As always, we are engaged in a lot of exciting things and I thought I would touch on a few items here.

MOOCs – Two of our self study courses that opened in January are drawing to a close. Italian Language and Culture: Beginner  and Personal Finance, Part 1: Investing in Yourself have been very well received. They have had much higher engagement percentages going into last couple of weeks (between 9 and 12%) than the typical MOOCs. And the learners are loving the courses. Please see here for several additional courses that are opening up in the next few weeks. A couple of them have been run before, but are redone to be shorter ones which seem to be more appropriate for this medium. Enroll yourself and enjoy!

Blended Learning – We are doing really great in this Mellon funded project. We continue to receive requests for support and experimentation. I strongly suggest that you view this website, especially the embedded video. Talking about blended learning, a second jointly taught course between Davidson College and Wellesley is going great by the reviews we have received so far. Van Hillard from Davidson and Justin Armstrong from Wellesley have been co-teaching a first year writing course. These are truly collaborative projects involving faculty members, students, staff members from Research and Instructional Support and Library Collections. For example, Helene Bilis is planning to jointly teach a course with a faculty member from Smith for which they are working on a project on making a digital clickable edition of an 18th-century almanac that once belonged to Marie-Antoinette. This book was acquired by special collections and a member of RIS team is assisting with digitization and the creation of clickable online version of this book!

Summer Interns for Academic Departments – In combination with the Blended Learning project, LTS will be supporting student interns in the summer who will be helping support the faculty in many different ways. We have 18 requests so far and they range from the creation of websites and small databases to video recordings that can be made available to students in addition to their face to face classes. In addition, we will be supporting a project involving travel to Greece and the use of Drones and possibly a Ricoh Theta camera that helps create a 3D experience.

Workday – We have done really well so far in this major project. We are in the process of implementing the HR module and uncovering all sorts of data issues and opportunities for some business process reengineering. Collaboration amongst the various participants at the College from different departments has been great to see. We have provided an initial extract of the core HR data to Workday ahead of schedule. Working on other data extracts while talking to our collaborators at Bentley College about integrations. Exciting progress…

Other Administrative Applications – After a successful piloting of our homegrown Waitlisting system, we have rolled it out widely and it is going great so far. We are also helping implement one additional placement exam (Russian) to be online while redoing French. These will be available to the first year students in the summer so they can take them remotely. Our homegrown degree audit system received a facelift and is in use full swing. We have a self scheduled exam that was fraught with logistical difficulties. We automated several aspects of them and it was a big hit. We will be improving it even further for the Spring exams. We have supported our colleagues in Admissions admirably in their transition to Slate, a new admissions system.

Our WANDA project is going great and increasing number of faculty and staff are benefitting from easy access to data. We are even providing deidentified and aggregate data for students for some of their projects and research. We are engaged in an exciting project to extend this technology to help report and analyze alumnae data.

Infrastructure – We are gearing up for a major redo of our wireless infrastructure in the summer, whereby we will be increasing the number of wireless access points across the campus. This requires us to upgrade some of our backend hardware, which are already in progress. In addition, we are looking to implement a two factor authentication system using Duo.

Organizational – We have been searching to fill the position of Director of Library Collections and the search committee consisting of five faculty and three staff members did a wonderful job and we are in the final stages of search. We took the opportunities created by some recent vacancies to create a new position – Director of Project Management and Business Analysis – which has been filled. Research and Instructional Support group recently reorganized to better support the emerging needs of the academic community such as blended learning and digital scholarship.

As always, this is just a small sample of what we are up to and I am sure I am missing some of the most critical ones. Please add  comments about those great projects that I may have inadvertently left out!