Last week, the Jarvis College of Computing and Digital Media technology team took home the SIM Leadership 2026 Team Excellence Award in the Nonprofit/NGO category, edging out groups from Goodwill and United Way. This national recognition from the Society of Information Management awards one exceptional technology team whose project demonstrates “leadership, innovation, measurable impact, and cross-functional collaboration.”
The winning project, led by CDM’s director of technology Lee Roberson, expanded and formalized online learning capabilities in the college. While online or “flex” learning has long been available as a convenience for students on an ad-hoc basis, CDM was given an ambitious goal by the Provost’s office to significantly expand its capabilities: take a selection of degree programs—and all of their required courses—and make them consistently available online in order to expand DePaul’s market opportunity.
“Providing this capability with a high-quality instructional product required significant change management effort in collaboration between administrative and academic leadership,” says Roberson. “The team not only had to build and scale infrastructure, but to ensure necessary support through staffing and training.”
The team managed interconnected projects in the following areas:
- In-Room technologies for instructors
- Advanced audiovisual capture hardware
- Recording, encoding, and playback systems
- Operations center and support consolidation
spaces from the Operations Center
Their efforts were a huge success, resulting in support for 15,693 total enrollments this year and a gross revenue impact exceeding $60 million. At their peak, the systems and processes implemented by the team produced 50 simultaneous live events at multiple time periods throughout the week, occurring from six buildings across DePaul’s Loop and Lincoln Park campuses.
“Consistent with our Vincentian values and ‘technology in service of all,’ our deployment of AI agents and analytics does not replace the vital instructor-student relationship, but instead augments it, placing the agency for academic success directly into the hands of the student,” says Roberson. “These tools provide personalized, just-in-time support for study, tutoring, and resource location, reinforcing our commitment to student success as a collective responsibility that requires accessible, reliable, and user-centric systems.”
SIM’s Team Excellence Award comes on the heels of the technology team’s third place "Most Effective Team" recognition by Association of Information Technology Professionals Chicago.
The CDM technology team consists of Roberson, associate technical director Bin Zhang, classroom operations manager Allen Guan, AV/IT project manager Christopher Puente, senior systems administrator Gina Zang and software development manager Tony Zoko.