Support Strategies

Our mission is to enable the Indiana University community to easily and effectively perform statistical analyses, advanced mathematical procedures, and the use of GIS Applications and remote sensing. The Stat/Math Center is responsible for centrally-delivered statistical, mathematial, and GIS software on systems ranging from the Student Technology Centers to the large shared High Performance Systems. This includes license administration, systems administration, and technical support for a broad spectrum of users, platforms, and operating systems.

Individual consulting is available to everyone at IU -- by e-mail, by appointment, on a walk-in basis or over the telephone -- but since it is very time-consuming, we try to meet most of the needs of most of our clients in other ways.

• We provide training, in coordination with the IT Training. We offer free 90 minute STEPS classes to students; the most popular of these introduce Maple, SPSS, and Matlab. They are usually taught by graduate students, in the evening or at a regular class meeting time during the second or third week of the semester. The goals of these classes are:
  • To provide some familiarity with the basic operation of the software,
  • To warn of common problems and illustrate how to recover from them, and
  • To familarize the students with the application's help system.

• Our major effort is electronic delivery over the World Wide Web of resources that enable our clients to solve their problems independently, such as:
  • a collection of locally-produced tutorials and documentation, including the materials upon which the STEPS classes are based:
    • Getting Started with Maple,
    • Getting Started with SPSS,
      . . .
  • a collection of hotlists pointing to resources produced at IU or elsewhere:
    • Information about particular software packages:
      • Maple at IU
      • SPSS at IU
      • Matlab at IU
        . . .
    • Information about particular areas:
      • Numerical Computing Resources
      • Mathematical Computing Resources
      • Statistical Computing Resources
        . . .
  • a collection of answers to frequently asked/ trivia questions, the UITS Knowledge Base:
    • In Maple and Mathematica how do I convert sin(A+B) to sinA cosB + cosA sinB, and vice versa?
    • With Netscape or Mosaic for Macintosh, how can I use Maple as a helper application?
    • In Mathematica, if I forget to load a package before I first use one of its functions, how can I recover?
    • Who can help me with statistical computing?
      . . .
    We "empower the users" by helping them to function as independent learners, while providing a robust safety net.
    • The STEPS classes reach most new users, and include the answers to the most frequently asked questions.
    • The Knowledge Base contains more advanced or specialized information, plus some very basic material.
    • The World Wide Web makes the class materials and a variety of examples available 24 hours a day.

  Extended one-on-one consulting is focused on students and faculty using software as a tool for research, and faculty using software for teaching. We try to provide as much support as possible, as efficiently as possible!