Vision and Guiding Principles

UniversityCollegeCork

Strategic Plans for

Information Services

2009 – 2012

Contents

1.Strategic Plan for IT3

2.Strategic Plan for the Library18

3.Strategic Plan for Audio Visual Services25

UniversityCollegeCork

Strategic Plan for

IT

2009 – 2012

Towards e-Community

Contents

1.Vision and Guiding Principles5

2.Environment5

3.Challenges6

4.Initiatives and Projects7

5.Infrastructure12

6.Support and Training Services14

7.Resources15

1. Vision and Guiding Principles

Our vision for the development of information technology in UCC is to have in place a top quality virtual environment which

• supports the needs of students, lecturers, researchers and administrators
• is fit for purpose, efficient and secure
• is easy to use
• is easy to access viastreamlined standardisedportals for students and staff.

1. Environment

This plan has been developed in the context of the UCC strategic planning process to contribute to the stated Strategic Goals and Objectives for the University 2009– 2012 (see Appendix). It also takes account of the developments in the University, in the Third Level sector generally and in IT which are shaping the environment in which we work. These include:

• a projected increase in student numbers to 17,500 FTE by 2012 including a doubling of postgraduate student numbers.

• a greatly increased emphasis on research for which the IT requirements are huge but are also more difficult to define than for other areas and are, in many cases, non-standard.

• a ‘data deluge’ - a term often used to describe the phenomenal increase in the volumes of data that we now find ourselves storing, processing and transmitting over the networks. There is a general trend now where the demand for data storage is increasing faster than the demand for high-performance networks or computation.

• the availability of good quality laptops at 50% of the price two years ago and approximately 25% of the price five years ago. As a result it is likely that very few students will be without a laptop in the next year or two. The experience has been that students tend to leave their laptops at home because of the weight and the possibility of theft. However this will probably change due to the lower price/replacement cost and the development of smaller lighter machines which are now beginning to come on the market. Also, laptops, palmtops, mobile phones and camera etc. are converging so it is almost certain that every student will have a mobile device accessing our services in the classroom and on campus generally in the next four years.

• the overlap of education, entertainment and social communications in cyberspace which means that by providing electronic resources for education and research, much of those resources will be used for gaining high-quality access to services which have not been part of the traditional formal education model.

• concerns about security and how we use and protect information in an open devolved organisation.

• concerns about our carbon footprint. The IT industry is focusing on various means of reducing energy requirements and introducing technologies to help with this. Nevertheless, today’s systems require much heavier processing which, if the industry projections are correct, will result in at least a ten-fold increase in energy consumption over the next four years.

• targeted funding by government such as the HEA’s SIF (Strategic Investment Fund). This funding is significant and very welcome but it gives us less independence in deciding our priorities and substantial resources must be transferred from other projects to provide the matched funding for SIF designated projects.

1. Challenges

The overall challenge for the Computer Centre over the next four years is to continue providing a reliable, high capacity and stable IT environment for a variety of users while maintaining the agility to respond to new developments, technologies and other demands. Many of these demands cannot be predicted but require an immediate response with a very large injection of resources which must, inevitably, be taken from other projects or services. As an example of the unpredictability, if we look back four years we see that Facebook, Bebo, YouTube, 2nd Life, podcasts, GoogleEarth and similar applications didn’t exist. Yet these now consume a significant portion of IT resources everywhere and there is an expectation that users can have easy access to them.

Security is at or near the top of every IT agenda today. Our information assets must be secure and therefore we must be able to identify and check the authorisation of each user who accesses them. Putting the technical infrastructure in place to accomplish this is a difficult challenge. However, it is much more than a technology issue. Every person in UCC who is authorised to access or process information has a responsibility with regard to that information to ensure where necessarythat, for example, they do not corrupt it; that it is adequately backed-up; that their use complies with copyright, data protection legislation etc. and that they don’t allow other unauthorised users access to it. Convincing each individual that they have such responsibilitiesis the biggest challenge of all and will require a significant culture change.

Allied to the security issue is that of data ownership. Whereas a security policy will define for each user their responsibilities with respect to all of their data and other relevant resources, a data ownership policy will define a model for the management of each dataset and will allocate responsibilities for different aspects of its management. The availability of cheap storage devices gives the impression that data storage is becoming much less expensive but in fact the overall central cost of storage management is increasing significantly. It will be impossible to contain the costs without a data ownership policy but, again, getting users to recognise that they have a role to play in this is a difficult task.

