Coordination of information technology resources is achieved through an advisory structure that was developed in 1998 as a result of a recommendation from the previous Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Information Technology that recognized the need for a more representative system. Most of the work is carried out by two councils, the Academic Computing Coordinating Council (AC4) and the Administrative Computing Coordinating Council (AdC3), who report to the Information Technology Policy Board, which is chaired by the Provost. The Councils are comprised of stakeholders and representatives of campus constituencies, rather than by Information Technology professionals or advocates, using similar principles to the Teaching and Learning Technology Advisory Boards being promoted through the American Association of Higher Education (AAHE) at the time (now the Teaching, Learning and Technology Group).

One of the first recommendations of the AC4 was that the senior information technology administrator should be an academic appointment, the Vice Provost-Information and Educational Technology (VP-IET), instead the Associate Vice Chancellor position then vacant. The new position was filled after a national search. At about the same time, there was an Administrative Unit Review of the Office of Information Technology (AUR-OIT), the Learning Environment Architecture Development Project (LEAD), and the Provost's Commission on the Future of Information Technology (PC-FIT). The importance of the councils was immediately established by the Provost requesting (and accepting) advice about substantial budgetary and programmatic issues.

The results of this period of intense study and planning for the coordination of information technology resources to best serve the mission of the institution were widespread on the campus. A case study illustrates the effects. The AUR-OIT and the PC-FIT both recognized that the services for education provided centrally needed to be more accessible and responsive to campus needs. As a result, many of these services were consolidated under the VP-IET in a unit named Mediaworks. Mediaworks immediately replaced the old first-come, first-served approach to educational projects for faculty with a 3-tiered approval mechanism that aligns the services to institutional priorities and pedagogical goals. The first tier is partnerships between a dean, a department and Mediaworks that address the challenges of enrollment growth. Two such partnerships are now in place and the program is developing. The second tier involves collaboration between Mediaworks and the Teaching Resources Center (TRC), a unit under the Vice Provost-Undergraduate Studies, in which the TRC approves the pedagogical quality of faculty-initiated projects at Mediaworks in a grant application mechanism (Education Tecnology Grants). The third tier requires a 10% cost-sharing.

This Criterion emphasizes the coordination of information technology activities. In addition to links relevant to our discussion of that, we have also included a few that go to sites where projects can be found. The structures that we have in place to coordinate educational technolology and the projects that we are capable of executing are a crucial element in the institutional capacity that is a prerequisite for our self-study element on educational technology.