Lacking Receptiveness to Student Input

Despite claiming to be student-centered, administrators really failed to listen to student leaders and work with them to address concerns. While Student Affairs was very willing to market the fee and woo students with beautiful facilities that other Universities have, they apparently had no genuine concern for student opinion. When the University Park Undergraduate Association chose not to support the implementation of this fee both Student Affairs and the President moved forward with it anyway.

Misleading Information

One of the key problems with the way University Administrators handled this fee is how compared the fees we pay with that of other Universities. Administrators argued that non-tuition fees are much lower than other Universities. However, they “forgot” to mention that many of these state Universities have much lower tuition rates.  In addition to bias in facts and statistics, Administrators were very vague about how the fee would be controlled and how building projects would be determined.  If students are paying a fee that directly impacts them, they ought to be included in the decision-making process.

Uncertain Future

Now that certain University Administrators have pushed their agenda forward, it is unclear how this fee will be implemented, governed, and used. My advice is that students continue to fight for a voice on this fee.  My biggest fear is that this will become an under-examined fee much like the Information Technology Fee. Administrators should be held accountable for how money is spent to ensure it gets used in the best ways possible while meeting the needs of those it is intended for. After all, it is obvious that the rates of both tuition and student fees will only continue to balloon in the future.

On Friday, an announcement was made that beginning this week, bandwidth limits will increase from 2GB/week to 4GB/week. Additionally, network throughput during the day would increase 120%. This is a major improvement for the residence halls. However, it should not make us forget about improving the service in the long-term. Here are my suggestions for ResCom, which I presented to University administrators 2 weeks ago in a formal letter:

Increasing Bandwidth Limits

In the immediate future, I believe that the weekly commodity bandwidth limit for students should be increased to 6GB/download and 4GB/upload per week. The download limit should be set higher than upload limits because, in my opinion, it is more important than upload bandwidth. In my experience, users that have exceeded the 2GB upload limit typically have file sharing applications running in the background that are abusing bandwidth and often sharing copyright material. These limits also meet the minimum of what I believe are the next-lowest bandwidth limits in the Big Ten. Wisconsin-Madison permits users 10GB total of off-campus bandwidth over any seven-day period.

Since a large number of students in the residence halls have received bandwidth violations at the current limits, I recommend that one or two violations be removed from their semester count if new limits are set in the middle of this semester. This would give them a fair opportunity to obey the new and more reasonable limits.

Allocating More Bandwidth to the Residence Halls

In order to increase the amount of bandwidth allocated to the residence halls, I recommend that Auxiliary and Business Services purchase additional internet commodity bandwidth for use in the residence halls. In my opinion, the residence halls should not be entitled to use commodity internet bandwidth that is paid for with the Information Technology Fee. This fee should support all students, and since the ResCom service is only available to students living in University residence halls, I believe it is unfair to students with off-campus housing that pay this fee.

Additionally, I have discovered that many students are confused by the differences between bandwidth limits and bandwidth caps on commodity internet connectivity. In the future, it may be clearer to define bandwidth caps as throughput caps since speed is what seems to be what this cap is limiting, not the amount that can be downloaded or uploaded in a week.

Annually Reviewing Bandwidth Limits and Policies

According to an archived copy of the ResCom bandwidth FAQ, Housing and Residence Life should have implemented a formal policy that would govern residence hall network bandwidth usage. ARHS and CCSG were to be consulted in the development of this policy. However, I am not aware of this policy ever being created or implemented. I would like to see this policy created or re-evaluated in order to create an annual review process for residence hall bandwidth limits. Things that should be included in the process are statistical data on bandwidth use as well as feedback from students. I believe that implementing an annual review committee that consists of staff from both Auxiliary & Business Services and Telecommunications & Networking Services, as well as student representation from organizations such as ARHS and CCSG, would be helpful to consistently analyze internet connectivity needs in the residence halls.

An online survey may also be useful for getting feedback from students regarding the ResCom service. This may help determine general satisfaction with ResCom customer service, bandwidth limits, and connection speeds. While I cannot guarantee that there would be a high volume of responses, I still think it is important to give students the opportunity to supply feedback.

Dealing with Repeat Bandwidth Violations

Although there may be little excuse for someone to receive three bandwidth violations under higher limits, I realize that these users still have legitimate work to do. While there should be a throttle for repeat offenders, I think it should be raised to something reasonable, such as 256Kb/s or 384Kb/s. Also, I do not believe that this throttle should affect access to sites on the Penn State network. This would make most web services that are vital to a student’s education at the University usable.

Improving the User Experience

While the issue of the moment seems to be bandwidth, I believe that several other processes within ResCom need to be improved in order to offer a service comparable to that of other Universities. As the former ResCom Student Supervisor at Penn State Mont Alto, I have seen the confusion caused by computers that have multiple Ethernet Addresses and IP Configurations. Implementing DHCP was a step in the right direction. However, the process would be much more efficient if more responsibility was taken out of the user’s hands. Additionally, allowing students to register with ResCom over their inactive connection would save them the hassle of finding another computer with internet access. I have seen examples from other Universities that automatically redirect students to a “remediation zone” prior to registering that only allows them to access the registration website. Automatically redirecting the user to this site after they plug in their network cable could further improve the experience.

