Campus Profile: Sinclair Community College Copyright 1993 CAUSE. From _CAUSE/EFFECT_ Volume 16, Number 4, Winter 1993. Permission to copy or disseminate all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage, the CAUSE copyright and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of CAUSE, the association for managing and using information resources in higher education. To disseminate otherwise, or to republish, requires written permission. For further information, contact Julia Rudy at CAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, Boulder, CO 80301 USA; 303-939-0308; e-mail: jrudy@CAUSE.colorado.edu CAMPUS COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT SINCLAIR COMMUNITY COLLEGE Founded in 1887 by David A. Sinclair as the Dayton (Ohio) YMCA educational program, Sinclair Community College has become one of the leading two-year colleges in the U.S., with an enrollment of over 21,000 students. Sinclair offers one-year certificates and two-year degree programs to prepare students for careers or to transfer to four-year colleges and universities. The College also offers a variety of continuing education opportunities to all who can benefit from its programs and resources, including training and retraining programs for local businesses, corporations, and military installations. Information technology as a critical resource Underlying Sinclair's commitment to leveraging information technology (IT) as a critical resource is the recognition of the importance of information access. A document prepared as part of the institution-wide strategic planning process, Into the Next Millenium, states that "knowledge will be the new capital (primary resource) of 21st-century society, and securing access to knowledge will be viewed as key to how individuals as well as economic, social, and political units achieve their goals." Many other predictions in the report relate to information technology, among them: * Instruction will focus less on the content of knowledge and more on the process of acquiring and managing knowledge. * Among the competencies the curricula will impart are information skills (learning how to acquire, evaluate, organize, maintain, interpret, communicate, and process information) and technology skills (working with a variety of technologies, including selecting and applying appropriate technologies to tasks). * Student support services will rely more on interactive electronic approaches to meeting students' needs, transcending time and place constraints. * Achieving Sinclair's goal of transformation "from teaching to learning" will require ready access to a host of interactive technologies that permit faculty to facilitate student learning in both off- and on-campus settings. Such scenarios in Sinclair's future underscore the importance of continued investment in IT. Sinclair President David Ponitz is quick to point out that his vision includes not only increased technology, but also increased productivity. In the future, he says, "faculty will have to teach more effectively and more efficiently, and use technology to do that." Last summer he issued this challenge to an audience of 325 Sinclair faculty; 276 pledged to accept the challenge. Ponitz believes that "we can't train people for jobs that don't exist anymore; we must train and educate them to live and work in a knowledge society, and we must understand why and how to do that. That is one of our biggest challenges." Organizing for IT management Over the past few years, Sinclair has invested heavily in a technological infrastructure, resulting in a complete change of hardware and operating software; installation of a campus-wide, fiber- optic, TCP/IP-based network; and migration to outsourced administrative applications. Administrative user access has increased from 100 to 600 users and the College has committed to ensuring that every faculty member and administrator has a PC on his or her desk, with connections to the network. According to Edwin Rennie, director of Information Systems and Services, as a result of these stepped-up initiatives a "reengineering" of IS&S has taken place, designed to provide staff positions and an organizational structure to address the changing technological environment and emerging user needs. This change also took place within the context of an institution-wide implementation of total quality management (TQM) principles. The new IS&S organization has been configured in three main divisions: customer support services, systems management, and production services. IS&S staff members are now in the process of developing a mission model for the organization, based on the Waterman and Peters 7-S framework (which is also being used at the institutional level), with the help of an outside consultant.