Community Integration and Innovation
Building an Enterprise Data Environment in the Cloud
The Ohio State University is moving their enterprise data environment to the cloud (AWS). This new environment includes an enterprise data lake, data warehouse, and Tableau environment. Hear the strategies that drove the decision, the process for gaining security approval, and the new opportunities to better serve the university community. We will provide an overview of the architecture and specific components. Learn the skills and technologies that have carried over and the new ones gained. Hear the challenges we faced, and the newfound advantages gained through the cloud and modern technologies.
Making IT Personal
IT Services at Miami University is considered the central technology group on campus. And to a lot of people at the University, we are just a bunch of tech-heads and nerds. And although that is not entirely false, we are so much more. To help alleviate some of that stereotype, our unit engages in a number of activities throughout the year to build camaraderie and teamwork. This includes playing intramural broomball and softball, hosting cornhole tournaments and diversity events. We then focus communication to the University on profiling our staff as real people. Are you doing anything similar?
Connecting the Campus with Community Cloud
Community Cloud is an online social platform that enables organizations to connect customers, partners, and employees with each other and the data and records they need to get work done. In a higher education context this platform can be used to promote engagement and communication within a division/department, with students, or with external partners. At Kent State, we are piloting Community Cloud as a tool within the Division of Information Services to leverage multiple key engagement functions including a social intranet, case management, searchable knowledge base, activities calendar, creating topical groups, and much more!
The Cheese Has Moved: Minimized Disruption During Rapid Transition to a Managed HelpDesk
Session Description:This session presents the overall process, development, planning and implementation of moving Miami University’s high-performance helpdesk to Blackboard Student Services. In this presentation, participants will explore the decisions behind the integration, the reason Miami selected BbSS, the success factors for rapid transition, and designs for sustainable improvements as the relationship matures. Upon conclusion of the session, participants will be provided an opportunity to ask questions related to the implementation.Session Objectives:Upon successful completion of this session, participants will be able to:Identify the decision drivers behind Miami University partnering with Bb Student Services.Describe how Knowledge Centered Service is imperative to a successful collaboration.Leverage data to drive key performance and service.Recognize the importance of agile methods when integrate ticketing systems.Identify techniques to manage (mis-manage) stakeholder participation.Utilize best practices for successful collaboration during and after the transition.Prior Knowledge of Audience:IT Helpdesk Management/AdministrationTicketing Systems (Service Now, TeamDynamix, BMC Remedy, Smart View, Advisor Desktop, HP Service Manager)
Designing Digital Display Systems for Community and University Environments
“Designing Digital Display Systems for Community and University Environments” is an intensive research project developed, designed, and implemented in downtown Youngstown, Ohio and on the campus of Youngstown State University (“YSU”). Inspired by the City of Youngstown investing substantial financial resources into creating a physical wayfinding signage program and the university campus being heavily integrated into the downtown district, this project seeks to create a complimentary digital signage program that is designed for and by Youngstown citizens and design students of YSU. This presentation will include a full project overview, live demonstrations, address challenges, and identify implementation strategies.
Cutting-Edge Infrastructure
Identity and Access Management at Malone University: Shibboleth, eduroam, & InCommon
How do you securely connect guest and organization users to your wireless network? How do you securely authenticate users in your web and desktop applications? We will talk about the evolution of our identity and access management infrastructure over the past five years. Malone University was a recipient of an NSF Cyber-infrastructure grant in 2015. We will talk about how the grant increased our awareness and participation in technology communities as well as the benefits. We will talk about where we were, where we are, where we are going, and what challenges we have had with these changes.
Selecting and Surviving Cutting-Edge Infrastructure
As the technology stack continues its march towards more complexity with new technologies such as Cloud Infrastructures, hyper-convergence, software defined everything, agile anything, etc., the management of the technology infrastructure becomes more challenging. The manifestation of this management effort is the delivery of more of the services that justify the Information Technology investments, with consistent reliability, security, and availability and with the adaptability to change in advance of, or at least, in step with the business requirements of the institution. This presentation will discuss some of the new technologies but the focus will be on selecting and surviving Cutting-Edge Infrastructure.
