Trustees talk virtual simulation, advising

Time travel and academic advising were on the meeting agenda for the Board of Trustees Thursday.

Informatics professor Bernard Frischer presented to the board the latest in 3D modeling and what it means for the academic world.

“The goal is to build up a virtual time machine,” Frischer said. “For education, for the visualization that supports education and for empirical research by scholars and scientists.”

Frischer is a virtual archeologist in the new field of virtual heritage. He and his team scan the remnants of statues and entire villas in Rome to recreate them as they would have been when the villas were being used and the statues first created.

“It’s very interdisciplinary by its nature, because we are involved, not in making pretty pictures, but in modeling information,” Frischer said. “And to model information we have to collaborate with specialists in really all of the fields that pertain to human behavior.”

These fields include informatics, anthropology, archeology and game design.

Provost and Executive Vice President Lauren Robel, Vice Provost for Research Sarita Soni and Vice President for Research Jorge Jose looked at IU-Bloomington research more broadly.

“At IU-Bloomington we define research to include creative activities and scholarship,” Soni said.

Three categories are used to measure IUB’s excellence: National and international awards, publications, performances and exhibits and sponsored research activity, Soni said.

“External funding for sponsored activities is important as a means of producing high-impact publications,” she said.

IUB faculty have been earning more and more American Association for the Advancement of Science awards during the past few years, Soni said.

“This is not an accident,” she said. “We have actually developed a concerted effort, working with the department chairs, to nominate our faculty for these awards.”
The trustees also discussed developing academic advising.

A new system called the Interactive Graduation Planning System is under construction, which presenters said will help expedite students’ graduation.

“Advising is one of the most important aspects of student success,” said John Applegate, executive vice president for University Academic Affairs. “The role of the University is fundamentally supporting that in a variety of different ways.”

Applegate led a presentation of the new system, which will include degree mapping as a key element in streamlining the graduation process.

The degree map will allow students to create their own path to degree completion, but it’s designed to work best when an academic adviser is there to help steer the wheel, Applegate said.

He said too many students forgo academic advising, thinking they can do it themselves, and it has set IU behind in on-time graduation rates.

But the new system won’t rid students of their independence as they plan courses, Applegate said. It looks to aid them. He said the degree maps will be available as a template, but each student is in charge of their own development plan.

“For every student we take at random, they will complete their degree in a different way,” Applegate said. “We don’t want to get in the way of that.”

Students aren’t the only ones who will benefit from the new system. With the IGPS, Applegate said scheduling meetings will be smoother, career advising will be more efficient and advisers will have more time to actually have a discussion with students, rather than navigating the software, as they do with the present system.

An exact time for the launch of the system wasn’t disclosed.

Applegate said across campuses, career services are also in the works. The trustees said career advising at the Kelley School of Business is the best University-wide, and that it should be used as a model for other colleges.

Improving career services has been a major project in recent years, Robel said.
She said the University has spent around $1.4 million recently, trying to do just that.

“It’s really been a laser-like focus for the last year and a half,” Robel said.