IT & Information Systems
The use of IT, the systems being used, the nature of their use, how they are developed and supported and an evaluation of any issues arising should be a part of any review of Business and Community Engagement. The need for systematic access to information and storage of data is widespread and vastly diverse across the landscape of activity that makes up Business and Community Engagement.
Access to IT Networks and Information Systems
A key requirement for many practitioners working in this field is to carry out one's activities off-site. Teaching staff engaged in the delivery of Continuing Professional Development courses at employers' own premises and those involved in other training off-site, such as less formal courses in the wider community can have a great reliance on online materials.
These can be delivered by a Virtual Learning Environment or from web sites, either static or interactive and collaboratively hosted either by the institution or a collaborative partner, or commercially. Access for delivery or for learning is not normally an issue where those being taught are members of the enrolled student body. Access where those being taught are not enrolled students, whether they are from a partnership operated on a commercial basis, on a fully economically costed one-day workshop, or under another form of partnership, can be problematic where registered logins to the Virtual Learning Environment is tied to an enrolment.
For teaching staff, the problem is more likely to be access to institutional systems and networks for development purposes. In many institutions, access to internal networks is not available to all staff unless they are on the institution's premises. External access by Virtual Private Networks (VPN) which give direct modem-to-modem access or by Internet access using software such as Citrix is by no means universal.
For those staff who spend the bulk, or all, of their time off-site this can cause problems with using the institutional VLE. There are also many staff carrying out delivery as third party sub-contractors, particularly within the FE sector, who do not have any access at all to networks, software tools or the development side of VLEs. A common solution is to develop stand-alone web sites to host materials, often using free web space from ISPs, tools such as wikis, or repositories such as Google Docs.
Use of such tools allows external staff to develop and deliver materials on a 24/7 basis from, and to, anywhere with Internet access. In such cases the loss of Intellectual Property to the institution can be total.
Similarly the institution can lose the ability to co-ordinate and share information where staff do not have access to database-driven information systems such as Customer Relationship Management systems (CRM), or contract and costing tools, financial and student database etc.