Simplifying and Securing the Wide Area Network
Wide Area Networking (WAN) has always been a challenge with its complexity, cost and functionality. This session will introduce VeloCloud by VMware which provides Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) services. This solution enables customers to simplify and secure their WAN while enhancing throughput and high availability with VeloCloud.
Enabling the hybrid cloud
This session will discuss the challenges associated with traditonal hybrid cloud models with a focus on security and networking. We will illustrate the complexity that underlies these challenges and then show how VMware NSX solves these challenges and enables a secure and scalable solution to hybrid cloud. Topics will include VMware NSX, VMware on AWS and vRealize Network Insight.
Working Smarter by Developing an Enterprise Visibility Platform
The University of Cincinnati has a plethora of different tools to aid in providing the highest level of service to a diverse community with unique individual needs. While all of these tools have a specific purpose, it is often challenging gaining visibility into a suite of tools and integrating data from each tool to make informed decisions. This presentation will focus on the processes and tools used at the University of Cincinnati to design, build and implement a visibility platform across a large, diverse set of tools, derive actionable data, and demonstrate return on investment of new initiatives.
OpsGenie – KSU’s New Alerting and On-Call Management System
A modern IT enterprise needs multiple monitoring tools to provide insight into the health and performance of their infrastructure and applications. KSU implemented OpsGenie to bring together all alerts from monitoring tools as well as custom scripts to deliver alerts in an effective, flexible way, improving operational excellence and the quality of life for our on call engineers. Attendees will leave with information on how OpsGenie can improve operational efficiency and effectiveness, while saving the university thousands in licensing.
Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Universal CPE
Software Defined Networking and Universal CPE is disrupting the networking world just as virtual machines did operating systems and applications. Learn how this technology is reducing investment costs while increasing flexibility, management and performance.
Rise Vision Digital Signage
Rise Vision has has created a streamlined and intuitive cloud-based digital signage solution that is scalable and cost-effective. Our previous digital signage solution required significant investment of time from a Sr. Systems Administrator to update and maintain a server that suffered from poor performance and high annual support and licensing costs. Rise Vision offers a cloud-hosted solution with priority support for 2/3rds the cost. We have the flexibility to add more displays, administrators and designers quickly and easily via a web interface. The software allows content developers to create presentations using non-proprietary HTML quickly and intuitively. For those non technical people or creatively inclined, there are over 100 templates and widgets included with their Professional Player; templates and widgets are added every month, and makes sure there’s always something for seasonal holidays; this let’s us easily add Google Calendar, Twitter, Google Sheets, live-stream videos, and more to our digital signage. In the event of an emergency, we can send alerts to all (or select) displays to notify students more quickly.Rise Vision’s support of multiple platforms (from Windows and Linux to Raspberry Pi and Chrome OS) ensures us that we’ll be covered in the event that we develop a different platform. We can manage an unlimited number of logical sub-organizations and displays to provide autonomy that frees our staff from support responsibilities. The software’s display monitoring, alerts us anytime a display has gone down, so we can troubleshoot problems more quickly. Users report significant levels of increased productivity due to the easier to use creation process.
Next Generation Dorm Wireless
This presentation will cover strategies for the growth of wireless in the college dorm environment and the necessity to support IoT devices while maintaining a secure and stable network experience.Topics include the use of AP placement, byod onboarding, mdns, port bridging, radio configuration, and channel use.
Extending Workflows beyond SharePoint with Flow
With the introduction of Microsoft Flow, Microsoft has expanded the workflow framework to interact with Office 365 services and external platforms like Twitter and Google Apps. Flow offers IT a way to automate data collection, approvals, and social media posts while simultaneously keeping sensitive data secure with data loss prevention policies. Additionally, Flow provides users with the ability to start or interact with workflows on any device, even physical buttons.
