Day 1: November 6 – Main Conference

• 7:30am-9:00am: Registration and Breakfast
• 9:00am-9:45am: Keynote Address – John Paul – Chancellor Ballroom
• 10:00am-10:45am: Sessions 1
  • Reimagining Classrooms for Transformative Learning Experiences
    Ava Wolf, Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning; Matthew Drain, Technology Services
    From the changing landscape of higher education to empirical evidence on improved learning outcomes, questions about how we design and manage classrooms must be considered if we are to fulfill the Strategic 150 goal of Transformative Learning Experiences. This session will cover multiple factors in the development of classrooms on this campus, while exploring some of the newest plans for interactive spaces that put students at the center of the learning experience. Join the conversation as we explore new frontiers in classroom design, and discuss possible solutions to the unique challenges we still face.
    Location: Humanties Room
    Track: Developing the Path Forward
  • Feedback in Action: Actively Seeking Customer Perspectives
    Calvin Shirley, Engineering IT; Mark Hart, Engineering IT
    In order to understand how our services are used or how to improve our ability to support our users, it is important to solicit feedback from our customers. In August of 2019, Engineering IT performed and Ask Me Anything on the /r/UIUC sub-reddit. The goal was to solicit direct feedback from our student population, and it worked! We wanted to share our experience (as well as our anxieties) and hopefully we can all walk away with ideas on how we can do a better job connecting with our customers at all levels. Please join us in a discussion about the value of direct feedback, how to connect with customers, and how to close the loop with their feedback in a way that fosters mutual trust and respect.
    
    Location: Lincoln Room
    Track: Education, Inspiration, Collaboration
  • Disability Inclusion: Campus Wide Assistive Technologies and Authoring Resources
    Jon Gunderson, DRES; Angella Anderson, DRES
    Participants will learn about campus wide assistive technologies used by students with disabilities to access documents and online resources, and the tools available to authors to help them make more accessible documents. The assistive technologies include the JAWS Screen Reader, Voice Over Screen Reader, ZoomText magnifier and Kurzweil 3000. The session will demonstrate the basic features of these assistive technologies and provide information on how to make them available in campus computer labs. The campus recently purchased a license to EquatIO to help faculty and staff make mathematical equations more accessible in web pages and documents, including Word and PDF. SensusAccess is a online resource to convert files, URLs, images of text or plain text into a range of alternate media including audio books (MP3 and DAISY), e-books (EPUB, EPUB3 and Mobi) and digital Braille. EquatIO and SensuAccess will be demonstrated and information provided on how to access these resources.
    Location: Technology Room
    Track: Education, Inspiration, Collaboration
  • Taking the Robots out of the Humans! – How RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is Changing the Landscape of Education and Beyond!
    Sachin Koshy, UiPath Inc.
    The educational sphere is a broad one, encompassing teachers, students, and academic administrators. As technologies become more widely adopted, they become incorporated into both primary and secondary education systems. This was the case with electronic calculators, desktop computers, laptops, tablets, “smart” boards, and much more. The same can be expected of automation and software robots, and the beginnings of this adoption are starting to be visible in schools as they implement RPA into the university framework be eliminating the need to have humans continue to handle repetitive and mundane tasks. With these examples in mind, we will share how RPA and UiPath the leader in the automation technologies arena, utilizes this technology to show benefits to teachers, students, and academic administrators.
    Location: Innovation Room
    Track: On the Horizon
  • Rokwire Initiative
    John Paul, Rokwire; William Sullivan, Rokwire
    This is the Rokwire initiative. We’re an interdisciplinary team at the University of Illinois: computer scientists and social scientists, entrepreneurs and philosophers. Together we’re building the operating system for the cities of tomorrow. A software platform designed to be personal, experiential, local and contextual. To show you how to navigate the places, institutions and communities you live in so that you can do the things you want to do. Rokwire is a living lab. We’re still finding out what’s possible. And you’re invited to learn with us.
    Location: Chancellor Ballroom
    Track: Developing the Path Forward
  • M*A*S*H – The Mac Admin Survival Handbook
    Matt Childress, Math IT; Allison Payne, ACES Admin IT
    We’re all in this together, trying to make the campus Mac user’s experience the best it can be. Let’s share our strategies for accomplishing that!