The primary focus of the restructuring in UCC has been on devolution. In relation to IT support, however, we are finding that some areas which provided their own support are now shifting many of the responsibilities and functions back on to the Computer Centre while retaining locally the resources which were originally allocated for this purpose. The whole question of central/distributed support needs to be reviewed - in particular the overall responsibility for IT management (and perhaps IT governance) in the distributed areas.

This strategic plan proposes the development of a virtual environment to serve the needs of all students and staff. However, this development will fail unless the processes associated with the central applications are reviewed and re-engineered where appropriate. Having the processes re-engineered is often a far more difficult task than the computerisation itself.

The greatest challenge facing the Computer Centre, however, is the lack of resources. Based on the most recent figures available across the sector our non-pay budget per student FTE is 80% of the average across the Irish Universities and 44% and 16% respectively of UK and US universities. Our staff headcount at 57 - is two less than NUIG while it is 32 less than UCD and 30 less than TCD. It will be impossible for us to keep up with the competition, not to mention getting ahead of it, if these trends are allowed to continue.

In terms of space, we are accommodating 51 of the staff members in a space designed for 35 with some of them in rooms that are unlikely to comply with safety regulations. Even more significantly, the vulnerability of our computer room to flooding presents the single biggest risk to the University’s systems.

Not alone are our resource levels very low, but the demands are increasing at an exceptionally high rate. For example, the IT Building and the Postgraduate Library together will have added approximately 6,000 active points to the network representing a 50% increase in the size of the network in little over a year. In planning such developments, no account is taken of the annual backend costs incurred in maintaining and supporting this. Similarly, when new applications are implemented, quite often no provision is made for the ongoing annual license costs which have to be borne by the Computer Centre. For example, the implementation of Agresso will add an extra annual expenditure of over €60,000 on license payments to our accounts.

1. Initiatives and Projects

From the technology perspective, the objective is to build a virtual learning and a virtual research environment to support the core mission of the university together with an e-business environment to support administration and management. To achieve this, a wide range of projects and initiatives will be undertaken as described below.

4.1Virtual Learning Environment

4.1.1 Blackboard The Blackboard system is now used regularly by 80% of students in UCC and 46% of modules (representing 68% of all module enrolments) are available on the system. A major enhancement of the system is currently underway and will be completed early in 2008/09. This will provide far greater capacity and faster response times as well as integration with the student administration system(ITS). While Blackboard will provide our primary VLE, at least until 2011, we will nevertheless continue to investigate other products such as Moodle.

4.1.2Learning Repositories The Computer Centre is collaborating with other third level institutions on the development of a HEA-sponsored National Digital Learning Repository (NDLR) for the purpose of establishing a framework to enable development and sharing of digital learning resources between the seven Universities and the Institutes of Technology. The project aims to provide support for best practise in the development of digital learning resources and to establish inter-institution academic groups (Communities of Practice) working towards improving the subject specific learning experience. In addition, it is researching the licensing and copyright issues that have to be considered before a learning repository can gain the confidence of its potential users.

4.1.3 Online Plagiarism Detection From 2008/09, we will be providing a digital plagiarism detection service through the Turnitin system. This will allow students and lecturers to run assignments through the system which will then produce an ‘originality report’. Guidelines for using the service have been incorporated in the UCC Plagiarism Policy. The launch of the service marks the outcome of the work of the Plagiarism Detection Working Group which was established by the Academic Board.

4.1.3Online Assessment To date, the development of the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) has been concentrated on the delivery of electronic content and media. The area of assessment has not been included to any significant extent. It is now planned to undertake a study of the feasibility of providing online examinations. At this stage it would appear that the implications of such a service could be quite wide-ranging and therefore it is likely that the roll-out of a service would be done on a gradual basis over the subsequent years.

4.1.5Video/Audio Streaming and Podcasting We are currently working with Audio Visual Services in the development of a streaming and a podcasting service which will be available in 2008/09. These services will be successful only if adequate training is available for all users. A suitable training programme will therefore be developed, ideally to be rolled out as a standard package.

4.1.6Web 2.0 Technologies Web 2.0 is a term used to describe loosely a set of services which allow the user to contribute information and to interact with other users rather than just receive information. They include social networking, wikis, blogs, and specific services such as Bebo, Facebook, YouTube, Second Life, iTunes etc. Web 2.0 services can be very effective in engaging students but they can also give rise to very serious privacy, data protection and information security issues. Also, there is evidence of a trend showing that some students prefer their universities to communicate with them via the more standard and formal web and email applications. While taking account of these issues, we will continue to investigate and exploit these technologies and in particular examine how we might use social networking to provide a UCC online community.

