Technology - USA (2021-03)

businesscheif.com 189

UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO

“I’m fortunate enough to work with a

leadership team that is high performing,

and has the skills to effectively meet the

needs of the institution”

BRICE BIBLE

VPCIO,

UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO

for performance-based classes, for example,

which needed a platform for high-speed,

real-time video. “So we would work with

them to build a solution for those kinds of

things, and we could then expose that to the

rest of the faculty, who would look at that

and go, ‘Hey, that kind of fits me so I can use

that too’. Those faculty members were the

best. They know what they're doing, they

know the content they need to get across to

their students. That's their role, that's their

expertise. And our job was then to listen

and help them find technological ways to

effectively do that.”

This is just one example of a digital

ecosystem that fuels UB’s hybrid approach,

where students can study on campus

and off in disparate but equally rewarding

fashion. While maintaining social distancing

was of paramount importance to the

university’s leadership, so too was retaining

the fundamentals of its tight-knit culture of

collaborative, hands-on learning. “We're an

on-premises campus, and we want to be

that,” says Bible. “We’re a research school,

we are hands-on collaboration, and we want

our students to have that multidimensional

relationship. So during the pandemic we

never went 100% remote. We did not at

the end of spring semester, and we did not

all the way through the fall semester. Our