Area Report for Board of Trustees

Core Theme 1: ACCESS: Increase equitable and representative access to postsecondary educational and career opportunities that lead to social and economic mobility in Highline’s service area.

• ITS, Student Funding, and Outreach and Recruitment staff recently made in-person visits to the College and Career Readiness teams at both Federal Way and Highline school districts. These visits were to support work happening under the Limitless grant and get district staff access to and training on a dashboard which has been built to give the high school staff insight into where their students are in the application, enrollment, and funding processes at Highline College in order to help their students better navigate the process and avoid barriers. Everyone involved appreciated the opportunity to put some faces to names and to strengthen our partnership in support of our shared students.
• In response to feedback from campus, ITS recently made some changes to how all-campus calendar invites are handled. Faculty and staff had reported that campus-wide calendar invites for optional events were creating tentative holds on all employee’s calendars which caused the tools that students use to make appointments to show those times as unavailable, limiting opportunities for students to book necessary appointments. ITS staff were able to identify configuration changes to limit this type of invites, but still allow employees to send invites for non-mandatory events in a way that employees can still add to their calendars when appropriate, but will not be automatically blocking availability for student appointments.

Core Theme 4: CULTURE & CAPACITY: Become an anti-racist college through intentional development of employees, facilities, and systems that support student success and close equity gaps.

• The ITS Infrastructure and System Administration (ISA) team worked with Public Safety to re-establish our ability to deliver emergency messages to classrooms via classroom phones. Our conversion from our legacy phone system to Teams phones had meant the previous method of delivering those messages was no longer available, but the ISA team was able to configure the system so that the phone calls from our ReGroup emergency messaging platform can now reach the classroom phones, which do not normally allow incoming calls. This helps assure that faculty and students in classrooms will be notified when there is a campus emergency message.
• ITS, Public Safety, and the Center for Leadership and Service recently collaborated to update the access control systems for the Highline Student Union (Building 8). This upgrade both creates efficiency for Public Safety staff and CLS employees, and creates the ability to automatically lock down the Student Union in the event of a campus emergency, which had previously been a task that had to be achieved manually.
• The campus AI Workgroup is moving forward with launching its subcommittees in Winter quarter. Subcommittee membership and chairs have been identified, and the chairs are in the process of scheduling the first meetings of their committees. The established committees are AI Literacy; AI & Academic Integrity; AI Procurement; AI in Teaching and Learning; Business Process Improvement with AI; and AI Pilots & Experimentation.

Report submitted by Chief Information Officer, Tim Wrye