[1] By the end of this year, IS&S expects to have completed a consolidated mission model with direct links to Sinclair's annual performance objectives and measurements process. IS&S reports to Vice President for Administration Stephen Jonas who also oversees, among several other functions, the Learning Resources Center, which includes the library, media services, and the Individualized Learning Center. According to Jonas, it was more serendipity than vision that placed library-related activities in the same line organization as information systems nearly ten years ago when he arrived at Sinclair. But that fortunate decision has resulted in a very strong synergy and cooperative relationship between the LRC and IS&S, and has strongly influenced Sinclair's identification of information access as critical to the future of the campus. Academic computing has for the most part been highly decentralized, with a central applications coordination function (under the direction of William Smith, reporting to Jonas) to ensure some standardization of hardware and software and to support departmental computing needs. Each department maintains its own computing lab, while IS&S is responsible for open microcomputer labs. With the College's intention of formalizing an educational technology plan in the coming year, it is likely that centralized support will be strengthened. Jonas believes it will be more important than ever to "matrix resources, bringing together teams of people to work cooperatively to support campus IT needs." Networking administrative systems Perhaps the most significant catalyst for the reorganization of IS&S was the replacement of the College's homegrown "core" administrative applications with proprietary systems tailored by the vendor to Sinclair's needs. A study conducted by Rennie's group shows that 37 percent of IS&S staff resources have been reallocated from support of core applications and production services to new customer services, now that applications development and maintenance have been "outsourced" to a vendor. Previous systems had been inadequate to meet the needs of students, and administrators were unable to access and retrieve data for decision-making purposes. In the spring of 1989, the College made the decision to invest in an integrated system that would allow all administrative and academic users to have access to and analyze relevant data with minimum help from IS&S staff. The process for investigating the alternatives and putting out an RFP to purchase an existing system, under the leadership of an Information Systems Planning Committee, involved very heavy user participation and lasted more than a year. After a thorough investigation, a contract was negotiated with Datatel, whose student and financial systems have since been implemented (with the exception of the human resources system, phone registration, and a continuing education system, which are in process). Key to the implementation of these integrated systems was ensuring access to them by all administrative and academic users. Thus the IS project called for laying a backbone network to provide connectivity for all buildings at Sinclair. Fortunately, the College's architectural design--a series of interconnected buildings-- facilitated the installation of fiber-optic cable through the existing coaxial cable plant at a minimal cost ($60,000). Users of the administrative systems (faculty and staff alike) now access them via the backbone network through a friendly, menu-driven interface called Office Productivity Network. The query-language tool INFORM helps users run ad hoc reports to retrieve the data they need from the systems. Educational technology initiatives According to Vice President for Instruction Karen Wells, development of a strategic plan for educational technology is a top priority for the College this year. Sinclair's academic programs already are technology-intensive, with widespread use of such technologies as interactive videodisc, simulation, CD-ROM, CAD/CAM, robotics, computer graphics, and electronic music. There is a need, however, to articulate and internalize a College-wide vision for the role IT can and should play to enhance the teaching and learning process. Supported by Sinclair's staff development program (to which the College commits 2-1/2 percent of its budget), last year faculty member Susan L'Heureux spent six months at the Institute for Academic Technology in North Carolina, studying multimedia development and its use in teaching and learning. This fall, she will be offering a course in multimedia to forty Sinclair faculty who have expressed an interest in this area. The committee that oversees distribution of the development program's funds has identified technology and information access as a priority target for study in 1993-94, as has Sinclair's Alternative Teaching Strategies Committee. The College recently proposed to the Ohio Board of Regents the establishment of a regional center for the transformation of teaching and learning for Southwest Ohio, where faculty could go to interact with other faculty and technologists to research how to transform the learning process through IT. Wells says, "Education is the only vocation I know of that hasn't been impacted by IT. We hope to change this, and believe the community college is an appropriate catalyst to foster the research needed for that transformation to take place." Learning Resources Center According to Virginia Peters, director of the Learning Resources Center, Sinclair's decision to connect the campus backbone network to the Internet has proved to be an excellent investment. When staff from the Ohio Supercomputer Center offered a seminar at the College to explain benefits of an Internet connection, it was a "hard sell," but affordable connection costs--thanks to an NSF grant--influenced an affirmative decision. The LRC has embraced with enthusiasm the task of educating campus users about the wealth of information