SUFFOLK COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE



SUFFOLK COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE

COLLEGE COMPUTING COUNCIL

MINUTES

MAY 10, 2002 MEETING

MEMBERS PRESENT: P. Basileo, H. BenAicha, J. Bravo, D. Coscia, P. DiGregorio, G. Gopinath,

E. Hassildine, G. Ris, A. Flack representing M. Weissberg, L. Wieman, and

R. Williams

MEMBERS ABSENT: J. Gaete, D. Giancola, F. Lourenso, R. Manning, F. Parrella, C. Rubman,

S. Schrier, and C. Stein

REPRESENTATIVES PRESENT: R. Johnston, N. Leonhardt, D. Rabinowitz, and J. Rice

ATTENDEES: W. Connors, S. Clark, D. Kahn

COPY TO: D. Quinn

I. MINUTES – Minutes from the March 1, 2002 meeting were accepted after making the following

correction to Western Campus report: 5th bullet should read “Closet was converted to Foreign Language/Music lab”.

CAMPUS COMPUTING COUNCIL REPORTS

1. Campus Reports

Ammerman Campus – P. Basileo

• Committee met and primary discussion was on installation of XP and upgrades to systems.

• There was some concern on the part of the faculty of the power user restrictions and the screen saver being password protected.

Paul distributed policy that is listed on the help page site about the rationale behind the migration.

• Jeanette said policy was well written.

• Discussed Distance Education to come up with more ideas to utilize classrooms.

• Smart Classrooms Updates - Islip 115 finished with exception of speakers and Southampton 30 is waiting for a pole to come in. Last year’s smart classrooms are almost done and now we can move to this year’s project.

West Campus - P. DiGregorio

• Tech Show went well and very heavily attended.

• Paul did presentation on smart board.

• Five machines have been installed so far.

• Standards – what are the campus ETU administrators allowed to change on admin machines? Needs to be discussed with Standards Committee.

• Now have five electronic classrooms done. One more will be coming up in next couple of weeks and then will work on the three for this year.

• Taking down blackboards that are there and putting in smart boards and regular white boards.

• Will be meeting with committee shortly.

• Gary asked Pete to send him minutes of the meeting and he will distribute them to everyone else.

• Gary complimented Pete on a job well done at the Board of Trustees meeting.

East Campus – L. Wieman

• Introduced faculty to Smart Classrooms

• Showed Council a track that was designed by their facilities people to mount smart boards. This track allows the boards to move very smoothly. Installed boards in all five classrooms.

• There was money left over on VTEA grant and will be buying more hard drives.

• Waiting for parts from R&B.

• Leslie expressed concern over R&B not being able to deliver products in a timely fashion.

• Don Coscia said he would meet with representative from R&B to discuss our concerns.

• Paul said he hopes it can be worked out with keeping R&B because it will keep product consistency.

Tech Deans Report – D. Coscia

• Mediated Math server coming on board. Students and faculty can access their courses with web browser. Expect to start the break in period during the second 5 week summer session on Ammerman campus and bring it fully on board for the fall.

• Eastern campus room will be done after the first five week session.

• West waiting for VTEA money to do their room.

• This is a college-wide project that brought the concept of a very smart classroom into focus.

• Web-based server –Will be looking for regional consortium, with high schools delivering math in a very unified fashion using this technology. Also looking for federal money to do this project.

• Don did presentation at Board of Trustees’ meeting on Distance Education. Made presentation with Bio Medical Ethics course. It was very successful and board members asked questions which enabled Don to show them that we need better technology to meet creative instructional needs.

• SUNY CourseSpace has been developed as the SUNY course management system which will support web-enhancing and hybrid/blended courses within SUNY. This can be located at . This course management system will compliment the SUNY Learning Networks’ goal to fully support asynchronous courses.

• In order to support CourseSpace, SCCC Tech Deans have development a training program that will take place in June for this new course management system. SUNY will give us train-the-trainers for this training.

• This project was a collaborative project developed by Herkimer Community College, Monroe Community College, and Suffolk Community College. We received funding from McGraw Hill and we built the Course Management System. We hired Empire State College to build this course management system and then we gave it to SUNY. We do not have to have servers to run this program; the state will have the servers.

• We are planning to have the Academic Computing Center’s function as student technical help desks and assist faculty in terms of technical help.

• The college needs to hire additional media instructional design assistance for faculty support.

