Episode Transcript
Brent Warner 0:00
We’re back with Nick Wilkening, Irvine Valley College’s Director of Technology Services, to talk about updates and changes around technology services on campus. This is the The Higher EdTech Podcast season Seven, Episode 15.
Tim Van Norman 0:26
welcome to today’s higher ed tech Podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman, the Interim Assistant Director Technology Services at IVC and Adjunct Professor of Business at Cypress College.
Nick Wilkening 0:35
And I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL here at IVC, we both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about.
Tim Van Norman 0:43
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us. And Nick welcome was I was looking back and I realized it was a year ago that we were back. We were together on episode 14 and 15. So welcome. We’re both going to a conference next week, at least as far as when we’re recording this and the same conference we were at when we recorded last time. So that’s right, yeah, so yeah, exactly a year later.
Nick Wilkening 1:13
Oh that’s right, yeah.
Tim Van Norman 1:13
How have you been doing the in the meantime?
Nick Wilkening 1:17
Yeah, thank you for having me back. I always appreciate being able to kind of geek out, talk about technology, and, you know, give timely updates. And I appreciate the service. I think you guys do with this, which is fantastic, being able to integrate all of it. And it’s always an exciting thing,
Brent Warner 1:33
yeah, yeah. So, so we have a number of things just to talk about, kind of see what’s been happening on campus. This is less of a classroom conversation, which is, you know, I would say 90% of our conversations are more classroom focused, but then we get a couple of just kind of deeper tech or nerdy episodes every once in a while, too, not to call you nerdy here, Nick, but (laughter) the work here is just a little bit more, maybe a little bit more technical, I guess, than than pedagogical in the conversation. So lots been changing for you guys. And I know we kind of wanted to start talking about the department changes, all the things that you’ve been making shifts with move, physical movements, structural movements, all those types of things. So can you just break down what’s been happening with your department?
Nick Wilkening 2:22
Yeah, thanks for that. It’s been quite a consequential year, as it feels like every year is at Irvine Valley. I love working here because it’s constantly dynamic. There’s always something to kind of wrap your head around. And most recently was the culmination of a multi year effort between our facilities and maintenance operations department, as well as my department, which was kind of the remodel of the library, which was many years in the making, as well as ensuring that there was improvements around the library, adding in a whole new HVAC system. Quite quite a large effort that our facilities team put together, and in that they built and prepped a space for our entire tech services department. So roughly about 20 to 25 members of our team at any given point, spread between the first and second floor and the first floor, really the space of, you know, dynamic technicians that we have coming in and out, responding to classroom, you know, out at technology issues, responding to wireless issues, setting up and tearing down events. So those are where predominantly, most of our tech side of the house is. On the second floor, we’ve got our service desk, which includes all of our application specialists and our instructional technologists and a few of our infrastructure folks who deal with a lot of the servers and routers and switches as well as web administration. So part of all of that remodel was kind of our team spread out all over campus for a year or so prior to that, and as recently as of July of this year, or of 2025 rather, our whole team moved back in. So we are moved into the library as one entire department, which has been just absolutely amazing to have all of our staff together in one spot. And then also at that same time we went through and kind of a pretty core change to our team. Our former assistant director, John Beatty, retired last year, which opened up opportunities for our team to kind of look at how our management structure is and see that, hey, we might need to add an additional manager for that service desk component, as well as our educational technology side, so that we can really kind of focus efforts around standardizing processes for our Service Desk team, as well as be a resource for any of our classified professionals on that side of the house that need you know quick answers to questions, as well as. As facilitating, you know, robust technical discussions on how we can make things better for our community. We’re unique in that we have all students, staff, faculty and managers that can call our phone line, 5696, or 949-451-5696, to you know, work through technical problems. So really, that level of management was really important, from my my standpoint, to ensure that we can improve services and ensure that there’s coverage there. So in that time, we went through an interim solicitation process where Tim Van Norman took the interim position and has been in that role since roughly June of last year. And then we did an internal and external solicitation for both positions, and we pulled in a fief, Ahmad, who came from an external entity, worked at an MSP prior to coming here, and he’s now taken John Beatty’s replacement as an Interim Assistant Director right now as well, and he was on board at around June, June of last year as well. So we’ve just had so much change within the within the department, retirees, new additions, moving into new spaces, all in the space of no or in the span of a couple months. It’s been insane. And it’s also been really nice to be able to have us all just walk around, check in with each other, say hi, instead of, you know, phone calls and driving all over the place and seeing each other in fits and spurts. So that’s been the most, you know, consequential piece to our department, and one that I’m very proud of and very happy so far as we’ve been moving through kind of the changes that come in. So, yeah, yeah, pretty excited about some of that.
Brent Warner 6:45
Well, as you’re saying it, I’m thinking about how different it is. And, you know, like, because you were off at ATEP, our satellite campus, right? Tim was off – so eagle-eared listeners will know that Tim has had different offices over the years. And it’s changed a few times, right? And so before it was, you know, that this separate building over, you know, in the A 300 and now it’s, you know, and it had rotated a few different places and locations. And then, so now it’s like, okay, we’ve got it settled. And not only if I go to see Tim, I can probably also swing by and see you Nick, and I can also go see, you know, our instructional technologist now, you know, like so it’s very convenient to be able to access everybody and right in the middle of campus. And I think it’s easy to overlook how important it is to be centralized with all that work.