Enabling Student Success
Leveraging Existing Resources to Modernize Academic Forms & Workflow
Come learn how the Youngstown State University Honors College is using existing technical resources available through the Office 365 platform to modernize complicated forms and workflows related to academic honors contracts between students, faculty and department chairs. The process modernization will dramatically increase the college's ability to meet the demand for quickly and accurately processing requests for Contract Honors - a process that has been entirely paper driven and extremely time intensive in the past.
From Modeling to Action: Using Data to Collaborate for Student Success
Using data from multiple sources and working with graduate assistants from statistics and computer science, persistence models with predictive, and more importantly, prescriptive analytics for the freshman cohort were produced and refined. Based on the outcomes from the modeling, secondary support structures were identified, strategies were constructed, and systems were put in place to monitor persistence of students impacted by the strategies. At the conclusion of the registration period, the analytical model was evaluated and refined for improved accuracy.
Communicating with Students While Speaking Their Language
Sinclair College has multiple departments/groups communicating with the broader student base in various frequencies and channels and utilizing various data sources. Enrollment, in an effort to isolate a subset of these communications, established a current student communication plan focused on enrollment related content. However, it was apparent that greater coordination and strategy should be implemented in order for the communication plan to be most effective and increase the efficacy of that communication channel.The Message Control Center (MCC) was implemented to support the ability for key stakeholders to build an integrated communication plan across the campus (Enrollment Management, Student Affairs, Academic Advising, Instruction, Career Communities, etc.) and allow for a strategic plan for communicating with students through various channels including text, push, and portal notifications.
Student Affairs and IT Collaboration: There’s an App for That
Members of YSU Student Experience and IT teams reinvented assessment on campus by using mobile technology to scale resources. Session participants will learn of IT’s pivotal role in the app implementation and their continued support of the Student Experience team in identifying patterns of involvement, setting benchmarks, and highlighting programming for students. They will review assessment on campus prior to app implementation, IT’s role in supporting Student Success initiatives, and how it changes after implementation. They will examine the relationship between areas and how fostering this relationship has allowed them to scale the implementation across multiple systems, departments and initiatives.Other presenters:Maureen Drabison - Programmer and Analyst- Youngstown State University- mrdrabison@ysu.eduChanel Fournier - Engagement and Nobile Development Consultant - OOHLALA Mobile- chanel@oohlalamobile.com
Media Accessibility and the Promise of the Cloud
Higher Education is undergoing a dramatic transformation as students with disabilities, veterans, single parents, and working adults enroll in ever-increasing numbers. This significant shift in student demographics, coupled with the exponential growth in the use of instructional videos in online courses, and aggressive monitoring by advocacy groups and the Department of Education, urgently highlights the need to produce universally accessible course content. Despite industry innovations, such as automatic speech recognition and crowdsourcing, have dramatically lowered the cost of captioning, transcription or translation of media, reductions in state and Federal education spending keep these services prohibitively expensive.This presentation will examine how artificial intelligence projects like IBM Watson, Google DeepMind, and Microsoft's Deep Learning Center are using the power of neural networks and machine learning to transform how students interact with and consume media. This transformational technology has the promise to expand the reach, utility, and affordability of accessible educational video.
An Innovative Solution to Bridge Industry and Student Needs
The Information Technology Solutions Center was founded at the University of Cincinnati in March, 2012 to address two apparent needs of the digitized world: industries needing affordable yet complex technological solutions and students seeking to gain experience and hands-on learning. Since its foundation, the organization has grown significantly and successfully completed over 60 projects for $1.4 million in revenues. The center is now celebrating 6 years and has trained more than 30 students. Students who stayed for 2+ years at the Solution Center have received a starting salary 30% higher than average. The community contracts the center for a reasonable fee to develop and support their IT solution needs and the ITSC sees a high retention rate of clients.The realization that the field of Information Technology is more hands-on than theoretical was the key to the formation of this solution. The digital transformation brought forth the needs that students could address by channeling their passion and drive. The impact that the center has had on students and the community is profound. This presentation will portray how the ITSC has addressed several needs of students and the community, display the growth in the quality of projects and development processes, address challenges encountered along the way, highlight success stories of student employees and discuss the future strategic direction of the company.
