Office of Information Technology and Learning Experience

Institutional Reporting Support of College-wide Surveys

Surveys are an important tool for gathering information about opinions and behaviors. The Institutional Reporting (IR) team manages HACC’s institutional surveys using the college's survey tool, Qualtrics. The team designs, creates, and administers surveys to address the college’s needs and then analyzes and reports on the respondent data to inform decision-making by college stakeholders. IR personnel are skilled at survey design, including question-wording and sequencing to ensure the desired information is collected.

Surveys routinely conducted by IR include student course evaluations, student satisfaction surveys, employee exit interviews, student exit forms, and graduate surveys. Recent ad hoc surveys have included the Spring 2022 Course Options survey, the Employee Health Interest survey, and the Spring 2021 Current Student survey.

Graduate surveys are of particular importance as they allow the college to assess student outcomes. IR currently surveys all graduates six months and 24 months after graduation. Graduates of Career and Technical Education Programs must receive a certain set of survey questions at the six-month mark. HACC is required by the PA Department of Education (PDE) to report the responses to these questions in order to continue to receive Perkins funding. If your program conducts a graduate survey and does not coordinate with IR, please contact the IR team as soon as possible so we can coordinate our efforts.

Institutional Reporting should be consulted for all surveys involving students, employees, and graduates within the first three years after graduation. It is not required that IR administer all surveys in these categories, but the IR team will provide guidance on survey design and timing with the aim being to prevent survey fatigue among these populations and effectively collect the required information. For more information, please contact Kim Kelsey, director, institutional reporting.

Faculty and Students Benefit from the Power of Microsoft Azure

Higher education institutions all across the country are adopting cloud services at an increasing rate, and Microsoft Azure is the hottest and most popular cloud-based platform that is leading the way. Azure is a key tool for academic teaching and use within our IT operations. Faculty and students at HACC are now discovering the educational advantage of having quick, easy, and secure access to learning resources, while easily allowing students to work remotely right from their homes.

We are confident that as cloud adoption grows at HACC

• More students can actively learn Azure skills and even gain certification

• Academia is choosing Azure first when utilizing cloud-based technologies

• Institutions are consolidating more of their services to Azure technologies

With Azure, the potential for expanding the teaching and learning process is truly unlimited. We believe that our key to harnessing the potential of Azure lies with our ability to raise awareness of what is possible and then unlock these possibilities through on-campus skills training. In addition, one of the primary enablers for higher education utilization is through the process of achieving Azure skills. There are three Azure resources that our students can make use of right now, to empower teaching, drive innovation, and realize their potential.

Microsoft Learn's Azure Fundamentals

Microsoft Learn is an incredible platform for learning all manner of new skills. It’s completely free, completely online, and lets you learn at your own pace – whether you’re a rookie or a veteran in your field. There are also options to become Microsoft Certified, an industry-recognized award that helps demonstrate your achievements.

Within Microsoft, Learn is a portal for Azure Fundamentals. This is a great place to start when bolstering skillsets. Across 12 highly targeted modules, you and your team can understand what the technology will help you achieve and the big benefits it brings. Perfect for those who aren’t sure if cloud migration is right for their HE institution and want to know more.

Azure in Education

Azure for Education is designed to give both students and educators the developer tools required to boost cloud skills. With a focus on hands-on learning, this is the best place for anyone interested in the cloud to experiment with building, deploying, and managing applications within the cloud sphere.

From a free coding course to creating a cloud-based computer lab through Azure Lab Services, there’s plenty to kickstart the passions of students and your team. And don’t forget to check out the Imagine Cup, a highly prestigious competition that asks students to create world-changing applications.

Beyond the fundamentals

Once you’ve mastered the basics of Azure, it’s time to kick it up a notch. Microsoft offers lots of role-based Azure courses that will help you and your team go beyond the fundamentals and start exploring benefits in greater depth.

Step-by-step guidance is given across topics like security, implementing virtual machines, remote desktops, and everything in between – and covers all the essentials for those in a range of job roles, including administrators and business users. If you’re learning or seeking new skills at an intermediate level, these are courses you won’t want to miss.

These are three great places to start learning more about the newest platform at HACC that can transform the way faculty teaches and the way students learn. For more information about how Microsoft Azure can expand your classroom capabilities and further engage your students, please contact Matt Gibson at mggibson@hacc.edu.

HACC Identity Management System (H.I.M.) - Student Account Activation Enhancements

When students enroll with HACC they are provisioned an account for accessing systems such as myHACC and Hawkmail. Some students found the process of activating their accounts confusing and they became frustrated with the process.

