Vice President for Information Technology Status and Activity Report for December 2023 Prepared by Timothy M. Chester, Vice President for Information Technology (VPIT) 1. Key Items for Faculty and Staff Meetings •
Improvements to curriculum management to further student success under way: EITS and the offices of the Registrar and Student Financial Aid have embarked on a multi-year initiative aimed at furthering student success by improving the curriculum management process and systematically supporting federal financial aid requirements that funds students for courses that are listed under their program of study. This initiative supports students with a clear path to graduate in four years and significantly enhances the time to degree completion. Moreover, the initiative benefits faculty, schools, colleges, advisors, and administration by providing valuable data for strategic enrollment planning and introducing a streamlined online curriculum revision process. Students, in turn, gain access to up-to-date and accurate degree requirements, eliminating hidden prerequisites and reducing the need for substitutions. Students and advisors are already benefiting from major milestones completed in 2023 that include a new user-friendly interface in the DegreeWorks degree audit system that is mobile responsive and provides clear and easyto-understand degree requirements. The project team has also developed an automated curriculum revision process which will support all academic departments in managing curriculum revisions for their respective programs starting in 2024. Additional milestones for 2024 include processing and approval of all revisions submitted with academic departments, reprogramming of DegreeWorks to accommodate such revisions and incorporate graduate programs which are currently not being supported under DegreeWorks. For more information on the project, contact Ilir Hasko at ihasko@uga.edu.
•
2023 State of Technology highlights improvements in research IT, academics and student digital life: Students, faculty and staff at the University of Georgia can expect continued improvements in the areas of research IT, academics and digital student life, and at the university system level, a new unified enterprise resource planning system is on the horizon, Dr. Timothy M. Chester said during his annual State of Technology address. Chester, Vice President for Information Technology at UGA, gave his address to about 250 people over Zoom on November 15, speaking about progress toward the IT strategic goals and the University System of Georgia’s planning for a new unified ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system. Chester also shared results of the 2023 TechQual survey, which measures satisfaction with central IT services on campus. For more information, read the story on the EITS website: https://eits.uga.edu/stories/2023_stateofit_recap/.
•
Microsoft Office 365 Upgrade Scheduled for December 1-3: Starting at 7 p.m. on December 1, EITS personnel will migrate active student and employee Microsoft Office 365 licenses from their current licensing level, known as A3, to an upgraded version, known as A5. Work is scheduled to conclude by 10 p.m. on December 3. Moving to this new license level will provide more collaboration tools such as Power BI Pro. This upgrade will also allow EITS to eventually migrate UGA’s existing telephone system to Teams Phone, which will serve as the next generation telephone system for UGA. More information about the Teams Phone transition will be shared in early 2024. For more information about this upgrade, please contact Justin Sackett (justin.sackett@uga.edu).
VPIT Status and Activity Report for December 2023
Page 1 of 4