2024 UNC CAUSE

This panel, featuring speakers from NC State University, UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University, will discuss the first annual Cyber Bowl competition (happening now!). Adapted from colleagues at Florida State University, the cyber bowl is a sports-rivalry-themed contest that encourages faculty students and staff to test their cyber knowledge (and learn more about cyber security). The session will discuss planning the Cyber Bowl, including logistics and infrastructure, marketing, outreach and how it’s going so far. Please attend if you might be interested in joining a larger competition in 2025!

Pavion will be discussing the emerging and dominant solutions for Higher Education Facilities in the Security System, Audio/Visual, Fire Safety, and Structured Cabling market and the impact these have in the Higher Ed sector and the critical nature of having highly functional solutions in safety and security along with educational technology solutions, both in the classroom and for remote classes.  

In August 2023, the DELTA LearnTech Help Desk welcomed two new hires: Grace, a help desk manager, and Mike, a lead technology support technician. Since Fall Semester was already underway at the time of their hiring, Grace and Mike were tasked with quickly mastering more than 20 instructional tools and an enterprise-level Learning Management System. With an abundance of training materials available for each instructional technology, Grace and Mike devised several methods for organizing and prioritizing knowledge resources. Reflecting on their experiences over the past year, they have identified commonalities in their approaches and valuable lessons that can be shared with future cohorts of incoming technical support staff. This lightning talk introduces a conceptual framework envisioning "levels" of resources available to new technical support staff. Beginning with vendor-provided resources, then advancing to institutional resources, peer resources, and finally, knowledge management resources, we will explore how each resource “level” can provide scaffolding for new IT staff during the onboarding process. We will also share practical recommendations for managers and team members on how to effectively support new hires throughout their learning journey. Join us as we delve into strategies for streamlining onboarding and fostering a culture of continuous learning within technical support teams.

The purpose of the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging SIG is to To provide a safe environment that encourages the discussion and sharing of resources regarding DEI&B within the IT community. Our diversity enhances our collective ability to serve our universities and communities, making us greater than the sum of our parts.

Old and new attendees are welcome, come find your people!

SIG Chairs:
Scott Gee - UNC Chapel Hill
Gabriella Ferguson - NCSU

https://unccause.org/sigs/sig-deib/

This presentation explores the concept of “Bespoke IT” or “Embedded IT” at Western Carolina University (WCU), detailing its evolution, unique challenges, and successes. Presenters Frank Hachadurian and AJ Morris will share their combined experiences, highlighting how decentralized IT support can foster stronger relationships with various departments and overcome the limitations of centralized IT structures. Attendees will learn proactive approaches taken to ensure IT services align with specific needs of departments, with an emphasis on relationship-building, problem-solving, and effective communication. The session will include real-world examples of how bespoke IT has improved outcomes in classroom support, departmental trust, and project implementation, offering insights into navigating the complex landscape of higher education IT.

Hybrid Cloud and AI are the two greatest trends affecting enterprise technology today.
Businesses are migrating to Hybrid Cloud architectures for flexibility, scalability and cost efficiency.
There’s also a surge in adoption of AI for efficiency gains, competitive advantage, and better decision making.
But as businesses race to adopt hybrid cloud and AI, they will confront new security challenges and risks. Come hear how IBM is addressing these challenges.

The use of LLMs such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot have made a splash in the last two years, & the ripples have affected many areas, with higher education feeling the waves on multiple fronts. The possibilities of AI have presented opportunities and issues for students, faculty, and staff at our institutions. This session seeks to explore the Good, productivity tools and research assistance; the Bad, intellectual property issues and plagiarism; and the Ugly, bias and discrimination; of AI and how these issues impact academia.
AI models can serve as powerful productivity tools, assisting educators and students with prompt generation, project outlines, analyzing papers, and more. This Good can be used for teaching & helping students and faculty to improve their research if taught and used correctly. We will provide an overview of apps that can help streamline these options, as well as how we have started to implement them with our users. We will also discuss working with faculty/staff to tackle AI. The University Libraries held an AI Symposium in Spring 2024 which explored the Ugly via algorithmic bias, the Good and Bad of incorporating AI into research, and other lesser known issues that are actively impacting our students and faculty. We will discuss what we are doing to address these concerns on our campus.
In summary, this session will show attendees some of the Good, Bad & the Ugly of AI, how it impacts our work, and what we can do to use AI effectively going forward.

One of the biggest challenges in higher education IT is providing consistent, uninterrupted and secure access to course software to all students and staff. Most students prefer using their own devices instead of computer labs, and often combine their studies with work, which means they need flexible access to their learning both on and off campus. Over the last 15 years, AppsAnywhere has been used by over 4 million students in 300 institutions to access hundreds of applications on managed or personal devices. Join this session to find out why so many colleges trust AppsAnywhere to improve the student experience while optimizing IT efficiencies and achieving cost savings. You will learn how AppsAnywhere can save packaging time and costs, reduce your reliance on VDI, and consolidate your delivery technologies in one simple platform.  

