Where the rubber meets the road
Thursday, April 09, 2009
The definition for “where the rubber meets the road” calls up these examples:
- when you get to the action
- when you get busy
- when it gets serious
Nothing could be more accurate in describing where the CIO Office is now in the IT Strategic Planning Process. The Chancellor’s overall campus strategic plan has been developed. The IT strategic planning sessions are done. The crafting of IT strategic priorities and initiatives is complete. And the drafting, vetting and redrafting phase is past.
Now, campus is working in earnest to define the strategies for achieving the ambitious goals in the IT strategic plan. With a dozen strategic priorities and roughly 35 proposed initiatives, our work is cut out for us. This is a campus IT plan, and it will take the involvement, enthusiasm and leadership of a wide variety of committees, schools, departments and individuals to bring the plan to fruition.
The Community of Educational Technology Support (ComETS) is one of the campus groups taking the lead to develop the implementation strategies for the initiatives that fall under each of the following strategic priorities. Details of their work to-date can be found the strategic planning web site.
Strategic Priority: Support teaching, learning, outreach and public service with appropriate technologies.
Initiatives:
- Equip classrooms and learning spaces with needed instructional technologies
- Find ways to accommodate large-scale online testing needs
- Create consistent, user-friendly interfaces on major campus services
- Offer a foundational suite of instructional technologies for all faculty/instructors
- Provide accessible, timely technology support for faculty/instructors at the local level
Strategic Priority: Support teaching, learning, outreach and public service with successful approaches.
Initiatives:
- Broadly research which instructional technologies have a demonstrated impact on learning and distribute results/best practices accordingly.
- Continue to support an innovation “incubator” on campus that enables faculty/instructors to research and evaluate instructional technologies.
Strategic Priority: Prepare students to learn and work in a technology-enhanced world.
Initiatives:
- Expand the newly developed Computing@UW Orientation for incoming students, which provides them an introduction to the major IT services they’ll use on campus.
- Explore the necessity, cost and value of allowing students to keep access to their UW IT resources after graduation.
Strategic Priority: Advance and sustain faculty, staff and student skills and competencies.
Initiatives:
- Provide multiple vehicles for instructors to develop basic instructional technology skills (e.g., online training, communities of practices, one-on-one, etc.).
Strategic Priority: Support and enhance our technology and service infrastructure for teaching, learning, research, outreach and public service.
Initiatives:
- Create and deploy technologies that help campus outreach organizations achieve their missions (e.g., video conferencing, iTunesU, file formats for making information available to low-tech customers, etc.).
- Provide a standard suite of collaboration tools and services that make it simpler to communicate and exchange information with constituents both on and off campus.
- Create a shared means for managing customer relationships at various points of entry to the University.
Strategic Priority: Support access for non-traditional students and the public (shrink distance for access).
Initiatives:
- Explore ways to make the vast resources of UW-Madison more accessible to the public (e.g., easily searchable across domains of content, minimal technology barriers, etc.).
A full draft of the plan is available at http://www.cio.wisc.edu/plan/draft/.
There are still many opportunities for involvement. Campus staff are urged to review the plan, identify areas of interest, and indicate their willingness (via the URL above) to either lead or participate in some initiatives.