ANNUAL REPORT 2020-2021 INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND COMPUTING SERVICES

As a result of the pandemic, many aspects of ECU community members' daily academic and professional lives moved online. With students learning remotely, faculty and staff working from home, and events being offered virtually, ITCS saw massive spikes in usage of digital resources and conferencing tools, such as Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, email, the Virtual Private Network (VPN), Qualtrics, and REDCAP.

New Student Orientation Course

With no option to offer in-person orientation during summer 2020, ITCS partnered with Undergraduate Admissions to build a front-facing Canvas course to facilitate an online New Student Orientation experience. Admissions staff participated in Canvas training to best support students. The Student Orientation App in PiratePort was modified to fulfill back-end data requirements.

Online Math Placement Test

Some transfer and first-year students must complete the Math Placement Diagnostic Test to determine which one of four math courses they will take. This test has only been offered in person, which was not an option during the previous fiscal year. ITCS assisted the Math department with gathering IT resources and developing a Canvas course to offer the test online. The course flows students through three exams that increase in difficulty to determine which course they will be enrolled in. Plans are to continue using this course as an option for students to complete this test.

Brody School of Medicine Virtual Admissions

ITCS assisted the Brody School of Medicine Admission Office and Student Affairs with a completely virtual process for facilitating interviews for medical school candidates. ITCS created and supported the sessions using a combination of three tools – Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Forms. In addition to faculty and staff, current medical students also participated in the sessions, giving candidates an opportunity to ask questions and learn about studying medicine at Brody. Brody School of Medicine Admissions plans to use the format again for the 2021-2022 admissions process.

Special Grading Accommodations

During the 2020-2021 Academic Year, the Faculty Senate and senior administrators approved a Pass/Fail grading initiative to help lessen the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on students. Working closely with the Registrar’s Office, ITCS developed a PiratePort application that allowed students to request special grading accommodations that adhered to the approved requirements. In response to the evolving business requirements, the application was updated each semester to remain compliant. In the Fall 2020 semester, students requested 18,526 accommodations and in the Spring 2021 semester students requested 10,809 accommodations.

DocuSign

After the majority of students and employees transitioned to remote learning and remote work, the demand for an online digital signature solution increased exponentially on campus. Prior to Spring 2020, ECU used less than 2,000 digital DocuSign envelopes per calendar year. After moving to remote learning and remote work, the campus’ demand for digital signatures increased 1,750%. Between Fall 2020 and Spring 2021, the university consumed approximately 35,000 digital DocuSign envelopes. This transition streamlined business processes, enabled traditionally face-to-face processes to persist in a remote, digital environment and had a significant positive impact on the environment.

COVID-19 Daily Screening

To prepare for the return to campus in Fall 2020, ITCS collaborated with several partners — Student Health, Office of Prospective Health, ECU Physicians, Housing Services, Institutional Planning, Assessment and Research, Office of University Counsel, Creative Services, and the Pitt County Health Department — to develop a solution for students, faculty, and staff to self-screen for COVID-19 symptoms. Individuals who registered their mobile devices in PiratePort received a daily screening reminder to encourage compliance and promote campus safety. A customized web page, https://symptom-screening.ecu.edu, was developed based on CDC guidelines and recommendations from our ECU and Pitt County Health partners.

Single Sign On with Multi-factor Authentication

Being able to protect user login credentials from attacks by those who want to steal passwords or hijack credentials for malicious intent requires more than just a complex password. Multi-factor Authentication has become an essential part to securing access; however, it requires several extra steps for each login. ITCS’s goal is to determine a balance between securing user access while providing a seamless work environment for staff. To provide this balance, ITCS continues to accelerate the implementation of Multi-factor Authentication with Azure Single Sign On to sensitive and critical systems. Throughout this project, ITCS collaborated with multiple departments and individuals across campus as well as vendors from around the world. This undertaking started in 2020 and has since seen the deployment to 19 major services. Eight services are currently in progress and research efforts are underway to determine if an additional 20-30 systems support an Azure implementation.

