Faculty Senate Information Technology Committee Report
February 13, 2007 Prepared by Brian Giza, Chair FSIT Committee
Membership:
Brian Giza, Chair, (Education); Virgilio Gonzalez, Vice-chair, (Engineering); Holly Denney (Registrar);  Mary Duffy, (Library); Helen Foster, (at large); Pierce, Kenneth, (IT); Frank Poblano, (IT); Jack Vaughn, (COBA); Marian Manciu (Physics); Susan Leech (Health Sciences), Maria Ivette Barraza-Rios (TIMS), Paulo Pinheiro da Silva, (Computer Science); Shepherd, Jeffrey P (Liberal Arts); Wei, Zhubao (Business, Economics). There has been an application for further membership.
Communications: Minutes, by-laws, agenda items, contributions, meeting schedule
Online at: https://mspace.utep.edu/FSIT/ (please note that FSIT must be in capital letters)
Faculty and staff are invited to visit the website and review minutes, which are online in both web-HTML and MS Word document format.  They may feel invited to make suggestions as to agenda items, concerns, etc.  Announced meeting times and dates for FSIT are available in each month's minutes, and any faculty or staff member is welcome to attend.   The next FSIT meeting is scheduled to be held in the Library, room 410, February 22 from 12:30 to 1:30 PM.
Key actions over the 2006-2007 year to date:
•	MailMine and working with the UTEP email system (Outcome: a tutorial for making MailMine work in expanding the capacity of email archives).
•	Information Technology Concerns spreadsheet and priorities (Outcome: the first draft may be downloaded from: https://mspace.utep.edu/FSIT/fsit-sort-by-category.xls and the second draft, with general priorities is online at: https://mspace.utep.edu/FSIT/fsit-sort-by-category-v2.xls ).  An online survey for faculty is available at the FSIT page to allow them to participate in generating priorities.
•	Laptop Data Security concerns (Outcome: Committee began discussions
about laptop security concerns – noting that all laptops will soon have higher data security capacity, either through moves to new operating systems, e.g.: Windows Vista, Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard", or through hardware/software mechanisms currently under consideration by UTEP IT.   Concerns among members included whether the security would be an option or mandate. 
New Agenda items:
•	Continued work on the IT concerns list, inviting contributions from other stakeholders including members of the Faculty Senate
•	Proposal(s) for a Faculty Database of research interests and activities.
•	Faculty evaluations for faculty members teaching fully online in WebCT.  Note, the UT Telecampus evaluation format is not consistent with the UTEP face-to-face evaluation instrument, and there are other aspects, strategies, and skill-sets, that play a part in good practice in online courses.  Evaluation of fully online courses in WebCT has NOT been addressed by the Faculty Senate and it is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED that the FS explore this in greater detail, leading to recommendations, guidelines, policy and an acceptable instrument.