While research shows diverse teams are good for business, we have to look hard to find women working in IT jobs. While women make up over half of the professional workforce, only 25% of computing jobs are held by women. The Careers in IT programs at Yale seek to narrow the gender gap in higher education IT. Join us as we explore opportunities for narrowing the gap. We will address the current state of gender representation in technology fields, a summary of programmatic efforts at Yale, and opportunities for future improvements in higher education IT.Outcomes: Understand and reference basic research on the impact of diversity initiatives in IT * Recognize and advocate for the organizational benefits gained from such initiatives * Start your own diversity programs using a basic framework and ideas from peer institutions
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Following the CLAMP model for a new type of hackathon, the Islandora Collaboration Group (ICG) has begun hosting hack/doc events. In this session, members of the ICG will lead you through the process of planning for and running your own hack/doc. Learn how to bring together a wide variety of participants to make your coding events fun and useful!Outcomes: Think critically about how this type of participatory event can break down possible barriers between organizational groups * Develop role, partner, and problem analysis pairings * Create worksheets for setup and documentation of such critical features as local resources, problem facets, and platforms
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How do you take a cloud-based system and leverage it to meet the unique pedagogical and administrative needs of a complex higher ed institution? In this session, presenters will review how Harvard Business School created an ecosystem of custom tools and processes to augment Canvas. Attendees will learn about HBS’s strategic approach to embracing vendor-provided solutions in lieu of custom-built applications. Leveraging instructional design consultations, community engagement, and sustainable customizations to the platform. During the presentation, we will discuss the challenges and lessons learned along the way and how those may be applied at other institutions. Outcomes: Define HBS’s strategic approach to implementing cloud-based software * Explore the lessons learned during HBS’s implementation of Canvas and take these lessons with you
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Active learning is a process that strives to integrate students into the ownership and process of learning. One might achieve this through a variety of approaches, pedagogy, and technologies. In this session, you will collaborate with two presenters on two key technologies that might support such an approach. Specifically, we will demonstrate and innovate around mobile devices and an active learning platform. Come, learn, brainstorm, and play!Outcomes: Experience, as a student, the delivery of content through an interactive classroom application/active learning platform * Understand the analytics, feedback, and tools that can support teachers and learners in targeted instruction * Be asked to consider a topic and consider delivery of that topic via technologies and through philosophies discussed – leave with design template and resources
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Required security training often covers state, federal, and financial regulations and practices that can be difficult to present in an exciting and retentive way. Using the gameshow formats for popular TV contests, this session will demonstrate how to provide important security concepts and information in an engaging forum for a wide variety of campus constituents. Participants will learn how to filter and organize the information to be imparted and present facts and otherwise dry material in a memorable event. Ultimately, attendees will be invited to participate in an actual security gameshow.Outcomes: Develop a more effective security awareness program that can be used for a variety of campus constituents * Learn how to present security awareness information in a way that can be retained more effectively * Organize and define the most important information that needs to be imparted in a security awareness training program
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DevOps is one of the fastest growing trends in IT operations, development, and management, yet it is almost an unknown in the higher ed space. Does this method of the web scale and start-ups make sense at colleges and universities? This session will introduce the concepts of DevOps while using participant input to discuss where and whether DevOps has a place at your school. As examples, the University of New Hampshire while share how we are adopting DevOps practices and tools for our website and mobile app development.Outcomes: Learn what DevOps is and is not including important values and principles * Assess your own IT development and operations activities to see where DevOps practices could make improvements * List the commonly used tools and practices to achieve continuous integration and delivery to the business via DevOps
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In this session, Bryant University will demonstrate how—with the right guidance and training—student workers can become an essential and integrated component of the support services team. We will show how we recruit, select, train, and mentor student employees to provide essential support services to the faculty, staff, and student communities. Through a carefully constructed formal program, we have molded our student staff into confident experts who can provide assistance across the gamut from answering software questions through actual hardware repair.Outcomes: Gain a deep appreciation of how students, with the proper “care and feeding,” can become an integral part of a school’s IT program * Learn the skills needed to build an overall strategy for the student employee life cycle * Participants see how to take that strategy and turn it into a day-to-day working plan that will improve student’s on-the-job skills, and build ideas of responsibility, reliability and team work.
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BYOD is the dream of every organization, but the problem has always been how do you provide students, staff, faculty, and others the ability to access the resources needed to perform their daily functions without violating the terms of license agreements and keeping security policies intact. Outcomes: Understand the pros and cons of virtualizing applications * Explore the differences between an on-premises infrastructure and a cloud-based infrastructure * Explore the pros and cons of on-premises vs. cloud-based infrastructures
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Medical schools are faced with the challenge of implementing and maintaining effective CQI (continuous quality improvement) cycles in order to meet institutional objectives and ensure compliance with accreditation standards. We describe how we designed curricular evaluation dashboards with the explicit goal of supporting CQI and driving decision making and then how we integrated the use of those dashboards into institutional goal setting and oversight/accountability processes. To achieve this we made strategic use of data visualization techniques and balanced scorecard approaches, harnessed available technologies, leveraged faculty expertise, sought buy-in and support, and integrated educational strategic planning with enterprise-wide accountability and cross-mission goals.Outcomes: Explore how storytelling and storyboarding can be used to design dashboards that meet educators’ needs for interpreting and acting on evaluation data * Plan how an interdisciplinary, cross-unit group of professionals can work together to integrate data into CQI processes * Formulate a list of strategies for enhancing data-based decision making at your institutions
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Investment in educational technology involves the input of significant financial and human resources. Evaluating the effectiveness of this investment can be an arduous, but extremely important, task for educational technologists. This session aims to equip you with the perspectives needed to develop an effective strategy for evaluating the use of educational technology at your institution. This is achieved first through a short presentation on the strategies used by the session facilitators in their own evaluation plans, and second by a structured discussion among participants on how these strategies can be applied to their specific situations. Outcomes: Outline 3 key examples of strategic information needs for your organization (formative and summative) * Describe data-gathering strategies that might help address your strategic information needs * Draft a data management strategy that ensures having complete and reliable information on learning technologies of your choosing
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