The system was recently enhanced to be easier for students to activate their accounts. The DevOps team acted on feedback provided by colleagues from the Office of Student Affairs and Enrollment Management to improve the system.

• The system was rebranded from Student Claim to Activate Your HACC Student Account.

• We’ve highlighted important information such as their login ID and HAWKMail account ID, since it was easy to miss the need to note them previously.

• Students can email their login ID's to an email address of their choice for later reference, although it defaults to the email they provided during admissions.

• A message informs students it may take up to 10 minutes for the account to become active.

These simple enhancements will reduce the volume of student support requests and ensure clarity and consistency in communications to students.

OITLE welcomes feedback on our systems. Any time you see opportunities to improve or simplify processes, please feel free to contact OITLE. We will try our best to make things better.

Please contact Matt Gordon, director, development operations at magordon@hacc.edu with any questions or submit an inquiry using the Enterprise Services Support Request.

The Security Benefits of Multi Factor Authentication (MFA) and the Security Challenges Associated with Email Forwarding at HACC

Multi Factor Authentication

Over the past year, OITLE has been consistently discussing the need to begin implementing Multi Factor Authentication (MFA) across the entire HACC environment. With the increasing prevalence of compromised accounts that we and other institutions are grappling with throughout the country, we realize that the time has come for HACC to expand its security posture to include Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). Multi-Factor Authentication provides a second layer of security when one of our users attempts to authenticate against our Office 365 Environment. The effect of this measure is that it is no longer possible to access our Online Microsoft Resources simply by acquiring one of our users’ passwords. Multi-Factor authentication (MFA) reduces the risk of security breaches from occurring and keeps data safe. In the past, requiring a static username and password to access an account seemed sufficient for security, however, weak or stolen passwords can be used to execute fraud attacks and data breaches when they are the only form of authentication required. Using MFA to bolster password security with another form of authentication has proven to keep hackers out of our most significant systems. According to Microsoft, MFA can “prevent 99.9 percent of attacks on your accounts.”

What are the benefits of Multi-Factor Authentication?

• Multi-factor authentication increases security with third parties and organizations

• MFA better controls who has access to your files

• It offers a variety of choices to meet your security needs

• MFA helps meet regulatory requirements

• It takes away password risks

Email: Why You Shouldn’t Forward….

STOP!

Email forwarding, what appears to be a harmless function that allows you the convenience of consolidating your mail accounts, may actually be causing you harm in ways you can’t see or know about. In this Ski Gram, we will explain a few reasons why you don’t want to forward your mail and what you can do differently.

1. Forwarding greatly increases the chances that your email will be seen as spam and arrive in the junk box, or worse yet, server-level spam filters can simply eliminate the message without your or the sender’s knowledge.

2. Mail Forwarding can result in your server getting blacklisted, which ultimately means you won’t receive or possibly send any email at all.

3. HACC’s reputation is also at risk, as when you reply, your emails are going to appear to come from that external service and not your business domain. For example, a site visitor sends a mail message to you at drew@mydomain.com and gets a response back from parrothead329@gmail.com, this will cause many people to end their business conversation immediately.

Why?

When forwarding mail from our HACC domain to another service, such as Gmail, all the mail received by your address is forwarded on, regardless of the content. If Gmail scans the content and decides it’s spam, it will take a look at the server that sent it. If enough is flagged from that source, which is now HACC’s server, Gmail may consider us to be a spammer. This can result in all mail from our server being blocked. This means all of our mail, and all the mail from other customers using that server. In addition, Spam filters are learning filters. They learn based on the actions of the email recipient. If you have your mail forwarded to Gmail and receive spam and mark it as spam, what you could be doing is marking your own server as spam. When the external server rejects email, it may cause the forwarding server to queue the email to resend later. In the end, the mail will ‘bounce’, creating the possibility that more reputation and delivery problems may arise.

All of these issues combined can also further damage our mail sending reputation and result in deeper issues, such as HACC’s server, and HACC’s external service, getting onto a blacklist.

Options

The best thing to do if you have multiple email accounts and want them easily checked is to set up an email client, like Outlook. There are many others as well. Some webmail programs, like Gmail, allow you to set up your account in a way that allows Gmail to check your HACC account. This eliminates the need to forward and allows you to get all your mail in one spot. Our IT team will be happy to assist in doing all we can to prevent the type of damage that can occur through email forwarding.