University of Minnesota

Institute of Technology

Minutes of the ITICC Meeting,

May 9, 2002

3:35 p.m., 170 Physics

Present: Randal Barnes (CE), John Baxter (Math), Evan Bollig (ITSB), Bryan Carlson (ADCS), Tom Chase (ME), Tracey DeLaney (Astro), John Hall (Math), Peter Hudleston (IT Stud Aff), Phil Kachelmyer (ADCS), Kent Kirkby (Geol), Satish Kumar (ChemEMatS), Larry LeMay (ADCS), Jim MacDonald (CSE, ITLabs), Jeremy Pape (ME)

1) Results of Balloting for Improvements for FY03

Hudleston reported that he had received the votes to approve the proposal for ITICC public lab improvements for the 2003-03 fiscal year. The purchase of new equipment will be made and equipment installed over the summer. Also, work will be started to modify Lind 26 for new computer classroom.

2)         Status of the Labs

Hudleston reported that Lind 26 is no longer open 24 hours a day during the last part of the semester.  24-hour opening was transferred this semester to the new Walter lab.

Carlson noted that there had been problems in ME308 with use of MS Word; ME students with reports involving large numbers of embedded figures were having difficulty saving the files.  Barnes said this was a common and well known problem with Word. He suggested to his students that they save the report as several separate files.

LeMay noted that the MagicWand keyboard has now been purchased and installed, allowing use by those who can’t use  regular keyboards.

Barnes inquired about usage statistics, noting that these were useful to chart changes in use and demand for machines.  Macdonald said that we have been gathering huge volumes of data – automatically querying machine usage every 30 minutes.  Hudleston said we would prepare a summary of this in the fall. He said ITICC has in the past carried out several surveys to get an idea of user usage and satisfaction.  What about the students who don’t use the labs?  Hudleston said he couldn’t recall the details, but the last survey showed usage by freshmen was light and usage by seniors heaviest. Pape said he thought most freshman were unaware of the existence of the labs; they didn’t find them until they took classes in upper division that use them.  He didn’t know about the labs when he first arrived as a transfer student.  Barnes said that in fact the freshman were told about the labs during freshman orientation, although they may not remember.

3)          Discussion of Management Proposals for 2002-03

The proposals for lab management for 2002-03 – one from ADCS and one from Computer Science - had been earlier placed on the web.  MacDonald handed out copies at the meeting. Hudleston said that the proposals represented business “as usual”, with increases to allow for salary increases and a few other changes.  The ADCS proposal has dropped 24-hour coverage of Lind 26 and the cost of security for Lind during the overnight hours. There are, however, added costs for consultants (15% of the total) for running the new Walter Library lab and some consultant hours budgeted for Lind 26 when not used as a classroom.  In the case of the CSci proposal, the only new item is the addition of a documentation administrator, to create and maintain a web page and provide documentation for software.

There was considerable discussion of two elements of the proposals: lab consultants and the documentation administrator.

Chase raised a some concern about the training and preparation of the lab consultants. Is the basic training – 3% of consultant hours, or about 3 hours per consultant - enough? Should there be more, and should there be ongoing training? Hudleston noted that a long-standing problem has been that students expect the consults to serve as TAs and be knowledgeable about the software, which is not what they are there for. Students report finding some consultants unhelpful or lazy.  It seems that some consultants do not report problems with machines so they are not promptly fixed. Would more training in fact help?  Is it an issue of training, or of attitude?  LeMay said it was hard to get good consultants, and the pay was not very attractive.  Students tended to sign up consultants in their senior year and are not around long enough to have much of stake in or knowledge of the operation. Pape suggested getting freshmen involved in the labs early on, and getting some trained as consultants while freshmen.  Those that stick with it would then be highly experienced by the time they were seniors. Barnes thought we had a typical management problem; there are  too many people (about 40) reporting to one supervisor, and there were no reward differentials. MacDonald noted that most peer institutions do not have lab attendants or consultants. Instead they rely on cameras and remote supervision.  He said our first cameras are being installed and we will be able to see how they can help monitoring the labs.

A sub-committee was formed to look into the issue of how improvements in the running of the labs might be made. Members of the committee are Chase (chair), Kachelmyer, Kumar, MacDonald and LeMay. The committee will meet and report in the fall semester.

On the issue of the proposed documentation administrator, Barnes questioned whether such an individual was necessary. He said in his experience no one reads documentation.  MacDonald said that every other Big10 school has a person with this title. He pointed out that we have lots of software that most people are unaware of, and that it is hard to find basic information from the IT web site.  He invited anyone to compare our web site with those of peer institutions.  The fact is we do not have anyone to work on this currently, all staff are busy and they do have the expertise to develop the user-friendly web pages and type of information that is needed.  The skills needed are more in communication than in technical matters.  Hudleston said he believed we badly needed work done on this area, and that it would have to be an add-on position – the funds included in the budget would pay for a student to do this task.  Barnes asked how we would assess whether the efforts into improving documentation were effective.  Hudleston said that this was a good question; one way would be to survey students about aspects of service before and after implementation.

Hudleston said these were important but not urgent issues to address. In order to continue lab operations, we need to proceed with the balloting for the management contracts, as presented to the committee.   He will prepare ballots for an e-mail vote by committee members

4)          Other Business

None