Nick Wilkening 7:39
I’m really glad you brought that up, because to me, that was a really important part in some symbolism of our service to the college community is if we’re Central, if we’re in the library, one of the largest hubs for our student population, we’re closer to the action, so to speak, we can send out a technician quickly on a golf cart and help solve a classroom emergency if we’re right in the middle of campus. It was a pretty important piece and defeat. My boss heard that, and definitely was in the same kind of lockstep with me on that, like that was a very I’m really glad we made the call to move into the library, because it does feel like we are closer to our library partners as well. We regularly have connection points with them, and feel very close to ensuring that we can provide them technical support, as well as the rest of the campus community, in a faster, more efficient way. And if you remember, even before a tap or a 300 like half of my team was in bistic And you know, Tim’s over in a 300 as well, for a period before that, it was just felt like ever since I’ve been here, since 2020 we’ve all been kind of spread out. So this is the first time in my career here where I felt like, holy cow, we’re all in the same space. And it’s really great to be able to, like, just say hi to my staff, and they can come say hi to me, and we can just kind of connect and, you know, problem solve and make sure that we’re all one team really was the most important piece we’re trying to get after.
Tim Van Norman 9:04
I have to say that has made a big difference as well being all together people, the help desk, wait, oh, wait here, this is what’s going on, or whatever, and and knowing each other, and especially as we brought on some new people, absolutely, the space here has been great also to the idea of being central to campus and in the library. We’ve also through this transition, been able to start providing some resources in the library and having time when students can literally just come see our staff three days a week. They can come and get help immediately. Don’t have to pick up the phone and call. And I know that’s been a huge impact. Made a huge impact on a lot of people too. So basically, our service, I feel like our service, has increased with this move and all these moves that you were just talking about.
Nick Wilkening 9:56
100% agree. Yeah, you said it very well. Agree. Completely
Brent Warner 10:01
Love it.
Tim Van Norman 10:03
So some of the main things that we’re talking about right now and right now is has been a lot of different movements, a lot of different things happening. But one of the cool ones that I see is telephones. We’re we’ve had the same telephone system, I believe, for like, 20 years, or something like that. I think I heard that number earlier this week, but we’re moving to a different telephone system. Talk to me about what that looks like.
Nick Wilkening 10:35
Yeah, no, I’m glad you you’re asking this question, because it is definitely one of those things that you don’t think of maybe in 2026 like we did in 2006 telephones have definitely changed, and the expectation around them most certainly in the last probably 10 to 15 years, as we’ve shifted more towards an online presence and really underscored with the pandemic and how, you know, A lot of folks got very used to being in a teleconference service as a whole, such as like zoom or teams tell the traditional handset on your desk has modified over the years. So we, about a year and a half ago, undertook like an approach through Saddleback College District, it as well as IVC, on replacing the infrastructure, which is like the back end systems, so that we can have a new telephone system. And part of what we do, when we looked at that, was ensuring that it’s standardized and that it’s integrated into our existing technology stack, and what we did was selected teams as the winner for telephone services, if you will. That’s Microsoft against us. I’m sorry, Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams. Yes, thank you, Microsoft Teams. And that’s really out of a number of objectives, but at the end of the day, it’s to help standardize around one space for your chat, your document retention, your telephone, it all is in that kind of same ecosystem. So training, support, all of it is much lessened. Also, one of the big objectives we were trying to shoot for was ensuring we had good disaster recovery and ensuring we had business continuity achieved through that. Our existing phone system right now is hosted on our campus. So if we lost power or we lost internet, it was a very challenging thing for us to still achieve, you know, managing all of our main lines. So if anybody calls 5100 that would go down, or if you’re trying to contact the college presidents, that would go down, if you use the direct phone lines with teams, it’s all cloud based, so if teams has issues, it’s going to be through Microsoft, and it will be much wider impacting than just, Say, Irvine Valley College. So it’s it’s not without its risk. It’s certainly there. However, relying heavily on a cloud based, what’s called a cloud based kind of SaaS solution has a higher availability and uptime, which means phones should be up through many different issues, many impacting issues, if you will, like power outages. So fast forward to the last five to six months in particular, and we’ve been working with our partner, vendor, and they’ve been fantastic, ensuring we do discovery, which is like data collection, formulate a plan for a replacement. Help Us purchase some of the handsets, help us trial some of the new handsets and really dial in the what it’s going to look like in order for us to be successful and have the least impact to college operations as a whole. So yeah, we’re pretty excited about this. This summer, we should be refreshing almost all of our handsets around campus, as well as improving our emergency response software tool called informacast that we use, we’re going to be upgrading that that’s part of this project, as well as kind of innovations in our main line. So one of the objectives we’ve we were really trying to do was improve our services for folks calling into 949-451-5100, and ensuring that we have some automations and technology to help with quick answers. So if somebody calls in and they’re like, I need financial aid, we’re trying to build in a what’s called a mainline AI response in order to make those calls more standardized and seamless for people so they don’t have to go through hitting a bunch of buttons. Oh, hit one for financial aid, hit three. Go here, leave a voicemail, wait for someone to call you back. Our goal is to try to reduce. Reduce that friction and help mainly, all of our all of the Folk styling. But we were most probably interested in ensuring that we can get information into prospective and current students hands as quickly as possible, so that we reduce some of the you know, the routing and some of the callback slowness that can happen, not through lack of trying, just through, you know, standard operations that we have as a college with a large student population and limited staff, so that we’re pretty excited about that. It’s pretty innovative. Our vendor has never done this before, but they’re confident that they will be able to build in an AI solution to help kind of overlay on that, but we will be kind of kicking the tires on that for the next month or two before rolling it out over summer, if, if it works out and kind of achieve some of the milestones we’re shooting for. So lot a lot of things going on with teams, telephony has a lot of my staff and district staff, Saddleback staff, that have just been absolutely, you know, awesome in problem solving and positive attitudes and thoughtful engagement and how we’re going to do this, I’ve been really proud of our teams and being able to kind of focus efforts around this.
