UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Just before a meeting with Penn State Information Technology (IT) leaders began at Behrend last fall, one campus employee jolted from his chair and quickly made his way to the door.
A few minutes later, the phone in the room rang. It was a professor in another building who needed help. A finnicky overhead projector was preventing her from starting class.
Before she even finished describing her problem, her IT help walked through the door.
“He was monitoring the equipment on his phone and could see that it went down,” said Kari Williamson, director of Commonwealth Campus IT. “Our IT specialist was already on his way there. So, we reduced the time that that faculty member had to wait. That is really the dream, to be that way across the state.”
To provide ample support for students, faculty and staff, Tier 1 is expanding to all Commonwealth Campuses.
At Penn State, Tier 1 support helps faculty, staff and students access and resolve issues with University services, including Canvas, email and LionPATH. While these services are critical to everyday functions, the IT support needed most often involves routine tasks like password resets and setting up multi-factor authentication.
As one of the many efforts ongoing through the work of the IT Optimized Service Team (OST), all campuses are beginning to onboard with Tier 1 support through the IT Service Desk. This additional support will allow the on-site IT talent to work more closely with staff and faculty at campuses on more specialized or large-scale issues.
Jim Serafin, IT director, and Nick Silka, associate IT director, work at the Behrend campus. Their office is not far from the Yahn Planetarium and the Nursing Technology Lab and Simulation Center where there are a host of potential IT issues awaiting their expertise.
“We’re spending time answering Office 365 questions and other enterprise-level questions that someone else probably spends all day doing,” Serafin said. “They’re quicker, faster, better able to respond. They have their support teams behind them. That really frees us up to focus on what our clients want from us.”
Enter the IT OST’s A/V Taskforce, created through the efforts of the IT Optimized Service Team (OST).
This group, co-led by Vince Mitchell, IT and audio/video support specialist at Schuylkill, and Jamie Davidson, IT consultant at Abington, has a busy summer ahead upgrading facilities based on a months-long process to evaluate the needs of students and faculty across the state to standardize classrooms.
Mitchell, Davidson and their colleagues are working to ensure that design is uniform across all of Penn State’s campuses and special-mission units.
“If a professor that teaches at Schuylkill has to teach at Hazleton, they come into the same design, basically,” Mitchell said.
The team began last summer by surveying IT units at Brandywine, Hazleton and Behrend about the type of equipment each campus was using and to determine their familiarity with different integration and programming systems.
Before coming to Penn State, Davidson worked for more than two decades in corporate IT doing integrations and live event production. He knew right away where to look for the answers.
“You have to start by listening to the end user,” Davidson said. “How is the room being used, what’s practical, can it be built in a way that allows future upgrades or changes to technology? The ideal solution has to be uniformity, homogenous approach so they can come into every room and not feel out of place.”
With the information they received, Mitchell, Davidson and the rest of the team put together a listing of three different classrooms — a basic room with limited IT resources, a general-purpose room with additional capabilities and then a full, advanced audio/visual room — and the equipment needed for each one that could be used by each campus to model their own spaces.
The task force was able to identify Extron Electronics as the AV technology most IT units had experience with. It has arranged a series of training courses for nearly 30 staff at no cost to bring other IT units up to speed with the technology.
Not only will IT staff members at campuses be able to troubleshoot, they’ll be able to integrate new equipment in the future, just as the task force will be integrating and programming classrooms this summer.
The task force is also cognizant that every campus and their facilities are unique.
“Here at Abington, we have very, very limited space,” Davidson said. “We can’t just dedicate a room to being Zoom only, because we have to flip it around to so many different classes that we kind of have to have a more uniform approach so any class can be taught in any one of them.”
As the OST continues its work, they will continue to explore ways to find efficiencies and provide better support for the University’s faculty, staff and students.
Williamson said, "While we recognize there is a lot of work ahead of us, we are excited about the opportunities that the OST approach will provide in the future to improve our operations and increase our impact on the teaching, research, and service mission.”