I was at one of the best annual conferences – CLAC Annual Conference. This year it was held in Swarthmore College with a reception and a dinner being hosted by Haverford and Bryn Mawr College respectively. They belong to the Tri-College consortium, so it was natural that we were hosted in all three beautiful campuses. I love this conference for the networking opportunities it provides. We are very similar institutions in terms of the number of students, faculty and staff, the services we provide and the issues we face. But still there are considerable variations in what we do and how we are organized, so it is always interesting to exchange notes and learn from each other.

You can read my tweets from the conference here.

The conference started with a keynote on Digital Ethics by John O’Brien, President and CEO of EDUCAUSE. The talk was about ethical concerns about technology and how this is nothing new. He went through several examples from the past highlighting the hype that follows any new technology. There were several funny moments as he recounted some of this, especially about radium. The conclusion is the message that is all too familiar to those of us in the liberal arts institutions – the right mixture of excitement and caution is necessary in promoting educational technology. Well said.

I also learned that several of our colleagues are going through very similar exercise that we have been going through – some implementing Workday, some looking at alternate solutions to their administrative systems; those who have been, like us, using Banner for advancement are moving on to other platforms (we are in the process of implementing Affinaquest); a few are looking for alternatives to their phone system because it is reaching end of life (like ours!). In each of these cases, how one arrives at a solution and what solution one arrives at is so dependent on the institutional culture, finances etc. But this gave us all interesting topics to discuss.

I attended several sessions and a couple stood out. One was about the analysis of MISO survey results. We administered the survey in 2019 Spring and are in the process of analyzing the data and sharing it with the community. The issue we have with the survey responses is how best to understand the answers to two questions together – services that are important to the respondents and how satisfied they are with the services we provide.

Often we struggle with the interpretation of the results because they don’t always go hand in hand. The authors have developed a clever regression model to tease some of the issues that we should be focusing on. When analyzed across all participating institutions, what stood out was the respondents are dissatisfied with the level of participation/voice in decision making. We plan to do the same analysis  for our dataset to understand  the responses more deeply.

In my opinion, one needs to drill further into the narratives in addition to just the analysis  based on responses regarding participation. We try to do the best in terms of shared governance and participation from the community. Many a times the challenge is to get input early on and at other times we cannot find solutions that satisfy the expectations of everyone. I am sure both of these contribute to the feelings of not being heard.

Heather Woods from Wellesley gave an excellent presentation of GDPR. It was clear that we have done a lot more in this area than our colleagues from other institutions. What came out of this was that several states such as California and Massachusetts are in the process of enacting similar laws and they are going to be much harder to comply with and that we better get ready for them soon.

Several CIOs participated in a panel about disasters they faced and needed to recover from. The conclusion was to develop strong relationship with the community member and communicate often because this will become important in the event of major disasters. Good advice!

We visited all three beautiful campuses and I thoroughly enjoyed the conversations and the conference presentations and it was time to head back to work!