Brent Warner 16:13
So I have a couple quick thoughts on that. So one I, you know, like, as you’re talking about it, I’m like, Duh, it’s such an obvious use and a great use for AI, right? Because how many times have we been sitting on the phone going, representative, representative, representative, you know, like, I just want to talk to a person or get to this weird thing, because my, my situation is custom, right? And so to not have to, like, sit and wait through a menu of things that are not really relevant, or whatever else it is, having an AI, quick response on there makes a ton of sense. And like, you know, it’s, it’s, you know, so many people are like, well, just hire more people. It’s like, well, that doesn’t, you know, we’ve seen how problematic it is, regardless of how big these companies are, with the with the call in system. So it’s a really great place to put AI in a situation like that, where it can kind of, hey, let me figure out quickly the direct way, and you can just kind of explain your situation in real, natural English, not, you know, not all the other things that are going on. So I really like the potential there. We’ll have to see, of course, how it plays out. You know, there’s, there’s certainly opportunity for other frustrations, but at the same time, the potential, like, for it being cool and useful, is really wonderful. The second thing that I kind of wanted to just touch on for a minute here around this is, since covid, we have so many people that have, you know, work from home opportunities that work on campus, and so this is also going to help them out, or help help let them stay connected in ways that maybe got lost when they just go home and work from home, right?
Nick Wilkening 17:41
Absolutely, yeah, I’m glad you brought that point up. Our existing phone infrastructure is, you know, it took a lot for us to get up and running, certainly when covid hit and we were trying to support everybody from home and trying to figure out the cell phone licensing and capability and all of the infrastructure requirements, like VPN and some of the other things that we had to do to to get that up and running with teams. And I’m a heavy teams user on my phone now, in off hours, if somebody calls me via teams at 9pm It’s completely like, Oh, cool. It’s just like another phone call. That’s the integration, I think, that we —
Brent Warner 18:22
–Nick says it’s cool for you to call him at 9pm just just, please everybody listen. (laughter)
Nick Wilkening 18:23
Give me a buzz. I’m always available. (laughter) But that that your point about being able to have it kind of part of this overall standard is with it with very minimal work, meaning, like no prerequisites, no training for the most part. It’s you know, if you dial an extension, it should pop up on your team’s phone and and make it that much more straightforward and seamless for folks that are using especially our remote workers or work from home, individuals that that’s a really nice piece, as well as those folks who might not be working from home, but are at a conference and they need a critical phone call. Or one of the things that we might potentially be exploring is like an emergency operation that’s virtual, or an Emergency Operations Center EOC that is virtual, where you can dial into it and we can have conversation with all of the data protections that Microsoft provides. It’s a highly secure environment. Microsoft vets it we feel comfortable with once we work through all of the contract terms, everything is more securely protected. And I also wanted to highlight one more piece about the AI component that you made a great point around Brent, which was our phase one is to use an existing AI overlay. Our phase two is to hopefully integrate a we went through a district wide effort where we onboarded a new product called element 451, we’ve been working for the last few months on setting. A lot of that up, which is a 24/7 kind of AI assistant that sits on our website, and it’s mainly for if students are running into challenges, they can go to element 451 chat bot ask questions and hopefully achieve a faster response on that 24/7 expectation, right? Because we have limited hours with support, so we’re really trying to look at the technologies and increase their their adapt, their adoptions. And our Phase two is to take a lot of them, the stuff that we learned from element 451, and the most common challenges that that students might be facing, or other public folks that are trying, that are interested in IVC, and port that into the AI phone system. So we are building and training the models to be better as they go on, just like you might have seen in different iterations of Claude or chat GPT. You see that each of their models get better with more training. That’s kind of the thought process that we’re trying to achieve with this is as we hear more from our community on things that they’re interested in, or challenges that they’re running into, we can utilize those models to improve those services, and it should hopefully fingers crossed get better as time goes on. So yes, I wanted to add that into it.
Tim Van Norman 21:18
absolutely and that’s one of the beautiful parts of this is we’re still trying, and fortunately, everybody knows that, so we’re not expecting, I’m not expecting 100% day one, which is good. But along those lines, one of the things you brought up is, you know, like your cell phone. A lot of people even don’t use teams on their cell phone. But what, what I’m looking at and love is the fact that somebody can Brent you can take your laptop from work home, open it up, and it rings on your laptop. You don’t have to have teams installed on your phone in order to do it. So it means that we can still live up to other requirements that we have. But for somebody who’s working at home, they can be in this one environment, instead of in two or three different things, trying to make everything work and well.
