1.Innovative solutions implemented.

Over the past year, Champlain’s community has evolved, expecting and demanding innovative change. Champlain’s Information Technology Services has launched a number of initiatives to better support the community and leverage the digital transformation of the organization. They are:

• In an effort to better serve the growing number of accommodations needed at our Lennoxville constituent college, virtualized testing environments have been created that can be used to access a student’s secure testing environment from any device. This eliminates the logistics and complexity of ensuring that students have access to the accommodations to which they are entitled.  Each student can now log in to our Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and be automatically assigned their properly configured test taking environment.
• At our constituent college of St. Lawrence, the use and implementation of Robotel has significantly improved the learning of the language program. By integrating this advanced language learning platform, the constituent college has been able to enhance the overall educational experience for both students and instructors.
  Robotel provides a comprehensive suite of tools to facilitate interactive and engaging language learning. The platform offers a variety of multimedia resources, including audio, video, and interactive exercises that cater to different learning styles and help students grasp complex language concepts more effectively.
  The platform’s real-time feedback and assessment features allow teachers to closely monitor student progress. This enables personalized instruction and timely intervention, ensuring that each student receives the support they need to succeed. The ability to track performance and provide immediate feedback is critical to maintaining high standards of language instruction.
  Robotel’s collaborative features promote a more dynamic and interactive classroom environment. Students can participate in group activities, discussions, and peer reviews that enhance their communication skills and build confidence in using the language. This collaborative approach not only improves language skills, but also fosters a sense of community among learners.
• Last year, the College began the process of developing and adapting its first official conservation calendar, which will lead to a series of new initiatives aimed at developing an archiving system and better managing and supporting information protection mechanisms. This year, we completed its creation and officially submitted the calendar for approval to the Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec. This is a multi-year initiative that will require the commitment of many stakeholders to make it a success. We will keep the community informed of progress.

2.Infrastructure enhancement.

A lot of the requirements for delivering and fostering innovative solutions depend on what happens behind the scenes. That is our infrastructures. We could not present any kind of improvement or innovation without improving our infrastructures. Below are the latest initiatives to improve them:

• As part of our upcoming cloud residency, a college-wide redundancy project was initiated last year. This year we have migrated our Administrative Services office to a redundant infrastructure. This will continue over the next two years until completion.
• In Lennoxville, a new computer lab with approximately 20 computers was configured and connected in the newly redesigned Adapted Services area. This will allow Adapted Services to better serve its growing clientele.
• At St Lawrence, we have continued the process of fine-tuning and optimizing our Azure Virtual Desktop Infrastructure to enhance the innovative solutions implemented. The constituent college has achieved a more efficient and effective virtual desktop environment, resulting in several benefits.

Overall, fine-tuning and optimizing Azure Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is a strategic move that has improved performance, managed costs, enhanced security, and supported scalability, all of which are critical to the success of innovative solutions at St. Lawrence.

• The upgrade of all network switches in the infrastructure of our constituent college of St Lawrence is a critical step in enhancing its overall capabilities. By modernising the network infrastructure, Information Resources Services can more effectively support the community in achieving its goals for success in teaching, learning, administration and community service activities.

The upgraded network switches will significantly improve the performance and reliability of the network, ensuring that all digital tools and resources are easily accessible and function smoothly. This upgrade is critical to creating an environment where students, faculty and staff can thrive and innovate.

3.Cybersecurity enhancement.

In our ongoing effort to ensure the integrity, availability, and protection of our infrastructure and systems, we continually implement measures to enhance the level of security and protection of our information resources. Below are some of our information security initiatives:

• In order to adopt best practices and comply with government mandates, the College has adopted a new Information Security Policy. This Policy is the starting point of an Information Security Management Framework that will spawn additional related documents that will help the College increase its level of information security.
• The College has always focused on protecting personal information. With this in mind, we began the process of protecting publicly visible information several years ago. With the advent of Act 25, we have now completed our last remaining change at our constituent college of Lennoxville by renaming the accounts used by our students. Student accounts now use a standard email naming convention.
• October being Cybersecurity Awareness Month provided an excellent opportunity to participate in the “Generation Cyber Safe: Because Cybersecurity Knows No Age” campaign. This initiative has been very beneficial in improving cybersecurity at the College.
  The campaign helped raise awareness of the importance of cybersecurity across all age groups. By emphasizing that cybersecurity is a shared responsibility, it encouraged students, faculty, and staff to adopt safer online practices. This collective effort is critical to creating a safer digital environment.
  The campaign also fostered a culture of vigilance and proactive behavior. By regularly discussing cybersecurity topics and sharing best practices, the College community became more aware of potential risks and the importance of staying informed. This ongoing dialogue is essential to maintaining a high level of cybersecurity awareness.
  Overall, “Generation Cyber Safe: Because Cybersecurity Knows No Age” campaign has been instrumental in improving cybersecurity at the College. It raised awareness, provided education, fostered a culture of vigilance, and emphasized the importance of continuously improving cybersecurity practices.

