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About EDUCAUSE
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EDUCAUSE Honors Outstanding Leaders and Innovative Achievements in Higher Education Information Technology
The EDUCAUSE annual awards recognize exemplary achievement in six areas of higher education information technology: leadership, professional writing, administrative information systems, information technology solutions, networking, and teaching and learning. Winners of the 2004 awards will be honored at the association’s annual conference this October in Denver. For more information on the EDUCAUSE awards program, see www.educause.edu/awards/. To identify sessions at the annual conference in which the award winners will highlight their achievements, see www.educause.edu/E04/Program/2859. The EDUCAUSE Leadership AwardsOne of the most important priorities of EDUCAUSE awards is to encourage and reward individual growth within the profession of higher education information technology management. This program honors prominent leaders for significant achievement and broad influence. The program is sponsored by SunGard SCT, An EDUCAUSE Platinum Partner. Excellence in Leadership—for extraordinary effectiveness, influence, statesmanship, and lifetime achievement, on both individual campuses and the wider higher education community M. Stuart Lynn Lynn’s career has spanned nearly every generation of higher education technology, from his early connection with computers as a graduate student at UCLA in 1958. In each era, he made national contributions that reflected his transformative vision, intellectual integrity, breadth of knowledge, and ability to encourage and develop emergent leaders. In 2001, Lynn came out of retirement from academic life to lead the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as president and CEO, retiring again in 2003. He earlier served as associate vice president for Information Resources and Communications at the University of California Office of the President, as vice president for Information Technologies at Cornell University, in academic and administrative positions at Rice University and the University of California at Berkeley, and as head of IBM’s Scientific Computing Center at Houston. A catalyst and leader in the evolution of generations of higher education networking, Lynn contributed to such important infrastructure initiatives as Bitnet, NYSERNet, NSFNET, the vBNS, Internet2, and Abilene. Most recently, he was a key energizing force and the first president and chair of the board of the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives (CENIC), the consortium of California universities responsible for advanced services networking in support of the Internet2 effort. Throughout his career, Lynn focused on taking technology out of the control of technologists and into the hands of users. He played pioneering roles in the development of campus planning and organizational models and in adapting such models to evolving needs, including early models for distributed computing support; in spearheading software innovations such as Cornell’s Mandarin, Bear Access, and CU-SeeMe projects to support easy information access and communications in the pre-Web era; in leading major initiatives in electronic publishing, the electronic library, and digital preservation, and in digital certification and authentication; and in shaping evolving intellectual property legislation. He orchestrated policy development across complex institutions, such as comprehensive institutional electronic mail and electronic communications policies for the then nine-campus University of California. His service on numerous boards, councils, and professional societies evidenced his wide-ranging interests. In 1994 he was elected a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Lynn holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from Oxford University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California at Los Angeles, all in mathematics. Few leaders in higher education information technology have had such a broad influence on campuses and the Internet community, initiated as many new applications of technology, or mentored as many emergent leaders. In announcing the award, EDUCAUSE President Brian L. Hawkins said, “Stuart Lynn has advanced information technology at four research institutions and a university system, helped shape our international network infrastructure, and, after earning a good rest, returned to lead the Internet’s principal governing entity. For his significant contributions, he is most deserving of this award.” Leadership in the Profession—for exceptionally effective leadership in campus information technology use and management, and the mentoring of other professionals Jacqueline Brown During her professional career of more than two decades, Brown has served effectively at both Princeton University and the University of Washington while mentoring and helping to build a community of IT leaders across the United States and internationally. A strategic and clear thinker, she brings training as a scientist to her enthusiasm for the potential of information technologies. As director of Information Services at Princeton in the late 1980s and ’90s, she demonstrated her hallmark qualities: an ability to find creative solutions to nettlesome organizational problems, an eye for talented staff and commitment to mentoring them through the professional ranks, and a willingness to learn from and advise other institutions about better ways to evaluate and improve the level of user services throughout higher education. At the University of Washington since 1999, Brown’s work has emphasized partnerships and collaboration, first (as director of technology outreach and partnerships) with public and corporate sectors in the region