Recently, a number of methods to reduce the budget of NCSU’s Office of Information Technology were put forward by its members. These include modifications to faculty, staff, and student e-mail, computer lab modification, homogenizing web hosting, and changing staff computing environments.

While all of these ideas are good in theory, whether they should be put into place at NCSU is debatable. Most of them have been touched on before, in one form or another, but I’d really like to talk about the one concerning computer usage on campus.

One of OIT’s ideas is to either require or expect that students will have laptops, then slashing half of the computer lab seats campus-wide. There are two sides to this story. During certain hours, computer labs are extremely underused. However, during peak hours, they’re almost always packed to the gills. Unfortunately, a lot of students either can’t afford, don’t want to own, or don’t want to carry a laptop with them. Furthermore, increasing the economic burden of education on students, by expecting laptop ownership, is contrary to the stated goal of NCSU — providing the best possible education for the lowest possible cost. On the other hand, reducing lab seats, software licenses, and energy used by computers is a very, very good cost saving point. If OIT could somehow strike a happy medium by cutting the least-used seats, or even the least-used labs, this could generate serious savings in the long run.

One other resource available to students is the innovative Virtual Computing Lab. The VCL allows you to request use of a remote computer that has various specialized software installed on it for up to four hours. Images you can request from the VCL include various subsets of Office, Visual Studio, Maple, Matlab, Solidworks, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, SAP, SAS, Autocad, Red Hat Linux, ArcGIS and many others.

Also, getting a VCL reservation is simple. The VCL e-mails you a remote desktop file, which you can open on almost any version of Windows (XP or Vista) or Linux. Ta-da! The software you would otherwise have to visit a lab for is at your fingertips. Do what you need to do with the software, save your results, and close the connection. It’s that easy. Furthermore, you can use VCL from anywhere, not just on campus. While using it on a dialup connection might be a little testy, any DSL or cable connection is more than enough to use the VCL service.

The VCL lives up to the mission on its Web site, which is “providing dedicated remote access to a range of computing environments for students and researchers to access from any networked location either on or off campus.” Promotion of this no-lab computing center concept holds a lot of promise for saving money while still providing students with the resources they need.

Since we are able to provide students with a large array of programs and data from any computer they have access to, reducing the number of lab seats is a viable strategy for OIT to reduce their energy consumption and operating costs. However, expecting students to own and use laptops is not the solution. During this economic slowdown, the one thing OIT should not do is push the burden onto the students.