IT Vision and Roadmap

The CSUN Technology 2022-Vision establishes the aspiration of a more digitally-enabled University, identifies strategic themes to organize initiatives to support institutional priorities, and sets technology principles to guide the decisions. The 2022-vision was created in consultation with the University Technology Governance and advisory groups and with the input of the broader University community through the annual Information Technology surveys of students, faculty and staff.

Aspiration

The CSUN Technology 2022-Vision creates the path to a more digitally-enabled institution that uses technology to facilitate student learning and success, empower innovation, provide intuitive services, and operate efficiently.

Strategic Themes

The vision has four key areas of focus, strategic themes, to realize CSUN’s aspiration to become a more digitally-enabled University:

Technology 2022-Vision: CSUN students will experience the latest and emerging technologies and develop the digital skills required for their careers and lifelong learning. Intuitive online services and information that is easy to discover and understand will lower barriers to CSUN enrollment and degree completion.

  • CSUN will use technology to remove barriers to student success by making it easier for students to access resources, services, events and activities of the University that are personalized to their interests, goals, and location.    
  • CSUN will provide students with the opportunity to explore new and emerging technologies as part of their college experience to advance student career-readiness.
  • CSUN will leverage students’ mobile devices and artificial intelligence as means to access and personalize services (e.g., One Card), to improve the service experience.
  • CSUN will develop programs, curate online content, and deploy self-help tools to assist students’ development of the technology competencies they need in their coursework, leadership opportunities, and co-curricular programs.
  • Processes used by students will be integrated and organized in CSUN apps and portals around the activities and events they relate to, such as becoming a student, enrolling in courses, or preparing for graduation. Where feasible, processes will be automatically triggered based on what a student will need, without them needing to request it.

Technology 2022-Vision: CSUN will be a leader among its peers in the application of technology to improve the quality of learning. CSUN will assist faculty to pilot leading technologies and pedagogies, access technology support to pursue their innovation ideas, and use data to evaluate student learning and enhance decision making. Instructional design and technology support will impact the greatest possible numbers of our students and faculty.

  • CSUN will continue to encourage and support faculty-led explorations of new technologies and pedagogy through an innovation process that includes forums, pilots, collaborative grant development, assessment and communication of outcomes.
  • Active learning spaces, support for simulations, and maker spaces will be added to increase experiential learning opportunities.
  • Course redesign and support services will be offered throughout the year and become more directly embedded in academic departments to improve student learning outcomes and enhance student engagement and achievement.
  • Support for research and scholarship, including by our students, will be enhanced by facilitating faculty and student access to public cloud (e.g., Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure), consortium (e.g., NSF's Extreme Digital program), blended with on-campus computational, storage, and data analysis resources.
  • Course level learning analytics will be provided to faculty to help track student learning and enable more self-directed, self-paced learning. 
  • CSUN will support the teaching and learning scholarship of the faculty and create opportunities for faculty research to inform the development of new learning technologies. 

Technology 2022-Vision: CSUN will become an administratively paperless University generating efficiencies while providing personalized, online services and communications to highly mobile constituents. Constituents include students, faculty, staff, and alumni.

  • The CSUN “eProcess+” initiative will streamline and redesign processes and use technology to become paperless, and move more services online with automated workflow and digital signatures.
  • CSUN will continue to leverage the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence (e.g., chat bots) to help administrative units gather data about their services, anticipate the needs of students and present multiple ways to access services, and optimize the use of campus space and resources.
  • CSUN will support use of web analytics and constituent data to measure the effectiveness of communication campaigns and tailor outreach to students, alumni and other external stakeholders.
  • CSUN will employ a user experience centered approach to the design (and refresh) of processes, web sites and mobile applications.

Technology 2022-Vision: CSUN will follow a cloud-first strategy wherever possible, consolidating to a single campus data center. Highly available and robust infrastructure will connect users securely to applications, data and computing resources in a hybrid on-campus and cloud infrastructure environment.

  • CSUN will continue to employ a risk-based approach to securing the institution’s information assets and deploy the necessary tools to detect and respond to security risks. 
  • Through partnership that CSUN will form with other institutions and cloud vendors, faculty and student researchers will have access to a variety of on-demand, scalable computational capabilities, storage and research software.
  • CSUN will implement “cloud-first” for new and replacement compute and storage infrastructure and continue to transition the computing and storage infrastructure in CSUN’s two on-premise data centers to the cloud, thereby transitioning to a blended model of private and public cloud services supplemented by a single on-premise data center. 
  • CSUN will strategically manage and secure data as an asset, through data governance, training, tools, and processes that emphasize the quality, availability, security, integrity and privacy of data.
  • CSUN will maintain an infrastructure that supports the anticipated adoption of greater numbers of internet-connected objects (i.e. Internet of Things) that will become integral to campus operations, teaching and learning, research and student life. 
  • CSUN’s software application strategy will continue to be “cloud-first” and favor selection of vendors’ “software-as-a-service” capabilities.

Resources

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