Agenda for CITAC – Friday, November 23, 2002

1) Approval of minutes from last meeting (October 22, 2003, available on the web at the URL http://www.ksu.edu/committees/citac/documents/) - Approved with no changes

2) Changes to agenda - none

3) Comments from VPAST Unger  

4) Subcommittee assignments and charges. Chair discussed the general charge to all subcommittees and the specific charges for each of the three. Subcommittees should make plans to meet and select a convenor. Duties of convenor include scheduling meetings, coordinating with CITAC chair, and delivering final subcommittee report.

5) Meeting schedule for Spring 2003 – Kelly will be in touch with members to determine best time for a monthly meeting in the spring semester.

6) Adjournment at 3:50 PM

Sub-Committee Assignments for CITAC 2002-03

 

General charges to the subcommittees: All subcommittees should meet soon and determine a “convenor” who will be in charge of scheduling meetings and other activities; the name of the convenor should be communicated to the CITAC chair. All subcommittees will gather information on the topic of interest, using various avenues such as CITAC/VPAST lectures, individual research, presentations at monthly CITAC meetings, the 2002 CITAC IT survey, etc. If subcommittee members decide to recruit presenters for upcoming CITAC meetings, the convenor should pass this request to the CITAC chair who will try to arrange such presentations. All subcommittees will be charged with writing a report, which should include an introduction to the topic, a summary of information that was gathered, and specific recommendations to the VPAST regarding future initiatives in the topic area. This report is to be submitted to the CITAC chair no later than Wednesday, April 30, 2003. These reports will be summarized and included in the chair’s annual report to the VPAST.

Specific charges for each subcommittee are outlined below

III (Integrated Information Infrastructure): This continues to be an important initiative, and will demand the continued involvement of the committee. Updates for this ongoing initiative should be communicated to CITAC at regular intervals. The importance of this initiative to the campus (and off-campus) communities is NOT yet widely understood or appreciated, and education of the faculty and administration is sorely needed. Consideration should also be given to the needs of faculty and administrative units in the interim period before the III becomes fully functional. An example of one of these needs would be assistance to enable departmental or college web pages to effectively use dynamic content (e.g. information about new and current students in the program) before integration of campus information databases is fully realized. Other issues can undoubtedly be identified.

A previous report on this initiative was prepared in April 2000 by a CITAC subcommittee. While progress has undoubtedly been made since then, this report may be useful to the subcommittee, and copies will be made available to subcommittee members if desired. In addition, VPAST Unger can provide detailed information on progress and possible changes in strategies since 2000.

Strategy for Distance Education at KSU: The University is proceeding toward a future that includes a significant increase in the number and type of courses offered as “distance education”. Many other institutions, both traditional universities and emergent educational institutions, are also actively trying to fill this perceived niche. Yet it is not apparent that KSU has any plan or policy to map out the university’s path toward this future. It is likely that unless the university develops a coherent policy on how it is going to support, collaborate, and develop distance teaching and learning, we will find ourselves being out-competed for students. Additional scenarios can also be envisioned, such as students taking web-based courses from others from our dorms, using our bandwidth, at tuition rates perhaps considerably less than KSU’s. These include graduate and continuing education classes as well as undergraduate classes; these are potentially the “low-hanging fruit” that other colleges (perhaps even within the KS Regents System) can pluck from the KSU orchard. CITAC should assist in the development of a coherent policy that will, among other things, give faculty recognition in real ways for developing distance education and mediated course work:  promotion, tenure, ownership, support, direction, expectations, resolution of student issues, etc. This should be a university-wide policy, rather than the piecemeal approach that has characterized the initial stages of this development at KSU and many other institutions.

It is the understanding of the chair that prior reports on this topic exist as well, although he has not been able to identify or locate these specifically.

Electronic publishing and access to academic research: This issue should be of interest to every faculty member and student at KSU. Electronic access to many academic journals is now available, but at what cost? Academic serials, particularly in the sciences, are increasing in price at a rate well above that of inflation every year.  Access to the data in these serials is critical for the functions of a research university, but this access is threatened by these cost issues. “Bundling” of hundreds of journals by ever-more monopolistic publishing houses is a strategy that is also worrisome. At some stage when fiscal shortfalls cause cancellation of serials subscriptions, researchers might lose access to hundreds of journals at once. Long-term archival access to electronic-only serials is not assured, not uniform, but is incredibly important to academic scholars and learners. “Ownership” of research results generated at universities is also an issue that needs to be explored, particularly with regard to electronic access to theses and dissertations. Strategies to avert these problems need to be researched and evaluated, and recommendations made to IT and library administration.

            Remarkably, this is not an issue that has attracted much attention from CITAC or other deliberative bodies on campus, so this subcommittee would be breaking new (and important) ground. A prior report (2000) on electronic availability of theses and dissertations can be provided, although little progress seems to have been made on the recommendations outlined in that report. A subcommittee of the Graduate Council is apparently looking into that specific issue again, and their activities could be a complementary or reinforcing voice for this CITAC subcommittee. The other issues identified in the paragraph above have seemingly not generated much official concern outside the library administration. However, these are all issues that have attracted significant attention and resources at other institutions in recent years, and substantial background information is available (e.g. http://www.arl.org/sparc/). It is important to provide useful and well-researched information to KSU Library and IT staff, so that they can make the best strategic decisions about the course that the university should take in the future. It is equally important that information about these issues be communicated to the university community at large.