Projects

Project Summary

Effective July 1st, 2018, the UW System merged UW Colleges' 13 two-year campuses with the UW System's four-year comprehensive and research universities. Per the restructure, UW-Rock County has become part of UW-Whitewater, going by the name, UW-Whitewater at Rock County. 

The objectives of this restructuring include:

• Maintaining and expanding access to higher education by offering more general education and upper-level courses at the integrated branch campuses.
• Identify and reduce barriers to transferring credits within the UW System Maintain affordability by continuing current tuition levels at the branch campuses post-merger for general education courses.
• Further standardize and regionalize administrative operations and services to more efficiently use resources.
• Leverage resources and shared talent at our institutions to get more students into and through the educational pipeline, better aligning the university to meet Wisconsin's projected workforce need.

As part of this system-wide restructure, ICIT has several projects and initiatives in development designed to help UW-Rock County students, faculty and staff transition into the UW-Whitewater ecosystem. The goal of these initiatives is to provide organizational effectiveness through reliable technology & customer-focused service. This means creating a consistent experience for all UW-Whitewater at Rock County students, faculty and staff.  

Current initiatives include (but not limited to):

• Merging UW-W at Rock County students into the UW-W lifecycle.
• Developing the UW-W at Rock County website. (Completed)
• Transitioning email accounts, shared data and network files to to UW-W.
• Transportation to and from UW-W and UW-W at Rock Country campuses. Transportation is provided by two buses which include built in Wi-Fi networks. (Completed)
• Learning Management System support for UW-W at Rock County through Canvas.
• Emergency Communication through the InformaCast App. (Completed)
• IT Security training for UW-W at Rock County faculty and staff. (Completed) 

Project Summary

In the Spring of 2018, ICIT and UW-Whitewater launched a partnership with Involvio. Involvio is a mobile application designed to aid students with regards to campus resources, local events, calendars and academic success. The goal of the project is to help students become more organized and involved with the UW-W community, make campus resources readily available and create a student success network. Involvio will be able to leverage numerous campus resources and integrations including the Canvas Learning Management System, campus calendars, student organizations and Webex. Involvio will help students stay more organized and aid in their overall success at UW-Whitewater.     

In the Fall of 2019, the UW-Whitewater app was officailly rolled out. The rollout began with SOAR sessions during the Summer and was implemented during the Warhawk Welcome Week at the beginning of the semester.  The UW-W app will continue to be used for larger events such as Homecoming. As of the end of 2019, more than 3,500 students have downloaded the UW-W App.  

Project Summary

In the Fall of 2018, ICIT began work on The PeopleSoft Fluid User Interface Project. Fluid User interface is a tile-oriented design that will significantly enhance the "classic" experience of PeopleSoft. Fluid pages will scale gracefully from large-screen devices such as laptops and desktops down to the reduced viewing space of tablets and smartphones without code modification.

The information presentation and layout is adjusted dynamically to conform to the dimensions of the user's device. The Fluid User Interface design approach gives developers just this type of control over the user experience. This new technology moves away from pixel-perfect page layout and provides greater flexibility with the improved use of cascading style sheets (CSS3) and HTML5.

The goals of this project are to provide an enhanced rebuilding experience for all PeopleSoft users including applicants, students, instructors, advisors and staff.  Additionally, the fluid interface will allow for new branding integrations and provide a smoother and more user-friendly experience while working in PeopleSoft. 

Completed

The WINS fluid interface was successfully transitioned on October 1st, 2019. 

Project Summary

In the fall of 2017, ICIT introduced Citrix Virtualized Applications. Citrix is a tool that provides easy access to virtual applications across campus. These applications can be accessed from anywhere and they eliminate the need to download an entire virtual desktop. Citrix provides a streamlined process for instructors and students to access course software during class time without the need of a physical lab. Students and instructors can access the virtual library of apps from their own computers for easy and seamless collaboration. To get started, please go to: https://www.uww.edu/icit/services/virtual-lab

Updates

In Summer 2019, the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite was added to the Virtual App library. Creative Cloud is Adobe’s suite of graphic design, video editing, web development, photography, and cloud services, many of which are the industry standard in their respective fields. Creative Cloud Apps that have been virtualized include: Dreamweaver, Illustrator, InDesign and PhotoShop. 

Project Summary

During the fall semester of 2017, the UW-System announced that the contract for UW-W's Learning Management System would be moving from Desire2Learn to Canvas. Statewide implementation of this shift required efforts from all campuses. UW-Whitewater has consistently been among the foremost of institutions during this adoption.

In Fall 2018, 25% of UW-System Canvas courses were located here at UW-W. We were the first institution to succeed at getting Canvas to pass grades into PeopleSoft. Starting in Fall 2019, all UW-W courses from both UW-W and UW-Rock County campuses were offered in Canvas. UW-Whitewater is on schedule regarding D2L retirement planning, and has made sweeping progress towards the June 2020 retirement of D2L.