April 2, 2024 at 11:00 AM - Information Services Committee Meeting

Discussion:  Meeting called to order at 11:00 AM.  

Staff:  Kraig Lofquist, Deb Hericks, Priscilla Quintana, Scott Isaacson, Andrew Easton, Rhonda Eis

Discussion: 

The Technology Director gave updates 141 school districts and ESUs are participating in the Proofpoint Security Awarenes Training platform, utilizing 22,152 staff licenses. 49 school districts and ESUs are participating in the Duo Security multi-factor authentication system, utilizing 8,646 licenses. 1,354 licenses remain available.

Canvas Updates:  152 public school districts, 47 non-public schools are participating in the Canvas consortium. Bill Schroeder is joining our Canvas team on April 8, 2024. Bill comes to us from Clarkson college with deep experience as an instructional designer and Canvas administrator.  Review some dates for training for Administrators for this Spring/Summer.  

The Nebraska Future Ready Conference is June 10-11, 2024 both in person at the NDE office and virtually.

The STEADfast project is a browser plug-in designed to help school districts collect data about the performance of home broadband Internet services and indicate areas of the state where service improvements are needed. This project was started with the development work of ESU 10 using GEER funds earlier. $45,000 remaining ESSER III funding is available to continue development and pilot this software with a school district. We are working out the details of this with NDE and ESU 10.

Discussion:  The Technology Director gave updates for cybersecurity.  

The SLCG committee has received copies of the submitted year 2 proposals. At the March 14, 2024 committee meeting, we learned updated numbers: 60 project proposals were submitted, totalling $7.7 million in requested funding. $4.2 million in funding is available. Projects range from very small (just a few thousand dollars, to one that is $4.4 million by itself). The projects have not been assigned for scoring yet. The plan is to have the projects scored during April, with announcements to the projects moving forward in May.

Four cybersecurity projects are moving forward with $500,000 in ESSER III funding allocated through ESUCC:

• Establish a Nebraska chapter of the Consortium of School Networking (CoSN)
• Provide summer workshops and support for schools and ESUs to create and improve cyber incident response plans
• Support the Cyber Tatanka training and simulation exercises conducted in the summer
• Fund trials of security operation center (SOC) and penetration testing services

All work must be completed with these funds by September 30, 2024.

Discussion:  Dr. Schnoes was present to give an update from the SIMPL Workgroup meeting.  The group feels it is important to have SIMPL attached to the Information Services Committee.  They would like to re-brand this group.  They would like to redefine the purpose/position.  Rework the phases into a tier structure.  This would allow the opportunity to possibly sell the product outside of Nebraska.  Explanation of the proposed tier structure.  

Discussion: 

The Technology Director shared that the NNNC is requesting that ESUCC assume ownership of the dmarcian contract. This contract is currently utilized by every ESU, except 18 & 19. The cost will be $12,000 per year, with each participating ESU paying their share. Andy Boell is working on a partnership with multiple post-secondary institutions which can help to reduce the cost to all ESUs. Management of this service would be done by a member of the ESUCC technical staff. DMARC stands for "Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance" and its purpose is to authenticate email from our domains to help people receiving our email to know it is or isn't really from us to reduce spam and security threats through email. The dmarcian platform is a tool to help configure, test and monitor DMARC much more easily than doing the tasks manually.

Discussion: 

SRS
The SRS team continues to upgrade the software. Rita McKinney (SRS helpdesk and communications specialist) and Scott Isaacson will present a session at the NDE data conference April 16th-17th, 2024. The SRS team has met with 28+ districts in Zoom sessions to hear their feedback on the software, and has collected feedback from 40+ through a Google feedback form. Discussed future/roadmap items for SRS.

NVIS
The team continues to update and test the software, preparing for a summer, 2024 release.

Project Para
A new user registration process has been set up using the Canvas catalog and is being tested now for release in the summer, 2024. The advisory team for the project will be engaged to review and recommend updates to the course content and the Canvas team will work during the 2024-2025 school year to make these updates.

Discussion:  The Digital Learning Director gave his updates to the committee.  

Discussion:  The IMAT Project Coordinator gave updates from her report.  

Discussion:  The meeting adjourned at 12:06 PM.