Brent Warner 22:07
And you can be flexible in how you want it to work for yourself, right? And that’s
Nick Wilkening 22:10
exactly, exactly, yeah, if you don’t want to, if you’re the type of person which is perfectly fair, who, when you’re done with work you check out of, you know, all things work, which I desperately try to achieve, with the family and all that fun stuff, that’s definitely an option, right? You turn it off and you’re not going to get called at 9pm like I said earlier, I tend to like that, just because, if something bad happens on campus, as far as technology goes, I’m definitely interested in trying to jump on it and get it fixed, but it does allow for that life work balance, as well as making sure that there’s no false expectation that this is going to be on your personal device. It’ll be on a college or district issued device, for sure.
Tim Van Norman 22:55
So another topic that most people probably have not ever heard of DAAS ERRCs, stuff like that. Irks has a very different meaning to me than this, when something irks me that’s not a positive, but in this case, I’m seeing this as a positive. So tell me about cell service here on campus.
Nick Wilkening 23:18
Yeah, yeah. So it’s kind of a paradox. It feels like with, you know, us being in Irvine, we’ve got a, you know, a very major metropolitan area for the most part. I know it’s urban or suburban rather, but it feels like oftentimes, when you’re walking around campus, you might have challenges with your cell service in some of the buildings, whether that’s Verizon, at&t, T Mobile, any of the different vendors, or cellular providers, rather. And so about a year ago, we undertook an engagement where we did some studies from a from an engineering firm to help us see how bad is it, because we’re getting kind of a lot of calls around this, and we really can’t help. Whenever we get a call around cell services or someone stops me in the courtyard and it’s like, Man, I just got no service. What are we doing about it? It’s like, we don’t have a lot of options. So we commissioned a firm, they did a study, and they basically told us that we have very minimal penetration into the buildings from all three providers. So all three of the major providers AT and T Mobile and Verizon, so introduce into that a solution called a cellular distributed antenna system, which is the DAS portion distributed antenna. So essentially, what it does is it takes the signal and propagates it through all buildings on campus. That’s the simplest, cleanest way of explaining it, and that’s specifically the cellular side. The IRC side is the emergency radio responder communication system, which is also a distributed antenna system, but it’s specific to our ability to provide Radio. Services to our external partners, such as Orange County Sheriff’s Department and Orange County Fire Authority, Irvine, PD, number of different areas where we are looking to expand out that connectivity and ensure that we have kind of ubiquitous radio coverage around around campus. I think it’s particularly important to highlight the public safety component of both of these systems, having an ERC system obviously makes sense for us to be able to communicate with our partners around Irvine and Orange County, and also the cellular component is, I would say, equally important for our students and the general public as well as our staff, to be able to, you know, quickly connect to resources, writ large as a whole, whether that’s emergency or not. So that we have, you know, it’s 2026 we need to be able to ensure that we have ubiquitous cellular coverage around campus. I just can’t imagine not having that nowadays, with everything being in the cloud or online at this point. So we’ve, we’re working through our capital request process. Hopefully have funds available, and we’ll take another, probably a year to two years, to implement these systems. Due to the timing for construction, there’s fiber that needs to be ran. There’s, you know, architectural drawings, there’s quite a bit of work that needs to be done in order for us to do this. So it’s by no means a short or quick solution, but we’re particularly excited about getting something like this in so that we can start kind of modernizing and ensure that a lot of that expected service is achieved and that we’ve got our community kind of taken care of.
Brent Warner 26:43
That’s great. So there’s going to be some more more big changes for all these things. Nick, we had a whole nother topic to talk to you about, but we’re going to run out of time, so you’re off the hook for now (laughter)
Nick Wilkening 26:54
I got another year? I got to wait till next year, right? (laughter)
Brent Warner 26:58
That’s right, yeah. So we were going to talk about some of the accessibility things happening with title two, that is, but Tim and I are going to do a deep dive on that in the next episode anyway. So, so it’s okay. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll take care of that the next time around. But, but there’s just so much happening. And as always, we’re like, oh, we could keep on talking to you about this and this and this and this. But thank you for coming back every year and, you know, letting people know what’s going on. I think it’s really valuable. I mean, I know it’s a little tricky for people off campus, but hopefully it’s an inspiration for things that can happen at other campuses as well, and then useful for everybody who’s here on our campus.
Nick Wilkening 27:35
I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you guys giving me the opportunity to talk with you and get some messaging out. So thank you for that, and yeah, keep doing the awesome work you guys are. Thank you.
Tim Van Norman 27:46
Thank you for listening today. For more information about this show, please visit our website, at TheHigherEdTechPodcast.com
Brent Warner 27:54
as always, we do want your feedback, so please go to TheHigherEdTechPodcast.com and let us know your thoughts for everyone
Tim Van Norman 28:01
at IVC that’s listening who need help with technology questions, please contact IVC technical support. If you have questions about technology in your classroom, please stop by lib 213 or contact me. Tim Van Norman at tvannorman@ivc.edu
Brent Warner 28:14
and if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on LinkedIn at @BrentGWarner.
Tim Van Norman 28:20
I’m Tim Van Norman
Brent Warner 28:21
and I’m Brent Warner, and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care everybody.
We’re back with Nick Wilkening, Irvine Valley College’s Director of Technology Services, to talk about updates and changes around technology services on campus. This is the The Higher EdTech Podcast season Seven, Episode 15.
