Higher Ed IT Takes on Cyberthreats

Cyberthreats have become an increasingly difficult threat to defend against, particularly on college campuses, where systems need to be as open as possible for students. What makes it even more challenging for higher-ed IT departments is that the end users are usually the biggest problem.

“I’m an old military guy—or I should say I’m a young military guy—and one of the things I’ve learned is that security is as strong as its weakest link,” Keith McIntose, vice president and chief information officer (CIO) at the University of Richmond, Richmond, VA, said in an article for EducationDive. “You know, we use a chain analogy. It requires everyone who is accessing information on our network—faculty, staff, and students—to be security-aware.”

End users are most often the ones who either use unsecure passwords or click on suspicious links, allowing hackers to gain access. Students are natural targets, but staff and faculty who have access to institutional and proprietary data can be a bigger risk.

The University of Dayton, Dayton, OH, has launched a campaign to reinforce the idea that everything done on the Internet is a potential security risk. The Dayton IT department runs regular phishing tests, sends updates and warnings, and offers incentives and prizes to people who participate in the program.

“Our goal here is that this is no different than any athlete training for the toughest competition,” said Thomas Skill, associate provost and CIO at Dayton. “Every day, the bad guys out there are coming up with newer, better, smarter, faster ways to trick us into doing stuff, so we’ve gotta be exercising every day with our effort to understand when we can recognize a phish and when we can’t, and we’re tracking all the data on what we’re doing here.”

Computers Consume the Most Bandwidth

College and university IT departments know students using smartphones and tablet computers to play games or stream movies eat up plenty of bandwidth. However, traditional computers are the biggest bandwidth hogs, according to a new report from the Association for College and University Technology Advancement and the Association of Colleges and University Housing Officers-International.

The survey of IT leaders, housing officers, and business officers at more than 360 colleges and universities for 2016 State of ResNet found that computers consumed 58.6% of the bandwidth used on campus. Tablet computers came next, at 57.7%, and mobile phones were third at 55.2%.

Participants were asked to rank devices by the severity of bandwidth consumption on a 1-10 scale with 8-10 being the area that used the most. The 58.6% result is down from the 76.5% the category registered in 2015, but it was the second year in a row that traditional computers topped the list.

“In previous years of the study, tablets were forecast as the largest bandwidth consumer in the years to come,” wrote authors of the report. “However, these past two years show a change as desktop and laptop computers take over the top spot and are now gateways to many disruptive applications, which may require even more bandwidth than ever before. Through these devices, students have found a larger canvas for complex games, virtual learning, 3-D modeling software, computer animation, or simply storing photos and videos.”

Nearly 49% of the IT professionals surveyed said that media devices such as Roku and Apple TV were in the severe 8-10 range, while gaming systems rounded out the top five at 41.9%. Just 7.4% of the respondents put e-readers in the 8-10 category.

Gen Z Shows Little Interest in IT Careers

The young men and women who make up Generation Z expect and demand that their mobile devices work seamlessly and are integrated into every aspect of their lives. The problem is, new data suggest they have little interest in making information technology a career.

According to a survey conducted by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), 70% of teen and young adult respondents said they “love technology,” but only 19% of those aged 18-24 said they were interested in an IT career. In addition, 21% of those aged 13-17 said they were not interested in IT as a career.

“On the surface, it seems like the affinity for technology is a great thing for the future workforce, since technology will be so intertwined with business,” the CompTIA report said. “However, most students are not eyeing a career in IT as a result of their technology learnings.”

The lack of interest is particularly troublesome for colleges and universities that are increasing the use of technology to handle everything from enrollment to graduation rates, according to a report in eCampus News. Stanford has even made a national plea for experts in the field of data science, and innovators are creating departments on campus focused on data science, and IT management.

While the survey of Generation Z proved disappointing, there may be good news on the horizon. A January online survey from The Harris Poll found that while most parents of K-12 students discourage their kids from becoming teachers in science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) subjects, 50% identified engineering as the career they would most prefer their children pursue.

Campus IT Pros See Bright Future for OER

The 2015 Inside Higher Ed Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology found that 92% of responding faculty and 97% of administrators agreed that open educational resources (OER) should be used more in the classroom. Now, the informational technology pros on campus have chimed in.

The Campus Computer Survey found that 81% of responding technology officers said OER will be an important source of instructional material in the next five years. They also said that 38% of their institutions are encouraging faculty to use OER, up from 33% just a year ago.

The top priority for campus IT officials is helping faculty members integrate information technology into their lessons, according to a blog post in The Chronicle of Higher Education. However, the report also found that just 17% of campuses include instructional IT as part of the faculty review and promotion process.

