First ACCORD Workshop

Thursday, 22 February 2007
https://web.mit.edu/accord/
accord@mit.edu

Steve Gass <sgass@mit.edu>
Oliver Thomas <othomas@mit.edu>
Vijay Kumar <vkumar@mit.edu>
Babi Mitra <babi@mit.edu>

SUMMARY

Common Themes

1. Customer view to services: providers, contact info, policies, practices, prices, escalation paths, etc.
2. Service provider community (revitalized Ed-Tech Partners) for sharing information and strengthening relationships within the provider and with client communities
3. Publicizing services to customers
4. Services at the edges: in departments, labs, and centers
5. Service/innovation life cycle: assessment, sustainability, business model (fee v. free, core v. premium)
6. Thinking beyond "academic computing"
7. Single sign-on
8. Engagement in the planning of new services, e.g., Athena Transition, Stellar, Media repositories, Image Management tools

ACCORD is immediately concentrating on three areas:

1. Revitalizing the community of service providers (formerly Ed-Tech Partners) into the "Accordiacs". We're actively planning the development of a wiki where we're hoping you will provide profiles to share with other members of the Accordiacs. We will also be drafting a "mission" for this new group. We plan to share more details about this with you very soon.
2. Updating the Teaching with Technology website - We expect to bring a group together both to make sure the information is up to date and accurate, and to determine what additional usability features it should provide. Again, we will share more specific details with you about this very soon.
3. Reaching out to customers - We're planning to meet with a variety of faculty (and maybe students too) this spring. As those happen we will update you.

ROUNDTABLE ITEMS

• Innovation Lifecycle
• Approach to meet diverse cross-departmental needs when designing an application (image toolbox to meet wide variety of image mgmt needs)
• Easy central interface to access support, software, and so on
• Define who is responsible for what:
  • Departmental, central IT, and local responsibilities
  • Define relationships across those boundaries
• Single sign-on which can be used by local services and service providers
• Assist faculty by helping them become aware of and understand IP, copyright, and policy issues; make content more reusable
• Enable DLC contacts to seamlessly route question to right places
• Single sign-on web portal
  • Libraries
  • Calendar
  • Bursar/student info
  • Other faculty / student info
• How to integrate innovation in administrative technology and services with educational technology to provide better service to faculty
• Think broader than academic computing
• How to integrate video with stellar
• Single sign-on that works across services
• How to reconcile various business models
  • Cost recovery
  • Free services
  • One-time project dollars
  • We seem to be inventing them on the fly
• Connecting needs to resources
  • Resources should be connected to services, not departments or buildings
• Collaborate on similar services across departments
  • Images tools
  • Video tools
• Do better job communicating what resources are available to faculty and students
• Do a better job communicating across service providers/IT groups
• Plug (market) existing, accessible versions of solutions
• Fix ACCORD web site
• More inclusion, communication, and transparency to make sure service providers are included in/informed of service changes EARLY
• Central coordination to make sure needed reserves (textbooks, etc.) are available to students who need them; demand often spikes during certain periods, resources are fixed quantity
• More promotion of good services, official services (video production)
• Essential services should have institute funding, not just be cost recovery; should not be isoldated (video productions)
• What is the future of Athena?
• Communication and outreach
  • Every MIT faculty member should be provided with a clear statement of services in the service portfolio
  • Available resources should be communicated clearly to set expectations appropriately
    • Athena software
    • OpenAFS
    • Resources need to be there to meet increased demand before resource is offered
• Organized way to find funding and resources
• Open up content in services (Libraries, OCW, Stellar) to each other
• Visibility and marketing of products and services that are cost-recovery, esp. media-rich content
• Definitions
  • What are those needs?
  • How do we ID them?
  • Faculty: range of understanding of tools
  • Proactive
• Broader one-stop shop ( > AC )
• "Common user interface" for accessing services
• Research and scholarly material - keep track of and support
• Initiative to identify services and where to go for what
• Future of Athena clusters
• How Dspace services fit
• Support, maintain, and sustain vs. "New and Cool"
• Communication about workflow and hand-off; faculty and students <-> ET
• Info on who's doing what <-> School (Sloan)
• Don't know enough, want to provide 1st level basic support
• Delivery and usage vs. Marketing in Departments
• Good image repository tool and culture change
• What each other is doing
  • Different educational technology in different organizations
  • Don't recreate the wheel
• Digital images repository
  • Still
  • Video
  • DVD collection
  • Accesible for courses by faculty
• Communicate amongst ourselves
  • Skeptical about one-stop shopping
  • More business from referrals
  • Responsiveness
• Better coordination of systems (Dspace, Stellar, Image tools...)
• Personal touch <-> know each other
• Email address = "one stop access" (single sign-on?)
• Knowing where to go
  • Information design challenge
  • Graphic/visual view of services
• "Single sign-on for MIT"
• More unified, consistent approach and process (Sloan)
• Innovation life cycle
  • Sustain, bring to life
• Single sign-on
• "Athena was cool 20 years ago"
  • What would "Athena" look like if we started now?
• Create structures for assessment
  • Hear back from community on what is working and not working
  • What to focus on

