The road to e-McGill

DANIEL McCABE | In the not too distant future, some students will earn their McGill degrees without once setting foot on campus. When a student registers for a course, via computer, she might automatically be given the opportunity to purchase the required texts online. Many of the computers currently taking up desk space throughout the University will disappear, replaced by less cumbersome portals to the web. As staff move about throughout the University, they'll be able to plug into portals located all over McGill to log onto the web when their jobs require it. At a presentation to Management Forum on Monday, Vice-Principal (Information Systems and Technology) Bruce Pennycook offered staff a sneak preview of what he believes the future could bring to McGill, technology-wise. Pennycook is on the verge of releasing McGill's information technology (IT) strategic plan to the University community. He gave his audience glimpses of what the plan will focus on. Key words will be "integration," "web-based" and "customer service." One of the driving forces behind the changes will be the Banner Project, the large-scale initiative aimed at rendering the University's key information systems (financial records, student records, human resources) more centralized and adaptable. Part of the plan is to have these major systems be able to "talk" to each other and share information much more easily. And, as the Banner systems are web-based, the web will become the number-one means for members of the McGill community to conduct a broad assortment of transactions with the University. Students, for instance, will register for courses, hand in quizzes, look up course materials, fill out teacher evaluations, mostly via the web. "The web is moving rapidly from being a place where we look at stuff to becoming a place where we do stuff," said Pennycook Once the Banner systems are fully operational in about two years, Pennycook said, "We want McGill to be functioning like an e-business." In other words, faculty staff and students "will hopefully have access to everything within our scope of activities electronically." These changes will be firmly grounded in McGill's educational mission, added Pennycook. Part of the planning involves re-focusing McGill's IT units on their "core competencies -- what they do really well." For the Instructional Communications Centre, this will mean, in part, an extension of the promising work they've done on developing courseware and supporting distance education projects. For the Computing Centre, it will be a primary devotion to "supporting our networking and operating systems, an area where they're as good as or better than any institution around." The Telecom Office will inherit responsibilities related to campus security (using technological means) and IT-related training. ISR will build on its strength in developing custom-made software tools for a variety of uses. One major obstacle in the way of Pennycook's vision for the future is "our ability to recruit and keep high-end IT professionals. The market is impossible. Salaries are going into the stratosphere" for people with precisely the sorts of skills McGill requires: network and security specialists, for instance. "To build the sorts of integrated systems we're talking about, it will take more people than we have today." Part of the work of steering McGill onto a more web-based approach to doing all sorts of things will fall to the Web Communications Group, a new unit set to open shop in January. This unit will expand and develop The McGill Gateway, the University's home page as well as play a major role "guiding the integration" process as McGill becomes more dependent on the web. A central IT help desk will be established, taking the place of the assortment of help desks that currently exist in different units. "If there is going to be significantly more infusion of IT into our daily work lives, we have to provide help in every conceivable way," said Pennycook. "What we would like to do is centralize the management of help." People with IT problems will quickly be put in touch with a specialist with the skills to help them out. An expansion into distance education is up for discussion and a task force has been formed to examine the matter. McGill is already active on this front, offering a distance master's in occupational health that will become totally web-based within two years, for example. "We're starting to understand what our skills are and where the market is," said Pennycook, adding, "I don't think we should go after the vanilla BA on the web" -- electronic degrees capitalizing on McGill's name with little substance to them. In general, on the academic front, the hope is to offer professors more support in adapting to a more technological approach to education. "It's well known that more services used to be available before the knob got turned down on funding. We'd like to try to move back" to offering faculty more support. A pilot project is currently looking at the implications of master's and PhD theses completed and delivered entirely in electronic form. Pennycook said McGill "doesn't intend to keep on collecting paper" theses indefinitely. "This opens up new possibilities." Students might start incorporating video-clips or computerized models of molecules as part of their theses. "It changes the concept of what a thesis could be."