Jordan Plowman
Lantern Staff
Beginning this school year, the Board of Trustees, with the help of Information Technology (IT) department, is implementing an effort to encourage every student and college employee to use Microsoft Office 365 for file transfers instead of traditional flash drives. Over time, the IT department will replace each computer’s tower with towers that do not have USB ports on the front of the tower.
“Well, there were a couple of factors honestly,” Vice President of Digital Transformations Bill Young said of explaining the unanimous decision of encouraging digital storage. “The first, and kind of the biggest overarching factor, was everyone was losing their flash drives.”
Young said IT found student and faculty flash drives and it would take hours of work to find the owner. According to Young, the college will move to a cloud based storage program, which will be more secure.
“There is also a lot of personal data on it, so it was kind of concerning if you had a flash drive that had your school work on, but you also had some of your personal information on it someone else could get that flash drive,” Young said. “There is kind of a security issue there, and we are just trying to protect your information.”
While IT focuses on security, Associate Professor of English Cory Teubner finds this change as a helpful tool to his students who often forget their flash drive.
“From my perspective as a teacher, there is less that could go wrong for a student from composing a paper and getting it, submitting it or printing it,” Teubner said. “It’s been pretty commonplace for students over the last few years to occasionally lose papers by not saving them properly or just losing their USB drives. Now that my students are using Microsoft Office 365 just composing papers there and same then in the cloud. They are way less likely to lose those papers, so I think it really benefits the student.”
Young explains that One Drive has a terabyte (1000 gigabytes) of storage space rather than an ordinary flash drive only having about 64 gigabytes. OneDrive is also accessible from any computer hooked up to the internet, students just have to login to their email.
On the other hand, sophomore Auh’shay Sanchez, a mass communications major, disagreed with this change.
“Personally I feel like it’s a bad idea,” Sanchez said. “… I feel like having a flash drive, there is always a good back up plan or just if anything were to go wrong with the internet…If {Microsoft Office} were to fail, then we are going to have to go back, and I always thought I could trust a flash drive as my back up in everything I have done.”
Sanchez said if an instructor requires students to use Microsoft Office 365, then he will always have his flash drive as a backup. If a rare glitch occurred and misplaced an assignment or delete it, “there is a process for them to retrieve that last copy of the document that was out there,” Young said.
Teubner added that the way his class is structured, he will work with anyone on a case by case basis if a document were to go missing.