Vulnerability Scanning

The vulnerability scanning process helps to reduce the chances of an attacker breaching ECU’s IT systems and yields a better understanding of assets, their vulnerabilities, and the overall risk to the organization. ECU endeavors to ensure that all vulnerability scans running on servers authenticate with proper credentials needed to gather complete information about a server asset and its software and vulnerabilities. In support of the university’s ongoing efforts to cultivate and further mature an intentional culture of IT security, ITCS provided guidance and support for server administrators within ITCS and distributed across the university. Process definitions, report review, targeted scanning support and technical troubleshooting, policy evaluation and update, enhanced discovery and vulnerability scanning scopes and educational materials were all outcomes of project work. The deliverables and efforts of this project team were also leveraged in response to feedback from the Office of the State Auditor.

Kronos Implementation

A collaboration among ITCS, Human Resources, and Financial Services, in conjunction with team members from individual departments, the Kronos project required a multi-year phased approach to implement across the university. Each phase included a formal introduction, process and standard operating procedure development, training and education, application go-live, and post-adoption support period. In Spring 2021, the final phase of the Kronos implementation was completed. The software standardizes the technology used to manage time and leave reporting across campus and streamlines business processes by eliminating paper timesheets. Kronos provides real-time access of leave balances to employees and supervisors while enforcing federal and state laws.

Electronic Research Administration & Compliance System (eTRACS)

ITCS partnered with Institutional Planning, Assessment and Research, ECU Banner teams, internal auditors, Systems Coordination, faculty from across campus, and Human Resources to implement the Electronic Research Administration & Compliance System (eTRACS). eTRACS (https://etracs.ecu.edu) efficiently and compliantly enables staff and faculty to develop, route and submit sponsored program proposals; track post-submission actions and awards; and submit post-award eForms for approval. Streamlining research processes through eTRACS has led to significant cost savings for the university and provides intuitive web-based self-service applications configured to facilitate best practices (single portal, secure, and accessible from anywhere).

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Implementation

Working with Undergraduate Admissions, Graduate Admissions, International Admissions, Marketing, Institutional Planning, Assessment and Research, the Payment Card Industry Office, Cashier’s Office, Registrar and faculty across campus, ITCS is in the process of implementing the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software TargetX, which will replace Recruit, Radius and Mongoose. TargetX will generate significant cost savings for the university and provide the tools necessary for ECU to better achieve a competitive advantage within the UNC System. The new system will provide an optimized student experience, automation of communication, tracking engagement with online advertising, consolidating tools, and predictive analytics.

Prenoting for Direct Deposit

The National Automated Clearing House Association (NACHA) is an organization that governs the Automated Clearing House (ACH) Network or payment system for direct deposits and direct payments, with the capability to reach all United States bank and credit union accounts. Recently, the NACHA updated their set of Operating Rules requiring bank account validation or proof of ownership for direct deposit accounts. The method by which Banner completes this process is called Prenoting. ITCS, Systems Coordination Payroll and Finance, Accounts Payable, Payroll, Office of Supplier Management, along with staff from Financial Services collaborated to implement prenoting prior to the deadline while streamlining ECU’s Payroll and Accounts Payable processes by moving from custom programs to Banner-delivered programs.

Canvas Operational Data Store Integration

Canvas Data is a service from Canvas that provides access to data for reporting and queries. To provide ecuBic and PowerBI reporting, ITCS automated data imports from Canvas Data into ODS and combined it with the Student Information System (SIS). This valuable access to data allowed for the creation of complicated reports such as Rubrics, Gradebook, and the ITCS Audit Report that were not captured in Canvas. This project directly supported the University Strategic goal of Student Success.

Move from Blackboard to Canvas

Through partnerships with academic departments and other campus units, ITCS completed the move from the Blackboard Learning Management System to Canvas. This campus-wide project provides the university a modern, cloud-hosted Learning Management System (LMS) that has proven essential in helping us manage the move to remote learning as a response to the pandemic.

Faculty have a stable platform to host courses, and students have tools, like the Canvas Student App, which they use to participate in course activities. The addition of Canvas 24/7 Help to our implementation provides users an option to quickly receive help through live chat. This is especially important so that our students receive the help they need when they need it, after business hours and on weekends.

New Tools Implementation

ITCS continues to research and implement new learning technologies that support and improve learning and teaching. In addition to leading the massive Move to Canvas project, ITCS implemented four additional learning technologies.

• Badgr: Digital badging tool used to issue badges for demonstrated mastery of skills and other learning achievements.
• Portfolium: ePortfolio creation and management system used to collect student work. Students have access for life and can use their portfolios to demonstrate skills to employers and clients.
• Qwickly Attendance: Attendance tracking tool that integrates with Canvas. Provides better features and customization than the native Canvas attendance tracking tool.
• Respondus Monitor: Software-based proctoring tool used to promote academic integrity when students are taking test in Canvas.