as well as nationally and internationally, then with building innovative teaching and learning partnerships facilitated by participation in advanced networks, and currently through the addition of biomedical and public health areas and international research opportunities to her earlier interests. Over the years, Brown has helped shape the collaborative processes for groups such as the EDUCAUSE Seminars on Academic Computing, CAUSE, and the Educom Educational Uses of Information Technology. She was a major player in the early New Media Centers work and has contributed significantly to Syllabus, the Pacific Telecommunications Consortium, Asia-Pacific Advanced Networks, The Quilt coalition, and Internet2. Throughout her work, she has challenged colleagues to remember that investments in theory need to be borne out in practice, and to focus on the relevant as well as the interesting. Brown holds degrees in astrophysics and library science. EDUCAUSE President Brian L. Hawkins said, “Jacqueline Brown exemplifies a long history of enabling others to excel in the intelligent use of information technology. At Princeton, the University of Washington, and numerous professional forums, as a long-time leader in our profession and with EDUCAUSE, she has been both a partner and a catalyst. By giving her best, she has helped the rest of us give ours.” EDUCAUSE Quarterly Contribution of the Year AwardProfessional growth requires a steady flow of reliable, relevant information. One of the fundamental means for transmitting significant experience among colleagues is through publication in peer-reviewed journals. This award program encourages such effort by honoring unusually effective and well-reasoned articulation of professional experience that will be of use to other institutions and individuals. The program is sponsored by SunGard SCT, An EDUCAUSE Platinum Partner. “Management by Fact: Benchmarking University IT Services,” EDUCAUSE Quarterly, Volume 27, Number 1, 2004 Jennifer Dowling Dougherty William Clebsch Greg Anderson This article describes a cross-institutional effort at MIT and Stanford that resulted in cultural and practical changes in IT management, as well as valuable tools for demonstrating value in IT investments. The authors’ outlining of processes, hurdles (including people and cultural issues), and benchmarking tools, such as “dashboard metrics,” can guide both IT management and IT practitioners. In conferring the award, the EDUCAUSE Quarterly Editorial Committee said, “This articulate, comprehensive, and candid article addresses a topic of nationwide concern among higher education institutions. It provides a roadmap for organizations looking for ways to evaluate how effectively they are performing, with concrete information about fact-based management and accountability approaches that can be essential to survival in the current funding environment.” Read the article. Award for Excellence in Administrative Information Systems (two winners)The backbone of the institution is its administrative and business functions, supporting and linking academic and scholarly activities. This award honors innovative and noteworthy applications or practices that use information technologies to improve the administrative processes of the institution with creativity, efficiency, and effectiveness worthy of emulation. The program is sponsored by SunGard SCT, An EDUCAUSE Platinum Partner. University of California, Irvine The University of California, Irvine (UCI), Web-based PayQuest system was developed by the Administrative and Business Services staff using open-source products to manage the institutional risk of processing payment requests efficiently, to automate approval and payment, and to improve customer service. During a period of rapid campus growth and severe budget reductions, the university had been facing enrollment growth of about 5 percent per year. A two-and-one-half-person accounting office was challenged to process more than 11,000 payment requests per month. The image-enabled request and tracking system The PayQuest system also PayQuest incorporates both the functionality required by campus customers and the most useful features evaluated in comparable vendor products. With its professional look and feel and an impressive number of user-friendly elements such as online access to all imaged receipts, PayQuest is a nearly complete solution to automating a process. It is a front-end system feeding accounts payable in batch mode, thus making it easily portable to other legacy or ERP environments. The PayQuest approach can be modified for any “approval” sequence and is proving to be a springboard for many other forms and processes. Although the initial cost was significant in terms of dedicating existing staff for project management, analysis, and development, the project has resulted in significant payoffs in terms of reduced transaction times, decreased institutional risk, and increased customer satisfaction. Western Washington University Western Washington University (WWU) implemented a simple, highly portable approach to converting paper forms into Web-based transactions with routing and approval functionality. The code on which E-sign is based stores and updates form data in a database, routes the form to the next approver in a sequence, and digitally signs the form. New forms can easily be created using any HTML editor to create a basic Web page, and include a reference to the prescribed routines. All Web pages use the same set of routines, which were developed in approximately one year by one programmer. The E-sign site currently has more than 80 separate forms, with new ones added each month. More than 40,000 E-sign Web forms were submitted during the 2003 calendar year, with no losses. Features that appeal to users include E-sign has proven to be an elegant solution for WWU