Ravi's Blog

When I first heard that the Educational Research and Development Committee (ER&D) has decided to award the Apgar teaching award to Library and Technology Committee (LTS) and Strategic Growth Initiative (SGI), I could not contain my excitement. This to me is an unprecedented move, given the description of the award:

Teaching Awards

Apgar Award

Endowed by Anne Nelson Apgar ’70, the prize is meant to recognize a faculty member who motivates students’ interest, curiosity, and love of learning; proposes and applies new teaching concepts and methods; and serves as a mentor to stimulate students’ intellectual development. Based upon proposals for new and experimental courses, Educational Research and Development Committee ER&D selects a winner, who receives a plaque.

When the College decided to go all remote in March 2020, we needed to quickly turn our attention to how best to support the students and faculty. Thankfully, because of the spring break, we had two weeks to do this. What we did during that short period of time and thereafter was simply remarkable. But most importantly, the strong collaboration and coordination between LTS, PLTC (The Pforzheimer Learning and Teaching Center) and SGI was critical. Above all, the willingness on the part of the faculty to participate actively in workshops and other venues in numbers that we just could not believe was also critical.

Our staff conducted record number of information sessions/workshops (attended by over 250 faculty members), held virtual office hours and responding to tickets as quickly as possible. After some initial issues, things began to come together. Did we have continuing issues? Absolutely, but if they are things related to what we can do, we resolved them quick. But there were other complications totally outside our domain resulting from the weight of the crisis that we could not do much about.

We had a bit more time to help the faculty plan for the Fall and it was equally successful. It was so great to hear from the faculty about lessons learned as well as some of the best practices emerging from the presentations. We heard how this medium is turning out to be more inclusive – that the directed chat between the student and instructor is making some students participate more than in a traditional classroom where they may not be participating the same way.

And finally, we decided to receive the award on behalf of the entire organization because every one of the staff member contributed to the success in one way or the other. PLTC leadership deserves a huge praise because we simply could not have reached out to the faculty as effectively as we did without Professor Oscar Fernandez.

This is just an incredible and generous gesture on the part of the faculty. My staff and I are so thankful for this.

On Nov 15th, 2020 I completed 10 years at Wellesley. I have to say that time has flown by fast! I have been very fortunate to have a team of individuals who are hard working and dedicated to the institution, my boss (Provost Shennan)  and the senior leaders who have provided the support needed for us to succeed.

When I interviewed, I was surprised to find out that the previous organization did not have an advisory committee to work with. I was pleased to hear that the College was forming one, because I am a firm believer in that model. Over the years, the Advisory Committee on Library and Technology Policy has been a great partner in developing policies that were non existent or incomplete and have supported so many new initiatives that have benefitted the College community.

We are fortunate to be able to provide services in a way that is trusted by the community and reliable. We also have an agile organization of individuals who are willing to pitch in where we need them to assist us in. This COVID crisis brought the best of LTS staff and what we did to support the students, faculty and staff has been remarkable. Our support extended beyond instructional support including the technologies used for managing the COVID testing.

I always remember a conversation that I had with one of my staff members shortly after my arrival. I had just moved from Pace University where I had a very short tenure (1 year and 3 months or so) and she told me that all the staff will be watching me carefully to see how long I will stay at Wellesley! Well… it has been ten years and I have enjoyed every moment of it and it has been a very satisfying experience. Looking forward to the future.

I saw a post in LinkedIn that referred to a podcast titled “How to Work Smarter”  where my friend Heather Abbot, Deputy Registrar, Yale Law School, discusses what she does to work smarter. I highly recommend this to anyone looking for some pointers.

This led me to think about some of what I do and I thought I would share them here. I should say that what I am describing below is something that has evolved over several years during which I constantly keep tweaking what I do. And I pick up ideas from various sources and if I find them applicable to me I do them. There is no single book or philosophy I can point to… I also realize that the fact that this works for me may not work for others.

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On the one hand, I feel terrible for not having written for so long… On the other, it is the reality of this COVID crisis. I have been working a lot, like everyone else. No need to elaborate. I just need to get going on posting here because I like doing it.

All faculty and staff at the College receive a computer with replacement every four years. This is just a general guideline and several prefer to keep their computers longer. I try to stick to the same 4 year replacement cycle as much as possible. The current one I have is a 15″ MacBook Pro and I believe I have had it for just over a year and a few months. I noticed that some keys on my keyboard were wearing off. It got to a point where A and S were practically unrecognizable and I said “we paid a lot for this and this is not acceptable”.

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Though we rolled out Workday Student in Feb 2019 in a limited fashion, the wider rollout to all students began in May 2019. Then, starting in July, we moved to Workday as our system of record. As is common with such major transitions, we continued to use Banner in parallel for a semester for a handful of things by synchronizing data between the two systems. We have a home grown degree audit system that relied on Banner we decided it is not worth moving because of the disruption it would have caused for our seniors and the faculty advisors. It turned out to be the right decision given what happened in March!