LinkedIn Learning

LinkedIn Learning is an on-demand library of instructional videos taught by experts from the business, technology, and creative industries. Through LinkedIn Learning students, faculty, and staff complete full-length courses or watch single videos to learn specific skills, like time management or entire applications like Microsoft Excel or Adobe Photoshop. Faculty also use LinkedIn Learning videos in their ECU courses. Students completing full-length courses are awarded certificates of completion that can be displayed on professional, social networking sites like LinkedIn.

Universal Design for Learning Services

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is an educational framework that uses research from learning sciences to guide the development of learning environments that accommodate learning differences. ITCS’s UDL specialist has developed course templates that faculty import to begin building new Canvas courses. These templates incorporate UDL concepts and other instructional design strategies giving instructors a head start on building flexible, well-organized courses that meet the learning differences of our students.

Training, User Education and Support

ITCS provides faculty training, consultation, and user education resources (i.e., announcements, e-mails, knowledgebase articles, etc.) and support for the university’s suite of supported learning technologies. In addition to the how-to, these opportunities and resources provide guidance on the why-to and when-to of successfully integrating learning technologies into courses in ways that create meaningful, memorable student learning experiences.

Financial Literacy Course for Students

ITCS assisted Institutional Planning, Assessment, and Research with the development of the optional course ECU Financial Literacy course. All students are enrolled as part of a SACS (Southern Association of Colleges and Schools) initiative. This course includes topics covered by the National Endowment for Financial Education and equips students with the knowledge, tools, and skills to help them make wise financial decisions. Students can work through any or all the four modules listed below. Each module includes videos, podcasts, discussions, polls and practice assignments.

1. Budgeting: Keeping Track of Your Money
2. Dealing with Debt
3. Paying Back Student Loans
4. Budgeting for Life After College

CourseFIT (Functional, Innovative Teaching) 2021

Annually, ITCS partners with the Office for Faulty Excellence to provide support to CourseFIT. As part of this program, ITCS assisted in the development of the ECU Teaching Toolkit. The Teaching Tool Kit contains a series of lessons that walk instructor through building courses that leverage research-based best practices.

Operational Data Store

This year, the university’s Operational Data Store and Data Warehouse integrated data from the Canvas Learning Management System that allowed the creation of several rubric analytics reports and final grade change emails for faculty. Other data integrated into the Operational Data Store this year includes the System Office’s Student Data Marts and HR Data Marts, Brody School of Medicine’s eValue Learning Management System.

GoldenGate

This past year, ITCS successfully implemented Oracle’s GoldenGate technology. GoldenGate allows the university databases to replicate and transform data between each other. The new technology provides faster and more reliable streaming of data.

Banner and Operational Data Store Hardware Upgrade

For the past year, ITCS has been migrating ECU’s Banner and Operational Data Store infrastructure to a new hardware platform. The new hardware platform has been implemented within the development and test environments with a production go live scheduled for September 11, 2021.

Chrome River

In September 2020, ECU went live with Chrome River, the campus’ new travel and expense management system. The Chrome River project spanned 2.5 years and required regular coordination between ITCS and Financial Services and sought input from constituents across the campus. The project scope included replacing the existing travel system due to aging technology and streamlining business processes pertaining to university travel, employee reimbursements, and corporate purchasing card transactions. Chrome River enabled paperless processing, streamlined the reimbursement process, and programmatically enforces state and university travel regulations.

WordPress Migration

In Spring 2021, ITCS completed a multi-year project to convert the second-level ECU websites from CommonSpot to WordPress. The project scope included working with end-users from across campus to review the content of 388 websites, 1,150 subsites, and 28,154 webpages to determine if they needed to be migrated to WordPress, archived, or removed. A total of 508 WordPress sites exist to date and 674 users from across the campus have attended training.

Email eDiscovery Migration

ITCS started the migration of on-premises email to the Office 365 Exchange online cloud in July 2018 with the project completion in December 2020. This email migration consisted of moving 176 terabytes/7 years of email for eDiscovery and compliance to the cloud. By making this change, ECU has taken advantage of cloud services included in the Microsoft campus agreement and eliminated the need for on-premises storage hardware.

