YEAR IN REVIEW
2020 has been a challenging year where needs, priorities, and initiatives kept shifting based on the impact of the pandemic on our community and across the world. Over the past year, we have worked with many areas with great success. At this time, I would like to thank you all for your partnerships, help, and understanding and would like to take a moment to highlight some of the accomplishments of a dedicated and talented IT team.
Expanded the Teaching & Learning Technologies team by 50% to meet the online/hybrid needs of the university for the expanding adult learning portfolio.
Pivot to Remote Teaching with training to over 800 faculty in 2 days. Facilitated faculty professional development opportunities for over 2,346 faculty, and provided drop-in consultations, and phone/email support for 1,800+ faculty.
The Teaching & Learning team facilitated a contest to promote the awareness of accessibility in a College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Student Scholarship Competition. The winning department (Classics) was awarded a $1,000 student scholarship in their name.
Additionally, GVSU was one of a select group of institutions that hosted a Blackboard Ally Tour, whereby, Blackboard accessibility experts came to campus to lead Universal Design for Learning workshops as well as connected with our Disability Support Resources office to share the impact Ally was having at GVSU.
When COVID-19 forced GVSU to move to remote and hybrid learning, the Tech Support Team assisted by setting up virtual Windows and Macintosh Labs to support hybrid instruction. The Virtual Labs support 700 concurrent Students using the Windows Environment and 60 using the Macintosh Environment.
As GVSU community began to work from home, the Tech Support Team assisted in lots of different areas, including expanding remote access VPN capacity and the Windows Direct Access automatic VPN, reconfigured 100’s of desktops to enable automatic VPN access, and helped departments secure servers that were previously restricted to on Campus so they could be accessed from home. Additional access included setting up outdoor drive-up WIFI and virtual Desktops for High Security processes.
A growing need to effectively manage projects across the University was becoming apparent, so we acted quickly. In September of 2020, the new IT Project Management Office was established.
An effective Project Management Office (PMO) will provide many benefits to the University to ensure strategic alignment, greater efficiency, and will significantly improve the project success rate. The primary objective of the PMO is to provide value to the University, IT, and its stakeholders. For the last quarter of 2020, the department has been working to accomplish this by defining the roadmap along with identifying and developing the necessary tools, services, and processes for success. One of the first steps the PMO took was the decision to lead three project initiatives, one of them being the implementation of the Slate Admissions and Enrollment Management solution. Another key item was the preliminary development of the project intake process with IT Leadership. With these significant steps, the PMO has made its mark for 2020 and is on the path to building something great for 2021!
With the pivot to remote teaching, learning, and working from home, additional videoconferencing resources were acquired to meet the needs of the university. March to January statistics:
- 15,321 faculty, staff, and students have created a GVSU Zoom account
- 242,279 meetings have taken place
- 1,142,227 participants
- 56,359,942 meeting minutes
Assisted with establishing 19 additional classroom spaces created for socially distanced instruction.
All IT Services team members have been trained to resolve the most commonly requested calls in order to better support our students, faculty and staff.
IT supported a 905% increase in the total hours spent watching Panopto content.
44% of all Panopto content was created in the Fall 2020 semester, and there was a 5X increase in Blackboard courses using Panopto.
The Teaching & Learning Technologies team established a course development and design model, a project management process to track progress with Asana, and created 25 courses for GVSU’s new Degree Completion Program (LEADS).