• Distance Education program has grown in the past three years from 1500 seats taken in 2000-2001 to an anticipated 3500 seats taken during 2002-2003. SCCC has risen to number nine out of 40 within SUNY Learning Network institutions in courses offered and seats taken. By fall 2003 we should be within top five.

• It is important to make commitment to Distance Education because people know there are 30,000 seats available through SUNY.

• 95% of seats taken are within county and 5% are non-county. 70% of students enrolled are women.

• The Title III grant continues to support the development of smart-classrooms. By the end of next year there should be 36 more rooms constructed. The TLCs will be capable of video-conferencing by the end of the summer 2002.

• Wireless Technology continues to be of great interest to Academic Affairs in terms of creating learning spaces that can serve multi-purposes. Campuses are using this technology to equip science laboratories with networked stations for student use.

• The Ammerman Campus will make great strides next year providing they get their budget. Western campus continues to be the leader in this technology.

• Looking at ways to help the Eastern campus get on board through Symbol.

• SUNY FACT has been awarded a SUNY Library Association award. An Academic Software subcommittee has been established to recommend system-contracts for the purchase of state-of-the-art academic software. Don will be chair on this SUNY committee.

• Gary suggested to Don that Academic Computing from campuses should be members of this subcommittee.

• Don stated he would make sure there is representation from campus computer support groups.

• Gary informed Don that he has to look at supporting both environments, administrative and educational.

• Paul asked what is the end goal.

• Don stated just looking for information (discovery mode) right now, then the provost will get prices and then functionality needs to be addressed.

• Gary stated that most campus ETUs have heard from their faculty members as to what they want.

• Don said he can recommend to subcommittee that they need to get campus IT involved in the selection process.

• Gary instructed Don that once subcommittee gets information, he should go to IT to see how we will support it.

II. SUBCOMMITTEE REPORTS

Academic Computing Subcommittee – Ed Hassildine

1. Minutes from meeting go to:

• Committee met on May 2, 2002 and discussed the following:

• Transition to Office XP - Want to hold onto Office 2000 from spring semester and will get into TLC over summer on the academic side.

• Ed reported that Steve Clark said there was no definitive plan to register students NICs for use on SWANET. SWANET crosses boundaries of many of the College Computing Council’s subcommittees. Ed asked how this affects the agenda of the other subcommittees?

• Steve said there is no plan yet to purchase wireless networking hardware from a particular vendor.

• Each campus ETU and Central may test different wireless solutions in an effort to recommend the best hardware solution for SWANET.

• Campus EDU network redesign was revisited. Steve Clarks said he had 3 Nortel Passport 2430 routers that might offer a routing/NAT solution for each campus. Business Policy switches, one per building could be used in combination with VLANs to address the needs of SWANET, Academic Systems, Video Streaming, etc.

• Looked at Active Directory for Windows 2000. Steve Clark will address domain issues with Bob Kempf.

• Gary asked how far along they are with Active Directory?

• East has it running because Ed wants full control over the desktop.

• West waiting.

• Ammerman waiting.

• Discussed standards for peripherals. Priced T520 cartridges with Staples and the cost was over $300. Paul found price of $250 on state contract.

• The Standards Committee has recommended that the printer to purchase is the Lexmark T520. While the printer costs less, the ink cartridges are very expensive.

• Jack said the Standards Committee will look into possibly recommending another printer at their next meeting.

Portal Ad Hoc Committee – G. Ris

• The cost of the portal is very expensive. Have a solid price from Campus Pipeline.

• One of the biggest issues we have is interfacing with backend.

• As a result of survey we did with the students, they are looking for access to information from the mainframe.

• Looking into whether to go to commercial product or building it ourselves.

• Computer Center has proposed that we build it ourselves.

• Gary will bring to Technical Subcommittee of the Portal Committee to decide if we should go outside or build it ourselves.

• Gary said we will need to hire staff to help do this project whether we build it ourselves to use an outside company.

• Need to put aside approximately $50,000 to $60,000 to help implement.

Student Technology Fee Subcommittee – Paul Basileo

• Paul reported that committee met and all spending is going according to plan with the exception of Portal money which has not been spent.

• Met with Leslie who is the point person for accessibility solutions portion and may identify over summer a few things to purchase with any money that maybe leftover. Looking at XP compatibility with Text zoom.

• Wireless project is in next year’s budget

• Jack asked if there has been a change in the fee structure as far as the students are concerned?

• Pete said he hasn’t been informed of a change.

