The EDUCAUSE Communications Infrastructure and Applications Constituent Group Steering Committee focuses on the challenges that higher-education institutions face with respect to enterprise communication, collaboration, mobility, and networking. As part of the outreach to our ACUTA friends and colleagues, a pre-conference workshop prior to this year’s EDUCAUSE conference has been organized for Tuesday, October 30th with topics that will be of interest to anyone involved with communications infrastructure in higher education.
Workshop Overview
This workshop is part of an on-going effort to provide members of the former ACUTA organization a sense of place within the EDUCAUSE community and opportunities to get together and share experiences and best practices. The workshop is being spearheaded by Mark Reynolds of the University of New Mexico, Adrienne Esposito of Rutgers University, and Geoff Tritsch of Vantage Technology Consulting Group.
The purpose of this workshop is three-fold:
- To present topics of interest to both ACUTA and COMMTECH communities
- To provide an educational and networking opportunity for former ACUTA members at EDUCAUSE
- To conduct our annual Constituent Group meeting and encourage former ACUTA members to get involved with the group
Sessions at the pre-conference include:
- Panel discussion on the overlapping products in the UC/video/collaboration space
- An overview of Internet of Things (IoT) in healthcare and how this translates into the higher education space
- Review of the current and future directions of key industry UC/collaboration/video platform providers
- Update on current key telecommunications legislative and regulatory changes that will impact higher education
- WHAMP (What’s Happening at My Place) is an interactive session where participants can discuss current projects and issues from their institutions
To wrap up the day, there will be a vendor-sponsored reception for former ACUTA members, workshop participants, and other interested individuals. Details and speakers for each session are provided below. View the detailed agenda and register for the pre-conference workshop by clicking on the button.
Ecosystems Collide: Campus Perspectives
In this session, a panel of higher education participants will discuss issues and strategies associated with the large numbers of overlapping communication services that are in use on all of our campuses. For example, how does a campus position MS Skype/Teams, Cisco Jabber / Spark / Webex Teams, Zoom, Blue Jeans, Polycom / Real Presence, Blackboard Collaboration, etc., in the UC/video/collaboration space.
Speakers:
- Mark Berman (Siena College)
- Samantha Earp (Smith College)
- Adrienne Esposito (Rutgers Univesity)
- Mark Katsouros (Penn State)
- Alok Vimawala (University of Michigan)
Internet of Things (IoT)
The session will focus on the potential scale for the Internet of Things (IoT) on campus and in health care, for both consumer and enterprise devices. Healthcare is presently using IoT technologies to improve efficiencies, increase patient safety and reduce errors, automate processes, and harvest data. How can these translate to educational institutions? What is being done now and what can we expect in the future in terms of security, energy management, IP addressing, network segmentation, general campus infrastructure and other applications of IoT.
Speakers:
Ecosystems Collide: Industry Update
This session will examine the current and future directions of key industry UC/collaboration/video platform providers including Avaya, Cisco/Broadsoft, Microsoft, and others.
Speakers:
- Geoffrey Tritsch (Vantage Technology Consulting Group)
- Jon Young (Vantage Technology Consulting Group)
Legislative Update
What are the current key telecommunications legislative and regulatory changes? How are these likely to impact campus operations? The speaker is a principal at a large Washington D.C. law firm specializing telecom regulation.
Speaker:
WHAMP Session – What’s Happening at My Place
In this highly interactive and facilitated session, workshop participants discuss current projects and issues from their institutions. Please come prepared with any topics for which you’d like to discuss solutions, hear about others pitfalls and hopefully glean tips towards pitfall avoidance, and do some general peer benchmarking and networking.
Facilitators:
ATUCA Reception
A vendor-funded reception for former ACUTA members, workshop participants, and other interested individuals is being planned.
Visit the EDUCAUSE 2018 Conference website for additional information on the agenda, program, exhibitors, presenters and registration.