Thinking back to my first days as an undergraduate student at Dublin City University in early 1990s, computer rooms tended to be fairly relaxed environments and still something of a novelty for fresher students then. I also firmly remember the IT technicians there as somewhat elusive individuals, never there when you really needed them. Mind you, the machines were mainly early thin client terminals that ran off noisy mainframes and the screens displayed green-coloured MS-DOS characters (Ah, IT nostalgia…). They frequently broke down, so the techies probably had their hands full. Chatting with Mary Crowe, Director of Computing Services at UCD, reveals just how much the concept of IT support has moved on considerably since my day. Today, students and staff have huge expectations of university IT and no one is in a better position to appreciate this than Crowe.
Well placed
She’s also well placed to appreciate just how much students and staff have come to depend on IT to support their learning environment. According to a 2003 internal annual review of UCD Computer Services, which employs about 60 staff, the use of IT services has doubled in since 2000 and is expected to double again over the next three to five years (see table below).
One might reasonably expect that part of this increase in usage is down to a rise in student numbers but in fact the total number of students and staff at UCD has remained stable over the last few years. “The student population is a continuous user base,” says Crowe. “In a company, usage may be fairly infrequent but students are a day to day continuous presence so with a user population of 20,000 plus, we have a network on that scale to match.” Ensuring the ongoing integrity of UCD’s underlying IT infrastructure is a big enough challenge, but Crowe and her department also have to contend with the diversity of the UCD user base.
“You have students who place great demands to use IT as part of their environment and get things done quickly. They really keep me at the forefront of what’s happening. They are very aware of the day to day core technologies.”
High end requirements
There is also a heavy nucleus of high-end, high performance computing projects undertaken by research students to support. The work involved here includes installing very heavy computational environments using clusters based on Linux machines. “We would work on the smaller elements of the clusters and the networking together of different clusters and moving into the whole grid computing area.” “On the business side you have the normal process transactions and e-enabling because there’s a huge range of requirements for IT, particularly over the past two years,” said Crowe. Given this user diversity and heavy demands on IT resources, Crowe also needs to keep her department one step ahead by looking at the future of the university as a whole and deciding where the IT strategy needs to go to support continuous change. To this end she is supported by the Computer Services Board, a governing board for IT that that fits within the management board structure and to which she reports on a day-to-day basis. “They really are the guiding force in terms of policy and strategy,” she says. She also reports to a vice president in terms of UCD upper-echelon management.
Complete review of IT needs
UCD’s current IT strategy was born out of a comprehensive technical review of its IT infrastructure, applications and technical architecture that was conducted in 2003. The result of this was five-year EUR*15m investment plan to improve the IT infrastructure and services within the University, which began in earnest last year. One strand of the 2003-2007 strategy is what Crowe terms the “virtual learning environment” and how to use virtual learning technologies and electronic materials to support the teaching environment. “UCD has a long history of using e-learning and it would date back to the start of my role here. In the beginning it was a niche base, only used in individual faculties but what we’ve succeeded in doing is spreading that right across the university so that we really do have adoption across all the faculties. “It’s the students who would push that as much as anything else. They would be very demanding of lecturers and tutors at this point in time that materials are available in this way and are accessible and suitable.”
24/7 access to IT services
But the real driving force in the UCD strategy is to make all IT services accessible on and off campus, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, says Crowe.
“UCD has always had a tradition of being a meaningful campus at Belfield since it was first developed. But now we also want it to be a virtually accessible campus. There’s no intention to lose the physical aspect of it, but the virtual environment supports a collaborative and cohesive, visible campus.”
So it’s with good reason that her department has begun upgrading its core four-node server cluster to a six-node version in order to provide the most robust support for what will possibly be UCD’s most important and high profile IT project to date (see panel).
Connect to the college
UCD Connect is a long-awaited portal technology that enables all students and staff to have their own, personalised information site that acts as a one-stop shop for all information relating to their activities at the University.
Another key aspect of the strategy is networking. For the past four or five years, UCD has undergone an extensive building programme that has given rise to new research institutes, medical faculties, vetinerary faculties and a new library – all substantial new buildings to be added to a growing IT network. “But we would have a very big base of older buildings on the campus that were built in the 1960s and 1970s and that would include the arts and finance buildings, so we really have a dual programme from a technology perspective, ” said Crowe. “Effectively we have now moved to a stage where there is one network point for every user on the campus,” a goal that was outlined in the strategy and has already been achieved.
