Steven M. Baule, Ed.D., Ph.D., Author at eSchool News

In cybersecurity, balancing vigilance with access

Steven M. Baule, Ed.D., Ph.D. — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 09:01:00 +0000

Cybersecurity is at the forefront of IT issues to be addressed over the next year. Nearly every list of major IT or educational technology issues for 2023 includes the need to further harden educational systems and infrastructure.

More than 20 educational organizations–including AASA, the American Association of School Administrators (the primary superintendents’ association)–have asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to expand E-rate to cover advanced firewall technology to support protection from denial of service (DOS), improve virtual private network (VLN) access, and similar upgrades. The FCC is currently soliciting public input on the potential change here until February 13, 2023.

It is easy to understand the need for increased cybersecurity safeguards. In the first half of 2022, at least 34 major cyberattacks were made against schools. Cybercrime cost more than $6.9 billion in 2021. The evening news commonly reports on cyberattacks against pipelines, government systems, and other vital services. Due diligence in considering ways to harden cyber targets and protect student and institutional data is essential and to not do so in today’s environment would probably be willfully negligent. However, there is a need for balancing security with usability.

IT leaders need to ensure that usability is still the primary consideration in building IT systems. IT systems are of little value if they are not able to be used effectively by end users. Considerations of what level of additional steps end users are willing to take is essential. This is particularly important as many organizations still have a high number of remote workers. Make sure the warnings provided to end users are significant as well. Too many warnings can numb end users into assuming the IT department is crying wolf and they may stop paying attention to warnings.

For instance, if a user is given a warning that the vast majority of links in the email system are dangerous, how long will it take until the user starts to ignore those warnings. This is particularly true when even links sent by the organization are flagged as unsafe. Most systems allow enough granularity to ensure that commonly used systems, trade newsletters or professional journals, etc. are not flagged. This would be a good first step in building effective trust between the end users and the IT staff.

Another common concern is to ensure that security strictures put into place do not so restrict users that the systems are not fully functional. Testing needs to occur with outside systems and partner organizations. It is particularly common for struggles between organizations that utilize the Google Suite verse those that use a Microsoft Suite. This is often a common struggle for K-12 educators, who are mostly Google users, when they want to interact with higher education institutions or other government agencies, many of which are Microsoft environments. IT staff need to make sure that interagency collaboration is encouraged and supported by the installed technology base. Most of us have had a situation where a Zoom, Teams, or Google call was complicated or failed due to one or both institutions involved having too tight of security.

When the security, as well intended as it may be, gets to the point of being burdensome to the end users, they will get creative. Their creativity will often create an even more insecure situation than the burdensome security measures were trying to address. For instance, when security measures create too many hurdles, users might find other users with more direct access and then just get them to send the sensitive data in a less secure email format, or even use a personal email to avoid the institutional system all together.

Similar rules against forwarding emails are well intended, but when staff or students have multiple emails, insisting that they do not forward them to their primary account is a set up for missed information. When multiple emails exist in the same system, as is common in higher education for staff who are also students, those emails should be merged. One student I was aware of missed his final comprehensive exam for his master’s degree because the notice was only sent to his student email and not to his staff address, which he used exclusively.

There is no doubt that cybersecurity is essential for all organizations in our modern world. However, security cannot be valued more than usability. The sad fact is that the only entirely secure computer system is one that have been unplugged and shut off. Cyberattacks will continue, and it will be important to ensure that every organization has strong backup and recovery plans in place. However, end user usability is just as important as security.

Using tracking sites to bring current events to students

Steven M. Baule, Ed.D., Ph.D. — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 10:00:00 +0000

There is a lot of conversation about supply chains and logistics in the news these days. As a picture is often worth a thousand words, maps and tracking sites that allow students to visualize the traffic making up these supply chains can be helpful.

It is possible to track much of the shipping traffic through websites like Marine Traffic. The site is an interactive map showing the movement of many types of commercial ship traffic throughout the world. It is possible to see the general build-up around southern California ports and the normally heavy traffic around the Panama Canal. VesselFinder is a similar tool but seems to include at least some river traffic as well. It allows one to track a specific cruise ship, for instance.

Marine Vessel Traffic allows for tracking through the Great Lakes and appears to allow one to track naval ships. AdsbExchange provides similar information for air traffic. It allows one to filter by type of aircraft–Boeing 777s, for instance–by airline, or only to show military aircraft. FlightAware is a similar interactive map showing flights. It allows filtering by destination or departure location as well as by airline or aircraft type. FlightRadar24 is a third option that provides some additional features with a paid subscription.

Post-COVID plans should focus on program values and evaluation

Steven M. Baule, Ed.D., Ph.D. — Tue, 04 May 2021 09:52:00 +0000

As the restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic begin to relax, many institutions are going to step back and try to reestablish institutional norms. Many educational organizations have struggled through a year or more of remote learning. The instructional and technology systems of many organizations have been strained.

Some of this stepping back may be as simple as trying to return to a pre-pandemic normal. More of this review may be revision and redevelopment of institutional strategic plans, technology plans, and other such planning documents.

Many of those planning processes have utilized the VMOSA standard as a guide to ensuring a coherent and complete final plan. VMOSA generally stands for vision, mission, objectives and goals, strategies, and action plans. However, as defined, VMOSA is missing a couple of key facets that are required for a truly holistic plan. V should be expanded to provide the planning process not only a guiding vision for the organization, but also the guiding values under which the organization is hoping to operate.

