Committee meeting - January 25

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee­­­
February 1, 2018

Present: 

Steven Bourque, Darren Bondy (Secretary), Trevor Bain, Colin Bell, Andrea Chappell, Don Duff-McCracken, Erick Engelke, Robyn Landers, Andrew McAlorum, Keith McGowan, Paul Miskovsky, Omar Nafees, Adam Savage, Jason Testart

Regrets:

Daryl Dore, Marko Dumancic, Dave Kibble

Agenda

1. Next CTSC Meeting

[Will be held Thursday, February 8, 2018, at 1:30 p.m., in EC2 1021.]

Chair’s Remarks (Steven Bourque)

• The IST annual report was published this past week; an overview of the previous year and we will continue doing this annually.
• Reminder to visit the CTSC wiki page to add agenda suggestions.

Approval of the minutes of the previous meeting

The previous meetings minutes were accepted as distributed.

NetApp pricing

The current offering for NetApp space is 5TB minimum (and increases in increments of 5TB) at $750 per year.

• That provides snapshots as well.
• It is to be purchased upfront for the year (if cancelled during the year it is not refunded).
• You can add additional terabytes throughout the year and the cost is prorated.
• You can request NetApp space via RT; now is a good time to submit those requests as we are currently budgeting for new hardware.

Lab usage

UCIST is interested in collecting this data and we think we have a found a way to collect it properly.

• We are targeting a March start date to begin collecting this data; using Active Directory to track when someone logs into a workstation.
• Steven will distribute a full list of labs that were requested by UCIST. Members were asked to review this list to identify labs in their respective areas.  

Other Business

EC5 server room

• It was discussed a while ago that if there was enough interest, the EC5 server room could be renovated and used for storage space.
  • IST does not own this space and apparently some of the server room is already being turned into office space.
  • Scott Nicoll is the person to talk to regarding the space in EC5.
• Could there be potential to apply for the energy efficient initiative recently announced? It could be used to fund major improvements to server room infrastructure and equipment.

Squirrelmail

• Will IST be supporting Squirrelmail now that myWaterloo is no longer available?
  • We have been moving everyone we can off of it. Grad students have been getting connect accounts.
  • Will need to work on a timeline for the different types of people who are still using mailservices and when they will be provided an alternative solution (i.e. alumni).

LEARN and Flash

• Some people are seeing notices in LEARN that says they need to have Flash on their systems to use LEARN.
  • Andrea Chappell will investigate and report back.

Roundtable Reporting

Science (Paul Miskovsky)

• A bug had been discovered in eValuate that caused duplicate submissions on some course evaluations. The following details were posted on the public-facing page in eValuate:

“As of Monday, January 22, the Science Computing team was made aware a bug was present in the Fall 2017 data collected here using evaluate. In a small percentage of cases, some student submissions were recorded two or more times, altering the final numbers in the computed results.

For those concerned, the bug which caused this to happen was purely technical. The duplicate submissions were not caused by a security breach, and could not have been done intentionally by students.

In Fall 2017, there were over 77000 student submissions in evaluate. By our calculations, just under 1% of these were duplicate entries. Due to the fact that evaluate is strictly anonymous, it is impossible to remove all the duplicates with 100% accuracy.

Fortunately for us, over 50% of submissions to evaluate contain student-written comments. The likelihood of two student submissions having identical responses and identical written comments is exceedingly low, allowing us to immediately eliminate duplicates containing text. As a sanity check, we ran a uniqueness test for submissions with comments in previous terms and discovered they occured at a rate less than 0.0001%.

By using these commented duplicates as a metric, it was immediately clear that duplicate submissions were occuring within a small time difference from each other. In this case, we determined that all commented duplicates occured within less than 0.5 seconds of one another.

Comment-less duplicates naturally exist in evaluate data even without the bug. Many times a course will have several students who select the exact same answers -- often times all "Excellent" or all "Unacceptable". We made a best-guess at removing these duplicates by only targeting instances which occured within the same time difference as the text-based comments.

Ultimately our process will be flagging 656 responses as duplicates, affecting 360 of 2169 courses, On average 1.82 duplicates were removed per affected course, causing an average change of +0.0027 in "Prof Score" results. The majority of courses had only 1 duplicate entry to remove.”

Engineering (Erick Engelke)

• The Dean of Engineering had asked for efficiencies of FTEs; we provided a few proposals on how to save money.
• Mechanical Engineering is not running the latest version of SharePoint and will be moving to the cloud. Is there anything we have to do to vet things before they go into the cloud?
  • IST has a guidance document on guidelines for secure data exchange.

Technology Integrated Services, IST (Steven Bourque)

• The RFP for the VPN replacement has been awarded to Cisco.
  • The plan is to have in service by April.
  • Cisco was our previous provider but this will be new hardware and next generation firewall as well.

Library (Adam Savage)

• We are looking to make the switch to Outlook for booking meetings; currently having some issues during testing.
  • Contact Jason Giles or Simon Dinney via RT for assistance.

Instructional Technologies and Media Services, IST (Andrea Chappell)

• Recently sent out the survey for student feedback on the online learning environment.
  • It will be open for 3 weeks.

Math (Robyn Landers)

• We have expressed concerns over the new purchase requisition process in Unit4; everyone line item needs to be entered separately which is not efficient.
• Looking into purchasing new batteries to put in our old UPSs but wanted to talk to someone who has more expertise regarding UPSs before ordering.
  • Contact Graham Leiher or Jason Gorrie regarding UPS efficiencies.

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on February 8 2018 at 1:30pm, in EC2 1021.