Well, we did it. We made it through 2020, a year that will be forever marked as a year of change.

Though a lot has changed to keep the St. Edward's community safe, OIT's commitment to championing campus vibrancy, supporting our community and keeping the Hilltop accessible has never wavered. Nobody knew what the future would hold, but we knew that the pandemic would create a learning, working and teaching experience that would rely on technology more than ever before. So, we got to work.

Our team worked to assess our resources and bridge the gaps in technology equity. To make remote operations more efficient and accessible, we sought feedback from our community; prioritized the health of our students, staff and faculty; updated our services and software to be more helpful and efficient; and reimagined our impact on campus vitality.

Thus, we began an overhaul of our knowledge base to meet our community's needs during the transition to remote learning and working. Part of this overhaul included highlighting our most relevant articles for distanced learning and working, such as Taking an Online Course and Working Remotely.

Still, not all university activities were virtual in Fall 2020. Some classes that required an in-person experience and depended on university equipment continued to meet on campus. Social distancing and other safety measures meant that campus learning spaces would need to support a quality experience for both on-campus and remote students. OIT equipped these spaces (including studio art, performance, and science lab environments) with iPads mounted on mobile, flexible stands. This solution allowed faculty to bring remote students into the on-campus experience via Zoom, capturing classroom activities from various vantage points and facilitating interaction between in-person and remote students.

When the university went remote, we were suddenly faced with a conundrum. Many, actually. Most students rely on software that is either unavailable on or untenable for personal computers and due to the lockdown, they wouldn't be able to walk into one of our computer labs when they needed to access that software. A communication major that can write all their papers in Word, Pages or Google Docs would probably be fine, but what about someone that needed to do complex data-crunching in ArcGIS? Or compile an app in Xcode when they don't own a Mac? To combat this looming access inequity, we worked with one of our existing services, LabStats, to create remote access portals for our lab computers. Now, we can offer computer labs over a remote connection, so students can access the resources they need, regardless of location or their own computing power.

Remote learning and working highlighted access to cloud services as a need. At St. Edward's, we use a lot. Think Google, Zoom, Canvas, Panopto… the list goes on. Even before the pandemic hit, when cloud service outages occurred, we prioritized letting the St. Edward's community know, and with haste. So, OIT developed a System Status page to provide links to the third-party vendors who monitor the status of our most-used cloud services. So, if you've ever wondered, "is it just me?" when Gmail seems slow, or if you get an error logging into Canvas, you can easily confirm with the service if it is, in fact, just you. Cloud-based services make it possible to work from anywhere at any time of day. Now, you can monitor these services in the same way. Alongside the development of this page, we made some changes to our existing catalog of cloud services for the university.

Cloud-Based Services

We decided a Zoom Pro account was a necessity for everyone as swiftly as we realized virtual operations would be the way of the foreseeable future. Accordingly, all St. Edward's staff, faculty and students now have access to a Zoom Pro account. In turn, we enabled Panopto and Canvas integration with Zoom to make videoconferencing as efficient as possible. We also piloted two services for anytime proctoring of online exams--Respondus and Honorlock--and ultimately chose Honorlock because of improved functionality, 24/7 direct support for both students and faculty, and it’s live pop-in proctor feature.

This year, St. Edward's also acquired Adobe Sign Enterprise (yes, another cloud-based service) to allow the user to send, sign, track and manage signature processes using a browser or mobile device. Adobe Sign is not only convenient, it also helps aid remote work as operations continue at St. Edward's. In addition, all St. Edward's students and employees have access to Adobe Creative Cloud on any classroom or lab computer.

Sometimes we'll explain tech terms, such as what even is "the cloud"? Sometimes, we'll help you navigate new tech so you can be empowered to take a course of action that makes the most sense for you. The possibilities are endless because the vast knowledge within the world of technology is endless.

