ISIT Report — March 2008

Issues impacting students and teaching

1. Student email will be outsourced—to Google sometime in the near future to improve service and reliability. The student email address will have the current "webmail.bakersfieldcollege.edu" server address (not the "gmail.bakersfieldcollege.edu" as stated in the previous month's report) and students won't have the advertisements as long as they are registered students. There is the question of how the 3rd party will be notified of the registration status of the students that needs to be worked out. Every student who registers will be automatically given an account for free. The username will be of the form "firstnamelastnameXXXX", where XXXX is a number that will distinguish one "Juan Lopez" from another "Juan Lopez".
2. Posting of student-produced educational videos to "iTunes U" for free—will be possible as soon as the LSC (district office) signs the contract---it is now before the Board of Trustees for final approval. If you have students creating media products for your class, then check out the Apple iTunes U service. It is a great way for students to get exposure (and for the college and your course to get positive publicity if the media products are high quality!).

Other items of note

1. Wireless access for students on campus—is now available in the Library and all conference rooms. The wireless access is straight to the internet, NOT to the campus network and campus fileservers (so no network drives or network directories). Once campus Information Services (I.S.) has experience with that, other access points around campus to the internet (NOT to the campus network and fileservers) will be installed. A draft of the roll-out schedule will soon be circulated to various campus groups and committees for feedback. Warning for students: we don't have the staffing to handle all of the student questions on setting up their computer for wireless access. I.S. will soon put instructions on the initial "capture" page that appears when people try to access the wireless network. BC employees: information for employee wireless access is posted on the I.S. site (see the "Employee Wireless Setup" link). See the February report for more on wireless access.

2. Help desk moving to LSC by September 15th. Calls on Saturdays will go to our local campus techs.

3. Standardization of your office computer to a districtwide standard—will happen as part of the move to centralize all of the help desk functions to the LSC. Your administrator rights for your office computer will be removed so any software installations will have to be done by a I.S. technician. A lot of these changes will happen during the summer.
4. All software purchases will soon be done by Information Services (see the December report). All GUI-funded software purchases will go through I.S. and the funds will come from the I.S. budget. HOWEVER: I.S. needs to know what software people are using, what maintenance or licensing fees people are paying, etc. so that the college administration can accurately determine how much money I.S. needs to go into the I.S. purchasing budget line item. Please contact Judy Ahl (X4899) SOON telling her what software you are using or what annual maintenance/license fees you have to pay to keep using the software.

last update: March 4, 2008

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