Program

No one likes to fail. No one wants to stand in front of a room full of stakeholders and say “we believe we can fail, but we know we can fail forward on this project”. No one wants to admit that it wasn’t glossy and it wasn’t easy.

Yet everyone will admit their most solid lessons were not learnt by their easy successes, but by their tough successes…

A request for new Search technology by a stakeholder created the opportunity to investigate the opportunities for a change in culture around Search and Information. However, the majority of System Owner Stakeholders had no vision for the future of search and were unaware of how quickly the environment was changing.

Thus a simple request for new technology lead us to:
* raise the focus on information management at a strategic level
* demonstrate what innovation in this sector looked like
* challenge upper management on search custodianship
* educate System Owner Stakeholders on expectations around search
* encourage Stakeholders and Operational Staff to become prophets for search
* support Operational Staff to improve the performance of search on their repositories

Some of it worked, some of it didn’t.

Tough success is when you realise your organisation is not full of text book perfect people. It’s full of budget constraints, siloes, personalities and politics. But you still make it work.

This is the tale of one of our Tough Successes – USQ Search.

James Cook University talks to their journey towards continuous business process improvement using ServiceNow

All ICT Departments struggle with effective and efficient procurement and contract management, whether it be Tier 1 Service Desk staff or Executive Management. USQ set about taking the confusion out of the process by utilising technology and innovation.

USQ were able to:

• Increase efficiency and consistency of ICT procurement processes with a vision to automate Academic and non-Academic Procurement Processes in the near future, through automation.
• See the benefits of strategic procurement resulting in the use of Standing Offer Arrangements (SOA) for ICT Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and Managers
• Implement processes in accordance with the Government procurement legislation and QITC Framework
• Improve ICT Contract Management and record keeping.
• Ensure S.M.A.R.T and consistent communication with suppliers.

Vanessa will also address the challenges and wins surrounding our workflow enablers, those being the Avanti Service Management System & Open Windows Contract Management Software.

Ultimately, USQ has implemented simpler, standardised processes, which remove the challenges and confusions of Procurement and Contract Management within the higher education sector.

It’s a struggle projects have likely all faced before – finding the right mix of resources to complete a complex project within short deadlines. Add in a regional location and things get seriously interesting!

During the Student Portal redevelopment project, USQ found itself in a position where midway through the project we had to rethink our approach in order to meet that looming Semester 1 deadline.

Agile project methodology offers a way of delivering high-quality work within strict deadlines – which was exactly what we needed if we were to launch on time. However, agile project approaches were still a relatively new way of thinking for USQ – we knew we needed to grow our internal capacity to ‘GO AGILE’ but didn’t realise how much short-term pain we would face to get there!

The solution? Accepting our skill gaps and partnering with a vendor to get us to where we needed to be. Securing external vendor assistance made perfect business sense, but also presented many challenges the project team did not anticipate.

This presentation will explore the opportunities, issues and learnings from partnering with an experienced agile agency to deliver our project, including

• Fostering productive working relationships between USQ and the vendor
• Managing personality and knowledge clashes between parties
• Project team readiness to adopt and thrive under a fully agile methodology
• Organisational and departmental hurdles to implementing agile
• Vendor and organisational expectations of performance and accountability

Don will provide insight into some of the mechanics behind delivering a successful product portfolio to the sector.

In particular Don will focus on the Cloudstor Roadmap and platform and openly discuss some of the challenges the team have with developing and delivering this service to a range of end users and sector customers.

Don will address the roadmap for the product and will seek feedback from the audience around the product on offer and hope to engage with the audience around their experiences and requirements.

Don will go into the process for selecting and developing new products and services and hope to engage with the attendees around some of their challenges in the teaching and learning and e-research space in particular.

Don will end with some case study examples over the last 2 years and where his team are focused for the next 2 years and compare this to some of the other Global NREN research and teaching and learning products available.

Analytics can be a surprisingly loaded word; for every person that gets excited about what improved data can offer their professional practice there will be another who is ambivalent or frankly disinterested.

So how can we take the data that we already have but aren’t really using, and make it not only informative but also actionable? This was the question that framed the In-Semester Analytics initiative at USQ in 2017. Using a custom built Moodle analytics tool (developed in-house), a sample of teaching academics piloted a resource usage analytics report and low grade threshold analytics report over courses in Semester 1 2017.