Tim Van Norman 0:26
welcome to today’s higher ed tech Podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman, the Interim Assistant Director Technology Services at IVC and Adjunct Professor of Business at Cypress College.
Nick Wilkening 0:35
And I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL here at IVC, we both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about.
Tim Van Norman 0:43
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us. And Nick welcome was I was looking back and I realized it was a year ago that we were back. We were together on episode 14 and 15. So welcome. We’re both going to a conference next week, at least as far as when we’re recording this and the same conference we were at when we recorded last time. So that’s right, yeah, so yeah, exactly a year later.
Nick Wilkening 1:13
Oh that’s right, yeah.
Tim Van Norman 1:13
How have you been doing the in the meantime?
Nick Wilkening 1:17
Yeah, thank you for having me back. I always appreciate being able to kind of geek out, talk about technology, and, you know, give timely updates. And I appreciate the service. I think you guys do with this, which is fantastic, being able to integrate all of it. And it’s always an exciting thing,
Brent Warner 1:33
yeah, yeah. So, so we have a number of things just to talk about, kind of see what’s been happening on campus. This is less of a classroom conversation, which is, you know, I would say 90% of our conversations are more classroom focused, but then we get a couple of just kind of deeper tech or nerdy episodes every once in a while, too, not to call you nerdy here, Nick, but (laughter) the work here is just a little bit more, maybe a little bit more technical, I guess, than than pedagogical in the conversation. So lots been changing for you guys. And I know we kind of wanted to start talking about the department changes, all the things that you’ve been making shifts with move, physical movements, structural movements, all those types of things. So can you just break down what’s been happening with your department?
Nick Wilkening 2:22
Yeah, thanks for that. It’s been quite a consequential year, as it feels like every year is at Irvine Valley. I love working here because it’s constantly dynamic. There’s always something to kind of wrap your head around. And most recently was the culmination of a multi year effort between our facilities and maintenance operations department, as well as my department, which was kind of the remodel of the library, which was many years in the making, as well as ensuring that there was improvements around the library, adding in a whole new HVAC system. Quite quite a large effort that our facilities team put together, and in that they built and prepped a space for our entire tech services department. So roughly about 20 to 25 members of our team at any given point, spread between the first and second floor and the first floor, really the space of, you know, dynamic technicians that we have coming in and out, responding to classroom, you know, out at technology issues, responding to wireless issues, setting up and tearing down events. So those are where predominantly, most of our tech side of the house is. On the second floor, we’ve got our service desk, which includes all of our application specialists and our instructional technologists and a few of our infrastructure folks who deal with a lot of the servers and routers and switches as well as web administration. So part of all of that remodel was kind of our team spread out all over campus for a year or so prior to that, and as recently as of July of this year, or of 2025 rather, our whole team moved back in. So we are moved into the library as one entire department, which has been just absolutely amazing to have all of our staff together in one spot. And then also at that same time we went through and kind of a pretty core change to our team. Our former assistant director, John Beatty, retired last year, which opened up opportunities for our team to kind of look at how our management structure is and see that, hey, we might need to add an additional manager for that service desk component, as well as our educational technology side, so that we can really kind of focus efforts around standardizing processes for our Service Desk team, as well as be a resource for any of our classified professionals on that side of the house that need you know quick answers to questions, as well as. As facilitating, you know, robust technical discussions on how we can make things better for our community. We’re unique in that we have all students, staff, faculty and managers that can call our phone line, 5696, or 949-451-5696, to you know, work through technical problems. So really, that level of management was really important, from my my standpoint, to ensure that we can improve services and ensure that there’s coverage there. So in that time, we went through an interim solicitation process where Tim Van Norman took the interim position and has been in that role since roughly June of last year. And then we did an internal and external solicitation for both positions, and we pulled in a fief, Ahmad, who came from an external entity, worked at an MSP prior to coming here, and he’s now taken John Beatty’s replacement as an Interim Assistant Director right now as well, and he was on board at around June, June of last year as well. So we’ve just had so much change within the within the department, retirees, new additions, moving into new spaces, all in the space of no or in the span of a couple months. It’s been insane. And it’s also been really nice to be able to have us all just walk around, check in with each other, say hi, instead of, you know, phone calls and driving all over the place and seeing each other in fits and spurts. So that’s been the most, you know, consequential piece to our department, and one that I’m very proud of and very happy so far as we’ve been moving through kind of the changes that come in. So, yeah, yeah, pretty excited about some of that.
Brent Warner 6:45
Well, as you’re saying it, I’m thinking about how different it is. And, you know, like, because you were off at ATEP, our satellite campus, right? Tim was off – so eagle-eared listeners will know that Tim has had different offices over the years. And it’s changed a few times, right? And so before it was, you know, that this separate building over, you know, in the A 300 and now it’s, you know, and it had rotated a few different places and locations. And then, so now it’s like, okay, we’ve got it settled. And not only if I go to see Tim, I can probably also swing by and see you Nick, and I can also go see, you know, our instructional technologist now, you know, like so it’s very convenient to be able to access everybody and right in the middle of campus. And I think it’s easy to overlook how important it is to be centralized with all that work.
