Information Technology Planning Board (ITPB) Retreat
Monday – July 16, 2007
Noon – 5 p.m.
Hacienda Room, Faculty Center

Members in Attendance: Kathryn Atchison, Elizabeth Bjork, Christine Borgman, Alfonso Cardenas, Mitch Creem, Jim Davis, Michael Goldstein, Xue Hua, Bill Jepson, David Kaplan, Kathleen Komar, Sam Morabito, Alan Robinson, Terry Ryan (for Gary Strong), Michael Schill, Judith Smith

Guests in Attendance: Julie Austin, Ross Bollens, Carmela Cunningham, Dan Greenstein, Patricia Keating, Bill Labate, Larry Loeher, Warren Mori, Nick Reddingius, Margo Reveil, Karen Ribback, Mike Schilling, Tom Trappler, Kent Wada, Don Worth

The meeting was called to order at 12:15 p.m. by ITPB Chair Alfonso Cardenas who welcomed attendees and reviewed the afternoon’s agenda. A brief overview of each of the agenda topics was presented:

 

1. Information Technology Guidance Committee (ITGC) Overview

Dan Greenstein, Vice Provost, UCOP Academic Information and Strategic Services, presented an overview of the ITGC goal to develop the framework to guide system-wide investments in information technology.He pointed out that the UC system spends $1.5 billon annually on information technology, excluding the labs.He is reasonably optimistic about some new funding.

The ITGC framework addresses three areas:

The aim is to ensure competitive advantage for the UC system and to:

Opportunities in the 2008-09 fiscal year:

Discussion about National Science Foundation:

 

2. Scholarly Interaction & IT-Enabled Research

ITPB Vice Chair Christine Borgman presented a framework for a scholarly interaction infrastructure. The goal is to enable new forms of scholarship through the use of information technology that will help provide faculty and students with the tools to do research and to share and store information using new and emerging resources and technology.

Library Issues - Terry Ryan, Associate University Librarian, provided an overview of library initiatives and issues. In addition to developing repositories for faculty content, the library is increasingly expanding its role as an advocate for open access, fair use, and intellectual property legislation.

Computational Infrastructure – Warren Mori, Director of the Institute for Digital Research & Education, introduced IDRE’s vision to support, advance and guide the campus-wide initiative to make UCLA a world leader in research through high performance computation, data visualization and analyses of large data sets and databases. IDRE challenges are:

 

3. Educational Technology & Common Collaboration & Learning Environment (CCLE)

Patricia Keating, Chair of the Faculty Committee on Educational Technology (FCET), provided the group with an overview of issues and primary concerns of the FCET.

Open Courseware - The FCET recommended that UCLA consider an open courseware pilot that would be focused on the course information that incoming transfer students need to clarify what is covered in UCLA lower division courses, how that relates to the courses that were taken in community college, and how those courses would count as the prerequisite for UCLA upper division courses.

Background Illustration - The FCET looked at MIT’s Open Courseware Group and determined that Open Courseware is not a course management system (as CCLE is), online instruction, or distance learning.Instead it is an archive of already completed courses, providing a thorough overview of what was covered in a given the course.The MIT course management system is the “draft in progress” used for current courses being offered at MIT.The course information is published in the open courseware repository after the course is completed.Although originally intended for external, non-MIT use, MIT found that it was most useful within the MIT community.

The main challenges of Open Courseware are copyright issues and obtaining clearances for teaching materials.The FCET’s position is that open courseware would be a valuable tool to help faculty better understand what students know or have been taught in other courses.

Common Collaborative Learning Environment (CCLE) -Detailed analysis and planning activities are being conducted for CCLE.There currently are no major milestones to report for the CCLE project.

WASC - In response to the accreditation review of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), the FCET has expressed their concern about educational technology leadership on campus with the retirement of Ruth Sabean.