Innovative Technology Solutions for Higher Education
Today’s Higher Education institutions are faced with numerous technology challenges and opportunities. Preparing students for today’s workplace, building innovative learning spaces, introducing new learning technologies, data and learning analytics, Virtual Reality and IoT/Smart Campus are just a few of the many topics that institutions are seeking collaborative partnerships to help strategize solutions with. Through examination of case study examples and other success stories, hear about thought leading initiatives at campuses across the country that are helping lead innovation for Higher Education.
Engaging Faculty in the Creation of Accessible Course Content
In Spring 2018, we conducted a pilot of Blackboard Ally as part of a broader commitment to ensure the accessibility of our digital content. There were many positive results, including significant accessibility increases in the pilot courses. Valuable hands-on experience in making documents accessible empowered faculty, resulting in an unexpected but noteworthy benefit. We will discuss how we worked with faculty to address the barriers to creating accessible content: time, skills, and resources. We will also discuss how this pilot is driving course content accessibility and our plan for broader faculty engagement and development moving forward.
Expanding Beyond the Classroom Walls
Classroom Technologies: Current Stations, Future Iterations and Collaboration
Utilization of and demand for technologies that facilitate delivery of instruction continue to grow. Solutions, current and future, must meet these challenges considerate of resource constraints, instructional styles and the diversity of student owned devices. Youngstown State University endeavors to identify and implement lower cost solutions that increase usability and functionality for instructors and students alike. The role of Individual devices (BYOD) cannot be ignored. A recent survey of Ohio public higher education institutions reveals a commonality of purpose and opportunities for collaboration that expand usability and functionality within and beyond individual institutions.
Integrated Digital Workspace: Automation of virtual application and desktop entitlements
Simply and securely deliver and manage any app on any device with VMware Workspace ONE, an intelligence-driven digital workspace platform powered by VMware AirWatch Technology. You will learn how Workspace ONE integrates access control, application management and multi-platform endpoint management.Come learn how to provide any app, any device access to any education resource through a digital backpack for students. Leverage virtual desktop infrastructure, identity management and SIS integration to automate the delivery of applications to students based on their enrollment, whether in person or online.
Design and Development of Mobile Apps for Education
iOS and Android-based mobile learning apps are being embraced as engaging learning tools that offer students meaningful and intuitive learning experiences. By using open source technologies, practical instructional planning, sound pedagogical strategies, and moderate design and development, class-specific apps for mobile devices can be designed, developed, and successfully implemented into the online or blended classroom experiences. Initiated in 2014 and continuing to present day, the YSU Department of Art supports 8 graphic design focused mobile apps made available for free download and used with consistent student success. This presentation will discuss design, development, user experience, and implementation strategies.
STUDY: A hybridized learning management system for visual learners
Originally built in 2009, STUDY is an open-source, socially-interactive, and cross-device capable learning management system built for visual learners in the art and design fields of study. Created as a reaction to undergraduate design students posting design work-in-progress on Facebook and Twitter in an effort to attain feedback, STUDY sought to offer worry-free, contextual critique inside of a secure website. By offering visually-driven course content in an effective and memorable manner, retention, positive learning outcomes, and social experiences from within the site can become better defined and enhanced. This presentation will offer design, development, and implementation strategies.
Information Security and Risk
The Ohio Cyber Range at the University of Cincinnati
"The Ohio Cyber Range at the University of Cincinnati (OCR@UC) is a virtual computing environment that lives in the cloud and provides users access to computing resources to educate, train, investigate, and practice skills and techniques to protect and defend digital assets. The Ohio Department of Higher Education, in collaboration with the Ohio Adjutant General's Department, awarded UC $1.9 million to establish a demonstration site for the Range by June 2019. In this session we will introduce the OCR@UC and the Ohio Cyber Collaboration Committee (OC3) and inform attendees how their institution can take advantage of this new educational technology infrastructure.
