Although 9 percent of its staff was lost this Spring in response to budget cuts, Computing Services will continue to focus on student and faculty support, according to Ellen Waite-Franzen, vice president of information technology and chief information officer at the College. None of the cuts made were in the Academic Computing department.
"What we tried to do was protect the student and faculty support areas," Waite-Franzen said. "One of the things we did was move management positions."
By increasing the number of people each manager oversees, Computing Services has been able to keep "the people actually doing the work," Waite-Franzen said. The 12 positions that were lost stemmed from both layoffs and cancelled searches for open positions, and were mainly managerial.
Academic Computing is still searching for a candidate to fill one available spot that has been open for over a year because the position is necessary for the support of students and faculty, she added.
Waite-Franzen said that overall the cuts have not yet affected the ability of Computing Services to respond to user problems.
"I think in general we're not seeing too much of a slowdown, but it will be interesting when Fall term comes," she said.
Each fall, Computing Services faces an increase in the number of inquiries because of new faculty and students joining the College, according to Barbara Knauff, a member of the curricular computing staff.
"People are coming to campus that don't even know what Dartmouth Secure is, so we have to bring them up to speed," she said.
Knauff said Academic Computing will be discussing issues related to compensating for their redistributed staff, including the support provided for the class management application, Blackboard, because the program "needs to be reliable."
"In a lot of cases, management is stepping back and saying, How are we going to deliver what we need to deliver and what are we not going to deliver?'" Waite-Franzen said. "We need to make those kinds of choices all across computing."
Although Blackboard is "the most essential" program overseen by Academic Computing, Knauff said, it is not the group's only task. Because of its importance, however, Academic Computing may "need to put other projects on the back burner," Knauff said.
One example is a program called the Computer Technology Venture Fund, a grant-funded system with which faculty can apply to get support from Academic Computing for a project. These ideas are typically "innovative" and "catalysts for change," according to Knauff. Knauff added no progress will be made on new venture fund projects before the end of September.
"Venture fund projects affect one course and though we're excited about them and their potential to spread to other courses, in a crunch we put fewer staff hours into one of those projects," Knauff said.
Podcasting and clickers are two academic tools frequently used at the College that began as venture fund projects.
"Blackboard support is cyclical, we just have to reallocate where we spend our time as the term comes and goes," Knauff said.
While the number of courses using Backboard has increased every year, according to Waite-Franzen, it is beginning to slow because there are a finite number of courses offered by the College.
