4 Pandemic pivot
Unparalleled COVID-19 response
When IU announced it was moving its classes online in March 2020, affecting all 93,000 students and 21,000
faculty and staff, UITS sprang into action.
With just two weeks’ notice, faculty had to be prepared to deliver their courses online and staff set up to work from home. UITS played a mission-critical role in creating the plans for shifting processes and infrastructure to
support the rapid transformation.
UITS staff worked tirelessly to create systems, dashboards, technology in the field, and everything in between, including:
- Shifting to online webinars for faculty support
- Updating our well-established Keep Teaching site and building the Keep Learning and Keep Working sites to help faculty, students, and staff stay informed and connected while remote
- Creating a detailed classroom inventory database to help with pandemic social-distancing planning and rescheduling of space
- Creating additional classrooms and installing AV/tech in auxiliary spaces such as the IU Auditorium that allowed for safe distancing
- Creating outdoor Wi-Fi across campus for drive-up access for the IU community and the public
- Designing, installing, and managing sign-in kiosks with barcode printers for the massive COVID-19 mitigation testing process
- Creating apps and data dashboards as well as a Citrix virtual desktop so students could access software at home
UITS touched nearly every facet of the university from the student learning experience to faculty redesign of coursework and learning new technologies, operations for COVID-19 testing, readjustment of campus social-distancing experiences in classrooms, and research for the COVID-19 vaccine.
Thanks to our committed professionals, the university was empowered to adapt successfully, students remained safe while continuing to learn, and the quality of the IU experience was preserved. Today, IU is more resilient than ever, with a more digitally-savvy faculty, an increase in online learning, and more flexibility in our work environments.
Perhaps most notably, UITS staff put on their face masks and provided on-site tech support for IU’s arrival and mitigation efforts, ultimately supporting the technology to conduct 204,903 mitigation tests throughout the
IU network.
The collaboration, creation, and deployment of the many new services could be described as heroic. Beyond the scope of our individual campuses, we supported COVID-19 research efforts globally. The UITS team worked with penMRS to use Jetstream for national and worldwide health efforts, including COVID-19 research and tracking.
Staff also worked with the IU School of Medicine on using REDCap, Indiana University’s research survey tool, to support the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine trial and developed multiple apps.