The Internet and Blackboard outages Oswego State students have experienced a few weeks ago left Student Association senators concerned about the transferring to online classes due to COVID-19 outbreak fears.
At Tuesday’s SA meeting, program directors addressed the senate in efforts of explaining the purpose of specific broad-based fees, attached to nearly every student’s bill, and the reason for the potential increases.
“Are there going to be problems if classes go online? I would say that the response of the faculty here at the time [of the outages] were all working together and faculty were very understanding and looked to find ways to ensure that students have time to get their work in,” Sean Moriarty, chief technology officer at Oswego State, said.
Moriarity explained that the outages came as a result of authentication attacks but he assured the senate that his team has implemented a system to protect Blackboard as best they can from future attacks.
Moriarity said that during a normal school day, Blackboard receives thousands of requests an hour. During the outages, the system was getting 35 million requests an hour and was simply unable to keep up.
“I feel like we really put in some good remediation to protect ourselves and I think those services remain stable,” Moriarity said.
Moriarty explained the technology fee, which currently accounts for an additional $445 on a student’s bills, and proposed a $10 increase. Moriarty explained some of the expenditures and benefits this fee provides for.
Accordingly to Moriarty, Internet bandwidth is one of the largest expenditures. Investing in state-of-the-art technology in the classroom, and servicing and providing about 1,100 computers on campus, mostly among Penfield Library and Marano Campus Center.
Moriarty said an increase in the fee will help to keep up with inflation as well as maintain and improve the services and tools provided.
“I don’t know exactly what the future holds but I feel that we are really strong and resilient now if something more comes up, we are going to take care of it,” Moriarty said.
Victoria Furlong, associate director of finance and budget, explained other broad-based fees that include an athletic fee of $467 with a proposed $11 increase, a health fee of $388 with a proposed $18 increase and lastly a transportation fee of $57 with a proposed increase of $3.
Furlong also stated that these increases are based on the Higher Education Price Index, which outlines an allowable increase each year. This year the total amount of increases cannot exceed $42.
Angie Brown, director of student health services, explained that her department would like to focus and allocate funds to health education and counseling as they plan to hire two more counselors.
Mike Flaherty, general manager of auxiliary services, explained that the transportation fee covers the costs of the CENTRO blue route, and the green route. Both are free to students both run through the campus, not downtown Oswego or Syracuse. An increase in fees comes from an increase in operating costs and the Birnie bus break shuttle, that runs later into the evening and takes students to and from Syracuse and Oswego before and after school breaks.
Lastly, Susan Viscomi, athletic director for Oswego State said that collegiate athletics bring notoriety as Oswego State offers 12 sports for men and 12 for women, which is the “second highest number of team sports in the SUNYAC Conference.”
