I was fortunate to be invited to be in a panel titled “Evolution of the CIO: IT leadership for the smart, sustainable campus” along with Klara Jelinkova from Harvard and Lev Gonick from Arizona State University. Unfortunately Lev could not join us, so it was just Klara and me. It was moderated by Sara Custer.
I want to share some of the things we discussed and possibly things I really wanted to say but may not have. Bottom line, whether it is Harvard or Wellesley, there is so much similarity in terms of what the CIOs have to manage. However, the scale and some of the details are distinctly different.
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****WARNING – This is much longer than my usual posts. But I promise you that it is very informational ***
I can’t believe that we have been using Workday Student for the past three years. I thought this is a good time to reflect on how far we have come. Why now? Because we have recently rolled out some exciting functions in Workday Student that took a lot of effort on the part of the Registrar’s office and LTS. And we are happy to see that it has been received well by our students and faculty.
I often get asked the question “I keep hearing that Workday Student doesn’t have all the functionalities of a Student Information System, how are you all doing”. My answer is “We have matriculated three classes, we have graduated two classes, our students have registered successfully at least 14 times, we have been producing transcripts for the past two years from Workday, students have been viewing their financial statements and students or parents have been paying the bills, we use it for functions we never had before, such as waitlisting, prerequisite checking etc. so it is working just fine for us. By the way, which SIS provides you EVERYTHING you want anyways?”
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Yesterday I was two miles away from home on a local road in Connecticut and I had a bad flat tire because I ran into a curb while driving at 45 mph. I will spare you other details. Unfortunately this is a road with no shoulder so I had parked it as close to the curb as possible. Still, the car was occupyting a significant portion of the lane, causing inconvenience to drivers on both sides. I was on the phone immediately to call AAA and this is about my experience through the process. (more…)
It will soon be 2 years since the covid crisis struck the United States causing all of our lives to be turned upside down. Higher ed institutions faced disruptions that we never imagined would happen during our lifetimes. Despite the severity of the crisis and the disruption it caused, thanks to wide availability of the internet and the advances in technology we did fairly well. However it’s fair to say that we all have lost 2 years of our life to the crisis because we simply could not live our lives the way that we were used to. This is why when we began the planning for last fall there was a sense of excitement that we may be inching towards a different world and more normalcy. That all turned south again because of a second wave and then the Omicron variant causing havoc. And here we are, a semester later, the crisis seems to continue though there are signs of it subsiding and we will never know what’s in the future.
As the Wellesley operations team was discussing the plans for spring semester in early January, it became increasingly clear that when the students returned to campus in mid-January the Omicron effect was not going to be under control. At the same time the administration was reluctant to move to a remote learning environment unless it is absolutely necessary. After a lot of deliberations, the decision was made that we will be remote just for the first week of spring semester. The rationale for this was that the greatest risk we faced was related to the students traveling from elsewhere and coming to the campus. By asking the students to come as planned and ensuring they all got two negative tests before they are released from in room restrictions, the community could feel safe. And the way to accomplish this was to make the first week remote.
This made us scramble to make some adjustments to the network…. And this is what resulted in an issue that we wish didn’t happen!
When everyone was home and doing remote learning, it did not tax the on-campus network at all because all the Zoom traffic was going from home networks directly to Zoom and vice versa. However when we have all students on campus, our networks should be able to handle literally thousands of simultaneous Zoom traffic during class meeting time. Though when the crisis hit us in March 2020, we doubled our internet connectivity to 4 Gb, it was not used that much, even after all the students returned back to campus. Though we had 4 Gb of internet bandwidth, we noticed that our firewall did not have the capacity to handle that level of traffic.
Though we had ordered and received a higher capacity firewall, other priority projects and the fact the current firewall was handling all of our traffic made us wait a bit to install it. These installations are time consuming and finding a stretch of time to take the network down for a significant amount of time is extremely hard. When we were fully remote for 3 days after Thanksgiving, we saw that the firewall was getting heavily taxed and we said, we need to do something as soon as feasible. Unfortunately, the only window of time we had was mid January.
When we heard of the final decision to have one week of remote classes, we scrambled quickly to identify a time to install the new firewall. Despite having an expert consultant and Cisco (our network vendor) to support our excellent network team, it took us three attempts, (yes, three!) to install it successfully. When this was completed, it was the Friday before the start of classes.
We monitored the network over the weekend, when the use was heavy because most students had arrived by that time. We felt good about how the network behaved.
Monday, when the classes began, everything held up and we were happy. However, around 9:30 we started hearing about problems. We quickly brought in the consultant and Cisco. The firewall seemed to be working fine from the standard metrics point of view. Our network engineer found out that the issue was that the firewall was running out of resources for Network Address Translation (NAT).
NAT in simple terms is used to map addresses in a local network to one or more outgoing IP addresses. This happens in all of our home networks where we all get 10.x IP addresses that the internet router translates and presents to the outside world its own IP number as the one generating the traffic. In order for this to work, the device doing the translation needs to keep track of this map (like, which internal computer sent me a packet) so that when it receives a response, it can reverse map and send it to the right computer.
We had recently converted the College network to 10.x address space and when the students came back, they all received the new IP number. Since everything worked fine during the weekend, we did not anticipate this to be an issue. But a few more faculty and staff on campus tipped the scale and the firewall’s ability to map was getting taxed.