    Location: Alma Mater Room
    Track: Developing the Path Forward
• 11:00am-11:45am: Sessions 2
  • Promote Innovation and Improved Support with Collaborative Service Management
    Isaac Galvan, Technology Services; Allison Payne; Matt Childress; Dena Strong
    IT organizations across the university are the first point of contact with our customers. The more we can have them contribute to the direction of service operations and development, the better. Agile service management invites a group of IT pros (and maybe users) as stakeholders in deciding how the team spends its time and effort supporting the service, together. We’ll discuss how several campus groups, including the Illinois Box IT Pros group, use agile service management to collaborate on a wide variety of tasks, iterate on collective deliverables, and break down information silos to create values for their users.
    Location: Chancellor Ballroom
    Track: Education, Inspiration, Collaboration
  • Pitfalls of DynamoDB
    Ken Taylor
    Relational database ideas emerged in the 1970s and for decades represented the dominant management system paradigm. More recently, the NoSQL movement has emerged, with types including columnar, key-value, and document stores. Amazon’s AWS-hosted DynamoDB is top-20 database management system of growing importance used by many firms. Despite the excitement around DynamoDB, there are still times when a well-designed relational database sitting in a mature DBMS like PostgreSQL will outperform DynamoDB in a number of important metrics, including cost. In this talk, Mr. Taylor will describe direct experiences with enterprise-scale deployments of DynamoDB, as well as exploring some of the issues that may not be understood before starting a new DynamoDB project.
    Location: Humanties Room
    Track: Expect the Unexpected
  • Everything I need to know about Troubleshooting I learned from Super Mario
    James Hamilton, Technology Services at Swanlund; Zachary Schnepp, Technology Services at Swanlund
    Some of my earliest memories are of me being left alone with a computer. In the late 80’s, just as I was developing a sense of self, our family acquired a surplus Apple IIe and dozens of games and programs on 5.25 inch floppy disk. I dutifully worked my way through all the disks, discovering what each was. I was exploring. My territory was not the backyard or the woods, but cyberspace. At that age there was distinction between game and application. MacPaint and Excel and Virtual Pinball were all entertaining software to me. These early home entertainment games taught me the value of persistence and practice. Many of the games’ challenges required learning through repeated failure and other required learning from other players. My early exposure to the kind of thinking required to play these games has shaped me into the variable-eliminating troubleshooter that I am today.
    Location: Technology Room
    Track: Expect the Unexpected
  • Shaping of the Future Work Force
    Michelle Rome, College of LAS – ATLAS; Kirstin Wilcox, Liberal Arts & Sciences at Illinois; Will Newton, ATLAS Internship Program; Julia Hartman, ATLAS Internship Program
    Students can study what they are passionate about and find rewarding careers no matter their major. The College of LAS at Illinois has established a partnership between our Humanities Professional Resource Center and College IT support (ATLAS) unit to help students explore career options through internships. In this session learn how your organization can be intern friendly and how you can help students explore possible career options. You will leave convinced to update your entry level job descriptions to be inclusive for more majors.
    Location: Quad Room
    Track: Education, Inspiration, Collaboration
  • Functional, Usability and Accessibility Testing on a Mobile Device
    Neeru Batura, Technology Services; Tim Offenstein, Technology Services
    Testing mobile devices for functional, usable and accessible interaction is a new area for many of us. The new Rokwire Illinois app has required all three. Neeru Batura and Tim Offenstein had the opportunity to participate in these phases of the Rokwire project. They will share the significant lessons learned in this process. Things like; the app can behave differently depending on the operating system, early usability testing has advantages and disadvantages, and communicating accessibility is a hands-on endeavor.
    Location: Alma Mater Room
    Track: Developing the Path Forward
  • Authenticating Email – Getting Ahead of Coming Changes!
    Eric Frahm, Technology Services
    We’ve heard it, I’ve preached it, but the deadline for changing how we send email is getting closer! Let’s discuss what the technical requirements will be and the solutions we’ve planned to make it easy.
    
    Location: Lincoln Room
    Track: On the Horizon
• 11:45am-1:00pm: Lunch, Poster Sessions, Vendor Showcase, and Networking
• 1:00pm-1:45pm: Sessions 3
  • Networking BOF
    Debbie Fligor, Technology Services; Chris Skaar, Technology services; Chuck Hayes, Technology Services; Aaron Brown
    A Birds of a Feather session for discussing networks. Wired, WiFi, old, new. Members of the Networking teams at Technology Services will attend and discuss networking things with the attendees.
