Daniela Tovar-Miranda
Staff Writer
The transition to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has slowed down Dominican University’s Information Technology other plans.
Even with this diversion, the IT department has made strides to complete two main goals – supporting faculty, staff and students and tightening cybersecurity.
In the past, students and staff members have received phishing emails, a type of online scam that targets the community through the false appearance of secure emails. According to Todd Kleine, interim chief information officer, just a few weeks ago, Dominican put all staff members on two-factor authentication so that if an email is compromised, two factor authorization stops hackers from gaining complete control of the email account.
To continue tightening security, the IT Department replaced the firewalls and had the required password lengths extended from 8 to 12 characters.
“We increased the password length; it is basically research that the longer the password is, the harder it is to crack,” said Kleine. Kleine was appointed by President Glena Temple last February and has been serving as an interim CIO.
Apart from security, there has been an emphasis on how to make servers like myDU user-friendly to make sure that people have an easier time using the site.
One update this year is the option of adding a chosen or preferred name. Students who want to change their display name in Canvas can request a preferred name through Student Success and Engagement, and once approved, the name would show up Canvas.
Temple had an outside company review Dominican’s IT Department. The company commended the IT department for the hard work being done these past two years, she said.
“Building a good team is challenging, but we are very lucky here at Dominican,” Temple said.
She did not release the report to the Star.
The next on-going projects are Canvas’s display of faculty members’ and students’ pronouns and accurate spellings of students’ names. For some students, Canvas does not show the accent marks and other diacritics in their names. According to Kleine, these projects aim to be completed in April.
“There have been situations where accent marks and things like that have been taken off in data processing,” says Kleine. “We want to avoid that.”
In addition, Dominican plans to stay on track with the replacement cycle which updates university computers every five years. These summer computers will be replaced the existing ones in classrooms and labs.
“We apply for a grant through the Department of Commerce, it is called Connecting Minority Communities Pilot Program, and in the program institutions that are minority-serving can apply for a certain amount of money from the government and be able to replace the technical infrastructure in the classroom,” Kleine said.
Dominican applied for a little less than $3 million, and the Department of Commerce will let institutions know if the university will receive funds on March 1. This will help the department conduct the replacement cycle much faster.
Student Success and Engagement and the advising offices are also discussing ways to make myDU more friendly by reaching out to students, staff and faculty to see what is and is not working.
Additionally, there are plans for the Dominican University app. The current target audience is prospective students who can check their application status through the app. Now there are plans to make the app usable for enrolled students, such as adding features for students to sign up for classes.
“We have heard from students, we are continuing to move forward in technology and continue to make sure that it is seamless for them,” Temple said.
