Best Practices in Higher Education Information Resources 1998 Award Winners

Professional Development category - University of Virginia

Computing Survival Skills Certification Program

Piloted in the fall of 1997, the University of Virginia's Computing Survival Skills has already proven to be an effective approach to training a distributed support staff, using an exceptionally well organized process, rich training materials, and instructors with vast technical expertise.

Based on the concept of providing computer support closer to the need, the primary purpose of the program is to build expertise in basic computing skills and knowledge among departmental administrative support personnel who dedicate about 10 percent of their work time to computer support. After completing eighteen hours of workshops and six hours of independent study over a six-week period, participants earn a certificate of completion. They also have the opportunity to become certified in Computing Survival Skills by passing a comprehensive exam. Computing Survival Skills offers participants a more sophisticated awareness of computing policies, procedures, and resources; improved problem-solving and troubleshooting skills; and increased work efficiency and productivity.

Basic units covered in this program include the University Computing Environment, Electronic Communications, Hardware and PC Operating Systems, Networking and Connectivity, Macintosh and UNIX Operating Systems, and Modems and Dialup Networking.

Training includes lectures, demonstrations, group discussion, and question-and-answers sessions supplemented by a 600-page reference manual, an instructional Web site, and computing magazine articles. The initial cost—estimated to be $475 per person—is expected to drop to about $275 per person over time: costs of internal resources to support the program are minimal compared to the direct benefit it brings at the department level.

Applications category - Indiana University

Expanded Grade Context Record

Since the beginning of academic record keeping, readers of transcripts have been bewildered by the variety of grading schemes and often unable to evaluate the academic performance of individual students. In 1994, the IU Faculty Council called for the development of an indexed grading system. The result, introduced this spring, is IU's Expanded Grade Context Record, one of the most innovative and objective approaches to grade reporting in existence.

The philosophy behind the new system is to display sufficient information that the reader can see the academic context in which the grade was given. The Expanded Context Transcript displays traditional elements—course title, academic department, course number, credit hours, and grade—and adds the following:

• Index (number of students in the course section receiving the same or higher grades over the total number of GPA grades awarded)
• Grade distribution (number of students receiving each possible grade, including number and periods of withdrawals)
• Instructor name
• Class GPA (average of all GPA grades awarded in the course section)
• Average student GPA (average GPA of all students in the class who received a GPA grade)
• Majors (percentage of students in the class whose major matches the school or department offering the course)

For privacy purposes, neither the index nor the context information appear when fewer than five students were enrolled in the course section or received a GPA grade.

This project incorporated commonly available data into three new kinds of reports—expanded transcripts and final grade notifications, and a grade distribution report and Web query—that students, faculty, and advisors have all found useful, and that could be beneficial to any higher education institution using a traditional grading system.

The Office of the Registrar worked closely with the Faculty Council to define system requirements, and with the University Information Technology Services (UITS) to code and deploy the application. Registrar personnel developed the user interface components while UITS staff developed the core modules. The use of object-oriented design principles reduced future maintenance and provided for extensibility. The application architecture followed the guiding principles for IU systems development to minimize data redundancy, create standard interface parameters, and encourage customization at the point of service.