Integrated Technologies Committee 2003

UNAPPROVED DRAFT

September 9, 2003
IHETS Board Room

Present:Fred Nay, Ball State University (Chair)
Wayne Bohn, University of Southern Indiana
Michael Gay, Purdue University
Abu Moniruzzaman, Bob Sorenson, Ivy Tech State College

Staff:
Tim Fisher, Max Gordon, Deanna Kern, Dave King, Dave Kaufman, Tim Ping, Kevin Siminski, Ed Stockey, Sarah Toney, Betty Hart

Nay called the meeting to order at 1:30 p.m. and stated that everyone has been coping with many changes since the passing of Ed Tully.

Position Description for Ed Tully
King announced that Tully’s position would be split with Tim Ping now serving as the Interim Director of Operations for IHETS business and Kevin Siminski as Interim Director of Operations for ITN business. King stated that they are both doing an excellent job of working together since many responsibilities crossover while a national search is being conducted during this six month period.

Portal Presentation – Dave King
At the end of July the assessment and the design phase of the project and that was funded for $125,000 from the Lilly Endowment and that was matched by 10 organizations and you will see the names on the screen with another $115.000. What we did during that process was to do the needs assessment and go out with 24 focus groups and factor that information in to a design, create a prototype and develop a business case for the statewide learning portal. For those online you may go to ihets.org and type portal in the search engine you will be able to follow along.

King will be meeting with Sarah Cobb from the Lilly Endowment tomorrow at IHETS to discuss CEO level presentations.

The background starts with silos and there are many silos in the state of Indiana but predominately they run K12, Higher Ed and Life Long Learning. Silos help you focus your resources and target audiences but they also have a downside in that as learners and students come to us they don’t really spend a lot of time worrying about where those pieces of information and learning resources may be. The idea is to take advantage of what we are calling the digital learning space, like a market place and once you get inside your can go across the spectrum, from library to K12 to higher ed, etc. These are the folks who put money on the table with the exception of the department of education and they are such a critical player that we decided to keep them with us. But when we get serious about spending money the workforce development folks the folks in commerce and YMCA, all have various learning opportunities available. These folks will be the charter members and we will bring on other partners as we go along. We worked across two spectrums; one was the learning life cycle assuming that you should be able to provide access across the full learner life cycle from preschool to K12 to higher education and adult life long learning and in doing so you would have a certain number of functions that you would provide. The functions become more obvious as we go along but these are the eleven functions. In doing the needs assessment we found the needs that were characterized by the folks in the 24 focus group. We found 161 discreet and separate things that they thought they needed. We took the 161 and boiled that down to 11 functions that will satisfy the spectrum of needs. Why do people go to a shopping mall so they can see and compare products side by side? We would bring our digital learning space to a shopping mall because of traffic.

A portal is an access point on the World Wide Web and provides access to multiple sites it is dramatically different from a web site. Portals are more expensive to build but they are less costly to maintain over time. We are talking about creating a significant infrastructure up front which will allow people to create their own web sites. The learner age in the state of Indiana is everybody over the age of 4 and up is 5.7 million people and what we are talking about instead of having 30 web sites is the possibility of having 5.7 million people discreetly operated web sites delivering exactly what people want exactly at the time they want it and if it doesn’t they will change it to make it what they want. The infrastructure under this can be very expensive but it can have a simply stated purpose, single sign-on. When you have a single sign-on you are creating an opportunity and a value to the learners in the state of Indiana.

A Middleware enabled environment allows for a trust relationship so if someone enters through the cooperative extension area and is taking courses there and then because they are in the digital learning space they decide to take a course on ICN and don’t want to download all their personal data over to ICN but they still want to take that course. Middleware enables this trust relationship and allows the players in the portal to interact with each other at an organizational level. The CES person that is coming over to take that ICN course has provided 6 or 7 pieces of personal information, the origination institution of the ICN course says I need to know 6 things about you before I can let you take my course. In this case ICN asks CES if they know 6 things about this person CES says yes and ICN says I trust you and the person takes the course.