I am very happy to report that we have successfully completed a full academic year in Workday student. With the degree completion for seniors and academic honors entered on May 31 and transcripts reflecting them, it has been a thrilling ride! Thanks to the core team that consisted of staff members from the Registrar’s Office, Student Financial Services, Office of Institutional Research and of course, LTS, working so hard to make all of this happen. We could not have gotten here without Alchemy and Workday! We also had involvement from several other departments such as Dean of Students, International Student office, Study Abroad, and the Provost’s office. So, it indeed took a village but we all worked with enormous focus and in coordination to make it all happen…

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In Higher Ed, the activities of an academic year has remained very predictable. The academic year begins by welcoming the newest members of the community, and then – the Fall semester starts, the Fall break and mid terms, Registering for the Spring, Thanksgiving, Early Admissions for the following year, Finals, Holiday Break, Winter Session, Spring Semester, Spring Break & midterms, Registration for Fall, Regular Admission notification, Spring Open Campus, Commencement, Reunion, Summer Session – and the cycle begins again. There are many variations on this theme, but each of the institutions has a predictable cycle. Though we have had some serious disruptions recently – 9/11 for one, a couple of major financial crises – but nothing stopped us from operating in significantly different ways.

But then came the COVID-19 pandemic. No one could have anticipated and planned for a global pandemic like this! So, it is remarkable what we have been able to accomplish collectively since March. The students and faculty adopted to a totally different and imperfect way to do remote learning/teaching amongst all sorts of issues that one rarely needs to deal with – staying at home and competing for bandwidth, family issues much closer to you than before, child care and elder care and so on and so forth. Despite all of this, teaching and learning happened and we can all agree it was not perfect, but everyone adjusted, improvised and through their creativity constantly improved the experience.

As much as this was a huge disruption in March, there was less uncertainty. For example, we knew that the most students, faculty and staff needed to leave the College and work and learn from home. That was not a choice! But now, here we are, in May and need to plan how would the next academic year shape up. It is very different with a lot of uncertainties and is  creating a lot of anxiety and frustrations all around.

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On the one hand, the last few weeks went by so fast.. On the other, though the rapid response to the COVID-19 crisis at the College began about a month ago, it feels like we have been on this for several months. This is a recount of how we prepared for supporting the remote instruction at the College and supporting work from home (WFH) for the administrative staff and faculty.

Before I start, I want to thank the all the LTS staff for rising to the occasion, especially those who spent a lot of time and effort to support the faculty and students in getting ready for remote instruction. We also could not have done this without excellent collaboration with Prof Oscar Fernandez, Associate Professor of Mathematics and PLTC Faculty Director. The unwavering support from the Provost’s office and the senior leadership was critical in our ability to make swift decisions, something we needed to do a lot in a short period of time. And finally, the familiarity of Zoom as a tool for many already and the fact that one could easily learn and adopt played a major role. The faculty and students have been tremendous partners through all of this and we are fortunate that all of these came together at this critical time and I am happy to report that the first week has gone remarkably well and we are hoping that this will continue.

What I describe below is something that you will see repeated amongst many of our peer institutions. We have all been exchanging information and ideas on our discussion fora which was tremendously helpful. I have tried to distill only important information and as you can imagine, there is a lot to getting ready and execution.

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..My time in the past few weeks have been consumed by supporting continuing activities related to transition to Workday, Strategic Planning meetings and most recently the emergency planning activities related to COVID19. I am not complaining, but trying to explain why I have not written in a while…

Pretty much everything we do these days is data heavy and data driven. Though there is a huge explosion in the collection and availability of data, there is also a lot of misunderstanding and confusion about the data and how best to use it. There are so many external forces that come into play, including cultural sensitivities and politics, which add to the complexities.

We are far from reaching nirvana (one of the definitions for it is “a state of perfect happiness; an ideal or idyllic place”) when it comes to data. However, that is not stopping us from attempting 🙂

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When you move to a new system, it is not as if you cut over and you are done! Far from it… As I wrote earlier, we had a successful registration in November and immediately started planning some of the next steps. Our transition plan had us using Banner for certain continued functionality for mostly back end integrations. We were essentially duplicating some of the things in both systems, most of them automated. But as we approached December, it became apparent that we needed a bit more time to completely remove Banner dependence.

Since we continue to use Banner for advancement it was not the end of the world. We will be moving to Affinaquest during the next few days and Banner will be made read only at that time. This is a huge step and you can imagine the anxiety that comes with it. We have been aggressively moving  various applications and integrations to use Workday as the source, but as everyone knows, with so many systems and dependencies, we are likely to find out we missed some. We have the staff waiting to monitor and take action as this happens.

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Everyone knows that I have been and continue to be an active software developer. After I wrote my last blog post, my ex-boss at Wesleyan (John Meerts) reminded me of the first homegrown registration system that I helped write at Wesleyan in the mid 1990’s. This was a game changer at that point and it created the trust of the community in our abilities. This allowed me to both write and lead several other major programming initiatives there which I have carried with me to other institutions.

But, as a software developer in small institutions with small staff to work with, you always encounter issues. There is a lot of excitement around software development, but there is also a lot of risk involved. The community comes to rely on them and wants constant enhancements which can never be predicted ahead of time. Also, with constant changes to the web browser and underlying technologies, you need to continually monitor and apply fixes. As a result, we end up struggling to support these in the long run. Also, when we write our own, our capacity to thoroughly test them is limited and it leads to mistakes. I just wanted to highlight some such mistakes that I have committed myself or have seen it done by others. For the sake of anonymity, I am not going to say who committed which one and leave it to your imagination…

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