Nick Wilkening 7:39
I’m really glad you brought that up, because to me, that was a really important part in some symbolism of our service to the college community is if we’re Central, if we’re in the library, one of the largest hubs for our student population, we’re closer to the action, so to speak, we can send out a technician quickly on a golf cart and help solve a classroom emergency if we’re right in the middle of campus. It was a pretty important piece and defeat. My boss heard that, and definitely was in the same kind of lockstep with me on that, like that was a very I’m really glad we made the call to move into the library, because it does feel like we are closer to our library partners as well. We regularly have connection points with them, and feel very close to ensuring that we can provide them technical support, as well as the rest of the campus community, in a faster, more efficient way. And if you remember, even before a tap or a 300 like half of my team was in bistic And you know, Tim’s over in a 300 as well, for a period before that, it was just felt like ever since I’ve been here, since 2020 we’ve all been kind of spread out. So this is the first time in my career here where I felt like, holy cow, we’re all in the same space. And it’s really great to be able to, like, just say hi to my staff, and they can come say hi to me, and we can just kind of connect and, you know, problem solve and make sure that we’re all one team really was the most important piece we’re trying to get after.
Tim Van Norman 9:04
I have to say that has made a big difference as well being all together people, the help desk, wait, oh, wait here, this is what’s going on, or whatever, and and knowing each other, and especially as we brought on some new people, absolutely, the space here has been great also to the idea of being central to campus and in the library. We’ve also through this transition, been able to start providing some resources in the library and having time when students can literally just come see our staff three days a week. They can come and get help immediately. Don’t have to pick up the phone and call. And I know that’s been a huge impact. Made a huge impact on a lot of people too. So basically, our service, I feel like our service, has increased with this move and all these moves that you were just talking about.
Nick Wilkening 9:56
100% agree. Yeah, you said it very well. Agree. Completely
Brent Warner 10:01
Love it.
Tim Van Norman 10:03
So some of the main things that we’re talking about right now and right now is has been a lot of different movements, a lot of different things happening. But one of the cool ones that I see is telephones. We’re we’ve had the same telephone system, I believe, for like, 20 years, or something like that. I think I heard that number earlier this week, but we’re moving to a different telephone system. Talk to me about what that looks like.
Nick Wilkening 10:35
Yeah, no, I’m glad you you’re asking this question, because it is definitely one of those things that you don’t think of maybe in 2026 like we did in 2006 telephones have definitely changed, and the expectation around them most certainly in the last probably 10 to 15 years, as we’ve shifted more towards an online presence and really underscored with the pandemic and how, you know, A lot of folks got very used to being in a teleconference service as a whole, such as like zoom or teams tell the traditional handset on your desk has modified over the years. So we, about a year and a half ago, undertook like an approach through Saddleback College District, it as well as IVC, on replacing the infrastructure, which is like the back end systems, so that we can have a new telephone system. And part of what we do, when we looked at that, was ensuring that it’s standardized and that it’s integrated into our existing technology stack, and what we did was selected teams as the winner for telephone services, if you will. That’s Microsoft against us. I’m sorry, Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams. Yes, thank you, Microsoft Teams. And that’s really out of a number of objectives, but at the end of the day, it’s to help standardize around one space for your chat, your document retention, your telephone, it all is in that kind of same ecosystem. So training, support, all of it is much lessened. Also, one of the big objectives we were trying to shoot for was ensuring we had good disaster recovery and ensuring we had business continuity achieved through that. Our existing phone system right now is hosted on our campus. So if we lost power or we lost internet, it was a very challenging thing for us to still achieve, you know, managing all of our main lines. So if anybody calls 5100 that would go down, or if you’re trying to contact the college presidents, that would go down, if you use the direct phone lines with teams, it’s all cloud based, so if teams has issues, it’s going to be through Microsoft, and it will be much wider impacting than just, Say, Irvine Valley College. So it’s it’s not without its risk. It’s certainly there. However, relying heavily on a cloud based, what’s called a cloud based kind of SaaS solution has a higher availability and uptime, which means phones should be up through many different issues, many impacting issues, if you will, like power outages. So fast forward to the last five to six months in particular, and we’ve been working with our partner, vendor, and they’ve been fantastic, ensuring we do discovery, which is like data collection, formulate a plan for a replacement. Help Us purchase some of the handsets, help us trial some of the new handsets and really dial in the what it’s going to look like in order for us to be successful and have the least impact to college operations as a whole. So yeah, we’re pretty excited about this. This summer, we should be refreshing almost all of our handsets around campus, as well as improving our emergency response software tool called informacast that we use, we’re going to be upgrading that that’s part of this project, as well as kind of innovations in our main line. So one of the objectives we’ve we were really trying to do was improve our services for folks calling into 949-451-5100, and ensuring that we have some automations and technology to help with quick answers. So if somebody calls in and they’re like, I need financial aid, we’re trying to build in a what’s called a mainline AI response in order to make those calls more standardized and seamless for people so they don’t have to go through hitting a bunch of buttons. Oh, hit one for financial aid, hit three. Go here, leave a voicemail, wait for someone to call you back. Our goal is to try to reduce. Reduce that friction and help mainly, all of our all of the Folk styling. But we were most probably interested in ensuring that we can get information into prospective and current students hands as quickly as possible, so that we reduce some of the you know, the routing and some of the callback slowness that can happen, not through lack of trying, just through, you know, standard operations that we have as a college with a large student population and limited staff, so that we’re pretty excited about that. It’s pretty innovative. Our vendor has never done this before, but they’re confident that they will be able to build in an AI solution to help kind of overlay on that, but we will be kind of kicking the tires on that for the next month or two before rolling it out over summer, if, if it works out and kind of achieve some of the milestones we’re shooting for. So lot a lot of things going on with teams, telephony has a lot of my staff and district staff, Saddleback staff, that have just been absolutely, you know, awesome in problem solving and positive attitudes and thoughtful engagement and how we’re going to do this, I’ve been really proud of our teams and being able to kind of focus efforts around this.
