Dear Campus Community,
Hello friends! I hope you had a restful break and are ready for an exciting and productive 2025. As we embark on this new year, I'm thrilled to share some key initiatives that DoIT has completed as well as initiatives we will be pursuing to enhance our technological capabilities and support the university's mission.
Enabling Transformation and Growth
- Student Information System and SOLAR Refresh: We're embarking on a major upgrade of our Student Information System (SIS) and SOLAR experience. This project will modernize our SIS infrastructure that will enable us to improve the user experience, and provide more efficient and effective services to students, faculty and staff. This builds on the work we completed on the Financial Aid updates in the system aligning with the new federal requirements.
- Teaching and Learning: We're continuing to invest in our classroom technology to create more engaging and interactive learning environments. This includes upgrading projectors, installing interactive whiteboards, and enhancing audio-visual systems in classrooms across campus. You can get more information by clicking and reading the Classroom Technology Updates quick link on the Classroom Support service page.
- Enhanced Collaboration: Partnerships with CELT, Undergraduate Academic Affairs, the Library and other areas have led to the addition of learning tools to our Brightspace and Google environment, including but not limited to OpenStax (OER), textbook publishers, and Turnitin Draft Coach. Recent integrations with EAB Navigate have helped advisors identify students at risk to improve student success initiatives.
Fostering Inclusivity and Professional Growth
- New Workshops: Based on feedback we’ve received from you, we’ve added new Mini Bytes/workshops to our catalog, including but not limited to AI Exploration, Interactive Budget reporting in Google Sheets, Data Visualization, and student engagement in Brightspace. You can register for workshops and provide suggestions for future topics.
- Brightspace Updates: Stony Brook Instructors made a difference in Brightspace. Recent additions such as delegated grading and assignment submission updates were made based on your enhancement requests to D2L.
- Student Employees: This semester DoIT has over 140 student employees gaining ‘real world’ experience and helping us service the community.
Partnering to Modernize and Protect
- Launch of Digital Governance 1.0: We're rolling out the first phase of our digital governance program. This initiative will help create and maintain alignment between institutional priorities and overall IT investments. As such, the digital governance process will establish clear guidelines and procedures for managing our digital assets, ensuring data integrity, security, and compliance with relevant regulations.
- Multi-Factor Authentication: Direct feedback collected from students has motivated us to enable multi-factor authentication for SOLAR. This implementation of this added layer to security is part of our ongoing commitment to maintain a safe and resilient campus community.
- New Research Computing GPUs: To support our researchers in their computationally intensive work, we're adding a new high-performance Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) cluster to our research computing portfolio. This will significantly accelerate research in fields like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science.
- Secure Enclave for Research Involving Regulated Data: We're in the early stages of establishing a secure computing enclave that can be leveraged to provide a secure platform for researchers working with highly sensitive and regulated data.
- IDM Solution Selected: After a thorough evaluation process, we've selected a vendor for our new Identity Management (IDM) solution. This system will streamline identity management, improve security, and pave the way for more convenient access to university resources.
We believe these initiatives will significantly enhance our IT infrastructure and services, empowering our students, faculty, staff and researchers to achieve their academic and research goals. We look forward to your continued collaboration and support as we work together to build a more connected and innovative campus.
Sincerely,
Simeon Ananou, D.Ed., MBA
Vice President for Information Technology & Chief Information Officer
Stony Brook University
