Georgia Southern University ITS News Blog

ITS has announced plans to expand the wireless network to cover most academic and student services buildings and illuminate “hot spots” throughout campus.   Hot spots are areas within buildings that students frequently visit before or after classes.  The work is planned to be completed by the opening of the fall term.  Funding for the expansion came from student technology fees and department funds. Read the rest

The Emerging Technology Center is updating our smart classroom management system during the summer of 2008.   This updated and expanded Crestron Roomview system will offer increased help desk and room monitoring capabilities as well as increased reporting functionality.  It is expected to be ready for use for Fall 08 in all smart classrooms with Crestron room controllers.

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The Center for Online Learning, in conjunction with the Provost and Continuing Education has been working with several departments on campus to develop new online degree programs. The COL program is a systematic design and review process that includes planning, scheduling and training between faculty and COL staff. The goal is to create courses that meet specific instructional objectives and are simple for students to navigate and use.

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The GSU Employee Information Self-Service portal allows you to view and modify your employee information in an online environment. You can also view and easily update your address, critical phone numbers, and emergency contact information; review your benefits and dependent information, get the most current medical and dental rates, make changes to your W-4 form, and view your current and previous paycheck advices. Want to sign up or change your Direct Deposit information?  The GSU Employee Information Self-Service Portal is the place to do it. 

In October you will be able to submit online requests for expense reimbursement. This new feature will give you the ability to submit and monitor your requests for travel and expense reimbursement from inception to generation of the check. Read the rest

The Emerging Technology Center recently hosted several training and orientation sessions for faculty and staff. In March we invited faculty & staff from the School of Nursing and the College of Education to a demonstration of Adobe Connect and Tegrity. Adobe Connect is a web conferencing tool that allows students and faculty to conference via their home or office computers without having to travel to conference.  It features the ability to show “continuous presence” or the Hollywood Squares view of all participants in the web conference. Tegrity is a class capture and playback product that can be put in classrooms to record class sessions and stream them for later viewing by students in the class.

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Procurement & Contract Services and IT Services recently updated workstation purchasing procedures to give Georgia Southern faculty and staff more choices.  We have added Dell as a supported vendor and it is considered standard hardware as long as the configuration is completed through the ITS Purchasing Site. Read the rest

Over the past few years, Georgia Southern University has made several significant improvements to the hardware setup of our centralized applications. In December 2006, we moved our Banner application from a host with a single point of failure to four redundant, load balanced servers with a raided disk array. The only down time we see now is usually related to scheduled patches and updates. This scenario also allows us to upgrade some Banner components while the system is up. This shortens the amount of down time during our “Banner and friends” weekends. Read the rest

Secure Passwords that are easy to remember – is that possible?

There are easy ways to remember secure passwords that you have created. Sounds like a hard task. Well it’s not as hard as you think. In this article I’ll mention a way that you can create a secure password and still be able to remember it, even when you have to change it ever so often. I’ll also mention the Georgia Southern Standards for passwords so you can make sure that your password does meet our minimum standard with some do’s and don’ts of password safety. Read the rest

The COL service center will provided information to students and perspective students seeking information about our online programs.  COL staff can answer most questions about the Unviersity online programs or quickly refer individuals to the appropriate persons in the University.   Their goal is to ensure student success.  This COL service center is managed by Deborah Champion and staffed by graduate and student assistants.  Visit http://online.georgiasouthern.edu/ for more information , or call 800-679-6801 or email GeorgiaSouthernOnLine@georgiasouthern.edu to contact the Center. Read the rest