Our network engineers had a quick solution to this by adding more outgoing addresses to map to. But this did not work. This was frustrating. Despite involving the consultant and Cisco support, we could not figure out why this was not working. We quickly made a decision to change IP address space for all of the residence halls around 2 PM and by 3 PM the network was back.
We escalated the issue further up in Cisco and a smart engineer found an issue with the configuration on the firewall the next morning. If only we had the fortune to have him 20 hours earlier! With the exception of the Monday issue, the network has held up well.
Still, we wish that we didn’t have that outage on Monday. Heroic efforts by LTS networking staff and several others should be commended. We communicated often with the community and got the network up as soon as we could. We learned a few lessons in the process.
Despite the temptation to assume that it is the changing of internal IP numbers to 10.x space is the cause of the problem, I want to assure that it was not the issue. It was a configuration issue in the firewall that should have handled the NAT that caused the problem and as I mentioned, even Cisco was unable to solve that until several hours later!
Now, looking forward to continuing the stable network so we can divert our attention to other projects to benefit the community!
Happy New Year everyone!
Preserving scholarly works, history of the world, countries all the way down to individual institutions has been happening for a very long time in very different ways. The decision to preserve something for the long haul always lags the initial creation of content. Generally, the value of the content and the intent to preserve it is based on the impact of the content, which takes some time. Libraries are the institutions that make decisions on what to preserve, how to preserve and how to make them available. This is a lot of hard work on the part often led by the special collections and archives in the libraries.
But, in the last 20 to 25 years, things have changed dramatically thanks to the internet, advances in technologies and predominantly the content are born-digital. And since the wide adoption of various social media, digital content has exploded exponentially. This applies to written text, audio as well as videos. These advances have democratized the content creation and distribution like never before, which, like everything else, has its positives and negatives. Of course the advanced technology allows for easy preservation and generally all content creators take advantage and preserve pretty much everything they create, although often not up to the standards that guarantee long-term preservation which libraries need to meet. This poses enormous challenges to the libraries and there has been some excellent work in this area led by Library of Congress and you can read about it in detail here. I just want to touch on some of the technical aspects of it here.
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We expected to be somewhat back to normal during the Fall semester and it went by the wayside in late summer, so we prepared to continue a lot of what we did in the previous year in terms of masking, social distancing, limited interactions on campus and continued testing. Just when things started looking good in October, things went south. As you can see, after a lull, it shot up right after Thanksgiving and has stayed there. This is not unique to Wellesley, it is affecting so many other Higher Eds as well as it seems to be a national trend.
As if this is not enough to drain your energy, we had a couple of phishing attacks on campus this past week. Despite our best attempts to educate the community about protections against such attempts, several fell for this. These things take away valuable time for many of us to clean up!
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It is Thanksgiving week already. Time just files… It is time to be thankful for a lot of things in life. I will not do justice by touching on everyone and everything, but I am going to give it a try, not in any particular order.
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Most of you know that I continue to be an avid developer. I have also expressed our organizational plan moving forward – low or no code. We are a small institution and have limited staff resources. However, we have realigned our resources in ways that we are still getting a lot done. How? We have shed a lot of the old ways of doing business in ll areas of LTS and in the area of code development, we are coding far less than before. We have an opportunity to do even less with advances in technologies.
I always say that our academic computing colleagues are great examples of those who find strategic uses of technologies to support teaching, learning and research and in predominent number of cases they do not code! They are experts at researching various existing or emerging technologies to see how they fit our institutional culture and practices to help adopt them and support them. The corresponding model in administrative system is business analysts. They are experts who understand the “business” (such as HR, Finance, Registrar, Student Financial Services etc) and try to research how major administrative systems we already have can be used to improve the various business processes and work with the offices to implement them.
This is where tools such as Extend can assist.
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It was about 18 months ago that the college decided to go fully remote as a result of the COVID crisis. That was not an easy decision at that time but the senior leadership and an expanded group of administrative staff who formed the operation team came to that conclusion and quickly started pivoting to the various action items that would make remote learning successful.
As the year developed, we started gaining confidence that the fall of 2021 is likely to be a different semester than the last year and therefore preparations were underway to make this an on campus experience for everyone. However, as we approached the beginning of summer it became very clear that the fall is not going to be what we all thought it was going to be.
The Delta variant was becoming more pervasive in the United States than anyone had imagined and it was becoming a major factor in us having to decide what to do next. The college instituted mandatory submission of proof of vaccination for all the students and all the faculty and staff who will be on campus on a regular basis. Because we were going to have all on campus classes and all students on campus the college also decided to recall the remote work policy for administrative staff. However the senior administration had developed a plan that accommodated up to 2 days a week of remote work for administrative staff to whom that applies.
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sometime agoIt finally happened! I picked up the phone and called Comcast and said I only want their internet service and no cable TV. They did the usual thing of passing me around to different department a couple of times, but to my surprise I was connected to a woman who was pleasant and willing to help.
I am not sure if I wrote earlier about getting out of landline phone, but I finally brought myself to doing it . My only reason for keeping it was ADT security system which still needed a land line, but they had recently graduated to using Cell connections as well as WiFi and once I got that taken care of, I called to cancel. Comcast tried to convince me to keep it because it didn’t cost much etc. etc. but I stood my ground and got out of it. What a relief! No more spam calls waking us up in the middle of the night etc. (yes, I did sign up for nomorobo etc but they had their own limitations). And we have been just fine with receiving calls on our cell phones.
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