A portal works with a framework and you can add access points which are called port let’s to take you where you need to go. We structure the framework and then let people come in and take a look and building the port lets the way they want.

A demonstration of a guest homepage followed.

For further information you may go to ihets.org and at the search type in portal and it will take you to 35 portal documents and a 15 page synopses report that was submitted to Lilly. The budget is approximately 10-12 million dollars in implementation costs and an approximately $800,000-1m in annual maintenance cost. Our goal is to create a proposal for the 10-12m for outside funds and then have 10-15 partners contribute the $800,000-1m estimated annual maintenance expense. The proposal calls for a 3 year start-up and after 3 years the 15 partners will have to provide the sustainability over time.

The management and partnership committees will observe a similar presentation as will Scott Massey of the Humanities Council, Sue Ellen Reed, of The Department of Education.

Price decrease of DS3 circuit – Tim Ping
An announcement was made at the ITN Steering Committee on September 4 that there would be a price reduction on DS3’s.

  OLD NEW
45m 12k 9k
15m (Burstable) 8k 7k
5m 7k 5k

Tl’s will remain the same with an effective date of September 1, 2003.
For those institutions having a credit or a refund contact IHETS to resolve this issue.

Currently available within the state through ITN are 5m, 15m and a full 45m.

Sarah Toney volunteered to outline an email to ITC members and anyone interested in a sharing opportunity to discuss future plans for 2004 at IHETS.

Desktop capability for ITC members – Tim Ping
Ping stated that this has been a topic in the past and that current pricing has been obtained from Polycom. For a video desktop unit the cost is $381.00 per unit. IHETS would be willing to assist in getting this setup for anyone needing help or participating in a group buy if anyone is interested. This will also be offered to IPSE group as well.

Gay stated his concerns on this issue and suggested that IHETS purchase maybe 12 units and loan them out for 30 days to see if this is something that would work for them and would be willing to purchase. Also the application sharing and immediate delivery component is lost when you are on the phone for a meeting and we need to make sure that from this room that a presentation can adequately support a T120 application desk top sharing medium is effective. At the majority of the meetings a presentation is made.
Clairpoint was suggested as a very valuable tool.

Nay suggested that the next ITC meeting be held via video conferencing
for those wanting to participate.

Sorensen recommended publishing the agenda 2 weeks prior to the meeting.
Gay made a suggestion to have institutions present new technologies that they are using for learning or exploring and out of that some interesting discussions may develop for new ideas and direction from this committee.

A recent topic suggested for discussion by Siminski is the worm viruses. There was a minimal impact from Ball State while Texas AM was shut down, obviously Ball State is doing something right. The private institutions and others would be interested in knowing what you are doing right. This is an example of a topic for immediate discussion via video conferencing, streaming and made available online for immediate use.

Toney will email everyone regarding brainstorming ideas for the next meeting. Nay will present Ball State’s infrastructure at the next meeting scheduled for November 11, 2003 via video conferencing.

Siminski shared that an RFP is being developed for the dark fiber services of the backbone, a letter of intent has been sent to the Indiana Department of Administration to secure a liaison assigned to the project. The next step is the procurement and within the next 2 months we could see an RFP. A foundation has been secured for several of the optical pieces, architecture and questions on the last mile. Siminski will continue to report with updates and a presentation within the next 2 months to the ITC.

Future agenda items -
H350
Stockey reported that the IP Task Force plans to have a full discussion dedicated to H350. It will also become part of the discussion about the dial plan and directory services. Stockey shared that IU is an all Polycom institution and Polycom directory services.
We are using FVC First Virtual click-to-meet statewide and they have taken the first step in that the under pinning of H350 is Ldap, the light weight directory access protocol. H350 was just approved on August 4th .

Stockey extended an invitation to the ITC members to attend the Video Task Force meetings.

The meeting adjourned at 2:45 p.m.