Of course, we can't forget that events look and feel different. Like many citizens, friends and innovators of Austin, the live music capital of the world, we have had to adapt to keep our community safe while supporting the artists who cultivate Austin's world-renowned vibrant culture. The @Jones concert series sponsored by OIT and the Mary Moody Northen Theatre has adapted to become a virtual experience that can be enjoyed from anywhere. We invited artists such as Guy Forsyth and Los Texmaniacs featuring Flaco Jimenez to bring back music and fun to the (virtual) Hilltop. These experiences remind us how important connection, art and fun are to the St. Edward's University experience. Simply put, we miss doing stuff with other people in the same room.

Forward Thinking

As much as it is important to take time to reflect, it is also just as important to look ahead to new and exciting experiences.

In the new year, the library is looking forward to increasing its staff's size, expanding onsite and online services, and acquiring targeted and in-demand print resources that are unavailable digitally. Furthermore, Munday Library is thrilled to be a part of the Learning Commons Task Force and to be working with the Faculty Senate Library Task Force to find dynamic new ways to serve the students, faculty and staff of St. Edward's University.

Homecoming 2021 is set to be done like never before. To support recommended social distancing guidelines, St. Edward's Homecoming will rely more on virtual engagement with our community. Though there will not be as many on-campus events this year, the university has the opportunity to connect in more ways than ever before with Hilltoppers all over the world. Events that have been traditionally restricted to the confines of our campus are now more open to participation because of its virtual nature. Though Homecoming will be different in many ways, one of the greatest silver linings is the ability to connect in new ways.

As previously mentioned, OIT did an overhaul of our resources to make them more relevant to remote operations during the COVID-19 pandemic. This marked a momentous change in the content we provide and the way we support the university. These changes will continue as we are constantly evolving to meet our community's needs. We can continue to evolve and grow as an organization through feedback provided by our community. Please consider joining TLTR or the Student Advisory Committee in the Spring 2021 semester to help shape the future of St. Edward’s University.

We are working to provide even more resources for our community, such as more tech guides, library resources and an updated user experience for our Support page, support.stedwards.edu. As our global, national and local situations fluctuate, we will adapt to provide the best experience we can given the circumstances. We are hopeful these turbulent and unprecedented waves of change will make for a more resilient, connected university experience.

AUSTIN, Texas — St. Edward’s University Social Work Program, the Texas Law Immigration Clinic and the William Wayne Justice Center for Public Interest Law at Texas Law are sponsoring a “New Era in Immigration,” a 3-part webinar series on immigration law and policy changes following the inauguration of President Biden.

The goal of the webinar series is to understand new and proposed changes to immigration policy in the Biden administration, and the impact those changes will have on communities.

When/Time/RSVP: 

Part 1: Ending Detention and Border Policies that Exclude Asylum Seekers

A panel of experts discusses changes to immigration policies in the Biden administration, focusing on detention and border policies that exclude asylum seekers.

March 3, Noon-1 p.m. CST
Register: bit.ly/3cD72Yi 

Part 2: A Promise of Permanency? Legislative Reform, Temporary Protections and Lingering Interior Enforcement

A panel of experts discusses changes to immigration policies in the Biden administration, focusing on legislative reform, temporary protections and interior enforcement.

March 24, Noon-1 p.m. CST
Register: bit.ly/2MKfDhf 

Part 3: Re-Building the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program

A panel of experts discusses changes to immigration policies in the Biden administration, focusing on rebuilding the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program.

April 14, Noon-1 p.m. CST
Register: bit.ly/3pQhf7u

More Information:

The series is open to the public. Continuing education units will be available.

AUSTIN, Texas — On behalf of the Board of Trustees, St. Edward’s University is pleased to announce the selection of Montserrat “Montse” Fuentes as its next president. 

Fuentes, a native of Spain, will be the first Hispanic president to lead St. Edward’s, representing a significant milestone for the university, which is a Hispanic-Serving Institution and is recognized as 8th in U.S. News & World Report’s Best Regional Universities in the West ranking. She will also become the second female president in the university’s history, a role held by Patricia Hayes from 1984–1998.

Fuentes will assume the role on July 1, 2021, succeeding President George E. Martin, who is retiring in June 2021 after leading the university for 21 years. 