Reimagining the school help desk

Thu, 19 Nov 2020 09:55:13 +0000

The impact of the pandemic on educational programming has created what will more than likely be fundamental and foundational changes to the traditional classroom environment. In general, the traditional classroom simply is not visible in today’s milieu. The physical hallways connecting traditional classrooms that have been present since education left the open air of Socrates’s Agora, when Plato established an academy, have been replaced with the fiber, copper, and Wi-Fi of high-speed networks. That has significantly reduced the stress on academic buildings but has put significant stress on the electronic connections within educational institutions. Many cabinet-level leaders are asking how institutions can ensure that they are managing an effective school help desk operation. Although cabinet responsibilities have not changed, the reliance on help services have increased exponentially in the last several months. At first, educational institutions were in an emergency “band-aid” mode in many cases, but just as patients transferred from the ambulance to the hospital will be reevaluated, it is time for help services to be reconsidered given that the current virtual environment will need to be sustained for at least the next year in many cases. One of the primary considerations should be if the school has a consolidated help desk. The most frustrating issue for many users is being bounced around between more than one help service. The first-line school help desk staff should be either able to address any issue or at least directly connect the user to the proper person for assistance. Being told by a help desk staff member, “No, we don’t support that, please contact the LMS support system for that issue,” or something similar is always frustrating. At a minimum, the school help desk staff should forward the e-mail or transfer the phone call to the proper help system. A lack of a consolidated help desk often means a lack of a consolidated ticketing system, so tracking the type of calls and the resolution times for many issues is not possible. Such a system can lead to learned helplessness on the part of faculty who simply develop their own workarounds or otherwise manipulate the systems in place to meet the needs of their students. Healthy help systems should be willing to embrace all types of help calls, because it might be more work for the school help desk staff, but is both more efficient and effective for the end users who should be the organization’s primary focus. First-contact resolution is often identified as one of the key metrics in evaluating help desk performance. If basic issues routinely require more than a single contact with the school help desk, then IT management needs to review how calls are addressed. This is particularly true in educational institutions that employ student workers as the first line of help desk response. These workers often are employed based primarily on considerations other than IT skills. About 75 percent of the time, my personal experience with help desk students is they are unfamiliar with the issue being addressed and either have to go ask their supervisor or are providing directions based on a knowledge base document that they don’t fully understand. In many cases, the student worker should simply pass the end user off to the supervisor and eliminate what is often an ineffective middle person It is not uncommon for staff and faculty to complain about having to escalate help calls to reach “an employee” and not a student. Although student workers can be a cost-effective solution, IT management should regularly evaluate the cost-benefits if first contact resolution rates are dipping below 50 percent to 66 percent depending upon the organization’s tolerance levels. Measuring customer satisfaction is another key facet to ensuring help desk effectiveness. The help desk process should always include a follow-up survey to the end user asking if the problem has been sufficiently addressed. A lack of follow-up with end users does not allow a holistic approach to evaluating the effectiveness of a help desk. If evaluative metrics only look at data provided by the help desk staff, such as time taken to respond to the initial ticket, etc., help desk statistics can be easily skewed towards the IT staff’s perspective. Often with low-functioning school help desks, end users simply give up and figure out a workaround. No one expects a high response level to such surveys, but end users with strong feelings about their school help desk experiences are likely to respond.

4 common barriers to accessible content for all students

Steven M. Baule — Thu, 12 Mar 2020 09:55:05 +0000

This summer, many faculty will work on developing or revising curricular content for their courses. One of the keys in developing new digital materials is verifying that those materials offer accessible content for all students.Today, most learning management systems (LMS) and software programs offer some level of accessibility compliance checking. However, they are not always thorough or error-free.Related: 5 steps to ensure accessibilityFor instance, some PowerPoint templates show less-than-ideal contrast between text and background colors. Many YouTube videos include closed captioning, but the automatic captioning often leaves something to be desired. Taking the time to review accessibility of materials makes sense to ensure all students can experience success instead of frustration.Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 are a checklist of items to consider in developing accessible websites or other digital documents. The WCAG 2.0 guidelines were published in 2008, so they are well established. Unfortunately, they are not well implemented. WCAG 2.0 has three levels of compliance from least to most restrictive: Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA. Level AAA is considered to be difficult for some new technologies to embrace immediately, so Level AA is considered an acceptable standard for digital resources. W3C, which is the entity responsible for issuing the WCAG 2.0 guidelines, maintains a listing of compliance tools for evaluating websites. The list also includes tools to check the compliance against the federal Access Board’s Section 508 standards and those of several other nations. Google provides a web development tool called Lighthouse that offers performance and accessibility audits.WebAIM did an analysis of the top 1 million websites earlier this year. They used WCAG 2.0 Level A/AA--the lower two levels of compliance--and estimated that less than 1 percent or so of commonly accessed websites conform to WCAG 2.0 Level AA. They found on average 59.6 average accessibility errors per page. According to WebAIM, users with disabilities should expect to encounter an error on 1 of every 13 HMTL elements with which they interact. A complete summary of the results is available.Four common barriers to accessible content for all studentsThe four most prevalent issues identified by WebAIM’s study were items lacking contrast, missing alternative text tags for images, empty or broken links, and missing form labels. Eighty-five percent of homepages have issues with presenting low contrast text. Nearly 68 percent of pages were missing alternative text for images. More than half of the websites included empty links or missing form labels.