Recommendations
Following is the complete list of detailed recommendations from the reports. Readers are directed to the Recommendations section of the Commission Report for a contextual synopsis.
INFRASTRUCTURE
A. Upgrading the Campus Physical Infrastructure
1. Upgrade building wiring as needed to provide the capacity to support up to one (1) Gigabit per second (Gbit/s) connectivity to end-user locations, with minimum desktop performance of 100 Megabits per second (Mbit/s). This upgrade will take several years to complete, and should start soon and be sustained until completed.
2. Upgrade the campus backbone network to provide backbone bandwidth capacity to support ten (10) Gbit/s of aggregate service. This upgrade, including fiber optic cable, electronics, and necessary physical provisioning, should begin immediately.
3. Upgrade our external connectivity to provide sufficient levels of commodity and Internet2 connectivity in light of anticipated traffic growth stemming from increased demand and removal of artificial bottlenecks as the preceding upgrades are realized.
4. Coordinate efforts with the State of Michigan, telecommunications providers, peer universities, and the regional business community to locate a Network Access Point (NAP) in the southeast Michigan area, preferably in Ann Arbor.
5. Equip a much larger number of classrooms than at present with network access and a significant number of classrooms across the campus with multimedia access.
6. Maintain and enhance the important asset of the Media Union, which was created to facilitate advanced experimentation in the use of the new media by students, staff, and faculty. It is vital that the technology in the Media Union be kept at the leading edge, and that the professional experts who can use, demonstrate, and teach the skills to apply that technology be retained.
B. Experimental Deployment and Evaluation of Emerging Technologies
1. Pilot Wireless Infrastructure Initiative: Start a focused Pilot Wireless Infrastructure Initiative to test the deployment of wireless networking on a large campus for planning and evaluation of a future pervasive campus installation.
2. Advanced Technologies and Services for Emerging Applications: Develop pilot projects and prototype demonstrations of services and technologies that support high performance research and instructional applications. This initiative is meant to exploit the full potential of emerging infrastructure and computing capabilities.
3. Voice over IP Initiative: Develop a plan to exploit the rapid convergence of voice and data networks into a “universal network,” and to test the widespread deployment of Voice over IP technology to replace the University’s legacy telephone system.
C. Unbundling of Services and the Establishment of Pricing Guidelines
1. The backbone network should be viewed as a strategic asset of the University. It should be provided to the campus as a commodity service with minimal bundling or tying with other services.
2. The idea of unbundled services should be a framework for pricing and cost allocation decisions. This approach should balance those services that are provided in a “common good” manner through central funding, and those specialized and/or advanced services that are cost-recovered via chargeback systems.
3. A “Campus IT Pricing and Services Commission” should be formed at a senior strategic level to advise the University executive officers on IT service and pricing recommendations.
4. A monitoring and measurement infrastructure should be deployed to aid in the collection and analysis of short-term and historical data for use in service measurement pricing and allocation decisions.
D. Organizational Structure and Governance
1. Executive and central IT leadership, with the cooperation of the campus IT organizations, must refocus to support the collaborative upgrade of the campus information infrastructure.
2. Central IT administration and the Provost’s Office must begin to negotiate and initiate a concerted campus-wide building infrastructure upgrade plan with Deans and Directors.
3. IT Administration must streamline and optimize key committees such as the Strategic Directions Group (SDG) and the IT Federation. These groups should be coordinated with IT leadership to ensure that their input and counsel are provided to the executive officers.
4. IT Administration must extend working corporate partnerships in IT for key areas of infrastructure development at all levels. Some areas for increased corporate partnership include the Pilot Wireless Infrastructure Initiative, campus-wide software licenses, campus-wide high performance end-to-end networking, and Voice over IP telephony.
E. Creation of a Campus-wide Security and Information Assurance Function
1. Ensure the security and privacy of valuable digital records and assets across campus through rigorous and continuous assessment of policies and practices on an ongoing basis.
2. Ensure implementation of baseline security in the University-wide IT infrastructure and services shared by both academic and administrative environments.
3. Establish mechanisms to ensure that “preventive IT security measures are available” to the entire campus.
4. Establish a “Crisis Response Team” representing campus IT service providers to coordinate a University-wide response to potential technology-based attacks or mishaps.
