The Academic Technology Advisory Committee is continuing to ask for feedback on a continuing university discussion about a laptop initiative.

Friday’s ATAC meeting was a discussion of concerns and opinions from the university that had been brought up since ATAC’s last meeting in October about requiring Eastern students to purchase laptops or computer software upon enrolling at Eastern.

“There are a lot of questions to be answered but that’s why it’s a concept,” and not a proposal, said Michael Hoadley, assistant vice-president for academic affairs for technology. “If you have some colleagues that are interested in discussing this I think we should encourage that,” he told ATAC members. “These issues that are being raised are very legitimate.”

Some of those reasons are concern for student costs, university costs, technical accommodations and how much of a benefit the initiative could be.

Brian Poulter, ATAC representative for the Faculty Senate shared with ATAC the Faculty Senate reactions to the idea.

There has been support for the idea accompanied by many questions about how it would work.

A major question that has been raised is if the initiative should be university-wide or done by department.

A university-wide initiative would take years to get into place, but a departmental initiative could be up and running fairly soon, said ATAC member Dean Will Hine of the School of Continuing Education.

“I think a pilot might be a good approach for an institution like Eastern to move ahead with this,” Hine said.

The Lumpkin College School of Business and the journalism department have both shown interest in a pilot program for the initiative.

The upgrade to Eastern’s wireless network that a laptop initiative would require was also discussed at the meeting.

Hoadley said some testing needs to be done to see what the campus could accommodate.

“Let’s see what happens when we add 200 more wireless laptops to a wireless infrastructure,” he said.

Chat Chatterji, assistant vice president for Information Technology Services, said the way the wireless network is currently set up, it could not handle every student using the wireless network during class.

“We’ve been able to absorb maybe a 20 percent increase in the last year, but the question is will we be able to handle a 20 percent increase in the next year, and we’re not sure,” he said.

While the technical problems are a large part of the initiative discussion, Hoadley said there are other important issues like financial aid, academia questions and student opinions that need to be addressed.

If ATAC continues to research the issue and eventually decides to support it, it will then be left to the President’s Council to make the decision on how to proceed. If it is not adopted by the university, individual departments could still have the option of requiring laptops for its students.