W4D2a Dominican's Information Technology Plan

I have pasted all of your recommendations for the next Dominican IT Plan below. That way, you can see what was said in the other Discusison Group. Many of you focused in improving Dominican's ability to create and deliver good online courses. The one comment about becoming paperless is, in my mind, related. If a student is taking all courses online one term, that students should be able to register for the next term without coming to campus or doing a lot of paperwork. Imagine the student is living with relatives in Australia.

Some of your comments implied curriculum changes and other actions that are outside the scope of IT. That's OK. Even though IT does not have the power to order professor's to attend training, IT can develop the material (in consultation with Provosts, Deans, and Faculty) and conduct the courses. Academic Management (Provosts, Deans) would then cause faculty to attend the session. The same process would be needed to develop templates to use in Canvas Online Courses. In fact, such a template was developed over the summer but has not yet been released.

Your comments were greatly influenced by your experience. Little was recommended to improve technology or data for fund raising, marketing, or recruiting new students.

Personally, I think the ability to develop and teach very good online courses is now required for survival of most institutions. If we started producing covid-19 vaccines today at a rate of 10,000,000 doses per day, it would take over two years to produce enough doses for everyone and that assumes no supply chain delays and no inventory buffers and perfect world wide cooperation in distribution. Therefore, I believe a significant percentage of education will be taking place online for at least three more years.

Notice I made an assumption (10,000,000 doses per day) and have not done enough homework to know how valid that assumption is. It does however, show that a successful vaccine trial by itself is not sufficient to get us all back into face-to-face classes.

Your Comments

I think that DU is doing a very good job at keeping its IT as modern as possible. So, if I have one goal to add to the plan for the next five years, I would focus on utilizing new IT tools such as virtual cards and handprint access.

One Goal I would write for Dominican would be the I idea of investing more in our webpage. I would create a single website that serve students, faculties, etc. that would be easy to utilize. The reason to this goal is that DU now has many websites including Mydu, an athletes page, the events webpage, and my other websites under DU. This makes it hard for the IT department to maintain and fix in case something goes wrong. Having many websites for many different things in my opinion creates confusion for users like me. It also shows a sense of disorganization within the organization. I believe creating one single website that includes everything is something DU must look into in the future.

if I was writing the next five year plan for technology at Dominican University, I would definitely include flexibility in the plan, since it has proven to work well in the past.
One goal I would have for the next five years for technology would be to continue the push for graduate classes online, as even before the Pandemic that was becoming more and more popular and Dominican was doing a good job at staying competitive with other institutions.  Perhaps with the zooms, and Microsoft Teams format as that seems as though for the near future that may be the way things are headed.   
If I were to create one of the new goals for the upcoming IT plan for Dominican, I would include a plan to increase interactivity with social media as well as try to include ways to improve interactivity among Dominican students in the social media realm around the University. The current Dominican app is not as popular with students as the school probably hoped for, but if they can create something that mirrors the Dominican Canvas app, there could be more student engagement.

Due to the current status in the country, I would emphasize online classes and technology. Although I wasn’t in school during the hit of the coronavirus in March, I know Zoom was the star of the show. Zoom took over most classrooms in the country as it was utilized by professors and students as a method of interaction and learning. However, having used Zoom myself, I am unsure whether that is the most reliable technology. I would emphasize the research of a new program or application; if no other option compares, then the reinforcement and  strengthening of Zoom would be the focus. The main goal/objective would be for students and professors to feel like they’re in a classroom, ready to learn and teach.

The next goal that I would place would be a goal of Hybrid Learning. I think that at least 50% of the classes should have some kind of Hybrid learning option. Allowing students to become confident in their skills online is important.

One goal would be to expand class capabilities with Online Services. Many students like taking classes in class, but some prefer the online templates. I think a goal for Dominican would be to offer “every” class excluding laboratory classes to students in both an in-class and online setting. Only some classes were being offered in an online format along with an in-class format as another option. This would allow those with busy schedules more flexibility and ease in registering for a class and making time for it. This would also increase profit for Dominican because this would increase the number of active classes being taken. This would also allow professors to teach more classes outside of the classroom. This would also help eliminate having to be waitlisted for classes because more options are available.

