Student Computing Support

Summary: Net Generation Students and Campus IT: Supporting Student Success in the Age of Multitasking, Facebooking, and Instant Messaging

The session was recorded for podcasting and will be available as a part of the conference proceedings.

General Session
Southeast Regional Conference
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Atlanta, Georgia

In this 32-minute recording from the 2006 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, we'll hear from Kimberly Brookes and Cynthia Rubino in a session entitled Fear Factor and American Idol: Leveraging Popular Culture for Student Support. They share how Simmons College has used interactive educational programs based around popular culture to teach students to care for their own computers.

 

The Student Guide to Evaluating Information Technology on Campus is designed to help students, their parents and guardians, and colleges and universities communicate about campus technology environments. The recently updated guide offers students questions about campus technologies and supplementary information covering academic experience, administrative experience, student life, and services and fees. The revised version addresses security, antivirus and antispyware measures, cost of technical accessories, and support for e-books. Follow this link to a downloadable PDF file or to order copies for your campus.

I just made some source code available on our web site last week that I thought others may be interested in. We use NetReg to require all computers on campus to register before gaining access to the campus network (and the internet). Last summer (2004), we were trying to figure out how we can enforce some minimum requirements on our student computers before allowing them to register. For example, we make McAfee Virusscan available for all students, but we didn't have a way to require them to install it.

So, I wrote a small program (using AutoIt) called SNC Validator to accomplish this. When a student first fires up their computer, they only have access to one web page, our page that allows them to register their computer. This web page now allows them to download SNC Validator (a 124KB exe file) and run it. The program reads some registry settings (for Windows version, SP level, installed apps like McAfee, etc), builds a long URL, then lauches that URL in the default browser. By launching the URL, it is sending info about the computer to our NetReg server. Then, the Perl CGI script on the NetReg server analyzes all of the data and decides if the computer can be registered or not.

For example, if the CGI script sees that the user is running Windows XP, it can also make sure the user has SP2 installed. Or it can require that a certain version of McAfee Virusscan is installed based on the OS. If a specific requirement is not met, the CGI script prints a message telling the user what they need to do (i.e. install McAfee). Once the user does that, they need to run SNC Validator again, which reads the registry again and the process keeps going until all the requirements are met. Note that the SNC Validator program makes no decisions. It simply gathers and reports information. The Perl CGI script on the NetReg server is what makes the decision.

The nice thing about this setup is that the register/no register decision can be made based on any registry settings, the existence of any file, etc on the student's computer. But it does require some programming with AutoIt and Perl. If you haven't used AutoIt yet, you gotta check it out; it's quite handy for many other uses too (and it's free).

If you're using NetReg and want to give this a shot, the source code is available on our SNC Validator web page. This is only the source for the Windows EXE file. It's my hope that based on this setup, you'd be able to edit the CGI script yourself to incorporate whatever requirements you have for your campus.

We've been using this for a year now, and it has improved the overall level of security on our student computers greatly.