    Location: Quad Room
    Track: Infrastructure and Architecture
  • DIY Captioning: Learn It, Live It, Love It!
    Christy Blew, DRES; Ann Fredricksen, DRES
    By law, video content must be captioned. In education, this includes video clips shown in class, lecture capture sessions, and online courses. This session will give you a beginning tutorial into the DIY world of captioning your course content and how you can use free resources to get it done.
    Location: Humanties Room
    Track: Education, Inspiration, Collaboration
  • macOS/iOS at Illinois
    Paul Roberts, Technology Services; Matt Childress, Department of Mathematics; Keith Mountin, Apple; Drew Coobs, Technology Services
    Fall update on macOS and iOS at Illinois. Keith Mountin our campus Apple System Engineer will be on hand to answer question plus give updates on the following: What’s new in macOS 10.15 and iOS 13 How to deploy macOS with DEP Enterprise Connect at Illinois.
    Location: Alma Mater Room
    Track: Education, Inspiration, Collaboration
  • What Students Want
    James Quisenberry, Student Affairs Technology; Dan Steward, Sociology
    Our continuing panel returns with four undergraduate students sharing from their experience on the Urbana Campus. Come hear how technology on campus works for them and the challenges they face.
    Location: Chancellor Ballroom
    Track: Developing the Path Forward
  • Tales from the Speakerphone
    Rob Watson, Tech Services; Michael Curtin, Tech Services; Glen Embertson, Tech Services; Keith Wessel, Tech Services
    Remote work is becoming more common on our campus and beyond. It’s important for those on-site and those remote to continue working effectively and efficiently together. Join Tech Services’ remote staff to hear about pain points and best practices, learned through our experiences, to get yourself ahead of the game. This session will offer techniques, tools, and ideas to help you avoid issues that can hinder creativity, inclusivity, effectiveness, and efficiency. Whether you interact with remote workers, are one yourself, or plan to start working remotely in the future, you’ll gain insight from this session.
    
    Location: Lincoln Room
    Track: Education, Inspiration, Collaboration
  • Critical Hit: Using the Dungeons and Dragons Platform for Training and Evaluation
    Evan Barber, Brookens Library
    Training and evaluating employees can be an arduous, boring task and they often aren’t linked in a meaningful way to each other. D&D brings employees together to create an immersive training experience that gives players a tangible document to show their progression as an employee.
    Location: Technology Room
    Track: Education, Inspiration, Collaboration
• 2:00pm-2:45pm: Sessions 4
  • The Pathology of Legacy Web Applications in Non Profits ***CANCELLED***
    John Barclay, University of Illinois Extension
    NOTE: This session has been cancelled. As the web gets older, non-profits with in house web applications can accumulate legacy code and applications over time creating great technical debt and poor user and user support experiences. I’ll examine some of the practices and belief systems that enable or discourage accumulation of legacy applications from the context of some university units I’ve worked with. Spoiler alert: many of practices hide or uncover costs related to application development and maintenance.
    Location: Quad Room
    Track: Developing the Path Forward
  • Meet Your LMS
    Mark Reynolds; Rick Hazlewood
    A presentation of current LMS (learning management system) offerings on the Urbana campus. Information about the LMS, primary features, user base, future plans. A short discussion of what students want/expect at a world-class institution of higher ed.
    Location: Humanties Room
    Track: Education, Inspiration, Collaboration
  • What Researchers Want
    Ashley Hetrick, Research Data Service; Amy Hovious, Research IT
    Inspired by James Quisenberry’s panel on student needs, What Researchers Want invites researchers from across campus to share information about their projects and to articulate how we can best support them.
    Location: Alma Mater Room
    Track: Developing the Path Forward
  • Shaping Your Future With Professional Development through MGRdev and ITLW
    James Quisenberry, Student Affairs Technology; Stephen Kemp, Technology Services; Jim Hurst, Engineering IT Shared Services; Candice Solomon-Strutz, AITS
    Professional development opportunities can help you shape your future career. Learn about the management and leadership development programs offered on campus through MGRdev and the IT Leadership Workshop (ITLW). Our panelists will help you understand the goals of these programs and the content offered. They will share the timelines for applying and the key points of the nomination process. Although MGRdev and ITLW are the focus of this presentation, other opportunities for development, such as the IT Leaders Program will be discussed. Attendees are welcome to bring their questions about these two programs, as well as suggestions for other development opportunities.
