As recently covered in The Brink, a group of researchers and BU leaders collaborated to produce an article about BU’s response to the pandemic in the Fall 2020 semester. Control of COVID-19 transmission on an urban university campus during a second wave of the pandemic provides a case study of the various efforts that went into keeping the university safe, and many of these efforts were enabled by the considerable work of IS&T staff. The work of several groups were highlighted in the study, including:
- Analytical Services & Institutional Research (AS&IR) developed public and internal dashboards, reports, and data feeds, and provided analytical support to the various working groups and senior leadership working to implement solutions and improvements to the university’s operations and academic programs.
- Client Services & Support coordinated and staffed the Healthway Help Line, which was dedicated to answering BU student questions about COVID-19 compliance policies, deployed and supported the technology used to enable Learn from Anywhere in the classrooms, and provided onsite support for the Healthway organization, including all COVID-19 testing locations.
- The Reporting and Data Architecture group created and completed several automated data collection and database development initiatives; pulling and consolidating information from a variety of key source systems (e.g., Student Registration and Course Scheduling, Student Health, Housing, and ERP and Human Resource systems, etc.) to support reporting and analysis efforts at a wide and more flexible scale.
- The Research Computing Services (RCS) group facilitated engagement between BU faculty and other groups within IS&T, provided programming, infrastructure, and dissemination support for mathematical modeling analysis and reporting, and closely coordinated with the IS&T groups above on data engineering, management, and automation activities.