Rice Campus

Information Technology 

The Office of the Vice Provost for Information Technology (IT) is responsible for all academic and research computing, the data centers, networking, telecommunications, security, campuswide systems infrastructure and architecture, Web and media services, and enterprise systems. IT supports Rice by: 

Envisioning and planning for the effective use of emerging technologies.  

Integrating information technology in a scholarly environment.  

Using technology planning expertise to enhance teaching, learning, research and administration.

The Rice campus is fully networked for wireless access and provides more than 42,000 wired ports. In addition, Rice participates in several advanced networks, including the Research and Education Network of Houston, the Lonestar Education and Research Network and the National LambdaRail. These facilities-based networks strengthen and complement existing activities with the Southeast Texas GigaPOP and Internet2, a consortium of more than 200 universities working with industry and government to advance network applications. 

The IT Help Desk and client services support university-owned computers in offices, classrooms and labs. The office also assists students with their personal computers and helps faculty and staff members connect their smartphones and PDAs to university systems.  

To enhance teaching and learning, IT provides a technology environment that includes more than 100 technology-enhanced classrooms, public and course-related computer labs, more than 150 academic software applications, OWL-Space (a course management and collaboration application), audience response systems that use hand-held clickers, a curricular environment for Linux, videoconferencing, classroom capture and webcasting.  

Cloud computing services, available to all members of the Rice community, include wikis, blogs, website hosting, email, and data and file storage. Versioning and bug tracking applications, including Subversion and JIRA, are supported at the request of engineering and computer science faculty members but are open to all Rice students and instructors. 

IT’s research computing support group includes a team of Red Hat-certified Linux experts, two of whom function as Campus Champions for the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). Campus Champions assist and empower researchers in their use of XSEDE for high-performance computing projects.    

Additional online IT resources include: 

IT website -- services, announcements

Vice Provost for IT website -- policies, organizational chart

IT alerts -- notification of issues and problem resolution

IT tutorials -- how to set-up or use your computer, phone, applications, etc.

JoeITguy -- announcements and assistance on Facebook