Brent Warner 16:13
So I have a couple quick thoughts on that. So one I, you know, like, as you’re talking about it, I’m like, Duh, it’s such an obvious use and a great use for AI, right? Because how many times have we been sitting on the phone going, representative, representative, representative, you know, like, I just want to talk to a person or get to this weird thing, because my, my situation is custom, right? And so to not have to, like, sit and wait through a menu of things that are not really relevant, or whatever else it is, having an AI, quick response on there makes a ton of sense. And like, you know, it’s, it’s, you know, so many people are like, well, just hire more people. It’s like, well, that doesn’t, you know, we’ve seen how problematic it is, regardless of how big these companies are, with the with the call in system. So it’s a really great place to put AI in a situation like that, where it can kind of, hey, let me figure out quickly the direct way, and you can just kind of explain your situation in real, natural English, not, you know, not all the other things that are going on. So I really like the potential there. We’ll have to see, of course, how it plays out. You know, there’s, there’s certainly opportunity for other frustrations, but at the same time, the potential, like, for it being cool and useful, is really wonderful. The second thing that I kind of wanted to just touch on for a minute here around this is, since covid, we have so many people that have, you know, work from home opportunities that work on campus, and so this is also going to help them out, or help help let them stay connected in ways that maybe got lost when they just go home and work from home, right?
Nick Wilkening 17:41
Absolutely, yeah, I’m glad you brought that point up. Our existing phone infrastructure is, you know, it took a lot for us to get up and running, certainly when covid hit and we were trying to support everybody from home and trying to figure out the cell phone licensing and capability and all of the infrastructure requirements, like VPN and some of the other things that we had to do to to get that up and running with teams. And I’m a heavy teams user on my phone now, in off hours, if somebody calls me via teams at 9pm It’s completely like, Oh, cool. It’s just like another phone call. That’s the integration, I think, that we —
Brent Warner 18:22
–Nick says it’s cool for you to call him at 9pm just just, please everybody listen. (laughter)
Nick Wilkening 18:23
Give me a buzz. I’m always available. (laughter) But that that your point about being able to have it kind of part of this overall standard is with it with very minimal work, meaning, like no prerequisites, no training for the most part. It’s you know, if you dial an extension, it should pop up on your team’s phone and and make it that much more straightforward and seamless for folks that are using especially our remote workers or work from home, individuals that that’s a really nice piece, as well as those folks who might not be working from home, but are at a conference and they need a critical phone call. Or one of the things that we might potentially be exploring is like an emergency operation that’s virtual, or an Emergency Operations Center EOC that is virtual, where you can dial into it and we can have conversation with all of the data protections that Microsoft provides. It’s a highly secure environment. Microsoft vets it we feel comfortable with once we work through all of the contract terms, everything is more securely protected. And I also wanted to highlight one more piece about the AI component that you made a great point around Brent, which was our phase one is to use an existing AI overlay. Our phase two is to hopefully integrate a we went through a district wide effort where we onboarded a new product called element 451, we’ve been working for the last few months on setting. A lot of that up, which is a 24/7 kind of AI assistant that sits on our website, and it’s mainly for if students are running into challenges, they can go to element 451 chat bot ask questions and hopefully achieve a faster response on that 24/7 expectation, right? Because we have limited hours with support, so we’re really trying to look at the technologies and increase their their adapt, their adoptions. And our Phase two is to take a lot of them, the stuff that we learned from element 451, and the most common challenges that that students might be facing, or other public folks that are trying, that are interested in IVC, and port that into the AI phone system. So we are building and training the models to be better as they go on, just like you might have seen in different iterations of Claude or chat GPT. You see that each of their models get better with more training. That’s kind of the thought process that we’re trying to achieve with this is as we hear more from our community on things that they’re interested in, or challenges that they’re running into, we can utilize those models to improve those services, and it should hopefully fingers crossed get better as time goes on. So yes, I wanted to add that into it.
Tim Van Norman 21:18
absolutely and that’s one of the beautiful parts of this is we’re still trying, and fortunately, everybody knows that, so we’re not expecting, I’m not expecting 100% day one, which is good. But along those lines, one of the things you brought up is, you know, like your cell phone. A lot of people even don’t use teams on their cell phone. But what, what I’m looking at and love is the fact that somebody can Brent you can take your laptop from work home, open it up, and it rings on your laptop. You don’t have to have teams installed on your phone in order to do it. So it means that we can still live up to other requirements that we have. But for somebody who’s working at home, they can be in this one environment, instead of in two or three different things, trying to make everything work and well.
