Jacobson receives EDUCAUSE leadership award

by Ann Manser

Carl Jacobson, director of Management Information Services at UD, has received the prestigious Leadership in Information Technology Award from EDUCAUSE, a national association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.

In announcing the award, EDUCAUSE called Jacobson "a pioneer in the use of the web to provide access to institutional administrative information resources," noting that he managed UD's "ground-breaking efforts" to enable students, faculty and staff to conduct University business online.

"Through this work, Jacobson showed the rest of higher education that previously unimagined levels of outreach and customer service were possible," according to the announcement.

EDUCAUSE will present its three top leadership awards Oct. 30 at the association's annual conference in Indianapolis. The other recipient of the 2001 Leadership in Information Technology Award is Carl F. Berger of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and J. Gary Augustson of Pennsylvania State University will receive the lifetime Excellence in Leadership Award.

"I think the award is primarily based on our leadership at the University of Delaware in using the web," Jacobson said. "We were the first university to give students access to their grades on the web and to put payroll and other human resources business on the web. We did it early–before Netscape was even a company–and we shared it with other universities. The whole team, not just me, started a tradition of collaboration."

In conjunction with each award, EDUCAUSE will contribute to a scholarship fund of the winner's choice. Jacobson has selected the Harry W. Rawstrom Scholarship Fund, a general scholarship fund in memory of the former UD professor and swimming coach, to receive a $2,000 donation.

The association's announcement of the award also praised the University's early work in implementing "comprehensive, process-based systems" using the web and said Jacobson's leadership was a key to UD's selection in 1994 as winner of the EDUCAUSE Award for Excellence in Campus Networking.

"Carl's long-term advocacy of web-based services has had a major influence on the service orientation of administrative activities at the University of Delaware," Susan Foster, vice president for information technology at UD, said. "I am very pleased that EDUCAUSE has recognized his contribution to higher education business practices with this well-deserved award."

In a speech at the upcoming convention, titled "The Institutional Web: A Lens to Living and Learning," Jacobson will outline some of the ways colleges and universities can use the Internet to help students learn, improve the way employees and administrators manage business, connect members of the campus community and present an institution's image to the public. "Through this lens, we project an official instance of the institution, while our customers focus on uniquely tailored, personal views of the institution," according to a synopsis of the speech.

UD has won wide recognition for its integration of computer technology into all facets of campus life. For example, faculty members share research and course materials online, students register for classes and order textbooks via the web, and staff members use the Internet to request vacation time and place small purchase orders.

A new initiative, Jacobson said, is to design "an institutional information portal," which will enable everyone in the University community to have a personalized web page, incorporating whatever information that particular user wants to have readily available. Ultimately, the portals will be designed for every group on campus, but the first stage–now under way–is the creation of portals for students, he said.

"The portal is like a pocket-sized version of the web, tailored to each person's individual preferences," Jacobson said. "It's a new form for a lot of information they already can get on the web, but this organizes it in a new, personalized, efficient way, under categories such as financial information, news, academics and other topics."

For example, he said, a student might choose to design a financial page that provides him with quick access to information about his financial aid benefits and the status of his Flex account, used to pay for meals, parking and other items. Another student might set up an academic page listing her course schedule, graduation requirements and grades. One student's news page might list national headlines and campus entertainment and social events, while another selects a display of headlines from The Review, the local weather forecast and classified ads.

"In addition, the portal is surrounded by web-based tools that bring people together in a kind of virtual community," Jacobson said, adding that pages can be designed to link members of a particular major, course or campus club and enable them to share academic and social information through bulletin boards, e-mail groups and chat rooms.

With the idea of sharing this technology, Jacobson recently received a $770,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the work of a group he helped form–the Java in Administration Special Interest Group (JA-SIG)–in developing and packaging portal software that will be available to all institutions of higher education. In turn, he said, UD will benefit by being able to adopt the improvements other universities may make to the portal technology.

The EDUCAUSE leadership award also cited Jacobson's role as one of the founders of the JA-SIG collaborative organization. In addition to the new portal project, JA-SIG has worked to increase the exchange of information about the use of Java, which is a programming language used to build web pages.

Jacobson serves on JA-SIG's steering committee, on the EDUCAUSE Institute Leadership Program faculty and on the EDUCAUSE Advisory Group on Administrative Systems and Services. He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from UD in 1973 and joined Management Information Services in 1976.

Recipients of the EDUCAUSE leadership awards are selected by member committees made up of higher-education technology professionals.