USF faced and overcame many obstacles during the COVID-19 pandemic and campus shutdown, especially regarding information systems and technology. At the October 27, 2021, Faculty Senate meeting, Sidney Fernandes, USF Vice President forTechnology and Chief Information Officer, provided a presentation on the activities and system implementations before and during the COVID-19 campus shutdown and responded to faculty questions and feedback about IT operations and services.
Some highlights of this presentation are:
- Consolidation gave USF a head start on the move to virtual work and communication with the implementation of Box and Teams prior to the pandemic
- IT provided a rapid response to the campus shutdown by
- moving 56,000 student email accounts to One USF platform
- implementing digital call centers for academic services
- enabling virtual classrooms on a unified platform
- launched a new VPN for increased cybersecurity oupdated 400 classrooms to support hybrid instruction
- upgraded wireless networks
- There are no plans to replace Box or move cloud storage to another service provider. Space per user is currently unlimited.
- Performance issues with Archivum are being addressed.
- IT is working with colleges on updating remaining Windows 7 PCs.
- IT is working with Innovative Education to build a test classroom to investigate technologies and gather faculty feedback to solve problems.
The slides for the presentation are available here, and the responses to faculty questions are available here.
Additionally, faculty can use this tool to provide feedback and up-vote topics: https://easyretro.io/publicboard/DTOeOu2WvOQsUvegMhLjLAB5va92/81a71887-4eb1-4fb4-bee1-197d01713709.