The pilot did not direct how the reports were to be used within the context of the teaching of a course, and focused on:

• The intuitiveness of each report.
• The usefulness of each report.
• Ways in which the data within the reports were acted upon.
• Any issues with the data, and
• Suggestions for improvements to the Reports

Pilot participants revealed different attitudes and abilities around being able to interpret the data presented. This taught us that Learning and Teaching Analytics must be more than “If you build it, they will come”, but rather it needs to be considered in the context of both the teaching academic’s own confidence in using data, as well as their motivations.

This presentation will outline the analytics pilot and share our findings and learnings from launching this tool at USQ.

Like all Universities Griffith University has been observing the dynamic changes in the personal computing devices market while also considering the current fleet of Student devices and the associated support
processes.
Commencing in 2014 a decision was made to review usage levels of teaching labs and the age profile of the
fleet. The outcome led to the repurposing of a number of labs to other uses and the development of a
Digital Workspace Solution strategy.
This presentation will follow the journey from discovery of the over servicing of of Students computing requirements through to successfully providing a solution that is cost contained yet student experienced focused.

Key activities during this journey that will be reflected upon include:
1. Lab closures commenced 2014
2. Development of the Digital Workspace strategy
3. Market review ITO – Value for money curve
4. Business case for benefit – reduced expenditure on lab PCs vs licensing costs
5. Turbo background
6. Turbo future architecture
7. Successful pilot details including lab closures

As more devices and apps are introduced to the learning environment, IT must work to meet user expectations of access and responsiveness. Issues with apps are sometimes attributed to poor Wi-Fi, which may not be the case. To date, many IT tools have focused on the availability of the network infrastructure, and not on the user or client perspective.

When learning is reliant on 100% up time for these apps, what’s needed are solutions that focus on the user, client and application. Come and listen as Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company demonstrates new solutions and best practices that allow IT Teams to have visibility into exactly what clients are experiencing on the network, allowing faster troubleshooting and remediation of potential issues. See how you can get on the front foot to find and resolve issues before they become trending topics.

The global video conferencing market has undergone fundamental changes that have led to unprecedented growth in adoption, primarily driven by innovation and technology advancements. Zoom has led the cloud services revolution and is disrupting the industry with particular adoption within the tertiary Sector of Australia over the past 3 years.

Zoom’s mission is simple yet powerful – to make video and web conferencing frictionless.  It offers a new class of video and web collaboration solution which is not only simple and affordable to deploy in every meeting space but also makes the experience enjoyable.  Zoom unifies cloud video conferencing, online meetings, group messaging, and a software-based conference room solution into one platform.

The key to Zoom’s success within the tertiary sector have been its product design, usability and flexibility in a BYOD focused sector, allowing Universities to utilising existing hardware and drive increased unified communication across the campus.

This session will dive into the Zoom Roadmap discussing the developments in all areas of Zoom including infrastructure, partnerships and software.

The global video conferencing market has undergone fundamental changes that have led to unprecedented growth in adoption, primarily driven by innovation and technology advancements. Zoom has led the cloud services revolution and is disrupting the industry with particular adoption within the tertiary Sector of Australia over the past 3 years.

Zoom’s mission is simple yet powerful – to make video and web conferencing frictionless.  It offers a new class of video and web collaboration solution which is not only simple and affordable to deploy in every meeting space but also makes the experience enjoyable.  Zoom unifies cloud video conferencing, online meetings, group messaging, and a software-based conference room solution into one platform.

The key to Zoom’s success within the tertiary sector have been its product design, usability and flexibility in a BYOD focused sector, allowing Universities to utilising existing hardware and drive increased unified communication across the campus.

This session will be an open discussion between a group of key Universities currently utilising Zoom and our presenter Sergio Aguilera.  The focus of the discussion will be on University specific focus’ such as LTI integrations and Zoom Room compatibility within learning spaces.

Astronomers are used to working with data that is too big to be processed on their local desktop computers.
While remote high performance computing for processing astronomical data is common practice, reliance remains on desktop based applications for some aspects of the research workflow, especially data visualisation. These applications typically run on a local computer, which requires the transfer of processed data from the remote facility, and suitably powerful computing hardware at the astronomer’s desk.
However, we show that a virtual hosted desktop provisioned from a cloud service such as Amazon Web Services or the NeCTAR Research Cloud, operating over a suitable network, can provide a desktop experience that exceeds that of a local computer. Operating on sharable hardware that can be deployed ad hoc and far more cost-effectively than a high-end graphics workstation, this approach to desktop computing also eliminates the need to transfer large amounts of data from a remote facility to the local desktop for processing, and the dependence on particular capabilities of a local computer. The approach described in this presentation is directly applicable to many other research disciplines.

