University Information Technology Services

Learning Technologies

Supporting teaching and learning is the software and hardware provided through IU’s lifecycle replacement program, which provides IUPUI schools and service units with a continually renewed foundation of desktop productivity tools.

• Enterprise license agreements with major software vendors are at the foundation of the program, including the landmark IU Microsoft Agreement, originally forged in 1998, and renewed again in 2007.
• A new strategic alliance forged in 2007 between IU and Sony Electronics offers special prices on select Sony consumer electronics products, including HD broadcast and production products, allowing the IU community to keep pace as the university transitions to high-definition media.

New leadership appointments bring UITS and the IUPUI community into closer dialogue, providing linkages between faculty and UITS, and helping UITS tailor support services to faculty needs. Two new positions provide a bridge between UITS and faculty, especially in using Oncourse CL, to which IU migrated in 2007. 

• A new faculty liaison helps faculty with Oncourse CL and other teaching and learning tools. A faculty fellow for Oncourse CL supports faculty in developing good practices using the resource.
• The new Director of Academic and Faculty Services oversees the campus centers for teaching and learning and IT Training and Education, and chairs the Functional Requirements Committee for Oncourse CL and ePortfolio, and the Support and Implementation Team for Oncourse CL.
• New/refocused UITS service groups help faculty use IT classrooms and new media. These include:
• The Classroom Technology Services group 
• The new UITS Media Design and Production group, with expertise in Web, digital audio and video, CD and DVD production
• The IU podcasting portal, linking iTunes U, and supporting learning internal and external to IU

• The AT&T Fellows Program (originally the Ameritech Fellows Program), which featured ten projects at the annual IU AT&T Summer Leadership Forum at the Informatics and Communications Technology Complex in June.

Research Technologies

UITS continues to provide the university with a robust cyberinfrastructure to support  teaching, learning, research, and creative activity by leveraging partnerships, sharing resources with other institutions, and securing grants from funding agencies.

• Big Red, at its 2006 launch the fastest supercomputer among all US academic institutions, enables scientific innovations at IU via the TeraGrid.  
• In spring 2007, through a partnership among IU, Purdue, IBM, and the Indiana Economic Development Corp, Big Red was doubled in size to support projects that encourage Indiana's economic growth.
• The 2-TFLOPS AVIDD cluster was replaced with the Quarry 7-TFLOPS supercomputer, which provides IUPUI researchers with faster Intel hardware for research and general Unix computing. 
• The upgraded Massive Data Storage System (MDSS) provides a competitive advantage for IUPUI grant seekers who need significant storage.

• Leveraging $1.72 million in NSF support, UITS funded the data capacitor, a major contribution to data-intensive computing at IU.
• The data capacitor helped an IU-led team push the limits of networking and storage technology to win first place in the international competition for high-bandwidth computing applications at SC07, the world’s largest international conference for high performance computing.

 
Enterprise Software

IU’s enterprise systems re-engineering project, completed in 2004, effected a transformation on a scale unmatched in the history of university software development projects. New systems based on new IT architecture work together via a common interface and are accessible via IU’s OneStart portal.

In 2007, UITS redesigned OneStart 2.0 with input from focus groups, usability studies, and testing. Improvements include easier navigation.

The university’s in-house-developed Oncourse online course environment provides for the creation, integration, and use of Web-based teaching and learning resources. Along with the University of Michigan CourseWorks, it became the basis for the Sakai Foundation’s efforts to develop learning and collaboration software for higher education.  These efforts have yielded dividends: Sakai membership today includes more than 100 institutions and a dozen commercial firms. In 2007, IU upgraded to Oncourse CL, IU’s installation of Sakai.

IU continues to provide leadership in the worldwide community source or open source software movement.

• Lance D. Speelmon of UITS was elected to the Sakai board of directors.
• The Kuali Foundation, in whose founding IU also played a part, now numbers some 15 member colleges and universities who work together to developing university financial systems.
• IU continues to develop Kuali Financial for financial management and reporting, and Kuali Research, a comprehensive research award management system.
• IU’s Jennifer Foutty was named Executive Director of the Kuali Foundation.
• UITS migrated IU from legacy Oncourse to Oncourse CL, with new functionality in several tools, including Site Statistics, Gradebook, Resources, Messages, and Forums.

Networks and Enterprise Infrastructure

IU was a co-founder, with Purdue University, of the I-Light high-speed, optical fiber network. In 2007 I-light grew to include 15 major network connection points or nodes across the states that connect Indiana colleges and universities to Internet2. Connections made in 2007 include IU East, Earlham College, and the Purdue University College of Technology.  In 2007, UITS developed IU-Notify, a notification system that can reach all eight campuses within minutes. It is part of the university-wide mechanism for communicating everything from weather delays to urgent news.

The IU Global Research Network Operations (Global NOC), housed at IUPUI, is a leader in advanced network management, providing operations services for leading national and international high performance research and education networks. In 2007, its network engineers helped with the transition to the new Internet2 100-Gigabits-per-second (Gbps) nationwide network infrastructure.

Security

The university has become a leading participant in national efforts to develop procedures, practices, and resources for security and information assurance in higher education. 

• The IU Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research (CACR) hosted the 2007 Indiana Higher Education Cybersecurity Summit at IUPUI with support from Purdue University, the University of Notre Dame, and Valparaiso University. Professionals in Information assurance and other IT fields and faculty from Indiana universities and colleges shared best practices, research, and trends in cybersecurity.
• The National Security Agency (NSA), in April 2007, designated IU as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education, making IU a partner for five years in national efforts to keep networks and computers safe and secure.

Support

The IT support services developed by UITS have developed increasingly rich self-service capabilities. The original self-service help tool, the Knowledge Base (KB), now includes some 14,000 IT questions and answers. The online Services and Support page  provides an online help and information utility. In 2007, UITS added to self-service help with:

• IT Now 2.0, a customizable version of IT Notices that users can customize for specific topic areas.
• IT Help Live, which provides Windows with IT help in real time from a UITS consultant, including remote assistance in some cases. IU entered a strategic alliance with ChaCha for research and development of next-generation Internet search tools. The project integrates searches from IUB Libraries, IUPUI Libraries, and the UITS Knowledge Base into a consolidated platform at search.iu.edu.

The core campuses at IUB and IUPUI are now part of one telephone system, based on one database, providing redundancy and efficiency. The system includes pagers, cell phone, and PDAs, and improved directory assistance, emergency response, messaging, and on-call information.

Based on the principle of the Leveraged Support Model, UITS delivers support resources and services to an ever-expanding audience. The OSE provides users with self-service access to the gamut of IT services, resources, and information, including access to downloadable software, the ability to register for IT classes, access to the online KB, and the ability to conduct live chat with a consultant. This fully functional online support system allows UITS to leverage its support services and resources to serve a growing audience with information, tools, and education, while reserving human support resources for those instances where human help provides the best solution, such as in-depth consulting.  The chart below provides figures for delivery of a range of services for the fiscal year.