“This is what IT officers think is important, but then we’ve got the continuing struggle,” said Kenneth C. Green, founding director of the survey. “Why is it that we don’t recognize the faculty members who do that as part of review and promotion?”

Providing user support and having qualified IT staff were next on the priority list, followed by network security and leveraging IT for student success.

Pros, Cons of Cloud Computing

In a June report, Educause ranked cloud computing third on its list of the top IT issues facing higher education. Yet, a Gartner report predicts that 30% of organizations using software as a service, such as for e-mail, will switch back from the cloud to on-premises systems in the next year.

In an article for Information Week, David Crain, assistant provost and chief information officer at Southern Illinois University, explained some of the reasons why his institution is headed back to on-premises service, at least for e-mail.

The university has been using cloud services for the last two years, but Crain found that discounts the institution receives on most technology made cloud services far more expensive than alternatives. He noted that the downtime in cloud service has been “consistently and significantly higher than we experienced with the on-premises solution.” Cloud security issues and the amount of bandwidth consumed are also concerns.

Crain said schools looking into cloud services should investigate private and community cloud offerings, costs, and the complexities of integrating services. He also advised against signing a long-term contract or using a cloud service without a strong service agreement.

Facing Accessibility Issues Head On

Keeping up with the rapid pace of technological change can be daunting, but on campus it too often comes at the expense of disabled students. Things don’t have to be that way, according to accessibility experts who discussed proactive IT solutions with Campus Technology.

“There is a lot of pressure on IT because of budget cuts and being asked to do more with less, so it is easy to ask what the payoff is for [making technology accessible],” said Greg Kraus, IT accessibility coordinator, North Carolina State University, Raleigh. “But what is the cost of not doing it? It’s like people who don’t buy insurance until something bad happens, and then say, ‘Oh, I guess I should have bought insurance.’”

First, few schools have accessibility requirements built into their IT procurement process. NC State is an exception, requiring every IT product to be evaluated for accessibility. Kraus complies with the requirement by adding his own research to the information provided on the voluntary product accessibility template (VPAT) form that most vendors supply on each product.

“They can be a starting point, but they are self-disclosing and not independently verified,” he said. “I always get my hands on the product and do my own testing.”

Second, faculty must be able to develop content that every student can access. Penn State University is working to help instructors understand the issues of students with visual and audio impairments and make developers available to help faculty develop online courses.

“I go to meetings and help developers design for accessibility,” said Anita Colyer Graham, manager of access for the Penn State online campus. “Often, it’s not that they are reluctant—they are unaware of accessibility design issues.”

Finally, a systemwide approach should be put in place to promote the sharing of problems and solutions. The California State University system created its Accessible Technology Initiative (ATI) to help set goals and deadlines for improvements, such as its Roadmap for Accessibility in Postsecondary Institutions, which was created to develop a plan to institutionalize accessibility and measure the progress across the system’s campuses.

Because of the ATI program, most CSU campuses have purchased web-evaluation tools that have resulted in cost savings. Cal State Northridge and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo even worked with the evaluation tool to develop accessibility checkpoints that check web pages and applications used by the system. In addition, CSU is working on systemwide services to provide captioning for course videos.

“We are also piloting RoboBraille, which allows users to submit text materials and receive them back in a variety of accessible formats,” said Cheryl Pruitt, director of the ATI program.

An observation on stores, libraries and IT

I made an observation recently at the ALA meeting during a panel for SPARC/ACRL. It is one I have made before, but this time I have gotten a few comments back, so I thought it might be worth sharing more broadly. Having experience in academic IT, libraries, and college stores, I have observed that these three groups have some very common interests and overlap. There is a challenge to our working together effectively though. That challenge is a conflict in values. Put in its simplest and most sterotypical form, that conflict of values plays out as follows:

- Libraries want to give everything away for free
- IT departments want to control access to everything
- College stores want to charge for everything

These fundamental value differences and stereotypes (based somewhat in reality) make it difficult for these three groups to come together to work on collaborative solutions for the benefit of the whole. The days of stovepipes in higher education must necessarily come to an end, however. That means we must find ways to overcome weaknesses or leverage the opportunities that come from these distinctly different value systems -- and the resulting skills and biases that come with them. As some institutions are finding, there is great advantage to be realized for students in doing so.

Does your campus have a group that meets regularly to discuss the future of digital content on campus? Does that group include the above three stakeholder groups, plus faculty, students, and others? What is your campus strategy for the transition to digital?