeare – On the Page and in Performance. We are very excited about these. Tremendous amount of time, effort and resources have gone into creating these and I am sure that the students in these MOOCs will appreciate everything that has been done.