III. Institutional Commitment: Faculty and Staff Engagement

Recommendation 3: Appropriate incentives and support should be established so that faculty and staff are encouraged in the creative use and application of information technology for teaching, research, and service.

Promotion & Tenure

Action 6. The Deans in each school should ask their faculty policy committees to review tenure and promotion guidelines to see whether they discourage creative activity involving the application of information technology, and refine these guidelines as necessary in a manner consistent with the mission and standards of excellence of the school.

Fellowships and Development Grants

Action 7. The University should review its current systems of faculty fellowships and staff development grants, with the aim of expanding these to offer financial support for the design, development, or innovative application of information technology to teaching, research and service, including the use of information technology in creative activity and the design of instructional materials to advance learning.

Throughout the year, efforts continued in support of faculty in their use of IT in teaching, research, and service through the provision of grants and fellowships offered in specific areas.

Ameritech Fellows Program
In its second year, the Ameritech Fellows Program, directed on behalf of OVPIT by Distinguished Consulting Technologist Gary Wittlich, received some 34 new proposals for funding, of which 13 were selected for support. These join the seven projects funded in FY 99-00, which are still underway and being supported by their respective campus centers for teaching and learning. All projects continue to develop and demonstrate best practices.

The High Performance Network Applications Program
The High Performance Network Applications Program (HPNAP), an initiative of the OVPIT, provides funding to assist IU faculty, graduate students, and staff on all campuses of the University in developing innovative applications in research and teaching that require high performance local, regional, or national research networks. The HPNAP aims to significantly accelerate the development of next generation network-based applications and development tools at IU, providing funds, access to advanced networks, and support resources through peer-reviewed proposals. (Descriptions of funded projects are available at www.indiana.edu/~uits/hpnap/projects/index.html.)

During the first year of the program (1999-2000), 19 of 26 proposals were funded from across the University and representing many disciplines, including the sciences, humanities, and education. Thirteen of the funded proposals were from IUB and six were from IUPUI; eight of the funded projects were educational development projects, ten were research or creative activity projects, and one was for an administrative application.

During the second year (2000-2001), less money was available for the HPNAP and only eight projects were funded. Of these, four were from IUB and four were from IUPUI; two of the funded projects were educational development projects, five were research or creative activity projects, and one was for an administrative application.

A symposium, "Collapsing Time and Space," is scheduled for April 2001, to recap HPNAP projects and accomplishments for the past two years.

Staff and Faculty Support

Action 4. The University should review the market compensation levels for qualified IT professionals at each campus and in their surrounding communities, and seek to make compensation competitive with employment alternatives, within the context of overall University salary goals.

Action 8. Schools across the University should be encouraged to provide more resources for maintenance and training for departmental and school computing environments. They should work creatively and in collaboration with UITS to train, retain and distribute knowledgeable individuals to maintain distributed server and desktop systems (UNIX, NT, Mac OS, etc.).

Action 10. The University should continue to support the efforts to educate and certify IT professionals in needed functional areas of the profession. These programs should be expanded to reach a wider University audience, especially on the IUPUI and regional campuses.

Action 16. To support existing and emerging faculty initiatives in basic skills education, the University should explore the use of IT to aid in the teaching of these basic skills.

Action 23. UITS should work with Human Recourses and other IU departments to explore ways of using teaching and learning technologies for the training and development needs of IU staff and faculty. Also, Human Resources should develop actions, in cooperation with UITS and other units, to improve staff access to (and use of) technology training.

NETg
Under IU's four-year, University-wide licensing agreement with National Education Training Group, Inc. (NETg) negotiated in 1999, some 600 course titles are now available to the IU community on CD. Courses range from basic to advanced, offering courses from basic word processing for beginners, to Microsoft certification training for local support providers, to specialized courses for IT staff. A Web interface to over 400 NETg courses was launched in June 2000. All members of the IU community can use these classes in self-study mode, and IU faculty can incorporate selected courses into their curricula. So far, over 4,400 users have registered to take NETg classes online. This initiative provides for the development of links between NETg learning object modules and IU's award-winning Knowledge Base. The UITS Education Program plans to incorporate NETg into their curriculum. Special "IT Lessons" CDs, containing some of the most popular courses, are sold in all IU Bookstores at a cost of $5 each (to cover the cost of production.)

A comprehensive communications and marketing plan targeting students, faculty, local support providers, and UITS technology staff, commenced in Summer 2000, culminating in new student orientations and "NETg Days" on all IU campuses during the Fall 2000 semester. Work will proceed with schools, departments, and human resources offices on specific integration strategies and plans for use of computer-based training. One NETg coordinator position, with responsibility for technical and program coordination, was filled.

UITS Education Program
The highly regarded UITS Education Program presented over 1,000 hands-on classes, and delivered hands-on and online class training to more than 30,000 faculty, staff, and students throughout the year.

Software Support
The Teaching and Learning Information Technologies Division has continued to leverage the buying power of the University to forge major software licensing agreements with leading software vendors for the desktop productivity tools and infrastructure server and messaging products that are fundamental in IU's teaching, learning, research, and administrative activities.

Special Faculty Symposium
The Office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs, the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology, the Office of Distributed Education, and the Teaching and Learning Information Technologies Division together sponsored a symposium designed to examine IU's faculty reward structure within the information technology environment. Titled New Times, New Technology, New Scholarship: Evolving Faculty Rewards, the day-long symposium brought together faculty and administrators from across IU and other universities in a dialogue about opportunities for IT scholarship, best practices, standards of excellence, and assessment. Presented over video broadcast technology, the symposium was made available across the University.

Teaching and Learning Center Expansions
Staffs at the Teaching and Learning Technologies Lab and the Center for Teaching and Learning on the core campuses were expanded; staffs at similar centers on the regional campuses were also expanded. (See Action 11 for more details.)

Expanded EdCert Program
Action 10 calls for a broader base of education and certification for IT professionals in several functional areas, especially at IUPUI and the regional campuses. This Action includes an expansion of the EdCert Program, which provides high-end technical training to IUB departmental support providers. Toward this goal, the Local Support Provider (LSP) Services group is now delivering EdCerts at the IUPUI campus. (Previously, EdCert classes were delivered only in Bloomington.) Additionally, the UITS Education Program at IUPUI has been identified to coordinate advanced NETg online training resources for local support providers and technical support staff at IUPUI and the regional campuses. Training may include a specific set of NETg computer-based training courses, as well as lecture and lab programs specifically designed for high-end technical staff. A new Education Program position will develop, coordinate, and market training opportunities for technical support staff at IUPUI and the regional campuses, as well as coordinate NETg training opportunities. The EdCert and LSP Services programs will test and certify the skills of technical staff that have completed the required training.

Space for UITS Staff

Action 9. Specific action should be taken to locate improved workspaces for UITS staff at IUPUI, and to bring UITS staff at IUB onto campus, thus making them more accessible.

Work continues on the Communications Technology Complex/Classroom Academic Building (CTC/CAB) on the Indianapolis campus, with a target occupancy date of mid-Spring 2003. Robert A.M. Stern Architects and the University Architect's Office submitted design development documents to estimators in January 2001. Construction documents will be finalized in the Spring, with groundbreaking scheduled for late-Summer 2001.

Discussions continue in an effort to identify ways in which UITS might be relocated nearer to the center of campus at IUB.

At IUB, Support Center hours were extended to evenings and weekends, making consulting help more readily available. In addition, the transition of information technology resources in the IUB residence centers to UITS management, along with the hiring of additional consulting staff, provides substantially greater access to IT consulting help for on-campus residents. (See Actions 55 and 57 for more details.)