• Gary said there has been a recommendation to increase the fee but there hasn’t been a recommendation to increase the dollars available.

Standards Subcommittee – J. Rice

1. Minutes from meeting on February 19, 2002 go to:



• Committee met in distance education classrooms from each campus and the following was discussed:

• Paul Sperber and Paul Discoli from Gateway joined the meeting with a proposal to try a demonstration lab with the Gateway Profile PCs, which would free up substantial desktop space in college labs. Paul Sperber will be sending a profile to each campus to test.

• Jack said Standards Committee will gather results from each campus.

• Gary asked is there was a way to place software image on the profile?

• Jack responded we will test first and then we can answer that question.

• Gary said to make sure we maintain serviceability and consistency, and to look at entire picture.

• Talked about possibility of having to adjust 5 year replacement plan for peripherals. Committee will explore this issue further at their next meeting.

• Discussed the PC purchase process. Comments were made about getting the orders to Gateway and all the revisions. The delays were caused by the Board of Trustees putting a cap on the purchase price of each computer.

• Positive comments were made on the installation of new PCs.

• Want to thank Ammerman ETU under the direction of Jeanette Bravo for their assistance in this process.

• Active Directory will be pursued further at the next meeting of the Standards Committee.

• Gobi asked that they look at the organization structure within Active Directory.

• Jack said how Active Directory will fit into our structure needs to be looked at through the Networking Committee as well.

• Pete said we have to push to hire a full time person to be able to understand, train and implement Active Directory.

• Jack’s committee suggested that instead of having staff being dispatched from Central Desktop Services, that a staff person be stationed on each campus and dedicated to that campus.

• Jack proposed a resolution to Computing Council that Desktop Services have a full time 12 month person stationed on each campus to deal with campus issues. They will still be under Drew’s supervision.

• Council approved.

• Gary will bring this to the Executive Council.

Training Subcommittee – D. Coscia

1. Report on meeting of May, 2002 go to:



• On June 10th from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. there will be a Window XP refresher question and answer session held the SCCC Corporate Training Center. All those who have attended Windows XP training in the fall 2001 and December 2001 and January 2002 will be attending this session. The College has already paid for this.

• Suggested training for next year will be a 4 to 5 days course on implementing and administering Windows 2000 Server with XP workstation Active Directory. The Corporate Training Center will be submitting a proposal to Don.

• Don asked each campus to set aside $5,000 in funds for training.

• Drew asked if more publicity could be given to students and faculty on what TLC is all about and why it is there.

• Don stated he would bring this back to the Training Committee to make sure that the TLCs should be a test bed and will make sure the faculty understands what the TLC is for.

• Nina’s office offered administrative Office XP training but no one registered for it.

• Gary said he believed no one registered because they did not receive their machines yet and hopefully everyone will have received them by the end of June.

• Nina said she will continue to offer this training.

• Student Orientation training is getting promoted and being delivered much more widely during the spring semester than it was during the fall semester.

• SUNY Conference on Instructional Technologies 2002 is scheduled on May 28th – 30th at SUNY Oneonta. This can be found at cit.suny.edu.

• SUNY Technology Conference 2002 is scheduled for June 16th – 19th at Hudson Valley Resort & Spa, Kerhonkson, New York. This can be found at sct.suny.edu.

• Gary explained that this is a conference where there are a lot of academic computing professionals talking about their labs and things they are up against and there is a lot of sharing of ideas.

• Gary suggested that ETU members consider attending this conference.

• SUNY Training Center at SUNY is sponsoring an online faculty development courses as well as several seminars at regional sites for the summer 2002. This can be found at tc.suny.edu.

• Don said we need to increase our Training Center points for next year.

New Business

PC Sale

• Foundation Association accepted Board of Trustees’ proposed resolution to sell old computers.

• Jack said there are three price levels: $25 for P575, $50 for P100 and P133 and $75 for P200 and E3000.

• Due to the overwhelming response on all 3 campuses and the TechniCenter, there were not enough machines to go around so a waiting list had to be established.

• Original plan was to sell computers for 4 weeks but we needed to suspend that plan until we take care of all the people on the waiting list.

• Leslie asked Jack about the process of collecting money and getting out receipts to the people purchasing the machines.

• Jack informed her that the Foundation was supposed to be dealing with Student Activities on the east and west campus and that Judy Koodin should contact the Foundation.

• Jack will talk to Rich Semple and Ginny Markett to find out what arrangements were made and will ask them to notify each campus representative of the plans.