resources now available to them, and how to take advantage of them. To assist in this undertaking, an Internet Users Group was formed. The group holds meetings, demonstrations, workshops, and tutorials, and produces fact sheets about accessing Internet resources. "An information resource is an information resource, regardless of the form it takes," says Peters. "Accessing information via the Internet is no different from accessing information in the traditional library sense; the functions are essentially the same." By next year, Sinclair will be the first community college in Ohio to join OhioLINK, a library automation project being implemented state-wide with software from Innovative Interfaces, Inc. Sinclair currently uses the Dynix library system for its online public access catalog and several other automation modules; these will be converted to the project software. The OhioLINK connection will enable faculty to identify and access resources in any college or university in the state, and to do interlibrary loans and document transfers, including eventual electronic delivery of full text. Vice President Wells believes that OhioLink will have a dramatic impact on the classroom and the curriculum: "If the library becomes the open system this process should create, then we have to ask, what is the role of the instructor? It becomes one of transmitting the knowledge from library to student. I don't think many faculty have looked at the library in quite that way." Partnerships President Ponitz has said, "If your students are really going to be successful, you can't simulate the exercise. It's important for them to work with the technology they will have to work with when they go out into the real world." This value, perhaps as much as any other, has driven Sinclair to seek partnerships with many different, especially technology-related, corporations, to provide the equipment, experience, and training that Sinclair students need to prepare them for their careers. According to Ponitz, "Our natural response is to create partnerships; sharing and leveraging resources and putting together alliances is part of our thinking, it's what we do. We have to." Presently the College is involved in dozens of formal relationships with businesses and corporations, and has functioned as a catalyst for forming consortia of technical organizations and other colleges and universities in the area, such as the University of Dayton, Wright State University, and Central State University. One of the most exciting recent partnerships is one between the University of Dayton and Sinclair Community College which resulted in the establishment of a manufacturing facility for education and training--the Advanced Integrated Manufacturing (AIM) Center--housed in Sinclair's newest campus building. The AIM Center will offer a comprehensive range of interdisciplinary services for manufacturing enterprises to enhance their global competitiveness. Like so many of the partnerships Sinclair has spawned, this one will bring economic development opportunities to the local community from around the world, while providing a full spectrum of educational programs and research opportunities for faculty and students. Undoubtedly, investing in IT requires some significant expenditures, but Ponitz sums it up thus: "You can spend a little here and a little there, or you can invest in something that will really make a difference. We've invested a great deal in giving people access to information; we think that will make a difference." ======================================================================== Footnote: 1 A description of the 7-S model is found in R. H. Waterman, T. J. Peters, and J. R. Phillips, "Structure Is Not Organization," Business Horizons, June 1980, pp. 14-26. ======================================================================== Photo Caption: CWEST (Counseling With Expert Systems Technology) is one of the features of the new kiosks on Sinclair's campus. The system was built by a team of faculty counseling experts and information systems staff from Sinclair with help from the Center for Artificial Intelligence Applications, a consortium of five Ohio colleges and universities that promotes artificial intelligence training activities. CWEST is an automated advising system that uses a touch-sensitive screen to help students decide what courses to take, how many credit hours they can handle along with job and family responsibilities, and other topics students typically discuss with academic advisors. Sinclair sought a partnership with The Robinson Group in developing the kiosk concept, which will shortly include the ability to interact with data from the student information system. Shown here is Katy Neff, an artificial intelligence specialist in Sinclair's computer applications unit. ************************************************************************ This article is based on a visit to Sinclair Community College by editor Julia Rudy. The Campus Computing Environment department of CAUSE/EFFECT regularly focuses on the computing and information technology environment of a CAUSE member institution, to promote a better understanding of how the information technologies are organized, managed, and used in colleges and universities of various sizes and types. ************************************************************************