4:00 – 4:05 – Announcements (5 minutes)

Robert Wolpert convened the meeting on behalf of Rachel Richesson. The meeting minutes for May 23, 2019, were circulated for review. Hearing no objections regarding the meeting minutes, they are approved and will be published. Robert introduced the newest undergraduate representative, Catherine McMillan. Welcome, Catherine.

4:05 - 4:35 – Graduate Student Presentation – State of IT, Kayako Yamakoshi, Chas Kissick (Not present: Shyam Krishna Ravi, Brandon Le) (20-minute presentation, 10-minute discussion)

The graduate student body started the meeting by covering the logistics of the survey.

The graduate presentation showed the results of a survey conducted on the services available to students at Duke. Some of these services included, email, DukeHub, Wi-Fi, help desk, research computing, communication tools, MFA and others. The survey also collected pain points that students have when using these services along with the satisfaction rate of using the different services. At the end of the survey, participants were asked to give feedback about the services.

Kayako Yamakoshi started the presentation and mentioned that the dates of the survey they ran started on January 28th until February 6th. In total there were 203 responses. Out of those 203 responses, 113 were first-years, 54 second-years, 36 third years, and 123 of the respondents consider their program STEM-related. 80 respondents do not consider their program to be STEM-related.

The survey included people from different schools with Pratt School of Engineering having the most responses. The undergraduate school followed along with the School of Law.

Kissick and Yamakoshi later took turns discussing some of the questions asked during the survey. One of the questions asked how often different services were used. Some of those services include Wi-Fi, ePrint, Sakai, DukeBox, DukeHub, and Co-Lab studios.

- 95% of the respondents used the Wi-Fi daily

- 58% used Sakai daily, 18% weekly, 19% monthly and the rest either had not heard of it or never used it.

- 48% used ePrint Weekly, 20% daily, 19% monthly.

- DukeBox differed in that 29% used it monthly, 23% used it weekly, and 19% used it daily.

- DukeHub – about 1% of the users mentioned they didn’t use it.

- Co-Lab Studios – only 36% said they have never used it.

Another question in the survey asked the users about the level of satisfaction of the different services offered. For the same services as above, it looks like the majority of the votes resided in being satisfied or somewhat satisfied. For example,

- 58% said they were satisfied with Wi-Fi and 35% said they were somewhat satisfied with Wi-Fi. That leaves less than 10% being either neutral about the Wi-Fi or dissatisfied.

- For Sakai, 70% of users said they were satisfied or somewhat satisfied. That leaves about 30% of users saying they were neutral or were not satisfied with Sakai.

- For ePrint, similar results as Sakai.

- DukeHub and DukeEmail shared the same findings as Wi-Fi with a satisfaction rate of about 90% and less than 10% of the users being neutral or not satisfied.

Concerning getting help with services, most users mentioned that they prefer walking up to the Link. Using their phone and chat were the other two methods of getting help from OIT. Another question from the survey asked users about the usage of messaging systems and what did they use. The respondents answered with GroupMe and WhatsApp being the two major messaging systems. 90% of users reported that they had downloaded at least 1 software applications for the software site.

The latter part of the presentation was focused on feedback received from users on different services.

Here is the feedback collected by the graduate student body broken down by services,

Multi-factor authentication:

The feedback received about the Multi-factor service was that the MFA option did not appear or it was delayed for some users. Users responded with wanting a longer MFA cookie beyond the current 72 hours.

Sakai:

The majority of the Sakai service was regarding the user interface of the site. Users wanted a mobile application friendly user interface and responsiveness of the site.

Wi-Fi:

Feedback regarding wi-fi was around a few spotty places. Hard to access the wi-fi on different devices.

Outlook and Office 365:

The majority of the responses reported some users trouble accessing their email through the apple mail client.

Other:

Someone mentioned having an “IT Hub” listing all the currents events and happenings across all schools under Duke.

More research software plotting availability.

To conclude, Yamakoshi and Kissick reported on what users were happy about. Users reported that tech support was splendid.

A few staff and faculty were praised for their assistance.

VPN access off-campus was mentioned as a service people were glad about.

Questions/Comments

Q: other than the specific services you asked about, did you see any obvious gaps or areas missing that we should be more attentive to support the needs of graduates?

A: I don’t think so. The survey results showed that people were mostly satisfied.

Q: it looks like some of the questions you asked were also asked in previous years, are you seeing any trends in the responses?

A: The only item that seemed to be a big complaint last time was the usage of Microsoft products instead of the G Suite products. However, this time around it looks like there was a high satisfaction rate. Perhaps people have gotten used to Microsoft products.

Q: I see a few responses regarding Sakai, do you have any specifics about what the complaints there were? it seems like some of them are negative responses about the system and also the use of a learning management system in general.