and potentially many other institutions, remarkable for its simplicity, flexibility, and functional value. According to the award selection committee, "The University of California, Irvine, and Western Washington University projects offer contrasting and complementary ways of managing costly, time-consuming manual approval and paperwork processes. Both approaches can provide useful ideas to different types of higher education institutions." Award for Excellence in Information Technology Solutions (two winners)This program honors original and creative campus projects that apply emerging technologies to improve the scholarship, service, or management practices and policies of the institution or that have the potential for changing the technology infrastructure so that new technology solutions become possible. The program is sponsored by PeopleSoft, Inc., An EDUCAUSE Platinum Partner. eArmyU In 2001, the U.S. Army launched an innovative e-learning program, eArmyU, to serve more than 46,000 soldiers around the world, giving them Web access to over 1,600 courses in 146 degree programs through a consortium of 29 higher education partners. A critical priority for eArmyU is student success in passing courses (goal: successful completion of 80 percent of courses attempted) and completing semester-hour program milestones. Coordinated student support services, critical to meeting these goals, are founded on an innovative, Web-based customer relationship management (CRM) system that streamlines processes and links all vendors and schools in the eArmyU system with two priorities: (1) to offer a single point of student access to comprehensive support for all questions and all users, and (2) to support proactive tracking and outreach to help students meet their program milestones. The CRM solution was designed to be set up quickly, with an inexpensive infrastructure that integrates vendor- and education-partner systems. It allows students and end users to generate a “help-desk case” directly through the eArmyU portal or by calling one 24x7 help-desk phone number and speaking with an agent—the user no longer needs to know which school, vendor, or support staff to call. A help-desk agent can escalate the case to more specialized “tier 2” support anywhere in the world. When the case is closed, the user receives an e-mail with the resolution and can view the full case history in the eArmyU portal. A second powerful innovation is a Distributed Compliance Tracker component, a tool that can be utilized in any environment where progress in meeting milestones must be tracked and flagged. The “behind-pace” component of the compliance tracker system allows an instructor to leverage an entire support network when trying to reach out to a student who is falling behind in a course. The tool coordinates a series of outreach activities, including automated cautionary e-mails, and changes the color of the traffic light indicators on a student’s “case summary” page, signaling program mentors and other student support staff to take action. Through these sophisticated customer service management tools, eArmyU has been able to serve a growing number of students and end users while maintaining relatively constant support staff. More than 100,000 cases were resolved from September 2002 through January 2004, with high student satisfaction. The average time to close a help-desk case has dropped from 11 to 1.2 business days, and help-desk costs per user have dropped from $7 to $3. Sinclair Community College Like most community colleges, Sinclair Community College serves a high proportion of students who require extra support to achieve academic success. During the past three years, an average of 45 percent of the new, degree-seeking students at Sinclair left during their first year. In response, Student Services staff, faculty, and IT staff partnered to develop a technology infrastructure that could tie together processes for identifying at-risk students, providing support, and tracking progress. The resulting Web-based support system for students and counselors includes a screening process that enables the college to determine the students’ risk of failure and provide a Student Success Plan (SSP) for identified at-risk students. The SSP offers assessments, a case-management counseling approach for both new and current students, and transition plans that range from intensive support services to self-service and Web-based systems. The SSP begins with an online screening survey to identify students who need additional support. Such students meet with a counselor to complete a more extensive interview and risk assessment that yield information about their understanding of processes, confidence, learning styles, and motivation. Results are recorded and can be referenced by any counselor who interacts with the student. Counselors and students agree on an SSP that may include courses to be taken, tutoring services to use, financial aid and childcare options, disability services, and other support services provided by the college. The SSP is documented in a password-protected, Web-based tracking system, and a customized to-do list guides students in their next steps. Counselors can add progress notes, record completed tasks, and monitor progress; various service providers across the institution can coordinate activities and follow up as appropriate. The application builds on Sinclair’s former success with implementing a database-driven Web site using content management technologies—authentication and role-definition software modules developed for the Web site were reused for the SSP, ensuring integration with existing systems (including an early-alert process). Since its release in July 2003, more than 2,000 students been served. Surveys show high student satisfaction with the counseling system: they appreciate the collaborative