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.