Many moons ago, our Registrar’s Office casually mentioned some new legislation, which stated students would only be able to pay for courses using many types of federal aid if the course was necessary for their degree. This was a big change across higher education, but was especially problematic for campuses focused on the liberal arts. Faculty decried the rule as the end of academic exploration, and a detriment to small programs with few majors. Financial Aid and Advising sparred over who would review schedules, and the best method to complete the review. Then… Radio silence.
Over the past two years, the Registrar’s Office began looking into the functionality delivered by Banner and Degree Works with ITS, and after deciding this was the best (and really, the only viable) option, resurfaced the project. Months later - after countless meetings, hours digging through documentation, a multitude of gracious colleagues across many states, and a seemingly excessive number of test instances, we are live in production.
What will participants get from this session?
Participants will come away with a better understanding of CPOS, a list of forms, tables and settings that must be updated, along with examples from UNC-Asheville’s implementation. They will also receive something even more valuable - a list of questions they need to answer before beginning their implementation, and the implications of not asking them before embarking on their CPOS journey.

How did Henry Ford revolutionize the automobile market? By standardizing parts and options and building an assembly line to mass-produce cars. Gone are the days when we in IT could create custom configurations and assemble them into a cohesive system. The business owner demands speed. Automation is here—embrace it! AI-driven automation and OPS are the next frontier. Charge!!  

This SIG is a group of professionals who support the academic mission of the university system. Our goal is to promote and facilitate teamwork and camaraderie among the IT personnel of all of the UNC schools. We will exchange information with each other, sharing trials, tribulations, best practices and ideas with each other.

Old and new attendees are welcome, come find your people!

SIG Chairs:
Emory Maiden - App State
Morgon Haskell - UNC Chapel Hill

​https://unccause.org/sigs/sig-tlt/​​​

Join Daniel Shields of WCU's LMS Team as he unveils an innovative approach to fostering student engagement! This session explores how to leverage automation and non-credited courses within their Learning Management System (LMS) to create a vibrant digital meeting place. Discover how Western Carolina utilizes automation to streamline the delivery of non-credit courses, freeing up valuable staff time for student interaction. Learn how their LMS serves as a central hub for programs, majors, and various campus offices, fostering collaboration and a strong sense of community. This session is perfect for: Educational professionals seeking to improve student engagement. LMS administrators looking for new ways to leverage the platform. Anyone interested in exploring automation for non-credit course delivery. Walk away with: Practical strategies for automating non-credit courses. Ideas for creating an engaging LMS environment for different student groups. Insights on fostering collaboration and community within your LMS.

We’ve all inherited a folder of those scripts. You know the ones. The ones that a user asks to be ran once or twice a year. They may have a variable, perhaps a term code which the user provides, but otherwise it never changes. If you are lucky enough to have some documentation, you may know what the purpose of the script, but otherwise it becomes an accepted cog in the wheel of higher education. For overachievers, we may ask the user to review the output from a test instance, but the clone is rarely as recent as they would like. Wouldn’t it be better if the user who knew the data was able to run and verify the script themselves?
Using Argos UNC Asheville has transformed many of these scripts into dashboards that can be ran by the user. After initial testing and training, ITS can provide users access run these dashboards as appropriate. This has provided departments with more governance of their data, decreased the amount number of FTE hours required to complete these tasks, and reduced other departments’ reliance on ITS. It might not be prudent to take vacation on census day, but you don’t have to be on standby to push a button at 5:01 either.
There are added benefits to streamlining these processes. As we grew in our confidence using Argos, we realized the standardization of the scripts and interface of the dashboard reduced data entry errors. The dashboards can also be built in a way to force staff in other departments to review the changes before they can be committed.

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte is celebrating a new look that brings the “Charlotte'' to the forefront campus identity. The new look, announced in August 2021, was timed to align with the university’s 75th anniversary. A new “all-in-C'' logo was just the first step in a series of phased projects working to transform the university’s image. This undertaking was heavily supported by the Department of OneIT. The university’s official URL was changed to https://www.charlotte.edu, then email addresses transitioned from @uncc.edu to @charlotte.edu. As part of OneIT’s larger effort, the College Support/Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) Tech Team helmed a major project to ensure all third-party technologies connecting with the Canvas Learning Management System (LMS) continued to operate smoothly throughout phased changes to email addresses and web domains. This involved analyzing and testing 165 external tools that integrated with the LMS and working with vendor technical support to make required code and settings changes on the Charlotte end as well as ensuring changes that needed to be made at the vendor level occurred according to the migration schedule. This presentation details the methodology employed by the CTL Tech Team for this project, encompassing insights gained from previous experiences, along with essential advice tailored to universities anticipating domain name and/or email changes linked to their academic technologies in the future.