Classrooms and Lecture/Video Capture Tools

This year, approximately 7 classrooms in 4 buildings were upgraded with current technology to best accommodate student and instructor needs.

Classrooms across campus are equipped with Mediasite recorders used for the recording, management and sharing of lecture material. Using Mediasite Mosaic outside the classroom, instructors can create screencasts, video-only and audio recordings. Ocularis is a campus-wide recording solution used to manage audio/video recordings for HIPAA, PHI, clinical and academic proctoring. This solution gives faculty and staff the ability to capture and archive recordings.

Expanded Sensitive Data Scanning

To complement the university’s established practice of leveraging Spirion Identity Finder as a tool to scan for and classify sensitive data on servers, ITCS completed a project to deploy Spirion Discovery Teams. Discovery Teams is a grouping of multiple dedicated machines with the Spirion Agent installed that can be used to search servers and computers on our network. This initiative increased the frequency of scans on servers to identify any sensitive data, allowing us to complement biannual manual scanning efforts with regular automated scanning, expanding our visibility of possible sensitive data, and proactively minimizing cyber risks.

Expansion of Security Tools

This past year, ITCS deployed AMP for Endpoints on all Windows servers, creating policy and groups within AMP, and assigning permissions. ITCS also assisted with the successful deployment of AMP for Endpoints on Macintosh workstations used by the School of Dental Medicine. ITCS provided expertise and support for a major upgrade of the forensic analysis tool EnCase, ensuring that Encase continued to work with encrypted workstations. ITCS also worked to establish Sysmon monitoring of enterprise servers, ingesting Sysmon log data into Splunk, and leveraging such machine data for cyber threat intelligence.

Information Security Program Overview and Teams Site

The ECU Information Security Program, as described in the ECU Information Security Regulation, consists of a collection of enterprise rules, standards, and guidance. ITCS developed a comprehensive document, Components of ECU Information Security Program, that describes the university's approach to Information Security, while summarizing the components of ECU's program. The overview document covers program components including policies, information security standards, IT security risk management, security awareness and education, security incident response, vulnerability management, and data governance. The overview document was supplemented with a new Microsoft Teams site to provide stakeholders with a user-friendly way to access related documentation associated with our program. Components of the ECU Information Security Program (or the "Concise Summary" version) was used to support the Cyber Security Management standard for SACSCOC Reaffirmation, National Center of Academic Excellence (CAE) in Cybersecurity redesignation (through CET), and the Financial Aid audit.

Incident Response Planning and Preparation

In partnership with the Office of Environmental Health and Safety, the Information Security Office facilitated a tabletop exercise for the Emergency Management Team on 6/18/21, designed to test our cyber incident response plans with emphasis on emergency management. The activity included participants from the Chancellor's Office, Environmental Health and Safety, Campus Safety & Auxiliary Services, ECU PD, University Communications, University Counsel, and Human Resources. The Information Security Office also facilitated a tabletop exercise for the Data Stewardship Committee on 6/30/21, with a special focus on the role of data stewards in cyber incident response processes such as data breach assessment. Such thought provoking tabletop exercises are a key part of our incident response planning. The real-life scenarios encourage discussion, and the simulation activities provide situational awareness, and help us to practice our readiness to handle cyber incidents and provide timely information to decision makers.

ECU Compliance Plan for UNC System Standard 1400.3

This past year, ITCS developed an ECU Compliance Plan for UNC System Standard 1400.3. As a constituent institution of the UNC System, the statewide policies approved by the Board of Governors apply to ECU. The plan presents an overview of ECU’s compliance with statewide access control standards, with particular emphasis on Multifactor Authentication, while summarizing related matters such as identified gaps, risk acceptance, and recommendations. The plan will be reviewed annually and considered as input into the annual risk assessment and reporting process. The university will be required to resubmit a new compliance plan every three years.

Enterprise Information Security Annual Risk Assessment

The Information Security Office completed in December our annual Enterprise Information Security Risk Assessment Report, which was approved by the CIO and VC of Finance and Administration in January. This report identifies information-related risks to ECU’s critical business processes, highlighting a prioritized list of eight top risks, including calculation of relative risk along with recommendations. The goal of the risk assessment is to provide actionable intelligence to university decision makers on the treatment, avoidance, acceptance, and management of information risks, which if realized would impair the University’s capability to fulfill its mission and key objectives. For this assessment, many sources of evidence were consulted, including third-party security assessments, and findings and recommendations from auditors.