After an extensive national search, the university’s Board of Trustees unanimously selected Fuentes because of her deep knowledge of higher education and her shared commitment to social justice and the Holy Cross mission of educating the heart and mind.

“Dr. Fuentes has a dedication to providing world-class scholarship and classroom teaching, an unsurpassed commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, and a clear vision for the university’s future,” said Steve Shadowen '80, Board of Trustees chair. “She is the right leader to move the university forward in the growing and evolving state of Texas and in the dynamic, global city of Austin.”

Fuentes, an accomplished administrator, professor of Statistics and researcher, was most recently executive vice president and provost for the University of Iowa, where she championed entrepreneurial and real-world training, curricular initiatives, leverage of technology, and civic engagement to enhance student success.

“It is a great privilege for me to be welcomed into the St. Edward’s University community. I am honored to be selected by the Board of Trustees to serve as the next president of St. Edward’s University,” Fuentes said. 

“St. Edward’s is an immensely vibrant institution with boundless opportunities,” she added. “I look forward to helping St. Edward’s reach the next level of excellence, while continuing the university’s commitment to offer a relevant, personalized and transformative educational experience that prepares students to be driven by purpose and to aspire to bring positive change to our world.”

As a first-generation college student who earned a dual degree in math and music, Fuentes shares the university’s dedication to providing a top-notch education for all students. She immigrated to the United States after she was recruited as a graduate student by the University of Chicago, where she earned a PhD in Statistics. 

Since then, Fuentes has accrued two decades of experience as a faculty member and administrator. During her role as department head at North Carolina State University, she was named the inaugural Goodnight Distinguished Professor of Statistics, and also served as a director of a National Science Foundation (NSF) research center for atmospheric sciences named STATMOS.

Before becoming executive vice president and provost at the University of Iowa, Fuentes also served as dean of Humanities and Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University.

As a researcher, her interests include big data, brain imaging analysis, statistics for spatial data, uncertainty analysis, computer models, interdisciplinary applications in neurosciences, environmental and health sciences. Her work addresses scientific and societal problems in brain imaging, weather forecasting, climate change, air pollution and human health effects from pollution, as well as studies of pregnancy and pregnancy outcomes for both the mother and child. 

Fuentes’ research has received funding from the NSF, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), among others. Her work has been published in top scientific journals, and she has authored or co-authored numerous book chapters and two books on statistics.

On top of her academic roles, Fuentes has served on committees and advisory boards for the EPA, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Institute of Health, along with other organizations and nonprofits.

Throughout her career, Fuentes has sought to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. In recognition of her efforts, she received the Equity of Women award in 2013 for major contributions to the equity and wellbeing of women at NC State University. She was also selected as the NC State University faculty liaison for the Office for Institutional Equity and Diversity in 2014 to support women and minorities as they manage a successful career in academia with family responsibilities.

The Board of Trustees said they are confident that Fuentes will continue to lead the university on a path toward growth and excellence set by her predecessor President George E. Martin. 

During Martin’s tenure, the university has grown undergraduate enrollment by 55%, invested more than $400 million to enhance the hilltop campus, significantly improved national and regional rankings, continued national leadership in producing Fulbright scholars, and significantly strengthened the endowment. Additionally, Martin has continued the university’s commitment to the nationally recognized College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP), which recruits and provides support to disadvantaged students.

About St. Edward's University

St. Edward’s University is a private, liberal arts university in the Catholic, Holy Cross tradition with approximately 4,000 students. Located in Austin, Texas, it is one of the top universities in Texas and offers more than 50 undergraduate and 10 graduate programs. With a network of partner universities around the world, St. Edward’s delivers a premier, highly personalized education that helps students explore their own transformational pathways to knowledge, experience, understanding and success. St. Edward’s has been recognized for 18 consecutive years as one of “America’s Best Colleges” by U.S. News & World Report and holds the #8 spot among Best Regional Universities in the West in the U.S. News 2020 and 2021 rankings. For more information on St. Edward’s, visit stedwards.edu/about.

We know technology can be intimidating.