The Research Bazaar (est at UniMelb[1]) is now in its 5th year as a global community with over 17 participating Universities worldwide[2]. #ResBaz is a grassroots effort to improve how PhDs, postgrads and postdocs can keep up to speed with the ever changing digital tools+data ecosystem.

The community continues to grow founded by its pedagogical principles of:

(i) for research by researchers,

(ii) blended community learning (face-to-face and digital communities), and

(iii) helping you -the researcher- work smarter, not harder.

Come learn:
(a) how UniMelb has made an IT department one of the most sociable learning places on campus, and
(b) how you can establish ResBaz on your campus (and get the funding support from your Uni to do so).
Free (Open Access) copies of the ‘Research Bazaar Cookbook’ will be given away to participants.

[1]= http://melbourne.resbaz.edu.au/
[2]= https://resbaz.github.io/resbaz2018/
[3]= https://www.amazon.co.uk/Digital-Research-Skills-Cookbook-Introduction/dp/1549698524/

It’s no secret Universities (and our online environments) are complex beasts. Implementing changes that appeal equally to every user is impossible, let alone appeasing internal stakeholders!
Student expectations of an online University environment remain fluid and are shaped by the rest of their digital lives – how do you keep up and deliver what they want as a user, but also deliver what we need to an institution?
Over the last two years USQ has been on a journey to improve our student online experience and tackle those real user problems our students were facing, via an iterative user-first approach.
To do this, we had to step back and think of ways to involve our students in their student portal redevelopment, from concept through to delivery. Launching a beta version of our entry portal to 26,000 students was a new concept for USQ, and harnessing that ongoing source of direct (and brutal) student feedback told us things we didn’t even know we wanted to know!
In this session we will use our portal project to demonstrate how taking students on the development ride with us forced a greater understanding of user frustrations and highlighted opportunities to improve as we went. Leveraging this direct student user input also helped manage those complex internal relationships, essential to effecting any kind of change!

Given the rise of digital, social and mobile, millennials and mature-age learners expect a digital environment to learn in that mirrors their day-to-day interactions. Technology and digitisation is giving rise to the Smart Classroom that improves student engagements, enriches student experiences and allows for flexible and enhanced teaching delivery. This facilitated session will follow Optus’ strategic mission to create connected customer, employee and space experiences and how this is translating into transforming Classrooms and Workplaces of the Future through the lens of a long-serving Higher Education CIO now sitting within Industry.

Developing effective and integrated experiences for online and on-campus learners.
Modern media strategies from desktop video to mini-documentaries and into the world of mixed reality.
What opportunities lie ahead for technology enhanced learning at James Cook University?

Living with a severe physical disability such as quadriplegia can be socially isolating. Getting together with your peers and singing is a socially inclusive activity that is denied to many due to the physical difficulties of getting out of the house and to a central location.
Singing together online overcomes the barriers caused by distance, transport and disability. However, using traditional video and web conference systems does not allow people to sing in time due to latency issues with the technology.
A team of researchers from the University of Melbourne developed a prototype virtual reality application and combined it with a low-latency audio solution to make online group singing possible for people with disability.
Respiratory dysfunction is a major cause of illness and death following quadriplegia and previous research has shown that group singing helps people with quadriplegia to breathe better, speak louder and to make social connections. Many of the motivational and emotional benefits come from singing with others rather than in isolation.
The team has researched a workable solution to this latency issue, allowing synchronous singing for geographically separated people. Furthermore, they have also developed a virtual reality application that creates an opportunity for people with disability who have difficulty leaving home, to conceptually leave their home and sing with others around a virtual campfire.
The presentation will outline the steps undertaken to achieve this solution to achieving low-latency networked audio combined with virtual reality that allows people to make music together online.

Malware has been around since the earliest days of connected computing. While it has evolved quite a bit, our core methods for fighting it have not. Join us to learn more about the history of artificial intelligence dating back to nearly a century, plus what our labs have implemented.