Ithaca College

Welcome to the November edition of our monthly IT@IC update.  Each month we bring you highlights of efforts that we are working on related to the IT services for the campus community.

NOVEMBER 2017 CONTENTS

• Introducing Our New IT Service Portal
• Engaging Students with VoiceThread 
• The Last Bit 

INTRODUCING OUR NEW IT SERVICE PORTAL
As part of our continued transformation of IT at the college, we are excited to introduce our new IT Service Portal – your one-stop location for help, support and information for IT services. From the IT Service Portal you can…

• Access hundreds of how-to articles written specifically for our services in the on-line Knowledge Base (and new articles are being added on a regular basis).
• Easily find information about our services (and often directly submit a request) in the Service Catalog.
• Submit your IT service requests directly from the portal – no need to call or stop by the service desk (although that’s always still an option).
• Track the progress of your service request, view, comment on, add attachments to or even withdraw your active tickets
• View your past tickets (note: this only applies to tickets created in the new system since November 1, 2017)
• Save “favorite” services that you access regularly

And later this academic year, we’ll be adding a project management portal to provide you with information about major college IT projects and related efforts.

Visit www.ithaca.edu/it to access the new IT Service Portal.

ENGAGING STUDENTS WITH VOICETHREAD
VoiceThread is a new interactive online environment that allows instructors and students to asynchronously engage with each other around a variety of media using their voice, video or text. Faculty are embracing this new tool in creative ways to provide better learning opportunities for our students.

A typical example is the way that Dr. Matt Clauhs, Assistant Professor in Music Education, began using VoiceThread this semester to transform the structure of his “Wind Instrument Pedagogy Class.” He created multimedia lectures in VoiceThread that the students could watch and engage with through commenting via voice, video, or text. This freed up in-classroom time that allowed the students to apply the principles learned in lecture to more hands-on activities such as teaching lessons or leading rehearsals. VoiceThread’s integration with Sakai allowed him to easily weave the VoiceThread lectures into the other course materials.

Click here to see a short video interview with Dr. Clauhs about his use of VoiceThread.

Dr. Clauhs and other early adopters report that it is a positive addition to their classes.

Members of the IT Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT) team are collaborating with the Center for Faculty Excellence (CFE) to raise awareness and offer development opportunities for faculty to incorporate it into their course design. In addition to introductory 20 minute webinars, TLT and CFE are running workshops that take place over an 8-day period. Each of 3 modules will take faculty through a series of activities that allow them to use features of the tool and interact with their colleagues and moderators. The sessions run November 1-9 and December 6-13. See https://www.ithaca.edu/it/tlt/services/voicethread/ for more information.

THE LAST BIT
A few of us just returned from the annual EDUCAUSE national conference where over 8,000 people from across the world gathered to explore issues related to IT and higher education. Many of the conversations and sessions echoed and affirmed discussions that we are having here on campus around student success, creating a student-centered institution, affordability, establishing a data-enabled culture, and change management. In talking with others at the conference it is clear that the recent investments in our IT infrastructure and organization have created good foundations for the important work related to these and other areas that is to come.

There is a lot of work ahead of us to reach our goals for improving the student experience, engagement and outcomes, and to ensure that we have a modern robust set of tools at our disposal. The conference reaffirmed that we are not alone in the challenges before us, and that we are having the right conversations and asking good questions. The challenge is to turn these discussions into the appropriate actions with the necessary resources that will allow us to succeed.

As always, if you have any suggestions or comments, please send them to cio@ithaca.edu. Thanks! -Dave Weil
Chief Information Officer, Information Technology, Ithaca College.