• Last year, the College also published its first Cybersecurity Best Practices Guide.
  The guide covers various aspects of cyber hygiene and encourages readers to adopt best practices.
  This first edition of the guide is aimed at college employees rather than students but can be used by anyone.
  A new edition will be published soon to focus more specifically on students.
  The guide is available to everyone on our website.

4.Digital transformation.

In its journey towards digital transformation, the College has launched many initiatives. The few described below are part of a plan to foster digital transformation by encouraging the creation and use of new ways to leverage technology in our daily initiatives aimed at transforming the organization in today’s digital world:

• Starting with our constituent college of Saint-Lambert, where Virtual Reality (VR) has been introduced in History. A new VR experience has been deployed to support the World History course, which focuses on ancient Roman civilization. Students are immersed in the world of ancient Rome and have the opportunity to view the architecture of the time, including common houses, city courtyards, temples and the Senate. During the experience, the student assumes the role of a junior senator and engages in an interactive dialogue to determine whether or not Octavius should be granted additional powers. The experience is immersive and engaging and aligns with the strategic plan to support the development of deep learning while leveraging technology.  The program has been developed in 2024, will be piloted in the January 2025 semester, and will be rolled out in the fall of 2025.
• As part of the college’s migration to the cloud, our constituent college of Lennoxville has completed the migration of all shared documents from our old traditional file server to SharePoint/OneDrive. This allows for better document connectivity and further aligns us with our cloud migration project.
• Last year, we implemented Virtual Reality (VR) in the nursing department of our constituent college of Saint-Lambert. This year, it is the turn of our constituent college of Lennoxville to do the same by using VR simulations in the nursing program. This successful implementation was tested in the classroom as part of a faculty-led project. Future VR simulations are planned for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd year nursing students.

VR simulations have also been used in biology labs, where they can supplement and perhaps one day replace dissections in anatomy labs.  This could reduce operating costs for anatomy labs and better accommodate students with moral objections to traditional dissection.

• The use of Business Intelligence (BI) Dashboard at our constituent college of St. Lawrence has significantly benefited the college’s digital transformation efforts. By leveraging advanced analytics and data visualization tools, the college has been able to make informed decisions and track the impact of those decisions on various aspects of its operations.

The BI Dashboard has improved the quality of information available to decision makers. By integrating data from multiple sources and transforming it into a unified format, the dashboard provides accurate and comprehensive insights. This enables the college to identify trends, uncover hidden patterns, and make data-driven decisions that support its strategic goals.
The dashboard has improved operational efficiency. By providing real-time visualizations of key performance indicators and other metrics, staff from different departments can monitor their activities and make timely adjustments. This has led to more efficient resource allocation and improved overall performance.
In addition, the BI Dashboard has fostered a culture of transparency and accountability. By making data accessible to all stakeholders, the dashboard ensures that everyone is on the same page and working toward common goals. This has helped to align efforts across the institution and drive continuous improvement.

5.Service and support for the community.

Information Technology is not only a support service, but also provides assistance to other services and departments to leverage opportunities, improve communication, provide direct support to our students, and more.
Below are some of the initiatives that help and support our community:

• Following the launch of two new websites last year, one for Administrative Services and one for the constituent college of Saint-Lambert, we have continued the same effort at our constituent college of Lennoxville, where the development of the new college website is nearing completion, with a launch scheduled for late December 2024. In addition to a modernized look, fully bilingual content, and full-featured accessibility plugins, the new site will introduce granular permissions for editing content.  This will allow specific individuals in various departments (Athletics, Records, Academics) who receive brief training to make basic content changes to sections of the site that fall under their purview.  This democratization of content input will result in a more dynamic site and reduce bottlenecks that occur when a single person is tasked with updating all content for the entire college.
• The use of new asset inventory software has brought significant benefits to the service and support provided to the community at our constituent colleges of St. Lawrence and Lennoxville. By implementing this software, the constituent colleges have been able to streamline their inventory management processes, resulting in several key benefits.
  The software has improved the efficiency of inventory tracking and management. With real-time updates and accurate records, the constituent colleges can ensure that all necessary resources are available when needed. This reduces downtime and ensures that services are delivered promptly and effectively.
  By analyzing inventory trends and usage patterns, the constituent colleges can make informed decisions about future resource needs.
  In addition, the software has improved communication and collaboration between different departments. With a centralized system, all stakeholders have access to the same information, making it easier to coordinate efforts and ensure everyone is on the same page.
  Overall, the use of this new asset inventory software has significantly improved the service and support provided to the community in both St. Lawrence and Lennoxville. It has improved efficiency, transparency, planning and collaboration, all of which are essential to providing quality service and support.

1. Innovative solutions implemented

In the last 12 months, the Champlain’s community has evolved and has expected and requested innovative changes. The Champlain’s Information Technology Services has been listening and taking concrete steps toward fulfilling as much request as possible to better help support its community and leverage the digital transformation plan of the organization. These initiatives are:

• Classrooms transformations:
  • The deployment of hybrid classrooms has allowed students and guests to join classrooms virtually and be immersed into the educational experience in the class through the use interactive SMART TVs, microphone pods, document cameras, projectors, and speakers in an integrated synergy.
  • Moving to new projectors, we have also improved the quality and durability by moving away from lamps to lasers in classrooms. In addition, all teachers can teach in class without any additional wires since the classrooms were also equipped with a universal docking station allowing for universal experience. To further improve the teaching experience, some furniture was also made adjustable. This initiative is still in the making and will be completed in the months to come.
• In its effort to ease the access to pedagogical reference material and teaching material, students can now experience new features and functionalities in its two communities of St. Lawrence and Lennoxville through the new and improve Bookstore platforms.
• With increased focus around the protection of personal information, the College has continued its process of developing and adapting its first official Conservation calendar that will lead to a new set of initiatives aimed at developing an Archiving System and better manage and support the mechanisms of information protection. This is a multi-year initiative and will require commitment from many stakeholders to lead this to success. We will keep the community informed of the progress.

2. Infrastructure enhancement

A lot of the requirements around providing and fostering innovative solutions rely on what is hidden behind the scenes. This is what is hidden behind our infrastructures. We could not present any type of improvement or innovations without improving our infrastructures. Below you will find the most recent initiatives related to improving our infrastructures:

• As part of a global approach to improve our level of, and availability of, services to our community, as well as enforce resilient infrastructure in our upcoming Cloud residency; a college-wide redundancy project has been initiated this year and is planned to proceed through the next three years until completion.
• A lifecycle management schedule has been established to ensure that the college’s computer farm will not exceed a duration of more than five years overall. A strategy has been implemented this year to achieve this objective. Mainly in 2022 we have replaced static desktop computers by laptop computers allowing for more mobility of our personnel and students in targeted programs. This same strategy also includes a “cascading”, or “domino” strategy to ensure that the device assigned to an individual or a department is meeting the needs and then existing device is passed on to a new individual or department. The same strategy is therefore ensuring a greener approach in reusing technology whenever possible. We are looking forward to continuing to improve this strategic replacement within next year deliverables to achieve a full replacement of endpoint devices.
• In the current Government-wide strategy of migrating to the cloud, we have started to identify assets that will not make the transition and therefore strategically started to retire its components piece by piece and recycle them through proper recycling facilities. We are establishing a yearly strategy to list and dispose. This process will renew itself every year to come, making our device’s list requirement as lean as possible while we target a greener operational environment that consumes less resources and generates unrecyclable elements as less as possible.
• Nowadays, WIFI is an important and critical to our operation as ever. As part of this important piece of our infrastructure, we are planning yearly improvement by replacing part of our WIFI architecture to better meet the current needs from our community. This year, we have done exactly that by replacing all the access points of our constituent college of St. Lawrence and met the WIFI 6 standard.
• As part of the continuing management of our key core infrastructures, one of our data centers was upgraded during the last year to allow for improve the level of service we provide to our St. Lawrence community and ensure compliance with Government’s regulations.