Brent Warner 22:07
And you can be flexible in how you want it to work for yourself, right? And that’s
Nick Wilkening 22:10
exactly, exactly, yeah, if you don’t want to, if you’re the type of person which is perfectly fair, who, when you’re done with work you check out of, you know, all things work, which I desperately try to achieve, with the family and all that fun stuff, that’s definitely an option, right? You turn it off and you’re not going to get called at 9pm like I said earlier, I tend to like that, just because, if something bad happens on campus, as far as technology goes, I’m definitely interested in trying to jump on it and get it fixed, but it does allow for that life work balance, as well as making sure that there’s no false expectation that this is going to be on your personal device. It’ll be on a college or district issued device, for sure.
Tim Van Norman 22:55
So another topic that most people probably have not ever heard of DAAS ERRCs, stuff like that. Irks has a very different meaning to me than this, when something irks me that’s not a positive, but in this case, I’m seeing this as a positive. So tell me about cell service here on campus.
Nick Wilkening 23:18
Yeah, yeah. So it’s kind of a paradox. It feels like with, you know, us being in Irvine, we’ve got a, you know, a very major metropolitan area for the most part. I know it’s urban or suburban rather, but it feels like oftentimes, when you’re walking around campus, you might have challenges with your cell service in some of the buildings, whether that’s Verizon, at&t, T Mobile, any of the different vendors, or cellular providers, rather. And so about a year ago, we undertook an engagement where we did some studies from a from an engineering firm to help us see how bad is it, because we’re getting kind of a lot of calls around this, and we really can’t help. Whenever we get a call around cell services or someone stops me in the courtyard and it’s like, Man, I just got no service. What are we doing about it? It’s like, we don’t have a lot of options. So we commissioned a firm, they did a study, and they basically told us that we have very minimal penetration into the buildings from all three providers. So all three of the major providers AT and T Mobile and Verizon, so introduce into that a solution called a cellular distributed antenna system, which is the DAS portion distributed antenna. So essentially, what it does is it takes the signal and propagates it through all buildings on campus. That’s the simplest, cleanest way of explaining it, and that’s specifically the cellular side. The IRC side is the emergency radio responder communication system, which is also a distributed antenna system, but it’s specific to our ability to provide Radio. Services to our external partners, such as Orange County Sheriff’s Department and Orange County Fire Authority, Irvine, PD, number of different areas where we are looking to expand out that connectivity and ensure that we have kind of ubiquitous radio coverage around around campus. I think it’s particularly important to highlight the public safety component of both of these systems, having an ERC system obviously makes sense for us to be able to communicate with our partners around Irvine and Orange County, and also the cellular component is, I would say, equally important for our students and the general public as well as our staff, to be able to, you know, quickly connect to resources, writ large as a whole, whether that’s emergency or not. So that we have, you know, it’s 2026 we need to be able to ensure that we have ubiquitous cellular coverage around campus. I just can’t imagine not having that nowadays, with everything being in the cloud or online at this point. So we’ve, we’re working through our capital request process. Hopefully have funds available, and we’ll take another, probably a year to two years, to implement these systems. Due to the timing for construction, there’s fiber that needs to be ran. There’s, you know, architectural drawings, there’s quite a bit of work that needs to be done in order for us to do this. So it’s by no means a short or quick solution, but we’re particularly excited about getting something like this in so that we can start kind of modernizing and ensure that a lot of that expected service is achieved and that we’ve got our community kind of taken care of.
Brent Warner 26:43
That’s great. So there’s going to be some more more big changes for all these things. Nick, we had a whole nother topic to talk to you about, but we’re going to run out of time, so you’re off the hook for now (laughter)
Nick Wilkening 26:54
I got another year? I got to wait till next year, right? (laughter)
Brent Warner 26:58
That’s right, yeah. So we were going to talk about some of the accessibility things happening with title two, that is, but Tim and I are going to do a deep dive on that in the next episode anyway. So, so it’s okay. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll take care of that the next time around. But, but there’s just so much happening. And as always, we’re like, oh, we could keep on talking to you about this and this and this and this. But thank you for coming back every year and, you know, letting people know what’s going on. I think it’s really valuable. I mean, I know it’s a little tricky for people off campus, but hopefully it’s an inspiration for things that can happen at other campuses as well, and then useful for everybody who’s here on our campus.
Nick Wilkening 27:35
I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you guys giving me the opportunity to talk with you and get some messaging out. So thank you for that, and yeah, keep doing the awesome work you guys are. Thank you.
Tim Van Norman 27:46
Thank you for listening today. For more information about this show, please visit our website, at TheHigherEdTechPodcast.com
Brent Warner 27:54
as always, we do want your feedback, so please go to TheHigherEdTechPodcast.com and let us know your thoughts for everyone
Tim Van Norman 28:01
at IVC that’s listening who need help with technology questions, please contact IVC technical support. If you have questions about technology in your classroom, please stop by lib 213 or contact me. Tim Van Norman at tvannorman@ivc.edu
Brent Warner 28:14
and if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on LinkedIn at @BrentGWarner.
Tim Van Norman 28:20
I’m Tim Van Norman
Brent Warner 28:21
and I’m Brent Warner, and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care everybody.
Nick Wilkening, Irvine Valley College’s Director of Technology Services, returns for his annual updates on what’s happening with Technology Services at IVC. Whether you’re at IVC or listening in from another institution, it’s always worth hearing what’s happening and how things work from the tech team on campus. Nick shares insights on organizational restructuring, changes to telephone services to match the modern age, and ensuring that cellular services work for everyone, no matter where you are.