Wireless roll-out
In terms of wireless, UCD’s adoption of this flexible technology is progressive. It plans to have all the open areas, including common rooms, open spaces, any place where people can congregate to be 802.11 enabled. Certain buildings are already fully wireless, such as the Quinn School of business, particularly as they have a major laptop programme with up to 3,000 laptops in existence there. “Wireless would be complementary to the wired network because the wired network, in terms of performance, would outpace it at this point in time but we would use wireless to complement the open spaces. We’re also starting to use it for the teaching environments.” Other faculties outside of Commerce have been looking at provided discounted laptops for students now that there is such a wide availability of network points.
Return on investment
On the face of it, the EUR*15m budget for the 2003-2007 IT strategy seems fairly generous in public sector terms, but it also means that the importance of getting value for money and return on investment has risen significantly.
“The education sector has a tight budget. It’s not an area where money freely flows. That said, UCD has recognised the need to invest in its IT infrastructure to support the learning environment.
“I think you need to make your case well, you need to prove there are demonstrative benefits from investment in IT and it’s important that those benefits are visible to the customer,” says Crowe.
Having the CSB has helped that case because they are a driving group of IT but they would insist that we would show the benefits of IT, she added.
To aid the department in achieving its goals, a rigorous set of performance management measures have been put in place over the last year that measures the availability of the IT service and also measures agility.
In terms of working with outside suppliers, UCD, like other third level institutions, is obliged to go through the same standardised tender processes as any public sector organisation. But the department has shown initiative in terms of getting the most out of supplier relationships.
In the case of UCD Connect, the tender for software to support the portal was granted in 2001 to a firm that specialised in the education sector. What swung it for the winning firm was that they offered a collaborative development approach to the product involving a number of other universities as well as UCD.
External collaboration
UCD Computer Services participated in a two year programme with seven to eight other universities that involved regular meetings to contribute their ideas to the development of the product. “I think the advantage of that particular programme was that there were a group of buyers involved in universities and they had all got different experiences to the table. It was a small group and you got a good level of interaction. It certainly helped accelerate the implementation of UCD Connect.” The diverse computing needs of UCD staff and students must make the Belfield campus something of a hotbed of resourceful IT and technology innovation and an interesting place to be an IT professional. “The biggest challenge is the pace of change,” says Crowe. “With most of the technologies like virtual learning environments, like laptops – when they catch hold they grow exponentially.” “It’s been said to me that you can be the victim of your own success in that scenario but we really have got good technology adoption, good adoptions of laptops and the virtual learning environments. The take-up on the research side has also been significant.” There’s one statistic that certainly underlines the growth in the use of IT in UCD. The IT system handles 150,000 e-mails a day – equal to 45 million e-mails a year. “We’re virtually an ISP,” says Crowe.
UCD’s IT evolution
Year 2000 to Year 2004
External Internet Capacity 2Mbyte to 1,000Mbyte
Student storage space 2Mbyte to 114Mbyte
Staff e-mail storage 10Mbyte to 150-500Mbyte
Number of e-learning users <200 to 15,000
Number of network points 4,000 to 19,000
Number of laptop computers <100 to 2,000+
UCD Connect
UCD Connect is an important project for UCD’s Computer Services Department. It will quickly represents the University’s “virtual” face and provide a one-stop shop for all the information requirements of staff and students.
The project has been in development since 2001 when the department awarded the contract for the development of the portal to a US firm called Campus Pipeline, which has since been bought by US firm SCT.
After two years of collaborative development which drew on the experiences of US universities as well as UCD’s own input, UCD Connect is the result, and it will become available to all students and staff from September this year.
This means that things online exams, email-based project collaboration and online access to the contents of library journals, will become a natural part of a UCD student’s everyday work.
It should help to create more intimacy on the campus because of its basis as a facilitator of easier internal communication, says Morrissey and should really come into its own after a year, by which time most people will be comfortable with it and will have created their own personalised versions and taken “ownership” of their portals.
It’s been running on a pilot basis for some time, used only by 4,000 first year students and full-time staff.
Brian Morrissey of UCD Computer Services, who is looking after the day-to-day implementation, says a key feature of the service is that it can be accessed anywhere, including at home. It essentially turns into reality the long-held dream of the virtual campus.
Not needing to be on campus to access the University IT system is a genuinely liberating concept for students used to having to trek to Belfield to hot and stuffy computer rooms in order to do research or write essays, only to find all the seats are taken.
Morrissey estimates that by the time the service is fully up and running, there will be 4,000 to 6,000 concurrent users at any one time. In order, then, to ensure a robust service, the backbone of the system, a Sun work environment running Sunguard SDT, will be upgraded from a four node cluster to six nodes. “We’ve had to grow with the project, bringing it into an environment which in university terms in Ireland is very sophisticated,” said Morrissey.
Ltd
