 Good afternoon. I feel a little bit like I'm on a ski jump, probably the largest room I've played. So in any event, I can't believe that all of you are here for governance. I'm sorry, but it's just not that interesting. I think the last time I gave this talk, yeah, we got one rapid fan. Great. The last time I gave this talk, I think I had about 20 people and they were just waiting for the next speaker, but I will do my best to entertain you. So I'm Marty Delberg. I am the Senior Coordinator for Learning Management Systems, and I have the best job at NC State University because I have a position where I have the ability to influence the direction of the technology that we take, help facilitate learning, and I have no direct reports. So I work with a variety of different groups within Delta, and I'll kind of explain what Delta is, and I work with a variety of different people at kind of a peer-to-peer level. We have a fairly, you know, while we do have a hierarchy, we really kind of jump those bounds and work well with each other to collaborate and make things happen. And I work with a green bunch of people, aside from the folks that are up front here that are planning on heckling me, but you know, we'll do what we can with that. So anyway, Delta is distance education, which is one part of what we do, and then learning technology applications. So we are a separate group from the IT group at the university, and our responsibility is to manage those learning technologies. So we deliver things, we have a portal, sorry, is there a question? We have something called Wolfware, which is kind of our portal, or the system or point of entry, and within Wolfware we have a bunch of technologies, most notably Moodle and Blackboard Collaborate and MediaSite for lecture capture. So we do a variety of different things there, but all of those technologies are kind of wrapped up and handled in our office. The benefit of that is that we get to deal with technology as our primary or most important focus. So rather than having five or six different competing things, like student information systems, like payroll, accounts payable or receivable, email, and all of these things, you know, authentication, all of these things go wrong on a regular basis and data centers and all that stuff, rather than being pushed and pulled by that and having to compete with that for budget money, we're in a separate group inside the provost's office where our primary focus can be on education and making things, making it possible for faculty to do wonderful things. So I think that pretty much covers all of that. So let's talk about a little bit about what governance is. So governance, you can look at it as a way to manage your, you know, your technology or, you know, manage whatever it happens to be. It's not, I mean, you know, people get the idea that, and somebody asked a great question at one of our last sessions, you know, if you set up this governance structure, what do you do with it? You know, what happens when they decide they want you to go off the cliff and, you know, five hundred and five thousand yards out into the desert or something like that? And the answer is the governance is there to guide from a strategic point of view. They are there to make recommendations about the strategy, the direction that you're going to take, the philosophy or approach that you're going to use to manage these tools of this technology. They are not there to oversee and manage your day-to-day operations. We reserve that Delta handles the implementation. We look to our governance to make recommendations, and I use the word recommendation about strategy. Now, all of that is a recommendation to the vice provost, but since it's his checkbook, he gets to hang on to it, and he does not have to follow the recommendations of this governance committee. So we've had one or two cases where our, you know, learning management system steering committee has suggested that we do something that was a little counter to what, you know, was actually going to work, and so we got a veto from the provost for those things. That's happened twice in about eight years. For the most part, it's simply a rubber stamp when we go ahead and do. There's usually good decisions that are made. So we try very hard to make it inclusive and collaborative, and for the most part, we are successful. It is difficult sometimes to find representation at all levels. How many of you folks are faculty? Do you have two or three hours a month to donate to something like this, and you do as well? Well, so it seems like in NC State, we have 2,000 faculty members, and we struggle to get three or four. So whether it's a visibility issue that we're not able to get the word out enough, you know, I've asked people at Faculty Senate, for example, for recommendations, and one or two people will be eager and will say yes, I want to join, I want to be on the committee, and then somewhere about two or three meetings later, they stop coming because they have other, you know, other constraints upon their time. So it can be a little bit difficult to get that kind of collaboration and buy-in with our most important constituency, which is the faculty. We're kind of geared towards making sure that they have what they need, figuring that if they can do what they need to do, the students' needs will get taken care of, they'll get to learn. So that's kind of how we approach it. So why is governance important? Okay? Not Delta, but, you know, a hypothetical organization has in the past had the reputation for making decisions in the blind. And by the way, these slides are available online in the course, so you can go get them afterwards and have a couple links at the end. But some hypothetical organizations had a reputation in the past for knowing what's best for people, okay? And for simply providing solutions in a vacuum and rolling them out. I am sure that you have all seen this at your institutions. That that's happens from time to time. And that's one of the things that when we formed this governance, we were trying to combat. We did not want to have that reputation for being a holier than now, or we know better than you what you need to do to do your job. So it was very important for us to kind of get that out there to be as transparent as we possibly could, make sure that we're meeting the needs of our constituency, and try to pull as many people in and get them to buy into that process. If they're not, if they don't feel that we're doing well, sooner or later, we will not exist any longer. I mean, that's just the fact of life in an organization. You know, somebody else will come along, they'll start doing their own things in different departments. And then our need, you know, our ability to provide technology across campus will get challenged and will be more and more difficult to happen. We try to adhere to kind of a basic principle of transparency over all else, and that can sometimes be very, very painful, because frequently there's dirty laundry or there's disagreement or there's, you know, things that people are asking for. And we have to say no and make that, you know, open to the whole world. But we really strive very hard to be transparent so that people can see what's going on, they can understand what decisions we're making and why, and can get involved and can weigh in on that. And so I'll talk a little bit about how we do that, and then I have some links for you. You can see some more of what we're doing. We want to have, you know, a heterogeneous viewpoint. We would like to be able to include or to understand all of the different things that are going on. So, you know, I'm really smart and I know better than everyone else what we need and what should happen, but every once in a while somebody comes up and explains to me the little things in life like, you know, vet school is a medical school and they have different needs, they have a different time frame, foreign language needs, voice recorders. I mean, I started teaching in the day when I taught, you listened, and that's how it worked. I would bring in a big pile of handouts into the classroom. And clearly things have changed a lot since then. And even from having this job, I have learned a lot. Okay. I've become, you know, I don't teach anymore, but I became a better teacher and a better understanding of what's involved and how learning works. So it's been a great thing for me. But with that said, you know, there are a lot of different, you know, universities, huge. We have 35,000 FTEs or something like that and a couple of thousand teachers. And, you know, there are a lot of different little nooks and crannies of things that people need special things. Like foreign language, for example, really needed poodle. I think that was talked about earlier today, voice recorder. And it was really helpful for them. And if their voice isn't heard, then it's very easy for that to get drowned out. And we create a good system for NC State and they're out of luck. So we really need to get that kind of input. Okay. It's also important that you get people who don't like what you're doing. And that's that could be really painful.