Northern Virginia Community College

Highlights of the College's General Technology Plan approved by the VCCS

Applications Plan

1. Every student registered has an ID and password to access e-mail, personal productivity applications and other specific services.
2. Every employee has an ID and password to access to a secured set of information technology services on servers separate from those used by students.
3. Electronic mail will be available to all individuals within the NOVA community, including the ability to access e-mail through dial-up over a phone line.
4. A set of personal productivity applications will be available to all faculty, staff and students. These applications will include word processing, spreadsheet and presentation/graphics packages as part of a suite of products designed to work together.
5. Additional academic programs and courses will be converted or expanded to take advantage of the new compressed-video units installed on the campuses and connected to all the other campuses throughout the VCCS and many additional sites throughout the country.
6. The Internet paradigm for information access will be used to allow user-navigated access to a variety of resources and information such as: class notes, schedule information, catalogs, admission and financial aid information, directories, student/faculty handbooks, etc.
7. Instructional modules for out-of-classroom use will be developed on a pilot basis.
8. We are currently developing a set of policies and procedures which will accompany the deployment of technology.
9. An appropriate plan will be developed to provide user support at the desktop level on each campus, with customer support through a centralized facility (help desk) and applications support through instructional technologists.
10. We will develop a comprehensive support plan including back-up strategies, naming conventions, server configuration and capacity management.
11. There will be a professional development plan with a requirement of 40 hours training annually in the use of personal productivity applications, NOVA-network navigation and use, and user-programming (as an option). We recognize the desire of many of our instructors to receive training to meet their own particular needs and timing.
12. We will develop an SIS query server which will provide static and ad hoc reporting capability to the college community. This query server will be based on a relational data base, receive daily downloads from SIS, and be used to address the many information needs in the campus community today, as a stop-gap solution permitting access to class rolls, transcripts, and other SIS imbedded information.
13. Any group, committee or roundtable appointed by the college administration will incorporate discussions on technology and its application into all their respective proceedings.
14. We will leverage our resources against the extensive resources available at other organizations within Northern Virginia.

Infrastructure Plan

1. All new physical connections will be through category 5, unshielded twisted pair with traditional RJ-45 connections at the end-user side, and clustered into wiring closets at the other end.
2. The initial model for allocating connections to each campus is as follows: four per classroom (one per wall), 28 in the typical lab classroom, one for every staff member in administrative areas, two per area for all other areas (e.g. cafeteria, common areas).
3. A detailed look at each campus will be necessary prior to finalizing the amount of work required to meet the standards and determine whether it is cheaper to continue using Token Ring or convert to Ethernet topology.
4. All networked environments, local or wide area, will utilize the TCP/IP protocols to achieve any-to-any connectivity. The migration from current protocols will be: all new NT server installations will be installed with IP; Novell servers will be migrated to IP one the NT servers have been deployed; the LAN Server environment will come across as needed only if not displaced first by the NT roll-out.
5. The wide area network will be based upon the ATM network currently being developed by the VCCS under the technical direction of Virginia Tech, to yield significant bandwidth between all NOVA and VCCS sites.
6. We will migrate all SNA mainframe connections connections to the new network. By the end of the plan period, all the traffic will be completely IP. The specifics of this migration are yet to be resolved.

NOVA Office of Instructional & Information Technology

Information Technology Governance

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