 Okay, good, the mic seems to be working. So I'm hoping by the end of this talk that I will convince all of you that governance is important. So here's my best job at it. So a little bit about me, my name is Marty Delberg. I am the Senior Coordinator for Wolfware, just like Cal Poly. We have to brand things with our own name and we're the Wolfpack. So we'll do whatever the Wolfpack. And I am part of Delta, along with Lou and Jeff. And we are the Learning Technology Applications Solidities. And Scott, sorry. Thank you, basket. Delta is a division of the provost office. And I bring this up because there are two basic ways for people to organize their LMS structure. One is to have it as part of their IT group. And the other is to have it as part of where they're teaching and learning with faculty or separate by provost for academic technology or something to have it separated from the IT functions. I actually think, and I know that most of you don't have the ability to change the structure of your organization, but we have found and we've done the research and actually wrote a book chapter about that structure and governance and that groups that you have governance that's outside of or that run their LMS outside of the IT functions usually do a better job at meeting the needs of their constituency. And if for no other reason, then they're able to devote the resources and the attention to it and focus on it. Because we all know that when the student information systems or PeopleSoft or e-mail goes down, the LMS is going to get short-tripped. They're not going to be paying attention to it. They're not going to be maintaining it when they have to take care of or put out more urgent fires. So what is governance? Well, I'd like to think about kind of the problems that we have as administrators or people who run learning management system or learning technology. And faculty members are accustomed to being in control of their classrooms. I mean, that's one of the essential functions of classroom management. We are accustomed to being in control of our LMS, or running the show and setting the rules. Now, I'm looking at it from a 20,000-foot view down. I'm doing what's best for the institution. I take all these 11 colleges that we have, all the different classes, and I mold it into one view or one frame. That's kind of the biggest best compromise for the whole university. Faculty obviously have very different thoughts about that. They want to get what's best for their class. And so, inherently, you have a conflict or tension in this relationship. Already, you are their enemy because you're not putting that plug in that they need in order to teach their classroom what they want. So we have 2,000 faculty, 2,500 faculty and 110,000 enrollment, 40,000 students. We can't just go willy-nilly installing plug-ins just on the whim of one person. So there are certainly issues. So we're trying to meet the needs of a large diverse constituency. We're also trying to give them some representation. We want them to be able to feel like they have a voice, like they actually do have control. We need to make sure that we have a viewpoint, that we're understanding the viewpoints of the different colleges. Our college of vet med is very interested in competency-based education. And they're pushing us to move forward with that. I don't know that engineering has really thought about it much. But we need to have representatives from all our stakeholders to make sure that we're understanding what's actually needed and where the future of this technology needs to go. So as I mentioned at the bottom, I will frequently get people who want to, you know, impletely tear me a new one, if you will, because we're happy about something that we're doing. And the easiest way to deal with those sorts of critics is to invite them to come and serve as representatives on committee. And one of two things do that happens is either they come and they understand the bigger picture or they get quiet because they don't want to volunteer to spend the time. So either way, I'm able to kind of calm down somebody that's having a problem. So just simple little chart, quick little visual for you to see. You know, that's our governance structure. Pretty simple and straightforward, right? Basically, we have, if you look at the pink layers, and I'm color-wise, so if I'm getting the colors wrong, Deli, but I think if the pink is the learning management system steering and content capture steering, those are our two decision-making bodies. As they have three subcommittees that feed into them, we try to look at things from three different ways. Customer needs and policy, so that's typically made up of administrators from different IT administrators, from different colleges and different units on campus. We try to have one from every large unit that's using our learning management system and learning technologies. We have a best practices of support, which Scott heads as a co-chair that handles the qualitative things, kind of how to support people, pedagogy, best practices within the LMS. What should we be doing to promote and help and assist teaching? And then we have a technical concerns committee, which is co-chaired by Jeff, and that's looking at what's feasible when the other two committees say it would be really nice if we could do this. He's the one who kind of reigns in our enthusiasm and says, you know, that's a great idea, but it will never work because we don't have, you know, $15 million worth of supercomputing equipment. You know, what happens? He's the reality check to make sure that things are working properly. Sometimes he says it's easy. Yeah, he's actually a great guy to work with. So, you know, and then this is available online, and I'll actually show you where you can get it on our website. I have a whole list of other resources, so I'm not gonna go over the rest of the chart, but how do you promote transparency? So how do I get, I want people to understand the decisions that we make and why we make the decisions? Because typically when you explain it to a faculty member, I mean, I am the, I'm the master of saying no in getting someone to thank me. So that's part of my job, is that I have to explain to a faculty member, well, I understand that you wanna integrate this book publisher saying blah, blah, blah, but it's not proper complaint. This is why we can't do it, you know, or whatever other issue. So I need to be able to do that with, you know, faculty members that need to be able to explain, we need to be able to get the word out to why we make the decisions that we do. It's not just an arbitrary decision that's made somewhere in a little closed room and then we issue the edict and go. If we do that, over time we'll become hated and reviled on campus. I mean, it's pretty much a