• CUNY INFORMATION SECURITY AWARENESS TRAINING • BLACKBOARD HIGHLIGHTS• ENHANCING IT ACCESSIBILITY • CUNY ALERT IN CUNYfirst

• CREATING A WORLD CLASS RESEARCH NETWORK • CUNYfirst DEPLOYMENTS • MICROSOFT LAUNCHES FREE OFFICE 365 DOWNLOADS • ACCESSING GARTNER FREE IT RESEARCH

TECHNOLOGY TODAY

CUNY Information Security Awareness Training Every day it seems we read about another incident of cyber theftor data loss. Securing the integrity, accuracy and privacy of ourpersonal and professional information is essential. Unfortunately,everyone is vulnerable to security breaches and having informa-tion inappropriately disclosed or stolen.

To help CUNY guard against such breaches, CUNY CIS has updated and improved its online Information Security course.This course was designed with the input of CIS and key collegestaff specifically for CUNY faculty, staff and students. This brieftraining program — taking no more than 30 minutes — reviewsgood cyber-security practices and ways to avoid disclosure or theftof personal and professional information. It can be found atCUNY CIS’s IT Information Security site: http://security.cuny.edu.While you’re on this site, please take time to review CUNY’s IT security policies, procedures and security advisories.

• Latest UpgradeCUNY’s Blackboard LMS environment was upgraded in December2014 from version 9.1 Service Pack 13 to version 9.1.15. Youcan learn about the upgrade and its features at the CUNY Black-board Resources website (www.cuny.edu/blackboard). The upgradeprovides students and faculty with the most up-to-date tools tosupport classroom endeavors. As with previous upgrades, the enhancement was overseen by a Steering Committee comprisingBlackboard administrators and faculty from many campuses, inpartnership with the CIS Project Management Office and CIS Application Support team.

Based on feedback from more than 25,000 faculty and studentsto a Spring 2014 user survey, late December was deemed thebest time for upgrades. Going forward, CUNY CIS will schedulefuture upgrades during this time period.

• Course size limitsThe growth of online learning across the University requires CIS toproactively manage our server storage space allocation. An analy-sis of more than 100,000 Blackboard courses from Spring, Summer, and Fall 2014 and Spring 2015 demonstrated that 98%of all CUNY Blackboard courses are 750 MB or less.

Starting with the Summer 2015 semester, CUNY CIS is institutinga 750 MB storage limit for courses on Blackboard. Expandedcourse sizes of 1.5 GB and 3 GB may be made available by theBlackboard Administrator upon request and with justification, respectively.

Implementation of the course size limits affects only new coursesand does not include student uploaded materials in Assignments,Discussion Boards, Wikis, etc. Instructors will receive a warning ifthey attempt to upload additional content, or copy or import acourse that is larger than the default course size limit. Resourcesfor managing your course can be found in the User Guides sectionof the CUNY Blackboard Resources site at:http://cuny.edu/about/administration/offices/CIS/functions/bb/userguides/faculty/Managing-Content.pdf

Blackboard Highlights

• Unprecedented UsageCUNY’s official Learning Management System, Blackboard, continues to experience increasing levels of usage. In Spring2015, instructors utilized Blackboard for approximately 25,000classes across CUNY, with 233,555 students and 12,409 instruc-tors accessing these classes in Blackboard. During this same period, there was an average of 79,000 log-ins every day. Thehighest daily log-ins experienced to date was 114,389 users onFebruary 2, 2015.

These Spring 2015 data show an increase from comparableBlackboard usage in Spring 2014, when there were approximately23,000 classes on Blackboard and 70,000 average daily logins.

New Initiatives Supporting Academia

JUNE 2015 |

CUNY CIS continues to undertake numerous projects to support the University’s faculty and students. The following provides updates on new, significant technology initiatives supporting academia.

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• Integration of Library Services with BlackboardSince Summer 2014, CIS has been working with 8 librarians se-lected by the Office of Library Services (OLS) and the BlackboardManagement Council (representing college Blackboard adminis-trators) to integrate library services and resources within Black-board. This working group has been developing new outreach andtraining materials for the library community, as well as adaptingpre-existing materials, in anticipation of librarians’ expanding useof the Content Management System (CMS) in Blackboard. CMSserves as a central repository that enables storage and sharing ofdocuments in a class, an institution, or with a third party inBlackboard. The group has made progress in finding ways thatCMS can serve as a vehicle to deliver content, enable collabora-tion, promote library services, and provide a point of access to licensed library resources within Blackboard.

Enhancing IT Accessibility Making IT more accessible to those with disabilities is a high priority for CUNY CIS. Approximately one year ago, Associate ViceChancellor and University CIO Brian Cohen called for an IT Acces-sibility Task Force to address this issue on a University-wide basis.The Task Force — with representation from college faculty mem-bers, librarians, and CIOs, as well as CIS, the University GeneralCounsel’s office, the Office of Academic Affairs, and others — istasked with developing a set of recommendations to make contentand technologies more accessible for those who use them.

Already, the Task Force has recommended a broad-based IT accessibility training program and highlighted the need to buildaccessibility into our procurement practices and into all onlinevideo content. The Task Force is also evaluating University-wideproposals to enhance IT accessibility for students. Faculty traininginitiatives to enhance student accessibility are also being considered.

