CITAC meeting minutes – September 13, 2002

 

1) Called to order at 1:05 PM

2) Additions to agenda –none

3) Announcements

A)     CITAC/VPAST lecture by Dr. Norman Coombs, 3 PM, Wednesday Sept. 18 2002 in the Hemisphere room on the 5th floor of Hale Library

B)     Results of IT survey are available on the web at the URL http://www.ksu.edu/committees/citac/survey/index.htm  This is also available from the Documents link on the CITAC home page.  Additional copies of the paper version of this report could be made available on request to the chair. Please be aware of this site and make use of it in the deliberations of your subcommittee (see below).

C)    Beth Unger announced that a presentation was made to Student Senate re the KEAS initiative, the Media Center, and the contract for providing a voting system for the spring SGA elections.

4) Subcommittees to be formed

Discussion ensued re the number of subcommittees that could/should be formed and charged with providing a report by late spring. General agreement was that three would be a good number, four might be too many. Harvard Townsend asked if the topics listed might mean a shift in focus from the past mission of CITAC, which was to provide advice to the central IT leaders. Rintoul suggested that this might indeed be the case, but that solicitation of input from faculty members on CITAC, and the faculty at large, would be a good thing. Many faculty members are concerned about these issues, and a detailed analysis of the issue by a CITAC subcommittee could go a long way in making sure that everyone understood the issues and the direction that the University might be headed. Rintoul also acknowledged the fact that CITAC predated his tenure as chair, will go on after his tenure as chair, and he did not want to impose any personal slant on the committee’s focus or mission. Comments re this possibility are solicited, and can be directed to our listserv (CITAC-L@ksu.edu) for further discussion.

 

The decision was made to forward a brief description of the issues for each proposed CITAC subcommittee to the entire membership of the committee. Members can sign up to work on one subcommittee, and those which receive the most interest (measured by membership) will be formed and given a formal charge, with a report due in April 2003. CITAC meetings and perhaps lectures will be focused on the issues that are chosen, in order to allow subcommittee members to gather as much information as possible before preparing their reports. These descriptions and a signup sheet will be circulated electronically to the committee soon. As noted in the agenda, four possible foci for the subcommittees are as follows:

 

A)     III

B)     Distance Education Strategy for KSU

C)    IT Funding Strategy for KSU

D)    Electronic Publishing and Access to Academic Research

5)  K-State Online (v. 4) presentation by Rob Caffey

Beth Unger made some introductory remarks re K-State Online, and the variety of course/media production products that are in use by other BIG 12 universities (including Web CT and Blackboard, which is also used by the KSU College of Education). Substantial up-front investment in K-State Online has resulted in a robust product, which is equal to or better than the commercial products, and very competitive cost-wise. Faculty and staff advisory committees, as well as the work of Rob and his staff, have been instrumental in giving KSU the best option available today. Future improvements that are planned (no timeline for some of these) include integration of advising/transcript actions, digital library reference availability, and grading program for ScanTron graded tests. KEAS integration is planned for next fall.

 

Rob Caffey then gave an online demo of the current version of K-State Online (v. 4.0), with only minor technical difficulties. Interested committee members are encouraged to contact Rob (caffey@dce.ksu.edu) to hear about the new features and to suggest additional enhancements.

6) Adjournment at 2:30 PM

 

minutes submitted by Dave Rintoul, Chair.