All institutions begin (or continue) on-line education for all students. I commend all of the instructional designers, academic technologists, IT staff, administration and faculty for the herculean effort to make this possible. For the week of March 23, the following items of general interest are worth commenting on:
News
New
The System Offices will be staffed with only essential personnel this week; the majority of staff will be working remotely until further notice
The Financial System Modernization Executive Steering Committee meets Monday at 2:00 p.m.
Texas A&M’s ITAC meets on Thursday at 8:30 a.m.
In Process
RELLIS contracts
- Contract negotiations for network services at RELLIS with AT&T/ Cisco (RELLIS NaaS) and for data center services at RELLIS with RCDRC continue
Captioning, transcription, streaming and experience management contracts
- A captioning RFP has been released: Solicitation Description: The Texas A&M University System (“A&M System”) Office of Information Technology (“IT”) has a need to acquire captioning products and services (“Captioning”) to ensure we have the best available tools and services for our faculty and students to improve their teaching and learning processes. In addition, A&M System IT wishes to insure the solution is robust enough to meet the Captioning needs of the A&M System and its members(“Member” as listed in Section 1.2) with a sustainable and economically viable process. A&M System is seeking proposals to select RESPONDENTS to provide the Captioning solution as described in Section 3.It is the intent of this RFP to establish Master Agreements with more than one qualified RESPONDENT for the requirements listed. These Master Agreements will allow each Member the discretion to adopt the Captioning solution according to its needs
System-Wide Contracting News
In Process
A&M System-wide Contracts Under Development
- Captioning Services will provide members with closed caption, transcription, and subtitling solutions to make video accessible, searchable, SEO-friendly and more engaging; the RFP was released last week
- Interfolio is a self-service web database program that allows faculty (or staff) to use the Internet to maintain their teaching, research, and service records; the System Offices received a proposal for a system-wide agreement and is working with the System Procurement Office to develop a competitive bid for this product
- Qualtrics provides feedback from customers, employees and students; the System Offices is in conversations to obtain a proposal for a system-wide agreement
Repeats
Current A&M System-wide Contracts
- Access Data provides members with preservation hold software (in annual assessment)
- Adobe provides members full Creative Cloud suite and Adobe Pro software tools (discretionary)
- Banner COE provides members with Banner-related services (discretionary)
- Blackboard provides a cloud-based learning management system option to members (discretionary)
- Canvas provides a cloud-based learning management system option to members (discretionary)
- Class Climate (Scantron) provides members with tools that allows students to evaluate academic courses and instructors (discretionary)
- D2L provides a cloud-based learning management system option to members (discretionary)
- Diligent provides board portal functionality for all members (discretionary)
- DocuSign provides members with electronic signature and related workflow capabilities (discretionary)
- Duo provides two-factor authentication for all members (discretionary)
- Examity provides members with on-line proctoring services under a one-year master contract (discretionary contract)
- eXplorance provides members with tools that allows students to evaluate academic courses and instructors (discretionary)
- GovQA (WebQA) is the TAMUS approved Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) solution for all members (in annual assessment)
- Guardian I-9 (LawLogix) provides members with electronic I-9 compliance verification (discretionary).
- Hootsuite enables members to manage social networks, schedule messages and measure social media from a dashboard (discretionary)
- IOTA Solutions provides members with tools that allows students to evaluate academic courses and instructors (discretionary)
- Laserfiche provides members with the digitization of documents, the automation of records processing, storage retrieval, security and archiving (discretionary)
- Modo Labs provides mobile application development support (discretionary)
- Navex provides members with a ethics and compliance management (discretionary)
- Oracle provides members with a shared hardware/software platform to host Oracle-based applications (discretionary)
- Portfolium provides students and recent graduates with the ability to connect with businesses and employers using previous academic work and projects to supplement their communication (discretionary)
- ProctorU provides members with on-line proctoring services under a one-year master contract (discretionary)
- Proofpoint email filtering and data loss prevention tools (in annual assessment)
- Siteimprove checks web pages, every five days, for spelling, grammar, broken links and accessibility for 54 cents per web page per year (discretionary)
- Smart Net (Cisco) offers members equipment maintenance (discretionary)
- SmartEvals (Gap Technologies) provides members with tools that allows students to evaluate academic courses and instructors (discretionary)
- Syncplicity licensing is available for all members (in annual assessment)
- WebEx online collaboration and meeting software is available to all members at the low cost of $1.44 per month per license (discretionary)
- Zoom online collaboration and meeting software provides members with an alternative to WebEx, GoToMeeting and Adobe Connect
SCIO Trips/Visits
- No trips scheduled this week (or for the foreseeable future)