There’s always some new gadget or app. Even if you have your trusted set of tools, it feels like software gets updated every time you blink. And everything — everything! — is a series of acronyms.

That’s why we’re here: to offer solutions to the technology questions you’ve been too scared to ask, which brings us to our blog and podcast, #AskOIT.

Software, hardware, wearables, robots — each month, we’ll answer any question you’ve got about tech. You can send us your anonymous questions and OIT’s Yasmeen Yahya and Jesse Plaza will hound our in-house experts to get the details. Then, we’ll share our expertise with you on the first Monday of each month.

So, let’s get started.

Q: Our department has files in both Box and Google Drive, and looking for a file in both places can be very time-consuming. Also, both are "cloud" services, but there doesn't seem to be any way to transfer files from one to the other. How can I easily view files across multiple services?

A: Oh, the good ol’ digital landfill. When you’ve got unlimited storage, it really can be unlimited, which means you’ve got years, and years, and years of files in this one big vault. Add another one to the mix and it can be sometimes hard to find stuff if you don’t have a good way of keeping yourself organized. Or, if you’re working with multiple people that just might be impossible in the first place. So, as you know, all of our faculty, staff and students have unlimited storage in both Google Drive and Box. So, what do you do when you have unlimited files in multiple locations and you’re never able to find anything?

Well, this is something that really is up to how you stay organized, both as a person or as a department. There is indeed a lot of stuff in Google and there’s a lot of stuff in Box and for various reasons. It may not be so simple as to just take everything from one and put it into the other. Probably the easiest thing to do is to use the sync apps on your computer. Box Drive and Google Drive File Stream are both available from Box and Google and they mount to your Box and your Google folder as kind of a virtual hard drive so that you can search for files through your native file explorer or finder, depending on if you’re on a Mac or a PC. 

Q: I am graduating soon. When will I lose access to my account and stuff like my email and Google Drive?

A: This will be a two-part answer. First, congratulations! The world is wild and you are certainly graduating into interesting times but I hope your time here at St. Edward’s has been useful.

So, to answer your actual question, alumni retain access to their accounts for a certain amount of time. You’ll have your sign-in to myHilltop forever, or, you know, until we replace it with something else in the far-flung future when none of us will be around for it. There are some things you will always need access to, like tax forms and transcript requests. So, you will always be able to sign in. You may need to reset your password if you forget it years down the line but it will still be available, nonetheless.

Certain things within that account, however, will not always be accessible. In particular, your mail, calendar, Google Drive, Box... that’s going to expire a little bit after a year following your last class. So, all former students get a “grace period” that lasts a year. Shortly after that, your access will expire.

For example, let's say someone graduated back in 2012 and they remembered they had a service attached to their St. Edward’s account and they want to go get it back. Well, after that grace period there’s just not an email for us to grant access to again, even temporarily. So, what we advise is, before that grace period ends, transfer out anything you need. Move over accounts, definitely move over anything that’s charging you monthly and transfer out anything you want to keep after that year. The same goes for your Google Drive and your Box content.

For the Google stuff, in particular, there is something we can definitely recommend: it’s called Google Takeout. You just go to takeout.google.com and sign in with your St. Edward’s account and as long as you still have access to it, you'll be able to migrate it to another Google account. Then all you will have to do is make sure that you don’t have any accounts tied to it because after it closes, it’s gone for good.

Q: I use a Mac and I keep hearing about “Apple Silicon”. What does it mean that Apple is making its own processors? Didn’t they already do that?

A: Basically, Apple is turning your Mac into a giant iPad.

That’s super reductive so let me clarify here. In most computers, there’s your CPU, the processor, or the brains that run all the other stuff. It runs in a certain architecture, which means it talks in a specific way. So, you have to write apps that speak the same language. You can make some changes if it’s a Mac or a PC because Windows and Mac OS read those “words” differently. Ultimately, though, the chip in your ten-year-old MacBook is the same as the one in your ten-year-old Windows laptop.

