The fourth week of SIGUCCS 2021 began with perspectives from several universities. Over 50 participants delighted in the stories shared.
Endlessly Exhausting Possibilities: Pandemic Planning in Support Services
Rebecca Klein, Jerome Hilscher, Greg Christie and Clayton Mitchell from Drake University
This team showcased the challenges of pandemic planning at Drake University by highlighting the following:
- This was an ever-changing situation and the need for adaptability
- The need to rebuild from the ground up multiple times
- The need to Implement new resources for help desk support
- The trials of managing remote student workers
- The challenges of supporting faculty in a move to remote teaching – use of LMS, synchronous web delivery (Bb Collaborate) and video platform (Panopto)

Japanese Activities to bring online academic meetings against COVID-19 -How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Online Meetings
Hiroki Kashiwazaki, Hajime Shimada, Nariyoshi Yamai, Kazuhiro Mishima, Shiu Sakashita, Kensuke Miyashita, Yusuke Komiya, Eisaku Sakane, Takuro Ozaki and Yoshiaki Kitaguchi
Japan is a country good at handling natural disasters, but little precedence for handling infectious disease.
This presentation discussed how they were able to move four conventions to online or hybrid environment after request from government to bot hold large events where spread of COVID might be rampant. (CIS, IA/IOT/SITE, DEIM, IPSJ)
Created technical requirements for presenters in one day. Requirements included all of the technology necessary to present, including second display, speaker microphone, webcam, and timer.
Common failures include
- Intrusion of presenter’s children
- Facilitator mixed the order or presentations
- Zoom application too heavy for older devices
Lessons learned
- Created documentation to help conflicts between Zoom and Powerpoint
- Chat log in Zoom not available after the event, so discussion was done on Slack
- Feedback when two people in same room turned on microphones required muting
One final acknowledgement, human relationships are still important.
Preventing COVID-19 Infection in a University Using Office 365
Shigekazu Katagiri, Takashi Yamanoue and Shinji Hira from Fukayama University
Health survey required in order to have in-person classes safely. Survey required staff and students to fill it out every day and asked to not come to campus if they have symptoms or if they did not fill out the survey. Created survey with Office 365. Also created an automated seating chart system for their 500 in-person classes to help with contact tracing. In addition to technology precautions, they had hand sanitizer available outside every classroom and sanitizing wipes for computer stations. Faculty and staff were also encouraged to install a contract tracing app called COCOA.
After in-person classes started in June, one two infections were reported between then and October, and low infection rates continued beyond that.