Author Archives: Bob Lim

Moving Large Events Online

One person working in SU Ballroom

As we prepared for a gradual return to campus, we looked at how technology could support campus life and student success outside the classroom. SJSU IT has deployed  a virtual event platform to enable larger gatherings online — things like alumni events, benefits fairs, conferences, career fairs, orientation events, open houses, and even courses with live presentations. These kinds of events create a richer college experience for students, drive engagement, and create opportunities. It was important to carry that experience into the hybrid future. The first event held with this new platform will be University Personnel’s Benefits Open Enrollment event in October 2021. You can visit the support page for our Virtual Event Platform on the SJSU IT website.

This kind of platform isn’t useful only for the short term — it supports our strategy of making our university mobile-enabled, with students able to access services when they need them from wherever they are. That kind of flexibility needs to exist for the entire college experience. 

As we return to campus, a hybrid approach to these kinds of events will ease the strain on campus facilities that were overflowed or overbooked pre-pandemic. For example, students who live far away could attend mandatory campus events without having to pay for travel and career fairs can host even more employers with remote sessions. 

Thanks go to Leon Nguyen, Sree Gandikota, and Ravi Alladi working to get this ready this semester.

Best regards,
Bob Lim

Adding Hybrid to the Equipment Loaning Service

A tech shows a customer how to use a loaned device

Throughout the COVID pandemic, SJSU IT’s Equipment Loaning Service supplied our students, faculty, and staff with the technology they needed for remote modalities: monitors, mice, keyboards, laptops, webcams, microphones, headsets, and more. Access to technology should never be a barrier for the education of our students. Our inventory, the equipment request process, and other helpful resources can be found at http://sjsu.edu/equipmentcheckout. 

In summer 2021, we worked directly with university colleges and faculty to get direct feedback on the new kinds of equipment they and their students need for the transition to hybrid. Based on that feedback, we ordered and delivered specialized technology to each college. I also want to highlight that we added portable voice amplifiers to our equipment loaning service inventory, which faculty let us know are very important in the classroom environment. 

I want to thank the College of Business chairs and faculty as well as Associate Dean Meg Virick for their great feedback as they played a critical role in the testing and selection process. Coordinating college-specific purchases was the great work of Vicky Van Leer, Bruce Gardner, Jason Ferguson, and Joseph Chou. 

Best regards,
Bob Lim

Bringing Multi-Factor Authentication to Our Students

In Spring 2021, we moved to protect our entire student population with multi-factor authentication (MFA). We rolled out MFA to more than 47,000 students in five waves, with the last group of accounts activated on April 9, 2021. As of today, 100% of SJSU accounts are protected with MFA.  

Our data shows that MFA works at SJSU. From September 2020 to February 2021, just before the student rollout, MFA blocked access almost 100,000 times, which is 4.6% of all attempted logins during that time span. Recently, other campuses without MFA have been attacked through unprotected student accounts. 

Protecting our student accounts with MFA is a major part of our strategy to be one of the most secure campuses in the country. Attackers have started playing the long game. They’re gaining access to student accounts, targeting people majoring in fields that are high income or who may have access to valuable research. Once they have passwords that work and access they can use, they wait five, ten, or more years to use that access to ransom user data or get into secure corporate systems. MFA for our students isn’t just about protecting them while they’re on campus, but protecting them when they’re alumni. 

There are lots of people in SJSU IT who worked on this rollout, but we couldn’t have done it without the support of Student Affairs, especially Robb Drury and Bonnie Sugiyama. I want to call out Maggie Panahi, Jason Ferguson, Sharon Watkins, Alfred Eclipse, Tristan Orlino, Andy Trembley, and James Anderson for their contributions. 

Best regards,
Bob Lim

Taking an Active Role Against Racism

Colleagues,

Like many of you, I felt the weight and importance of Tuesday’s verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial — what it means for our country, our community, and our campus. While that verdict will hopefully have lasting repercussions, the work of building a better society shouldn’t stop with this outcome. We all can take an active role in fighting the racism that we hear about in the news, that happens to others, or that we ourselves experience.

While I encourage all of you to help out in the communities you feel you can have the biggest impact, I also want to mention what you can do right here at SJSU.

I’ve always believed that given equal opportunity, so many more in our community could shine even brighter. That’s why we created the SJSU IT Diversity and Inclusion Committee to provide me with feedback and recommendations on how to make our division and campus community a welcoming environment. Starting this summer, I will be joining and leading this committee. I want to thank Kara for leading this effort over the last couple of years. If you’re interested in joining the SJSU IT Diversity and Inclusion Committee with me and making a difference, just send me an email.

In her email earlier this week, President Papazian shared a number of services at your disposal — whether you seek counseling, would like to connect with supportive communities, or are looking for more ways to contribute to anti-racism efforts. I encourage you to give it a second look. And of course, we must keep in mind that our students will need our support and understanding in these changing times.

As always, the SJSU IT Division is here to support you, too. Please do not hesitate to reach out to your supervisor or to me directly.

Thank you,
Bob Lim

Guiding SJSU toward a Data-Driven Future

A shadow-and-light pattern created by the Student Union's exterior facade

UPDATE (September 2022): The Campus Data Warehouse initiative continues to drive SJSU data adoption with some pilot departments already using our unified data lake platform. One such program combines university data with national data to create learning analytics that to identify students at risk of dropping out or falling behind and not completing their degree. Campus departments can use that data to provide identified students with additional support and resources to improve their academic outcomes and keep them on track for a degree.

In partnership with Institutional Effectiveness and Student Analytics (IESA), SJSU IT is developing a campus-wide data platform hosted on the Google Cloud that is effective, efficient, intuitive, and user-friendly. This new Campus Data Warehouse will be a single source of truth for San Jose State University, creating a foundation for analytics and data-driven decision making. 

For the past few years, SJSU IT has been working toward a more data-driven culture. Using data to inform our decisions allows us to eliminate bias and better evaluate the way things “have always been done.” SJSU IT uses data to inform our decisions and we partner with other departments to help analyze and understand their data. But there’s always been a problem: San Jose State University hasn’t had a unified data strategy. That changes this year.

The new Campus Data Warehouse will transform how departments on campus use data. As a single source of truth, this will be that platform which everything else pulls data. Instead of having three or four databases maintained by different departments for different uses, there will be one database operated through university partnerships. This will open up entirely new opportunities for integration between systems. We’re developing data governance structures with campus partners to set definitions for parameters, decide who has access to what data, and guide the ethics and privacy discussion. 

Aside from addressing the problems around today’s data silos, the Campus Data Warehouse will move SJSU into future technologies. Having a unified platform for the entire university enables us to use AI and Machine Learning to develop predictive analytics models. By removing barriers that make data hard to access and hard to use, we empower departments to improve outcomes for students, faculty, and staff. 

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, reducing bias and increasing equity are primary benefits of a shift toward leveraging data. Using data to inform our decisions circumvents whatever predetermined notions we may have as individuals, whether they were formed by habit, institutional practices, or our upbringing. As the most transformative university in the country, it’s our responsibility to provide the opportunities of higher education to every student equally. We can do that better with data. 

Best regards,
Bob Lim