CIS also established a position for a Disability Specialist withinCIS. This Specialist is now involved with the procurement andtesting of third-party tools and services, as well as evaluation andtesting of CIS- developed tools, to ensure that all are accessible.If you have ideas for enhancing IT accessibility, please email cisfeedback@cuny.edu.

CUNY Alert in CUNYfirst CUNY Alert, CUNY’s emergency notification system for weather-related and other emergencies, was integrated with CUNYfirst insummer 2014. The integration enabled employee ‘auto enroll-ment’ so that all faculty and staff are now registered to receive notifications from CUNY Alert. Additional fields were also included at this time to allow users to supply more contact infor-mation. In Fall 2014, CUNY Alert enrollment was also added tostudents’ ‘To-Do’ lists in CUNYfirst, encouraging students to signup. Additional features, such as notifications being sent to userswhen their email, campus or phone number is updated, wereadded in 2015.

Creating a World Class Research Network

CIS kicked off a new network expansion project to extend the University’s sophisticated fiber network to campuses in Brooklyn,Queens and Staten Island. This expansion will provide those campuses in the outer boroughs with two 10gbps, highly reliableconnections into the University’s network - the same speed Manhattan and Bronx campuses have currently. As a result of thisproject, every college will have high speed connectivity to everyother college and to the High Performance Computing Center(HPCC) at the College of Staten Island and the Advanced ScienceResearch Center (ASRC). Work on the expanded fiber networkbegan in March 2015 and is likely to be completed in Spring2016.

Leveraging the new high-speed CUNY-wide network, CIS is alsoworking with a number of campuses to design and deploy a sepa-rate, world class, research-only network as an overlay across thefiber network. The research network will incorporate cutting-edgetechnology, putting CUNY at the forefront of network speed anddesign. It will allow the colleges to set up dedicated paths for special purposes, as needed. The research network will also provide speeds up to 100 gbps, enabling high speed access to theInternet 2 network from every college, the sharing of large datafiles between colleges, as well the transfer of large files to theHPCC and the ASRC. To put this capacity in perspective, a terabyte of data will be able to move from one campus to anotherin about 90 seconds, or a full Blu-ray movie to move across thenetwork in about 3.5 seconds. The buildout of the research network will likely begin in fall 2015 and be completed by summer 2016.

CUNYfirst DeploymentsThe CUNYfirst Campus Solutions module (which includes registra-tion, enrollment, grading, admissions, bursar functions, and finan-cial aid) has now been rolled out to all CUNY colleges except forfive of the six entities constituting the Graduate School and University Center (GSUC). In March 2015, Campus Solutions wasalso deployed at the School of Professional Studies (SPS). CUNY-first is now the system of record for approximately 245,000 students, and all colleges that utilized CUNY’s prior system forstudent administration functions (called SIMS) have been migrated to CUNYfirst. Campus Solutions will be rolled out to theremaining five GSUC schools entities (The Graduate School,School of Journalism, Macaulay Honors College, School of PublicHealth, and CUNY BA) by Spring 2016.

The Faculty Resources tab on CUNY’s website now contains a sectionon “Disability Resources for Faculty. See http://www.cuny.edu/faculty-staff.html. This new section links to Reasonable Accommodations: A Faculty Guide to Teaching Students with Disabilities, an updated,comprehensive document that contains guidance and resources formaking courses and content accessible.

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Microsoft Launches Free Office 365 Downloads On Monday, April 20, 2015, Chan-cellor James B. Miliken joined NewYork City Council Speaker MelissaMark-Viverito to announce the offer-ing of Microsoft’s Office 365 ProPlussoftware at no cost to CUNY students. Also joining them were

Mitchel Wallerstein, President of Baruch College, Richard Lang-ford of Microsoft Corporation, and Kathy Wylde of the Partnershipfor New York City.

Students with current Office 365 email accounts are now able todownload the free Microsoft Office 365 software on up to five machines that are Mac or PC. They can also run Office Mobile forAndroid or Office Mobile for iPhone on up to 5 mobile devices.This software suite includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote,as well as one terabyte of cloud storage. Most CUNY colleges arecurrently using Office 365 email and are eligible to receive thisoffer. CIS will be working with the remaining colleges to put themon the Microsoft email platform.

CIS is also exploring with Microsoft opportunities to extend a similar offering of free Microsoft software downloads to CUNY faculty and staff. We welcome input from faculty as to specificMicrosoft tools used for instruction to inform our ongoing discus-sions with Microsoft. Please email provide input by emailing cisfeedback@cuny.edu.

We welcome your comments and ideas fornew initiatives at cisfeedback@cuny.edu

Design: CIS Communications & Marketing

Accessing Gartner Free IT Research CUNY continues to provide faculty, students and staff with 24/7 free access to Gartner, Inc’s technology-

related research and advice. As a faculty member you can accessall of Gartner’s core written research to gain insight into technol-ogy trends, vendors, and analytics. Students can use Gartner fortechnology-related research, find reports on the latest technologytrends, and learn about real-world case studies. And staff can useGartner to validate their technology decisions, analyze industrytrends, and explore best practices.

You can access Gartner research by logging into the CUNY portaland clicking on the Gartner portlet.