REPORT OUT

Understand Need:

1. Help faculty understand their needs
   1. Services available
   2. Price point
   3. Colleague's needs
      • Focus groups
2. Push vs pull
   • Get in circle of trust
     1. students
     2. colleagues
     3. admins
     4. departmental support
3. Structure for assessment
   1. communicating with each other
   2. evaluating
   3. translation into agile, responsive services
   4. surveys
   5. are the services currently in place working?
   6. 

Facilitate:

• Scope
  • Completely new vs. solutions that exist (in part)
• Video
  • Graduation <-> Retrospectives
  • Choke point?
  • Tracking resources - know where to go
  • Needs gathering vs. Answering questions

Communicate:

1. ACCORD: Clearing house, comprehensive index
   1. Sustained
   2. Moderated
   3. Collect from providers
2. Rejuvenate EdTech Partners
   1. Affinity groups
   2. Institute mandate/support
3. Edit and upgrade Teaching with Technology page
   • searchable
4. Address core areas of confusion
   1. Video delivery and production
   2. Classroom ownership and management
   3. Course management
   4. Content repositories
   5. Affinity groups

Communicate:

• With the end user and with departments/people who service the end user
• Power of the liaison programs
  • OCW and Libraries and (who else?)
  • Coordinate among liaison groups
• Amongst ourselves
• Easy, obvious, and visual
• Sustain groups like EdTech partners
  • Someone in ACCORD to be accountable?

Understanding need:

• Formulate multiple strategies for communicating with faculty
  • Survye
  • Documenting trends in HD
  • Attending faculty meetings
  • Making the channels more visible
  • How do you find out when faculty need help?
  • Pro-actively interact with the the faculty in departments
• Harvesting feedback
• Developing strategies for communicating with faculty service providers
  • Liaisons
    • Libraries
    • OCW
    • Ed Tech consultants (FL)(Non-OEIT)
    • Departmental staff
  • We need to get these groups together
• Strategies for understanding student needs
  • More proactive than faculty at searching out assistance
  • Survey (electronic)(web form)
  • Collecting trends at the HD
  • Student needs are different/distinct from faculty needs
  • Email / phone call
• Aggregate and respond to all the disparate feedback that comes in via a myriad of services (feedback emails, help desk, phone calls)
  • Leverage the student advisory board

Still on "Understanding need":

1. Determine a method for aggregate feedback from different existing sources; assess and respond to these trends
   • Help Desk
   • Student Advisory Board
   • Feedback email
   • Phone calls
     • Different approaches for faculty and students
2. Have all the existing liaison groups start meeting regularly (OCW, Libraries, RMs, etc.)
3. Evaluating and improving our existing communication vehicles for faculty and students

Sidebar notes during "Report Out"

• Video "wizard" (decision tree to help faculty decide on service/approach)
• Dynamic "who does what" list by topic/service
• Should "user group coordination" (by topic) be formal ACCORD responsibility?
• Liaison Partners group
• Faculty focus groups (perhaps that is a "panel discussion"?)
• Communication hierarchy by topic?

"Missing in Charter" / Questions

• Decision making power of ACCORD?
• We ARE the champions
• How does ACCORD related to other groups, e.g. IT-SPAARC? Governance process?
• Achieving transparency
  • Know what services exist and the types
    • Storefronts
    • Backend
  • These groups should be communicating!
    • Set a date [ ]
    • Clearing house
    • Details
• Human contact -> Relationship, high-touch contacts/liaisons can be wildly expensive
• Graduate vs Undergraduate Education
• The Research question (To add more detail, what I said was that to me (and maybe to some of our users) the phrase "academic computing" seems to include research as well as teaching, so I would expect our group to deal with both.  And others commented that to them the lines of classes/research can be blurred (e.g. UROPs, graduate thesis work).--Kate McNeill-Harman

What ACCORD will do

1. Capture ideas, synthesize, communicate back to today's workshop attendees and on ACCORD web site
2. Recommend next steps -> "Top 3" actions
3. Moira list ( ? )
4. Provide more granular list of activites
5. Resurrect EdTech partners
6. Roadmap
   • Compile and distribute
   • Work and people
7. Departmental people