MEETING MINUTES

Present: Eric Loehr, Thomas Laughner, Marnie Anderson, Fraser Stables, Joe O’Rourke, Susannah Howe, Sara Pruss, David Gregory, Deborah Haas-Wilson

Guest: Kevin Rocha

Minutes from October 16, 2012

The minutes of the October 16 meeting were approved as submitted.

Demo of AirDisplay – Kevin Rocha

Kevin Rocha gave the group a presentation on AirDisplay, an iPad app that allows your iPad to be a second monitor. He has been looking at options that could be useful in seminar rooms where space is an issue. There would need to be a MacMini or notebook in the seminar room and a control panel, all of which require the rooms to be wired and the equipment to be secured. A faculty member could bring a laptop or an iPad and use the AirDisplay app to make their iPad a second screen so that the faculty member could control the flow of their presentation. To put a MacMini and an Apple TV in each seminar room would require an initial budget of $10,560 with a five year replacement cycle put in place at the same time. The committee felt that this would be valuable and asked Tom Laughner to add this into his budget request for FY14.

Learning Spaces as part of the IT Strategic Plan

Tom had provided the committee with a paragraph from the revised IT Strategic Plan that speaks to the use of technology to improve learning and research. He showed a You Tube video of the UMass T.B.L. (team based learning) classrooms that have been built and showed how they were used by various disciplines. Joseph O’Rourke said that there may be an opportunity at Smith to create a space of this nature in Hillyer. There may be $350,000 available to do the required building renovations and then funding would be sought for the equipment and furnishings. Tom suggested that the committee look at some of the newer learning spaces that have been created on campus such as in Ford Hall and Bass 103. The committee agreed that it would be good to create a sub-committee of C.E.T. that would include representation from the Art Department, Libraries, Sherrerd Center, and Div.III. Tom will talk to people in the different areas and put a group together by January.

Other Matters

Tom informed the committee that an instructional technologist has been hired and will begin working in December.. Her name is Deborah Polin, she is completing her PhD in Anthropology at UMass.

The C.A.P. has turned down a request to include digital media certifications that are not credited from being included on student’s transcripts.

David Gregory told the committee that ITS is purchasing a site license for Lynda.com; this is a valuable online video training tool with many areas of interest.

Tom said that the SPSS license requested by Psychology will be purchased specifically for them with a cost sharing scheme between ETS and Psychology which will be revised each year until Psychology is paying for the license themselves.

The meeting was adjourned at 11:00 AM; the next meeting is December 18^th at 10:00 AM in Seelye B4