F. The Recruitment, Training, and Retaining of IT Professional Staff
1. The University must develop innovative compensation packages to reward excellence and to maintain a degree of parity with industry in recruiting and retaining professional IT staff.
2. The University should create internship and training programs, partnership programs, and transition programs to move recent graduates and support staff into IT professional roles.
WHAT WE TEACH AND HOW WE TEACH
Faculty and graduate students: Creating a new institutional environment for learning about the information revolution
A. Physical and Human Infrastructure
1. The University should make it a priority to equip a much larger number of classrooms than at present with network access and a significant number of classrooms across the campus with multimedia access.
2. The University should invest significant incremental resources to ensure that technical help is available to maintain equipment in working order and that instructional help is available to work in a “side-by-side” model for faculty and graduate students seeking to use information technology in teaching.
3. All support staff should be competent with information technology in their areas of responsibility. New hires should be required to have this competency; staff in place should be required to upgrade their skills to competency. The University should provide the training programs that will enable this.
B. Dissemination and Coordination
4. The University should create structures in which faculty, along with student and staff collaborators, work together and share their discoveries and expertise about information technology and teaching.
C. Support Structures
5. The University should establish processes by which faculty apply for release time specifically in order to establish or improve the instructional technology component of a new or existing course or to participate in the curricular development of new minors or concentrations on some aspect of the information revolution.
6. Departmental, college, and school executive committees should accept innovative and effective teaching, pedagogical research, and research with instructional technologies as a positive aspect of a tenure or promotion file.
7. Issues of intellectual property with regard to courses delivered by faculty and distributed by means of information technology should be clarified in ways that respect the interests of the faculty and the University.
8. The University should make target-of-opportunity funds available to hire faculty whose area of scholarship is in the information revolution, broadly conceived. These faculty should be cross-appointed to at least two disciplines or programs. These appointments should be distributed across the University.
D. Graduate Students
9. Graduate students should be given numerous and wide-ranging opportunities to work with faculty in developing uses of information technology in courses and in developing courses/curricula about the information revolution.
10. A number of centralized information technology facilities, available to graduate students and particular to their needs, should be established. These facilities should be devoted to areas of scholarly expertise that students from a variety of disciplines can draw on (e.g., the current GIS facility, computational modeling, large-scale database analysis, etc.).
Undergraduate Students and Learning Outcomes: Creating a new institutional environment for learning about the information revolution
A. Undergraduate Programs
11. Every undergraduate program should ensure that the significance of information technology and the information revolution is adequately and appropriately reflected in the program’s curriculum.
12. Schools and colleges should be encouraged to adopt an “information revolution across the curriculum” approach to the teaching of the information revolution and information technology.
B. Learning Outcomes
Understanding the information revolution and evaluating its “information”
13. Curricula at the University of Michigan should enable students a) to evaluate information and its reliability in a critical fashion; b) to incorporate information into a field of knowledge so that it serves a specific purpose or intellectual goal; c) to gain an understanding of the some of the cultural, economic, political, social and psychological implications of the information revolution and to grasp the legal and ethical issues it raises.
Fluency and conceptual skills
14. Schools and colleges should develop introductory information technology courses for credit that will realize the three learning outcomes outlined in recommendation 13. Sufficient sections should be made available to all students who wish to take them.
15. At the same time, the University should develop, perhaps through ITCS or CRLT, or through college and school learning centers, a series of non-credit workshops for students that address these learning outcomes. These workshops might also be made available to faculty, staff, and graduate students.
Multimedia communication
16. The University should develop an interdisciplinary concentration or major in multimedia studies (c.f., Fathom). Possible participants in the concentration might come from, but need not be limited to, the School of Information, the School of Art and Design, the School of Music, the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Film and Video, Communications, and English.
17. The concentration or major should include a series of two or three well publicized introductory or sophomore level courses open to large numbers of students not concentrating in multimedia studies.
Collaboration using information technology
18. All departments and programs should examine ways in which collaboration, including collaboration using information technology, can become both an activity and a learning outcome in their courses.