3. Cybersecurity enhancement

In our continued effort to ensure the integrity, availability and protection of our infrastructures and systems, we continuously implement measures designed to enhance the level of security and protect our informational assets. Below you will find some of our last year’s initiatives in the field of information security:

• One of the key elements in case of a cyberincident, or any type of disaster, is readiness. In information technology, readiness takes the form of a Disaster Recovery Plan. In the last few months, we have undergone into the process of improving our existing disaster recovery plan by reviewing and improving our backup solutions and strategies aiming at increasing protection of our information and infrastructures.
• To ensure a better identity protection and protect access to our systems and infrastructures, we have continued and completed our strategy of deploying multi-factor authentication. This year’s focus was around our Organizational Resource Planning System forcing employees and students to double-authenticate. This was done in partnership with the supplier. A phase remains to be completed in the near future as soon as the supplier will be ready.
• An additional information security mechanism has been deployed to improve the security in communicating using emails. The College has started its deployment of a DMARC strategy to better manage spam-based email and help the internet community in mitigating the impact of unwanted emails and potential threats.
• In a continuing effort of protecting critical assets, a secured cloud-based, and Quebec-owned, Password Management System has been deployed; this will allow IT and high-privileged access accounts users to use a secured vault storage systems and therefore improve our Identity Management Strategy.

4. Digital transformation

In its journey toward digital transformation, the College has launched many initiatives. The few ones described below are part of a bigger plan aiming at fostering digital transformation, promoting the creation and use of new ways to leverage technology in the core of day-to-day initiatives targeting organizational transformation in the current digital world:

• Numerous workshops to faculty on the use of AI in education and how it can impact evaluations and student success were offered. The constituent of Lennoxville is developing a report on AI in education which will include guidelines and common language for faculty to use in giving instructions on the permissibility of AI use for their courses and assignments. This initiative has only started, and we still have a lot to discover. We are pursuing this in the coming year as well and will increase the frequency of such workshops.
• In support to the organization transformation toward leveraging and adapting to digital changes, a new classroom experience was designed where new teacher laptops, docking stations, monitor, document cameras and interactive SMART TVs were deployed as a standard layout and old traditional projectors were removed. At this time, this new classroom experience has been implemented at our Saint-Lambert constituent and part of this new transformation was also implemented into our other constituent colleges of St. Lawrence and Lennoxville. This is an ongoing transformation, and it will continue in the coming months and years.
• A new initiative of our constituent college of Saint-Lambert has lead IT local services and the Nursing department to commonly develop a new Virtual Reality (or VR) training, and assessment for the Nursing program to enhance the pedagogical experience and strengthen the preparation of our students before going into a hospital environment.
• Multiple new initiatives around the use of learning platforms like Moodle are initiated every year. At our St. Lawrence constituent this year, IT has worked with our local pedagogical counselor at developing expertise with a new application called Wooclap. Wooclap is a comprehensive tool for faculty to capture students’ attention and measure their level of understanding. Training session were provided to faculty in the use of this new digital tool.
• In compliance with the Government “cloud migration” project, the College continue and improve its level of service by migrating the different ticketing systems to the cloud. The process of migrating the ticketing systems from an “on-premises” model to a “cloud-based” model has started and is planned to be completed in spring of 2024.
• In the effort of improving web-based services, the constituent college of Saint-Lambert has started a process of systematically review hosted websites used throughout the different services of this constituent to consolidate, improve, or retire obsolete websites and streamline its web-based offer to the community.

5. Service and support for the community

Information Technology is not only a support service in relation to the community at Champlain; it also provides assistance to other services and departments in leveraging opportunities, improve communication, provide direct support to our students and more.

Below you will find some of the last year’s hep and support initiatives to our community:

• Providing continued and dynamic content and information to our community is paramount to the organization of Champlain. To help in this process, two new websites were redesigned and launched. The Administrative Services website and Saint-Lambert constituent college’s website. Both sites are now bilingual, accessibility compliant, compliant with personal information protection, and are offering a new generation of information and services to current and future students and employees.
• In collaboration with local IT, a peer tutors initiative at our constituent college of Lennoxville has been implemented. It has been named “Brains”. This student tech tutoring service give workshops and one-on-one support to fellow students with basic digital skills.  This allows teachers to integrate technology more confidently into their pedagogical practices without having to provide technology support to their students.