A: So, it’s not about the existence of Sakai. It’s more of a making the user interface and the mobile app more intuitive.

Q: from the responses you received, what is the best approach to bring this to the people who maintain these services?

A: You can talk to us about your specific interest and we can give you the results of the Qualtrics survey.

4:35 – 5:30 – Undergraduate Student Presentation – State of IT, Sanya Kochhar, Shrey Majmudar, Catherine McMillan (40-minute presentation, 15-minute discussion)

Shrey Majmudar started the meeting addressing the goals of the survey. Some of the goals for the survey included,

- Identify aspects of IT that can be improved

- Gauge the ongoing success of newer IT initiatives

- Pinpoint new areas of focus for OIT, DLI, and/or other departments to explore

- Provide crucial undergraduate student data to ITAC and relevant IT leaders

Majmudar mentioned that the survey ran for two weeks starting on the week of January 21.

The survey was distributed through different channels, Facebook groups, email to the student body and other channels. The survey was also distributed on the student body email blast through DSG president Liv McKinney. As an incentive for completing the survey, three $25 Amazon gift cards will be given to three randomly selected students that completed the survey.

Majmudar also highlighted some of the demographics of the survey in terms of the undergraduate class. There was a total of 232 students who completed the survey as compared to last year’s 255 respondents.

For this year,

  • 87 freshmen
  • 57 sophomores
  • 36 Juniors
  • 52 Seniors

The survey captured responses from students from West Campus, East Campus and Swift Apartments. The number of respondents from each location was 119, 94 and 14, respectively.

The survey also asked students to identify their Area of Study. Biology topped at number one with 30 respondents followed by Computer Science with 26 respondents, Economics with 19 respondents and Electrical and Computer Engineering with 16 respondents. There was more area of studies in the survey that had 9 or 10 respondents but Majmudar highlighted the top four and mentioned that the entire survey results were available to anyone who requested them.

Majmudar also covered questions from the survey related to the operating system students used and also captured the students' preferred browser. Compared to Windows and Linux operating systems, 161 respondents chose Mac OS as their favorite operating system. 85 respondents favored Windows and 4 respondents favored Linux. In terms of phone operating systems, most respondents chose iOS with 160 respondents and only 30 respondents choosing Android.

Majmudar next covered the users' preferred browser. Google Chrome came at the top of the list with 175 respondents, Safari had 48 respondents, 3 for Firefox and only 1 respondent using Internet Explorer.

Next Sanya Kochhar took the stage and started talking about Academic survey results.

Email – For the most part, students were largely satisfied or very satisfied with email. The only few comments regarding email were about staying logged in, saving password so you don’t have to keep logging in if you exit your browser, and also sometimes emails from professors go to spam. There were also some comments about switching to google.

Q: The issue of emails from professors going to spam, is it because the professors are sending emails from Gmail or what’s the issue there?

A: I think that these comments were more related to emails being sent from Sakai. Since some students might already be getting a lot of emails from Sakai that their inbox might see them as spam.

Dukehub – Most students were overall satisfied with DukeHub. There were a few pain points, however. Some of those pain points were related to course evaluations, class search and registration, and the what-if/academic advisement reports. For the what-if/academic advisement report, there were some comments about inaccuracy concerning the courses students needed to take, some frustration with the formatting of the what/if report. There were also comments about financial aid and bursar tabs being somewhat hard to navigate through and not very clear information there.

Majmudar then took the stage to talk about DukeHub 2.0. He mentioned that another classmate and he have been working with Chris Derickson from the SISS office to roll out DukeHub 2.0. He then talked about the improvements being done with the class search process and course evaluation process in DukeHub 2.0. Majmudar also mentioned that he and Catherine McMillan are working on a project regarding course evaluation being broken and how they can work to get that process enhanced. Majmudar and McMillan are meeting with Jose Maria from the arts and sciences council to start this journey of enhancing the course evaluation process.

Sakai – For the most part, respondents of the survey were satisfied with Sakai. A few of the comments regarding Sakai were about the inconsistency of professors not using Sakai. Some students were bothered about the syllabus tab because some professors do not upload the syllabus there. Also, problems with downloading all the resources in the resources section was another pain point for students.

Box – The survey results for Box showed that most users don’t use and those that use it are satisfied. Not too many surprising results there.

Duke mobile – The biggest comments regarding Duke mobile were regarding the different links in Duke mobile that take you out of the app into the internet to which students could have just searched the website themselves. There is a preference for a more fully native Duke Mobile app.

Eprint / Eprint mobile – Eprint doesn’t seem to work with the newest version of Mac OS in some cases. Students reported problems with processing different types of files, not just big data files but specific file types. The usage of ePrint mobile has risen. The only comments here were about having issues with the initial set up and intermittent having issues again after using it for a couple of times.