19. CRLT should mount workshops, in as discipline-specific a manner as possible, that demonstrate effective strategies for structuring and enabling student collaboration and that enable faculty and GSIs to understand and to teach undergraduates which collaborative tools are appropriate in different circumstances.
RESEARCH
1. To advance research in the digital age, the University should aggressively invest and build leadership in a broad set of integrated technical and social initiatives to understand and use new information technology tools more profoundly in its mission of knowledge creation, dissemination, preservation, and application. The development and use of “knowledge networks” can serve as a guiding idea. The required strategy has three elements: increasing research about information technology and the information revolution, increasing research using information technology, and exploiting the synergy between these two modes:
a. Research about fundamental information and communication technologies (ICT) and techniques:
i. capturing, visualizing, mining, manipulating, and storing and retrieving data.
ii. advanced computation and communication activities, such as computer modeling and simulation, high-performance computing, embedded and mobile systems, and distributed processing.
iii. advanced security for data and communications.
b. Research about crucial information and communication technology application areas, which builds on the fundamental areas listed above and takes the next step toward integrated knowledge networks. For example:
i. collaboration technology.
ii. digital libraries.
iii. human/computer interaction.
c. Research using information and communication technology in particular disciplinary or interdisciplinary domains, such as the arts, humanities, life sciences, physical sciences, and social sciences.
2. The University should develop integrated, cross-cutting initiatives towards the development of knowledge networks:
a. Ubiquitous data-rich portals, interactive websites, and data delivery systems.
b. New models for extramural collaboration.
c. Initiatives to increase interdisciplinary activity.
3. Information and communication technology research should be fostered by improved infrastructure, development of specialized resources, and enhancing support, including:
a. Development of a distributed but coordinated infrastructure to support information and communications technology for research.
b. Improving and extending the basic physical ICT infrastructure as well as specialized, high-end technology application services to support research computing.
c. Improving access to technical support and expertise by offering a basic level of support campus-wide, by establishing a single point of contact for those seeking information and communication technology resources.
d. Improve training and credentialing of ICT professionals and students through creation of an ICT Training Institute.
4. Central ICT leadership at the University must:
a. Lead and nurture an effective, interoperative ICT environment.
b. Lead in coordinating innovation and marshalling resources to support it.
5. The University and the schools and colleges must recognize and reward faculty contributions toward the development of leading-edge information technology and communication applications and tools.
E-OUTREACH
1. The University must engage in the knowledge economy with collective vision and foresight.
2. In this vision, the role of the central administration as coordinator, facilitator, leverager, and occasional initiator of e-outreach must be clearly established.
3. The University should pursue multiple modes of outreach—e.g., commercial, sponsored, and service—determining which modes will best advance the mission and express the values of the University in a given situation.
4. The central administration and the schools and colleges must establish incentives and support for those individuals and units who want to participate in this new economy.
5. The University must develop, coordinate, and maintain high-end production capabilities and a robust structure of “distribution channels,” building upon the substantial assets it already holds.
6. The central administration must quickly resolve key policy issues that bear upon digital production and dissemination of information and knowledge:
a. intellectual property policies (ownership).
b. conflict of interest/commitment policies.
c. advertising/endorsement policies.
d. use of the University name/marks.
e. terms of agreement and legal resources (e.g., releases) and awareness of the legal restrictions that apply to digital material and broadcasts.
f. policies and models for external partnerships and agreements.
7. The central administration and the schools and colleges must develop effective mechanisms for vetting all outreach initiatives in terms of finances, legal constraints, academic mission, contribution to on-campus educational and research capabilities, and impact on other units and on the University as a whole.
8. The University should reexamine its relationship to critical learning communities.
9. The University should collectively engage in an aggressive program of experimentation in the area of location-independent instruction or distance learning, and should develop mechanisms for institution-wide sharing of experiences gained from ongoing experiments and mechanisms.
10. The University should take advantage of the collaboration support potential of the new technology to reach out to previously underserved communities, both to extend the university’s benefits and to increase the valuable diversity of views within the University itself.
11. The University should accelerate its development of information technology for the conduct of routine business transactions, for providing information to the public, and for extending the social networks of its faculty, staff, students, and alumni.