Specific FCET concerns:

  1. Electronic course packs for students
  2. 24 Hour Help Desk for faculty
  3. Interoperability; continued membership in SAKAI
  4. Equipping and upgrading classrooms to a level generally expected by faculty
  5. IT competence and literacy
  6. Need for more assessment of educational/technical innovation to determine how successful each piece is and to push forward on the most successful pieces.

Issues that are being addressed by the ITPB, but have not been discussed by the FCET include wireless, distance learning and online instruction.Upon request from the ITPB, the FCET will include these topics in their fall agenda.The fall agenda of FCET will also be looking at various questions raised at the ASUCLA student-faculty roundtable on the educational technology big picture and a broader range of issues.

 

4. Wireless Technology

ITPB Chair Alfonso Cardenas presented trends and user expectations that were identified by the ITPB Wireless Subcommittee, which was formed to study wireless on campus.The subcommittee expressed concern about insufficient mobile ability.The integration of internet access, cell phones, sensors and multi-media services is the largest growth market, and it is anticipated that the new generation of mobile device-users will expect integrated access and services anytime and anywhere.The subcommittee discussed the issue of meeting the expectations of students for these services on campus as well as other possible mobile scenarios.

 

5. Break-out Session Reports

The meeting broke into four subgroups that each looked at several issues relative to their topics.

Scholarly Interaction – Computational Infrastructure (Chair: ChristineBorgman. Members: Warren Mori, Kathy Komar, Jim Davis, Bill Labate)

This group addressed three questions that are critical to UCLA computational infrastructure.

1. What is – or could be – the strategic vision and priorities for UCLA?
The group agreed that UCLA’s focus should be in three areas:high performance computing, end-to-end computing services and data as infrastructure.Data infrastructure issues to be addressed by the campus:

2. Who “owns” the Problem?

3. In what areas do UCLA’s issues and priorities intersect with the UC ITGC planning?

Scholarly Interaction – Collaboration, Sharing, Intellectual Property (Chair: Kathy Atchison. Members: Dave Kaplan, Alan Robinson, Tom Trappler, Don Worth, Margo Reveil)

The group began with a statement that, unlike teaching, research communities can be anyplace – not just on campus - and so all tools and policies have to span geographical communities.Also, faculty are far more likely to be engaged in collaboration on research than teaching. The requirements for a robust collaboration revolve around setting standards, policies and infrastructure that would provide openness and widely available, indexed material at the same time that they protect the intellectual property rights of individuals and the university.

1. Technical Priorities for Scholarly Interaction are (unranked):

2. Policy and Standards Issues to be addressed are:

3. Intellectual Property Rights Discussion:

4. Questions to explore in the future:

Education Technology and CCLE (Chair:Mike Schill and Judi SmithMembers: Pat Keating, Elizabeth Bjork, Terry Ryan, Julie Austin, Xue Hua)

The group looked at three major topics.

1. UCLA now has general education program requirements for all students in certain areas.

2. Do we have someone to facilitate the development of such a system?

3. Common Collaborative Learning Environment (CCLE)

Wireless and Mobile Communications (Chair: Mitch Creem. Members:Alfonso Cardenas, Sam Morabito, Bill Jepson, Mike Schilling, Karen Ribback)

The wireless group reported more questions than answers from their break-out session.They didn’t think that wireless and cell phones should necessarily be integrated now and weren’t sure of what is reasonable to expect from wireless/cell functionality in the future.They also did not see any clear business model for supporting wireless or cell phones, and weren’t sure that on how to prioritize any investment in this arena.

Discussion points:

The group recommended more study and that the ITPB set up another subcommittee.

Business Systems and Processes Discussion

Dan Greenstein gave an overview of the UC position on administrative systems, which lead to a discussion of several issues. Greenstein’s main points were:

1. There are significant resources spent on redundant systems.

2. Business systems are the easiest to address technically, but the hardest to address culturally:

3. Questions for UCOP to resolve:

Group discussion:

 

The meeting was adjourned at 5 p.m.