Transloc – Dissatisfaction levels have increased since last year. However, there have been instances where the map is not accurate about the status of the bus. With that being said, some students fall back to google maps to check the status of the bus. One suggestion mentioned putting timers outside of buses. It was mentioned that some students have been late to class because Transloc is not accurate and they usually spend a lot of time waiting for the bus. Of all services surveyed, this was the area of greatest dissatisfaction among students.

Others (OneDrive, Duke Calendar, 25 Live room reservation, tv boxes in dorms, university desktop computers, duke virtual machines) – The only comments here were about 25 live room reservations. The comments here entailed the navigation of reserving rooms and not being able to figure out how the service works. Kochhar also pointed out that she recently found out about an online eprint portal. She mentioned that it would be a good idea to advertise this more since there have been a few complaints about with eprint recently.

Q: how do students find events at Duke?

A: Facebook is the place where most people find events at Duke since that’s the medium that most classes use. However, communication generally for events with first year students has become more difficult in the past year because there is less consistent utilization of Facebook among some of our first year students than has been the experience in the past several years.

Next, Catherine McMillan covered the survey findings related to IT.

Wi-fi – main concerns seem to be outdoor connectivity and sometimes with Duke Blue dropping connections sometimes.

Q: Do you have a specific location outdoors where connectivity problems arise?

A: quad, bus routes are some of the areas where there are poor connectivity issues.

Q: do you have any specific on devices that are having the issues?

A: we did not get that granular in the narrowing down the devices. I would say that it is with laptops and phones(ios/android).

Cellular – T-mobile seems to have poor connectivity in some areas. The other phone services seem to have good coverage.

mobile duke card – There were not many complaints here except for some android users reporting issues with mobile readers. For example, vending machines, laundry, mail, etc. Overall, people love it.

Duke software – There were not that many comments here. A lot of downloads of Adobe creative cloud products and Microsoft Office products.

Q: is there a particular tool that is popular with the Creative Cloud suite?

A: it seems to be that mostly its Acrobat pdf reader, photoshop, and Illustrator.

Cybersecurity – Many people expressed interest in learning more about cybersecurity. In terms of preventive measures, people use ad blockers, webcam covers and are using the VPN.

The penultimate part of the presentation covered services and miscellaneous topics.

Majmudar highlighted one new question on this survey regarding the usage of slacks messaging service for anything Duke related. The results here showed that 70% (359) of users mentioned that they use slack for things related to Duke. Majmudar emphasized that the usage of slack messaging service for Duke related communication among students, faculty, and staff is highly usable and expressed that Duke should look into licensing.

Another question included in the survey asked students about the usage of any smart home devices. 70% of users mentioned that they don’t have a smart home device, but of those that did have smart home devices, they mentioned issues connecting their devices to the wi-fi network.

The last question on the survey focused on how students seek help for IT resources. The results here showed that most students use their peers for help. The next path is to go to the Duke websites and find help or they go to the service desks.

To recap, Majmudar showed the audience a slide with the takeaways and concrete improvements that they collected. Copied exactly from the slide here is the takeaway as captured by the undergraduate student body:

  • Students want improvements to [Transloc] Rider immediately – biggest complaint by the numbers
  • Level the playing field for faculty use of Sakai (policy issue from Provost’s office, perhaps)
  • A lot of dissatisfaction with DukeHub Class Search, but it is being changed. Work needs to be done on the Course Evaluation front, though (current DSG Project actually)
  • Widespread discontent with the DukeMobile app as it stands – need to maximize usability.
  • Continued confusion when it comes to Box and/or OneDrive
  • Wide range of time it takes for ePrint to process
  • Mobile ePrint needs to be advertised even more!
  • Lot more comments about TV Boxes than we expected – make them more resident-friendly
  • Massive issues with Wi-Fi dropping or being slow to connect when the computer wakes up
  • Continued discontent with T-Mobile, similar to last year
  • People LOVE Mobile DukeCard!!!
  • Room for growth in Cybersecurity, though OIT rocks in education perspective already
  • Strong “one-way” preference for GSuite over Outlook, as we have discussed many times
  • OIT should seriously and swiftly examine Slack licensing, as it is very widely used
  • Need to improve the process of setting up smart home devices on Duke Wi-Fi (Google Home!)

Both graduate and undergraduate student bodies did a splendid job presenting and collecting feedback from their peers in aims to present their findings to the ITAC leadership council.

It was mentioned by both of the student representative bodies that if a particular office/group/individual present at ITAC wanted to see the results of the Qualtrics survey in detail, they can reach out directly to the presenters.