A number of years ago I was very active in CoSN. I was a member of the Emerging Technologies Committee and lead and contributed to a number of that group's publications. Then as income dropped and CoSN raised dues, I dropped out. But, I'd seen the announcement looking for presenters for this year's CTO Clinic which is run through the Texas CTO Council so I applied with a session focusing on access (no surprise) for online learning and websites. CTOs have a range of responsibilities depending on their institution.
Session was accepted and presented to a small audience last week. The slides are at the end of this post.
There were about 300 registrants for the event, and I saw some good sessions. In some respects this is an organization very much like TxDLA. They depend on vendor support and vendors play a prominent roll. CTOs do have some say in budget matters and may have a substantial budget.
One of the general sessions was presented by folks from the Texas Association of School Boards focused on salary compensation for all the folks that might work in the information/instruction technology area. There was a comparison between industry and education and generally industry was paying more, but not for all positions and not for all areas of the state. Of course one needs to be a member of TASB to get the details. One of their interesting components of the presentation was the Hot Tech Jobs in 2015-2016. They identified Security, Mobil Device Management, and Network Management as the three sectors with significant growth.
So, my session was after Lunch the first day, and it seems like that's a time when folks are doing other things. That said, I had a half-dozen attendees and we had a good discussion. Not all the information was greeted warmly, but that's to be expected when some folks find out they have some problems they didn't know they had. This session is just an updated version of the other slides.
If this had been a higher ed audience I would have added the Atlantic Cape Community College legal settlement. That will be another post.