    Location: Technology Room
    Track: Education, Inspiration, Collaboration
  • Sending Email from ‘The Cloud’
    Eric Frahm, Technology Services
    Sending properly authenticated and trusted email from increasingly diverse platforms facing increasing scrutiny and compliance poses unique challenges. The new ‘Cloud Emailer Service’ can provide an easy solution for ‘lift and shift’ moves, or it can provide an improved platform for new use of email and communications.
    Location: Chancellor Ballroom
    Track: Developing the Path Forward
  • Creating Change that Sticks
    Brian Mertz, Public Affairs
    Why do some services and apps become an inseparable part of people’s lives while others are largely ignored? Is a good communications campaign all that it takes to drive culture change amongst a user base? As technology constantly evolves, part of an IT team’s job is to help people adopt and accept changes whether that is removing a beloved feature or spinning up an entirely new service offering. But service adoption isn’t the sole responsibility of the marketing team, and it shouldn’t solely fall on the help desk to guide users through service changes. There are techniques that developers and service managers can also use to change user behavior. This talk will introduce attendees to some of the basics principles of behavioral psychology, choice architecture and marketing research that anyone in IT can use to facilitate large scale change.
    Location: Lincoln Room
    Track: Developing the Path Forward
• 2:45pm-3:15pm: Snack, Poster Sessions, Vendor Showcase, and Networking –
  Illinois Ballroom
• 3:15pm-4:00pm: Sessions 5
  • Good Enough: Knowing (and Accepting) Your Limitations
    Keelan Lang, Engineering IT; Mark Hart, Engineering IT; Gina Duello, Engineering IT; Tim Vruwink, Engineering IT
    “We want to knock it out of the park with every request, but sometimes good enough is good enough.” Supporting users in an ecosystem like ours can be messy. Oftentimes, to avoid this mess, we don’t take on challenges or associated risks. Our teams at Engineering IT find that, more often than not, “good enough” is exactly what end users need. We’ll take this time to discuss what works for us, how to work with your users to make sure their needs are met, and field questions from the audience.
    Location: Technology Room
    Track: Expect the Unexpected
  • Re-calibrating the Knowledge Base
    Wesley Pate, AITS Service Desk; Joshua Erenberg, Technology Services
    Have you ever wondered how best to search your search results? Were instructions for your microwave easier to read than a knowledge base article? We want a knowledge base that is efficient, consistent, easy to use, and easy to read. We need your help! This Birds of a Feather is a brainstorming session focused the university knowledge base. We want the IT community’s ideas on how to shape our knowledge base. Please come ready to share, listen, and collaborate
    Location: tbd
    Track: Developing the Path Forward
  • Introducing CrowdStrike Falcon, Next Generation Antivirus
    Mark Wenneborg, Technology Services; Drew Coobs, Technology Services
    Learn about the University’s new antivirus and endpoint detection and response tool, CrowdStrike Falcon. Whether you’ve used the tool before or not, come to ask questions, learn tips and tricks, and share your feedback with Security and the IT community.
    Location: Chancellor Ballroom
    Track: Developing the Path Forward
  • The Transformation Journey of Technology Services and You
    Scott Genung; Beth Scheid; Greg Gulick; Tracy Smith
    Technology Services is reinventing and reinvigorating itself through an IT Transformation (ITX) journey. We envision an organization poised for high impact as the University embarks on a digital transformation and the partnership required throughout campus to enable these emerging capabilities. We will provide an overview of the ITX journey, including a status update and why this is important to campus IT professionals, while soliciting feedback from the broader campus community.
    Location: Lincoln Room
    Track: Education, Inspiration, Collaboration
  • Sharing Successful Teamwork Strategies
    Candice Solomon-Strutz, AITS
    We all know some elements for effective teamwork. Share and learn more teamwork strategies through facilitated hands-on activities and group discussion. In this session, we will be developing the skills that need to be developed and present to work effectively with a team. There is a 30 person cap for this session to provide participants with team approaches and the opportunity to practice these skills. This session relies heavily on the participation of all attendees and hopes to challenge you to learn and practice new skills. Are you ready to adapt to changing conditions and shape your future?
    Location: Alma Mater Room
    Track: Education, Inspiration, Collaboration
• 4:15 PM – 4:30 PM: Closing Remarks and Sponsor Quiz / Prize
• 4:30 PM: ITPF Connect Event at Houlihan’s (located in iHotel) sponsored by CDW-G and DELL