The permanent shift to blended learning means colleges and universities must make a significant and ongoing investment to meet demand. Institutions need to ensure that students, faculty, and staff have seamless and secure access wherever they are.
During Fierce Education’s recent virtual event, Higher Education: Technology Profiles in Success, Dr. Ivon Foster-McGowan, Executive Director for Instructional Technology at the University of Alabama (UA) discussed how they met the challenges of the pandemic and began an expansion of capacity that continues today. The university has approximately 38,645 enrolled students of which 6,000 are in online programs. With more than 7,000 employees and 300 buildings on 1,200 acres, keeping up with network demand is an ongoing challenge.
Some university staff had experience in operating in crisis conditions as they had experienced a devastating tornado several years earlier. However, the depth and breadth of the pandemic put the staff and faculty to the test. They were near the end of the spring semester when the first lockdowns were announced in 2020 and they were able to conclude the semester online. During the summer, they began a significant expansion with additional bandwidth, network infrastructure, increased software applications, hardware, and devices.
Dr. Foster-McGowan was surprised to learn in the last few weeks of the semester, how many students depended on the computer labs for devices and access. Through existing relationships with their partners, they were able to develop a loaner program for laptops and webcams to replace access to the closed labs. The IT teams were also able to reactivate the ethernet connections in the dorms that they had disconnected the previous year. This expanded both wireless and wired connectivity for students.
Some of the other immediate changes they made included:
- Accelerating deployment of Microsoft 0365 cloud
- Activating Microsoft Teams earlier than planned
- Issuing 804 Cisco softphones so university offices could take calls remotely
- Initiating hotspot procurement as the campus is in a rural area and they needed to support both faculty and students in the surrounding area.
Eighty-six percent of the faculty were already using the Blackboard LMS, but the tech teams scaled up to handle heavier traffic. Over the summer they installed web cameras in every classroom, some of which had no previous audio-visual equipment or computers. In order to provide 24/7 support to off campus students and faculty, Dr. Foster-McGowan said they used a third party to expand coverage to nights and weekends as the university went fully online. Although they supported Zoom, very few instructors had an account. They created 3500 accounts within a week and now have converted to a self-service model that faculty can self-service.
Current and Future State
Today the university maintains 11,000 wireless access points and supports 65,000 devices daily. Many of the faculty and staff desktops were replaced with laptops, creating a mobile workforce. Continuing to focus on capacity is necessary as demand expands with new software requirements, new technologies, such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality and any other new technologies that will be necessary for teaching and learning and non-teaching support. “We need to keep pace with high performance computing needs and capacity for our students, faculty, and researchers, so that we remain at the forefront of our work,” said Dr. Foster-McGowan.
For more articles from the event see:
Technology Takes Center Stage in the Decision-Making Process
Ensuring Engagement: Reaching and Keeping Students’ Attention