process and the combination of individualized counseling sessions and the ability to track their own progress independently. Research on the tool is providing trend data not available anywhere else in the Sinclair community and has sparked conversations about curricular change that will improve retention. In naming eArmyU and Sinclair CC, the award selection committee said, “Both of these programs reflect exemplary alignment of information technology projects with the overall objectives of the organization. They are proactive, intelligent, comprehensive approaches to the crucial challenge of student retention.” Award for Excellence in Networking: Innovation in Network Technology, Services, and ManagementCrucial to effective use of information technologies on today's campuses is a solid, reliable, pervasive network infrastructure. This award honors innovative programs or practices that improve network infrastructure and architecture, integration, and quality of service on campus or within an educational system, and that have a positive effect on the campus community or a significant subcommunity. The program is sponsored by Cisco Systems, Inc., An EDUCAUSE Platinum Partner. Dartmouth College Over the course of six months in the winter of 2001–02, Dartmouth created a robust, comprehensive 802.11b wireless overlay to the college’s existing wired, switched, fast-Ethernet infrastructure. The project encompassed all campus buildings, outdoor spaces, major auxiliary operations, and selected adjacent residential areas, and involved collaborations among senior academic leadership, key faculty, the alumni advisory group, and the central IT group. The result is a 100-percent wireless environment that supports teaching/learning, research, and daily life and that has pushed all Dartmouth constituents into new modes of activity, thinking, and entrepreneurship. The original technical innovation has provided the matrix for a wealth of spin-off activities. Noteworthy features of this effort include: Dartmouth’s wireless network was one of the earliest such deployments and is larger than many corporate installations. The open network environment, which might not meet security requirements in some organizations, was a deliberate decision to give priority to ease of use for end users; it also allowed technical staff to move quickly with actual physical deployment. The college considers this environment to be a test bed, supporting a wealth of unanticipated benefits and experiments. It has helped foster an overall positive attitude toward computing among users and helped the central IT group’s image with senior leadership. Ongoing progress includes upgrades in the summer of 2004 to increase speed and manageability, and enhanced focus on research/scientific uses as well as support for video. According to the award selection committee, “Dartmouth's wireless initiative reflects planning that is in tune with overall university priorities, exemplary responsiveness to the user community, and interesting and unconventional thinking throughout the deployment that has generated excitement and experimentation across the various campus constituencies.” Award for Systemic Progress in Teaching and Learning—recognizes transformative improvements in the campus teaching and learning culture. It honors replicable, sustainable, technology-based programs and practices that have helped move institutions or systems toward effective, enterprise-wide, learner-centered instructional systems. Embodying the philosophy of the EDUCAUSE National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII), the award is designed to encourage development of new collegiate learning environments that harness the power of information technology to improve the quality of teaching and learning, contain or reduce rising costs, and provide greater access to higher education. This program is expected to contribute to the creation of a base of accepted practice and principles for support of learner-centered teaching and learning. This award is sponsored by SunGard Collegis. Lehigh University Lehigh Lab’s primary objectives are to facilitate innovative undergraduate and graduate teaching that utilizes information and technology to their fullest in a learner-centered environment, to enable faculty to achieve their core teaching goals, and to provide students with the capability to tap into the worldwide reservoir of social, economic, scientific, and political knowledge. The Lab fosters collaboration by showcasing best practices across departments, disciplines, and colleges. Lehigh’s libraries provide the essential content needed for curricular innovation and development. A novel, scalable approach to the strategic organization of human resources and technological infrastructure, it relies on a number of effective supporting elements: According to the award selection committee, “Lehigh Lab has brought together disparate units from across the university in a coordinated fashion and truly changed the institutional culture. The effort is a mature, transferable model of viewing the entire institution as a learning laboratory.” About EDUCAUSE
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| Unless otherwise noted, EDUCAUSE holds the copyright on all materials published by the association, whether in print or electronic form. In certain cases the work remains the intellectual property of the individual author(s) (see Special Circumstances). Content from conference speeches, presentations, blogs, wikis and feeds reflect the opinions of the author, and not necessarily those of EDUCAUSE or its members. | |||||
EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. The current membership comprises more than 2,200 colleges, universities, and educational organizations, including 250 corporations, with 17,000 active members. Learn more about EDUCAUSE at