given. So you need to get people involved. We often need to actually get their input in these decisions. So it's very important that you get a good representative sample of stakeholders across campus. I will tell you, it's very difficult to get faculty and student representation and I struggle with that constantly. I'm not gonna, you know, sugarcoat anything here. So that's why I regularly, whatever somebody engages me, because they want something I will frequently ask and if they would like to participate. And that's how we keep our faculty slots open. You need to hold regular meetings. So many times I've gone to things where people claim to look for input and they are telling you what they wanna do and just looking for validation. And if you do that with people, they will very quickly realize that it's a waste of time, it's a fruitless exercise. So it's very important to go in there with an agenda of things that you want to talk about but not with the decisions of the agenda. You need to allow people to discuss, go over what their feelings are, have a little, hopefully have some healthy debate about it and then make a decision. Obviously, you need to get to the decision-making stage. So there are other cases where people will argue and discuss and talk, you know, ad nauseam for three months or revisit issues. We're very much trying to be of the mold where we make a decision and then we move on it. I'd rather make a good decision than spend forever to make a great one because you just need to keep moving. You need to get things done. So we try very hard to solicit feedback from the community at large. We have a few mechanisms for that which I'll talk about and we try to get new perspective from people. We try to bring fresh blood in as often as possible. So some of the things that we do, it's about communication. It is really, really difficult to communicate with your campus, with faculty. Okay, they're busy. To give you an example, I send out a direct email once or twice a semester. We go out per year, beginning of the fall, beginning of the spring, and kind of when we're rolling over to the next year. And I've gotten people asking me to unsubscribe. Now, this is crucial information that they need to know to use the tools to do their job. And they're asking me to unsubscribe. I found out that I was remarkably successful because 52% of them opened the email. Now, what about the other 48? A little bit of a problem. So we also, you know, we have a few different channels. We have that, we have what we call Delta Wire articles and just kind of a blog that we keep. We have knowledge-based articles to help them with individual topics, more of a just-in-time type thing, trainings, custom trainings, how to do videos. And we also have big, ugly, yellow messages with red type that appear, that they have to actually dismiss called notifications that appear right at the front of our portal so that we have a log. I could actually go back and look and say, well, you clicked, you got this message on 17, 2008, you know, whatever at such and such a time as a way of trying to kind of give them or make them a little more mindful of the fact that they need to actually pay attention to these communications. So we're rapidly running out of time. So we've had a number of successes. One of the things that we do, you know, because everybody feels Moodle's open source, we can change it, we can do anything we want. You know, and Lou and I, several years ago, did a talk called Free As In Puppies, Not As In Beer, and the idea being that, you know, Moodle is free, but there's a cost associated with it once you get it for free in terms of maintenance, updating, customization, things like that. So we try very hard not to modify core and to look at both the importance of breadth and depth when we consider a feature request. And so anybody in the community, in our NC State community that can log into our system can put in a feature request. So students, faculty, what have you. What's that? Yeah, okay. So we also have a variety of SOPs that we, the committees have agreed upon as far as retention, as far as, you know, the profit feature request, you know, the whole host of other ones. And so we work very hard to build a shared vision of where we need to be and what we're doing. You know, we actively solicit that input, and we've gotten a lot of positive feedback from faculty. I mean, they're much happier now, I think, than they were 10 years ago when we, or nine years ago when we first got this effort started. I think, you know, this is admittedly anecdotal. I only have a very small amount of data to back that up. But the general climate seems to be that they feel like we're responding. You know, we do have occasional problems with marketing from companies like Kansas. Or, you know, we've gotten a lot of, you know, people who know faculty members and, you know, we get questions about that. And so we're actually working on those types of communications to explain why we're sticking with Moodle. There are a couple downsides. We're, unfortunately, I'm running out of time, so I can't really talk too much about those. But it takes a lot of time. Okay, it's a lot of time and effort to spend the time to communicate with people. It's a lot easier to just expel you. We make a decision and move on and go. It also takes additional resources. Occasionally, they're going to drag you to a place where you don't want to go. And, you know, if it's consensus and it can be done, even though you felt that making more expedient to do it a certain way, you may have to go and go with what your governance body suggests. It can also be very, very slow. I mean, you may have to wait until the meeting. One of our failings right now is feature requests could take up to two years before we finally do something, we've decided on them, and actually do something with them. And I think we've had a couple that lasted longer than that. So there, you can actually be sending a message that, yeah, great, tell us, but we don't care about you. So there are dangers associated with this, and we're actually changing our process to try to speed that up. So the resources for you, our portal, and I know people hate that portal word, but it seems to work, is wolfware.ncsu.edu. And these slides are uploaded, so you can just download and take a look. And we also have all of our SOPs, governance structure membership at wolfware.ncsu.edu slash SOP, where you can just go to Wolfware and go all the way to the bottom of the page and click on governance. And you are free to take, steal, copy, paste, do whatever you want, anything that we can do to help you promote, you know, better governance or, you know, better organization management of your learning technologies we'd be happy to talk to you about. That's all I got.