Attending: Brian Bell, Benjamin Barenblat, Manjul Sahay, Liz Denys, Alex Dehnert, Alec Lai (by proxy)
This meeting consists primarily of brainstorming topics for the remainder of the semester
I. Printing
Discussion about Pharos ensues, and student concerns are raised, particularly about students who live off-campus:
- Most printing is primarily done between classes
- The printer in the Hayden 24x7 room is used a lot because it "just works"
- There are no printers along the infinite corridor except for quick-print, which is overloaded
- IS&T will investigate moving a second printer to the building 11 quickstation cluster
- The clusters are generally not convenient to classes; 4-167 is hidden and nobody knows it exists.
- Pharos might help, but it's a queueing issue
II. Grad student concerns
- Grad students receive a lot of info from their departments, but are under-utilizing IS&T resources, such as TSM and ECAT3
- There's a lack of information: People just use whatever comes up on Google
- Sloan has an extensive orientation by Sloan Tech. Services, but more IS&T info would help
III. Concerns about the IS&T website
- It's aimed more at administrators and staff
- Students want quick information. Common topics: get VSLS software, change e-mail forwarding, print, get certificates, use VPN
IV. Discussion about IS&T's current offerings
- The MIT iPhone App is very useful
- Android client certificates
- This is a platform limitation
- Cheaper/free Office for students
- Not a huge concern. Most students have Office already, or get it through non-traditional channels.
- Stellar has a steep learning curve, and in many cases it's easier for TAs to just create a blog or wiki or web page elsewhere.
- Stellar NG (based on Blackboard) may help with this
- The software download matrix is too confusing
- Nobody reads documentation. Maybe include 5 bullet points, then download link, then docs.
- Most people know what they want. They don't care about categories - they know they want, e.g. MATLAB, and just want to download it.
- The key to software offerings is providing software you can use while at MIT, they don't care about lifetime. If they end up somewhere where they need X, the new place will provide it.
V. Feedback to IS&T
- There are way too many surveys - students get bombarded with a survey from the administration or student groups constantly.
- Surveys at points of usage might help – i.e. a touch screen, short, 3-question survey in the Athena cluster
- More raw data powering decisions would be helpful.
- Focus groups and townhall meetings, especially with food, would be a great way of getting feedback. For grad students, lunches would be much more convenient than afternoon/evening.
- Maybe a Lobby 10 booth, tell us a 5-second summary (verbal), get free food.
Meeting schedule: Bi-weekly, Thursdays, 5:00, next meeting on the 17th