Providing tools to teach for tomorrow
Lying just beneath the surface, Concordia’s IITS department is everywhere. Amid the brick-and-mortar structure of Concordia’s infrastructure, IITS provides the nerves, helping day-to-day business run smoothly and always striving to reflect contemporary technological standards.
A next-generation library
Principal among IITS’s accomplishments over the past year, says IITS associate vice-president and CIO Marc Denoncourt, is the Webster Library Technology Program—itself an illustration of IITS’s complementary infrastructure role.
While the Webster Library transformation was a project in itself, IITS worked in concert with Facilities Management and the Concordia Library team to modernizing library technology.
“Concordia had a vision to make Webster Library into a showcase of digital technologies and digital resources to showcase university resources and more importantly, become a library of the future,” says Denoncourt
The results? Technology is embedded throughout the new space, right down to simple digital signage which clearly helps users grasp the physical layout of rooms to widely extended wireless coverage. In many ways, these have been the quiet developments.
Much more noticeable is The Visualization Room, with its gigantic screens scaled to accommodate enormous data sets and fine detailed images, and the Digital Sandbox—a hands-on makers’ space designed to allow community members to encounter new technology like 3D printers, simple single-board computers, and microcontrollers.
“Maybe you can't afford them, or you don't want to buy these items—this space allows you to simply explore and learn how to use this technology,” Denoncourt says.
He stresses that he and his team have undertaken these upgrades to better support learning and research, to provide a foundation for intellectual life, and to foster a culture of research and innovation and collaborative learning.
Digital teaching and learning
These principles have been at the heart of Concordia's investments to support Digital Teaching and Learning across the entire university, another project IITS helped bring to completion this year.
“The overarching theme is providing a tool set to the community, to foster more collaborative learning,” Denoncourt continues.
Key projects IITS helped achieve this past year include new lecture-capture technology in select classrooms across campus, investments into film, animation and production labs, 23 classroom technology upgrades and 500 computer upgrades in designated computer labs.
If this isn’t enough, new and returning students were greeted on the first day of classes with the rollout of a mobile app designed to help connect students even more tightly to their data.
“Knowing where technology is these days and how students really love apps, we started working on an app last winter in conjunction with University Communication Services (UCS),” Denoncourt explains.
Taking into consideration what would be useful to students and easy to develop, the new app was collaboratively created to provide everything from class schedules and shuttle bus times to campus news and events.
Within the first week of the app becoming available, it was downloaded 3,000 times. Denoncourt says that IITS and UCS are watching feedback from students in order to determine how best to meet their needs.
“Students seem to like the ability to track the exact location of the shuttle bus— we've got a lot of feedback within both the Apple store and the Google store and we’re constantly thinking about what to roll out next.”
Big and small, groundbreaking and subtle, IITS’s continual changes have improved the University’s nervous system, providing students and staff alike with technological learning spaces and working places.
