I would like to suggest that some time and effort is spent in developing a usable virtual desktop infrastructure. Currently we have a "prototype" service in the form of a single nxserver machine. Having used this recently, and experienced its inadequacies, I think we need to address this gap in provision. A single server cannot be considered as an "infrastructure" and, as more and more staff and students discover that virtual desktops is a convenient way to work remotely, the existing service will cease to provide a usable service (it barely does at present). We need to provide two specific services, one for students (who don't have a dedicated DICE machine) and one for staff (who do have a DICE machine). The student service would be hosted by a rack of DICE hosts, and would load-balance the service at the time of connection. The staff service could operate in the same way as the student service, but should also allow staff to connect to a virtual desktop on their own DICE workstation. This will maximize the usability of existing computing resources. It seems we are missing a trick here, and it should be relatively simple to address using existing tools and software.

Our current process for gathering student feedback on individual courses is hosted through the external BOS company. There are disadvantages to using this systems, both from functionality and security aspects. We request the development of an in-house system which would EASE-authenticate users, and hopefully populate the form with that student's actual course enrolments. Other things we would like include (i) better .pdf reports of the submitted responses, (ii) hashing/encryption to support anonymity of submissions and (iii) support for ensuring one-submission per student per course only plus potentially the award of "printing credit" or some other reward for completing the form. There are links to EASE to be taken into account.

I noticed the "Path for Informatics" item when I came on here to add this proposal. It might make sense for the two items to be considered together since the concerns overlap.