• Jack said there is a need to re-evaluate how the word gets out for purchasing these machines and will make sure that the problems incurred this time will not occur the next time.

• Ed suggested that kiosks be used to advertise the purchasing of these machines.

• Jack said East and Ammerman have video but West does not. Jack will look into putting information on kiosks on East and Ammerman.

Faculty Desktop Needs

• Don asked, since we are now coming out with web applications for the faculty use, why can’t we move faculty offices to the educational network, where they can experiment and feel less restrictive in terms of software installation and utilization.

• Gary said we should be looking at what the faculty member needs. How much security do they need on their network, how much privacy do they need on their machine and how much administrative activity do they need to do. E-mail right now is on an administrative service, so Outlook is an administrative service. Exchange server is on an administrative server right now. We need to balance their need for administrative access with their academic needs for a more open environment.

• Don said he feels they can standardize machines so that they can be serviced if necessary, but feels we need to open up the capability of faculty using software other than what the administrative side is using.

• Drew said he agrees with that and there is a mechanism in place right now for a faculty member to have anything they want that is compatible with the configuration their desktop system.

• Drew stated that the only problem is one of installation time frame. At present Drew will send a professional person to install software on these PC, but for security and operating system maintenance, individuals cannot install administrative class software themselves.

• Don asked if a mechanism could be developed to install software on faculty machines in a more timely fashion.

• Drew responded that currently the ETUs on each campus are involved and have been doing a great job. If they become overburdened there is a mechanism to add additional staff with installation authority. However, if an individual comes back at 9 o’clock at night and decide to add software, there will be no one available to help.

• Don stated he knows that’s out of the constraints of adding software and has no problem with that. Drew said he needs to inform faculty of that.

• Gary said there still will be issues when a faculty member wants to add software that is incompatible. For example if the college is standardized on Office XP and a faculty member still wants to teach Windows 2000 or Office 2000 what do you do in that case?

• Don said the concept of using a removable hard drive was so that these individuals could flip from one operating system to another operating system. So if we have a faculty member who has the right to flip between operating systems because it is part of their job function, than he thinks we should supply that capability for the faculty member.

• Gary stated it can be done but the protections to the network environment need to remain in place.

• Don suggested that two machines be installed in faculty office because some faculty functions as administrators as well as teaching faculty.

• Gary said it will be hard to do this because of cost involved.

• Gary suggested that we need more time to look at this issue. We need to identify the individuals who need this and what would be involved.

• Don suggested Tech Deans gather information from their faculty on what there needs are.

• Suggestion was made that Tech Deans and Standards Committee work together to resolve this problem.

• Steve Clark said we need to understand both the academic and administrative sides, as there are resource constraints we all are living with.

• Gary suggested that a committee be formed to address this issue. He will contact Don and Jack to get people together to work on this committee.

• Gary stated this committee will focus on the following: faculty needs in their office, how hardware and software are supported, personal laptops and the capability of college laptops moving around.

• Don would like a report from this committee to be given to the Computing Council at their December meeting.

New Web Services

• Gary stated there have been a couple of new web services added and asked Doug Kahn to explain these.

• Doug informed the Council that there are three new services the Computer Center has put together. Some have been deployed and the remainder will be deployed shortly.

• One is web-based rosters, which has been implemented and is dramatically reducing the reliance on paper rosters.

• Computer Center has been working with the Registrar’s office and Anna has been a tremendous help in rolling this out.

• We have had nothing but rave revues.

• Will be going live on May 17th and all grade rosters with the exception of early ending classes are going to be submitted electronically.

• Will be training faculty on all campuses on how to get their rosters in.

• The second new service will be starting in August. Students will be able to pay their bills on the web. It’s not their full bill, it’s only this semester’s bill but starting in the fall they will be able to pay their entire bill on the Internet. Will be partnering with VeriSign on this as we do not want to hold onto student’s credit card numbers.

• The last project is a centralized administrative calendar on the web that has been approved for use by the Executive Council.

• A number of central departments that publish the a lot of calendar information are already posting to this calendar.

• The Computer Center will be doing training in the next couple of weeks and there will be a college brief issued shortly about this calendar.

• The goal is to mover every public calendar at this college onto this web platform so that important dates will be on the web and accessible from anywhere.

• Grade/Enrollment verification is done.

• Don asked Doug to send copy of instructions to his office.

Gary thanked everyone for all their hard work and the meeting was adjourned at 4:00 p.m.

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