4.1.7Wireless & Mobile IT Support While wireless access is available widely throughout the campus, there are still a number of blackspots and it can be difficult to provide coverage in many of these. However, we aim to have full wireless coverage in all UCC buildings by 2010. In the meantime we will continue to explore other networking technologies such as 3G broadband, WiMax etc. and adopt these as appropriate. We are also collaborating with the other institutions to provide federated access to services which will allow mobility for students and staff by giving them access to their normal services from outside the campus and particularly from other universities. Some of these services will be rolled out in 2009 and will continue to be developed through to 2012.

By negotiating special deals with the suppliers, we expect to have student laptops available for approximately €500 and less in 2008/09 and we will continue to provide extensive support for students who purchase laptops. However, as the IT market looks like moving towards other mobile devices ranging from mini-laptops to iPhones, we will provide support for these devices where feasible.

4.2Virtual Research Environment

To date the Computer Centre has focused primarily on providing an extensive IT infrastructure as well as a wide range of services and applications to support teaching and learning, and management and administration. For the research community we have provided little added value on the infrastructure other than network services. This is very much in line with the pattern in universities generally since,rather than attempting to provide a wide range of specialist services centrally, it has been more cost-effective to have many such services, including storage and processing, supplied locally within the individual research groups. However, this model is becoming less viable for many researchers.

Research is now the most significantgrowth area in UCC. With the increasing emphasis on collaborative research across disciplines and institutions, the management of individual projects is becoming more complex. It is getting increasingly difficult for research teams to provide and manage IT resources, particularly storage and processing, on the scale required for their work. Also, the management and security of research data is becoming an issue.

The term Cyberinfrastructure (CI) was coined by the NSF to describe the IT model to support today’s research requirements. Generally the term is used to describe a support model which includes high-performance computing, an advanced network infrastructure, data storage and management facilities, collaboration tools and analysis software. We are developing some of these components within UCC and others are available to us from external partners.

4.2.1High-Performance Computing Supercomputing services are available from ICHEC (Irish Centre for High-End Computing) who also provide support and helpdesk services. The supercomputers are hosted by HEAnet and are therefore accessible directly from the UCC network. The users of this service will deal directly with ICHEC but, where necessary, the Computer Centre will provide first-level support and will work with the users to address any connectivity requirements.

4.2.2Advanced Network Infrastructure The rollout of gigabit connectivity to the desktop in all research areas of the University will be completed in 2009. External connectivity, currently at 1Gb, will be kept at least on a par with the other universities. Where there are exceptional high bandwidth requirements for large data transfers, arrangements will be made through HEAnet to establish point-to-point connections to provide for these.

4.2.3Data Storage and Management Network Area Storage (NAS) will be made available to all researchers by 2010. It has already been made available to some in a pilot project that is underway. The project is being used to determine more clearly the requirements of researchers. A fixed quota of storage will be allocated to each individual researcher. In addition, storage will be provided for individual research projects to allow all researchers on the team to share data and information. The NAS storage will be accessible from anywhere over the internet and will be backed up automatically on a regular basis thus providing large capacity, accessible and secure storage.

4.2.4 Collaboration Tools The tools necessary to enable collaboration in virtual research communities within UCC and across institutions will be provided and supported. These range from communication tools such as Sharepoint to remotely controlled instrumentation as well as Web2.0-type online communities and secure forums. In addition, since it is an essential requirement for many research projects to have a website, the Computer Centre will provide web development and hosting services. Also, we will continue to work with Audio Visual Services in exploiting the use of audio and videoconferencing throughout UCC.

4.2.5Analysis Software We provide a range of statistical analysis and mathematical modelling software while advanced simulation, mathematical, programming and visualisation tools are available from ICHEC. The range of software currently provided will be reviewed to see if it’s adequate for the needs of our researchers.

4.2.6 Server Hosting Many researchers have their own local servers and in some cases these are very powerful machines/clusters with special environmental requirements in terms of temperature control, power supply etc. Since it is often difficult to meet these requirements locally, there is a need for a central hosting service and this will be included in the overall plans for a new data centre.

We will engage with the research community to establish how best to present and support these facilities as an integrated research support service. Because many of the IT support tasks sought by researchers are short-term and need to be delivered quickly, it is recognised that any support model must be agile enough to address such requirements.

While the cyberinfrastructure model originated within the scientific community, most of it is equally relevant in the arts and humanities. We will continue to develop and enhance our support for the specific concerns of the arts and humanities in relation to areas such as data curation and preservation, electronic publishing, digital repositories etc.