Teaching, Technology, and Learning

Just like a stock of a company can be delisted from the exchange for failing to trade above a certain price, our computer science labs were recently "delisted" by ITS for failing to meet a utilization threshold of 5%.

I'm not sure how the 5% was calculated (time spent logged in? number of logins?) but when our two labs were delisted one was about 4.5% and the other was around 1.5% utilization.

What this means for our labs is they are no longer supported by ITS. Supported labs get money for maintenance and machine lifecycle replacement every 4-5 years. The money came from student technology fees. This means we'll have to pay for upgrading the lab machines ourselves.

While this might seem bad for us, it's not entirely a bad thing. For one, we will no longer have to abide by the rules required for all supported labs so we can do some more freewheeling like boot into linux, authenticate locally instead of using Active Directory, etc.

More significant though are the reasons why our utilization was low. 1) We lost a lot of enrollment around 2001 when the dot com's went bust. We're just starting to get enrollment back up. 2) We now have available a computer classroom, so some of the classes we once held in the lab are now held in the classroom. 3) Way more students are doing their own work at home or on their laptops. In particular, laptop use is way up. This might actually be a good opportunity to retool our lab to make it more laptop friendly with simple desks / tables and power and perhaps a network they can plug into. One fixture that I don't think will go away though is the printer. If we do turn our lab into a laptop station, we will need to figure out a way for students to conveniently print from their laptop to one of the laser printers.