To strengthen cybersecurity in Ohio, the Ohio National Guard has brought together more than 30 public, private, military and educational organizations to form the Ohio Cyber Collaboration Committee (OC3). The OC3 mission is being carried out by Ohio higher education to support education and workforce development with capabilities to be shared statewide.
Among the committee’s goals is to create a cyber range — a virtual environment used for cybersecurity training and technology development. The Ohio Cyber Range project, OCR, is led by the Unviersity of Cincinnati and OARnet. Capture the Flag competitions are being held around the state in Phase 1 of the program, which is run remotely from MERIT. Later phases will acquire assets and build scenarios for use by Ohio's higher education, K12, and business communities.
ODHE and ODE are also collaboarating to create a cybesecurity curriculum for K12 and CTE in Ohio.
(panelists will include UC, OARnet, ODHE, representatives, and self)
Security and Compliance for the Classrooms
Why—Why do we care about Cybersecurity?
Who—Who are we worried about when it comes to hacking and why?
Getting started—We all know that we should take steps to improve our organizations how to we get started?
List of critical items—Everyone wants a list of things to do and we are no exception, can you give us a list of the must items?
Recent Incidents—What type of recent cybersecurity incidents are companies experiencing?
Security vs. Compliance—Is there a difference between cybersecurity and compliance?
What works—Given your experience, can you tell us what works or does not work for creating a secure company?
Standards/Certifications/Frameworks – Can you discuss the differences?
24 Hours after the cyber incident—What does that look like?
File, Print, Pwn3d: The Importance of Including IoT in Your Security Plan
Internet of Things (IoT) interacts with some of your organization's most sensitive data, but is often overlooked during software maintenance, security assessments, or penetration testing. This session will identify which devices classify as IoT, provide tips on searching for IoT within your network, and explore how threat actors can use IoT to the detriment of your infrastructure.
Risk Managment Framework as part of Security Best Practices
In spite of ever increasing exploitation of known vulnerabilities by hackers, most higher education organizations do not follow a prescriptive approach for good security hygiene including and beginning at the policy level with establishment and implementation of a cohesive risk management framework.This presentation will discuss common models and standards that are available as templates and reference for use in higher education.No specific model will be recommended nor will any vendor services be promoted. Rather, the objective is to share useful information and awarenes of resources available to higher educaton leaders.
Local Admin Rights: Notes from the Trenches
Removing local administrative rights on client computers is an effective measure for reducing security risks, but it is often controversial and difficult to implement. We will examine the arguments for and against administrator rights. We will then explore various tools and techniques for striking a balance: providing administrator rights on-demand.
Your Key to Success: University Information Security Awareness
The Office of Information Security (OIS) at the University of Cincinnati strives to ensure all students, faculty, and staff are aware of the Information Security Threats that we face on a day-to-day basis. The presenters will share what actions their office takes, as well as their personal experiences with educating the community about these day-to-day threats. See how we strengthened our relationship with the student population and educated them on how they can protect themselves. This presentation will cover the Office of Information Security’s social media accounts, awareness and outreach events, as well as the university-wide Information Security awareness training.
IT Leaders/CIO
Shawnee State's Approach to Managing Organizational Change during their Journey to the Cloud
Remembering that technology is an enabler and people do the work is important for any technology implementation. This is especially true when transitioning from customized, on premise systems to cloud based software as a service solutions. Join us to learn how Shawnee State University managed their organizational change, engaged stakeholders and drove technology acceptance of their new Oracle Cloud system.
The Value Proposition for an IT Project Management Office and Governance at YSU
In this session, I plan to discuss the Value Proposition of the IT Project Management Office and Govenance at YSU. Key takeaways for attendees will include how to: Assign value to IT initiatives, Prioritize IT initiatives across multiple business/academic units with limited IT resources and Appropriately assign initiatives within the Governance structure.