More or less, there are two big manufacturers, Intel and AMD, of this architecture, which is called x86. Well, Apple, for about ten years now, has been making their own chips. They call it their Apple A-series and those don't use x86. They use a different architecture called ARM.

If you’re a long-time Austinite, you may know that ARM and a lot of its development happens here in town, or at least it used to. All you need to know about ARM is that it’s a different instruction set that is used on pretty much every single mobile chip. So, any smartphone will use various labors of the ARM instruction set.

It’s meant to do more with more “cores”, which are the little thinking parts of the CPU. While your desktop computer may have four or six big powerful cores, a smaller phone may have eight smaller cores. It’s all about how those instructions from your application can be broken up so that your computer can multitask and do it all at the same time. The ARM architecture does that really, really well so you want to use a lot of cores but make them small so your phone can multitask on a bunch of things, like running Instagram, Facebook, Pokemon Go, all at once while taking a phone call or sending a message.

Now, Apple has decided to ramp up these chips for desktops. They’re making what’s called the Apple M1 chip, which is a big, fat ARM processor scaled up to use power and complexity typical of a real desktop computer instead of just being a phone that has a battery and runs off a tiny charger. This would be something with a battery that’s the size of a phone itself.

So, what does any of that have anything to do with your apps and how you use your computer? Doesn’t everything just still work? Well, actually it doesn’t.

You see, this architecture means that apps written for the x86 that are on older computers won’t run on newer computers. At least, not natively. It would be like trying to tell a guy who only speaks English your favorite quesadilla order but you only speak Spanish. You’re not going to get very far.

So, this means that all of these apps that you use are going to have to be rewritten. They’re going to have to be reprogrammed to talk in that ARM architecture. Apple has been highlighting this in a bunch of their ads, you may have seen it. It’s super-fast, it’s super-efficient and in a lot of cases, it is. I’m seeing folks with the new Apple M1 MacBook Pro get 20 hours of battery life! However, all those apps having to be rewritten means if they don’t get rewritten, they’re going to be operating in something called “emulation.” If you’re a fan of classic video games, you may have used an emulator before, which takes that classic video game and translates it to work on your computer, your smartphone, or wherever you’re running it on. It’s basically a translator — telling that guy what quesadilla you want, even though he’s a nerd who only speaks English.

The same thing is available on the new Macs; it’s called Rosetta, like the Rosetta Stone. It’s going to translate those x86 apps into ARM so that they can work on your computer. Though, just as speaking through a translator can be a bit awkward, so too, is there kind of a pause, or a waiting period with this Rosetta 2 thing.

Take Adobe Photoshop, for example. I love it. It runs super well. If I want it to work on a new Mac that doesn’t support it natively, it’s going to have to work every single brushstroke, every single effect, every single layer, through that emulation layer. That’s going to slow things down a little. 

In short, Apple is rewriting a completely new series of apps. Everything is going to have to be reprogrammed for this new kind of processor, which they’ve switched to because they think they can get more power, performance and battery life out of the same amount of energy. This is all so that your computer uses less battery power and less electricity.

The desire for thinner, faster computers is only going to continue and these older x86 processors can only go so far. Compared to ARM, they are not nearly as power efficient. You can expect to see more Apple Silicon, which is really just a marketing term, computers to come out over the next two years or so as apps for the Mac are rewritten to use it.

Our advice? Wait, like, a year if you want to buy a new Mac. Just don’t do it yet. It’s brand-new and, while it works really well, there are still a lot of apps that don’t support it.

We hope this was helpful to you and if you think of a question that maybe doesn’t warrant a support ticket, you’re having a tech issue that’s driving you crazy, or maybe you’re just curious, feel free to send over your questions.

You can find our #AskOIT submission form on our blog and linked on our social media accounts, @SEU_OIT, on Twitter and Instagram. There, you’ll get the latest updates from OIT, which can be critical as our reliance on technology is greater than ever before. Though, you’ll get fun stuff too, like information about events we are putting on and nice-to-know tech tips. 

This is our last #AskOIT of 2020, so happy holidays and we will meet you back here next year for another round of questions.