Network Access Controls (NAC) will also need to be updated to improve both the registration and network security aspects of ResCom. Newer Network Access Protection (NAP) solutions could proactively help provision student computers by making sure they have the latest operating system updates and antivirus definitions. This would improve network security and, in my opinion, potentially cut costs by working to reduce the number of compromised machines on the network that ResCom and Security Operations Services must support.

In 2001, University President Graham Spanier spoke at the Advising Odyssey conference about issues that academic advisers will be faced with in the future. During his speech, Spanier explained that an important factor of successfully educating students in the future will be creating an engaged or student-centered University. While this term is somewhat self-explanatory, it could easily be misinterpreted as creating a university that pampers students. Sorry if you were expecting full time massage therapists or day spas in our residence halls.

Spanier defined a student-centered University with three relatively broad statements:

• “An engaged institution must be responsive to the needs of today’s students and tomorrow’s– not yesterday’s. “
• “It will enrich student experiences by bringing research and engagement into the curriculum and offering practical opportunities for students to prepare for the world they will enter.”
• “…it will put knowledge and expertise to work on problems its communities face.”

Are we a student-centered University?

In many ways, Penn State is a student-centered University. Faculty, staff, and administrators have made many attempts to tailor courses and majors to meet the needs of students. Many professors engage students by giving them the opportunity to participate in research projects. These are only a few examples.

However, Penn State isn’t always perfect at meeting the educational needs of its students. Sometimes students get shafted when it comes to resources that are important to their education and career. Sometimes, students don’t have a role in decisions that are made in the University. For being so student-centered, I find it frustrating when University Administrators turn a deaf ear when students speak out about issues.

The Bad Days

On some days, many of my student colleagues deal with people that have subconsciously generalized students as immature, irresponsible, and more of a cash cow than a valuable resource of advice for the betterment of the University, and their attitude reflects that. While their perception may be true of some students, it is wrong to place all students in this category. Every day I work with student leaders that are passionate about making the University a better place for everyone. They are selfless workaholics who do not want or need recognition, even though they deserve it. For students with this kind of dedication, it is incredibly disheartening to come into contact with people that has a negative impression of the students that they are supposed to support.

The Good Days

On a good day, the people that student leaders interact with are receptive to the needs of students. They want to make life better for students throughout the University. For a genuine student leader, nothing feels better than having staff or administration reach out to you looking for ways to improve that they can University, in either a small way or a large one. To me, that is student-centered culture at its finest.

The Days Ahead

Hopefully, our University will continue to be student-centered. It is vital to the success of both students and the University as a whole. There will always be skeptics that believe they know what is best for the student body despite lacking student input. However, the value of being student-centered will hopefully be proven by those that listen to the needs of students and continue to help reshape the University to meet their academic needs. Hopefully, there will be more good days than bad ones for student leaders.

I’m not pushing blame on anyone in the University, but there should be some level of accountability when production services fail. Ever hear of an SLA?

On top of that, the ITS Alert for this issue is about as descriptive as.. well.. okay it’s not very descriptive at all.

Yes, I’m cranky.

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“Converting” your PSU e-mail to Gmail, as I will call it, isn’t really difficult at all. You just have to know where to look for a few settings, and I’ll show you exactly where in this guide. If you’re wondering whether or not your outgoing messages (messages you send) will still show @psu.edu in Gmail, yes they will.

First things first. If you don’t have a Gmail account, I suggest you start by getting one. Go to Gmail.com to sign up. You will need a mobile phone to get an invitation code. Once you have your username of choice and your account is set up, I suggest using it a bit to see if you like it. Some of my favorite features include the 2.6 GB of space for mail (and it increases daily), automatic labels so you can sort your mail into categories, and integrated google search so you can search your email messages. Plus, let me say that the spam filter blocks almost all of the spam mail I ever get and I never seem to get false positives (that is, mail marked as spam that isn’t really spam).

So now if you’re ready to combine gmail with your PSU e-mail, the first thing you need to do in gmail is click on the “Settings” link at the top of the page in your gmail account.  In your account settings, click the “Accounts” tab and then click the link that says “Add another e-mail address”. It should bring up a window that looks like this:

In here you should enter your psu email address and your name. Don’t use my e-mail address.. it won’t work. Now you need to click the Next Step button. Gmail is going to tell you it needs to send a verification e-mail to confirm that this is in fact your e-mail address. Click the Send Verification button. Now you need to log into your Penn State webmail and click the confirmation link that it is in the e-mail that you should have recieved from gmail. After you do this, you should be able to send messages from your gmail account as *@psu.edu. You can either set your psu address as your default or keep your gmail address as your default, but you’ll be able to alternate in any message you send. Now you need to set up your PSU e-mail so you can recieve your PSU e-mail messages in your gmail account. How? I’ll give you a hint, it’s NOT in your PSU webmail settings.

If you thought that www.work.psu.edu was just for changing your access password you’re about to learn something new. If you never knew what www.work.psu.edu was to begin with, well you’re also going to learn something new. You can change your PSU e-mail forwarding address by clicking the link on the right side of the site. To save time I’m providing a direct link to change your forwarding address here.

Once you log in with your access account and password, you should see something like this:

Simply enter your gmail address as I did above and click change. THAT’S IT. You should now start recieving all of your PSU e-mail in your Gmail inbox. Two e-mail addresses, one inbox, 2.6+ of storage. What more could you want?