A goal I would include in the plan would be to add training for Dominican faculty and students in order to help guide in the use of these technologies. This would help most staff and students be able to understand how to use most technologies available at Dominican before the start of the semester. Many professors and students sometimes struggle with using the technologies which wastes time for learning and teaching. Having training would avoid the risk of losing time trying to figure out how to use technology and give more time for teaching and learning.

I would include the goal of consistent feedback communication/satisfaction by having students and faculty have the opportunity to provide feedback to improve the technology plans for Dominican University. Since there is a lot of money being spent on improving IT in the classroom and improving the students' experience, then it should be important to know that it is working for the students and faculty. By receiving feedback along the way, changes can be made during the process instead of after the entire plan is implemented. It can also give students and faculty a feeling of involvement in updating the technology and methods implemented at Dominican, which can improve the satisfaction of the students and faculty. 

Although Dominican has moved to an online education platform, I think there needs to be a bit more continuity between classes and professors. I have had great experiences in some classes and subpar experiences in others simply due to the difference in online class formats. I think students would benefit from streamlining what each professor must do to create a feasible, well-structured class. Because I believe faculty and students must have a better understanding of how an online learning system functions, I would continue refining and investing in Goal 1.

For the next year plan for technology at DU, I would implement a new capstone course something unique, where students will be able to learn any time, from anywhere, with anyone. By doing this students will have the opportunities to learns more about technology and create a global network with different and more opportunities. 
we need to make myDU easier for students to maneuver so the in the future, if a student wants to enroll in only online classes, they can do everything and anything that they may ever need during their time at DU online as well. One of the objectives that DU had in mind, was that by 2017, each student will have at least one class per year in an online or hybrid delivery. This did not happen. There are more online and hybrid classes available to graduate students than to undergraduates. I think that this is a good transition for the next five year plan. It would be very nice and appealing if we were able to offer the same classes in-person and online, this way we can meet students needs and wants and it would be appealing to current students and perspective students. According to a report from the U.S Department of Education, classes with online learning, on average, produce stronger student learning outcomes than do classes with solely face-to-face instruction. This would make our classes stronger and the success stories can also be higher (i.e, students receiving more job offers prior to graduation, etc..)

One goal that I would implement for DU IT would be to be completely paperless by 2025. This is definitely an attainable goal but if we dont need to use paper, why bother investing in it (unless we absolutely have to) and why make our lives more difficult by having to file a paper copy and web-based copy? 

If I were writing the next five year plan for technology at Dominican University, one of the main goals I would include would be to further enrich the environment for e-learning. Many classes have been carried out very well online! However some courses normally held on campus were more challenged by the transition to e-learning. 

In objective 5, I don't believe this was very successful.  I've seen a lot of reports and presentations in my time here, and the only data is explored and visualized seems to be in excel and powerpoint.  I'm not even sure what business intelligence tools faculty are expected to use, other than their committee work.  Lastly, if I were writing a new IT plan  I would include a goal of improving the flow if information across different parts of Dominican's information system and establish clear policies for where different types of data and files reside.  There are at least four places where important documents might reside:  the "regular" website (mostly things that are visible to the outside community), myDU, DUconnect, and now Canvas.  This is not neccesarily a problem by itself, but the search function generally does not work well (or even at all) across these domains, meaning various documents wind up lost.  It increases time neccesary to acclimate for new faculty and staff.  Furthermore, it's not always clear who can add or edit files on certain domains.  Therefore we wind up with multiple, occasionally conflicting or outdated, documents.  This significantly reduces our institutional efficiency. 

 
A goal that I would add to the next five-year plan is to increase record protection and security. After reading about the significance of data backup and recovery along with IT investment and management, I think it’s vital to store information in multiple locations and perform frequent mock exercises. This includes reducing the amount of information stored on paper and replacing it with automated and web-based processes.