Tag: EDUCAUSE

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Technology

Initiative Impact Analysis to Prioritize Action and Resource Allocation

Presenters

  • Virginia Fraire, VP of Student Success, Austin Community College District
  • Laura Malcom, VP of Product, Civitas Learning Inc.
  • Angela Baldasare, Asst. Provost, Institutional Research, The University of Arizona
  • partnerships@civitaslearning.com
  • civitaslearning.com

University of Arizona

  • Goal: improve 1st year retention rate from 81% to 91% by 2025
  • How do we find and integrate good data to make good decisions that help our students?
  • When I came on board, I found out that we never had a centralized student academic support office
  • SALT office (Strategic Alternative Learning Techniques) – used to support students with learning disabilities. How can we adopt and adapt some of the techniques that worked there?
  • We were using siloed participant data that was not very helpful. It was not transformative and it didn’t tell us much.
  • We came to Civitas for help.
  • In 2009, U of A opened doors to the “Think Tank” to streamline and centralize a number of academic support services offered by nationally certified tutors; mission is to empower UA students by providing a positive environment where they can master the skills needed to become successful lifelong learners.
  • In one year, nearly 11,000 students make more than 70,000 visits and spend 85,000+ hours with support staff.

Think Tank Impact

  • Illume Impact used PPSM to measure 2.7%(pp) overall life in persistence for students using the writing center
  • 3.4% (pp) increase for 1st year students
  • Less than 10% of 1st year students taking advantage of this service!
  • These results will inform strategic campaigns to offer Think Tank services to students as part of first-year experience.
  • 8.2% persistence increase for students who were most at risk

Taking Initiative With Confidence

  • Sharing impact findings with academic colleges to discuss the need for increased referrals to Think Tank.
  • PPSM has changed the conversation with faculty who want rigorous data.
  • Bolstering credibility and validity to Think Tank services.

Austin Community College

Highland Campus is home to the ACCelerator, one of the largest high-tech learning environments in the country.

“The Accelerator”

  • Provides access to 600+ desktop computer stations spread over 32,000 square feet, surrounded by classrooms and study rooms.
  • Offers redesigned DevEd math courses powered by learning software with an onsite faculty members, tutors and academic coaches to increase personalization and engagement
  • Additional support services are offered, including non-math tutoring, advising, financial aid, supplemental instruction, and peer tutoring.
  • During the 2015-16 year, the ACCelerator served over 13,000 unique students in well over 170,000 interactions.

Accelerator Impact

  • Students who visit the lab at least once each term persist at a higher rate.
  • 4x persistence impact found for DevEd students.
  • Part-time DevEd students and DevEd students with the lowest persistence predictions had even better outcomes.
  • 6.15% increase in persistence for students visiting the learning lab.
  • Results are informing strategic decisions about creating similar learning spaces at other campuses.
  • Impact results have helped validate ACC data and in-house analyses
  • Discussions with math faculty continue to strengthen the developmental math redesign
  • Persistence results leading to further investigation of other metrics related to accelerated learning, particularly for DevEd students.
  • For this kind of approach to work, silos need to be broken down.

 

 

 

Categories
Education Technology Uncategorized

Moving to the Cloud with Amazon Web Services

Presenters

  • Ron Kraemer, VP and CIO, University of Notre Dame
  • Ryan Frazier, Director, System Engineering & Operations, Harvard Business School
  • Sarah Christen, Director of Community Platforms and CIO, Cornell University
  • Mike Chapple, Senior Director, IT Service Delivery, University of Notre Dame
  • Blake Chism, IT Transformation Sr., Amazon Web Services

Resource

Session Introduction

RC: we want to accomplish 1 major goal: roadmap and framework to take back to campus and “deal with the cloud in your culture and your world.”

It’s not perfect, and it’s a lot of work. BUT, it’s better service to our universities if we do it well.

SC: we’re a cloud-first institution. Lots of leadership change since that initiative started. We have 62 accounts under our master contract (master contract signed 18 months ago). Lots of accounts outside our contract. About $300K annual spend outside the IT org…we have a very distributed IT model.

We call the transformation “cloudification.” It’s a partnership with campus IT units. We refactor for most effective use of cloud technologies and containerization vs. “lift and shift.” Central IT must be the expert that campus wants to come to for help. We want to enable, not enforce (we do have SOME requirements to move to the master contract). We understand that if IaaS isn’t better with us, campus will make the move without us. We allow campus technologists to focus on unit differentiators central IT can help with the utilities.

Reqs for Cornell Master Contract

  • Onboarding discussion
  • Attestation
  • Shibboleth for authentication
  • DUO for multi-factor authentication for AWS Console access
  • Lock down root account, escrow with security office
  • Activation of AWS config
  • Activation of CloudTrail
  • CloudTrail logs sent to Security office
  • Activation of Cloudcheckr

What About Researcher AWS Accounts?

  • Easy onboarding without a lot of steps or complication
  • No interference with their research. No overhead (cost or performance)
  • Solutions for export control data and other compliance reqs.
  • Standard network config not always a good fit. “I am an island, not part of Cornell campus.”
  • Technical consultation options: docker, data storage, training, devops support

Today

  • All centrally hosted apps are being moved if possible
  • Infrastructure services are a large part of our on prem inventory
  • Campus units are moving more quickly than our central IT org

Biggest Challenge to Cloud Transformation: RESISTANCE TO CHANGE

RF: I’m director of Infrastructure Customer and Project Services. Initiated cloud strategy and planning when I was in the central IT division.

Cloud @Harvard

  • <2013: Exploration. Very early adopters at Harvard Medical School (research lab), pockets of uncoordinated use, little use within central and school-level IT departments.
  • 2013-2016: Alignment. We got enterprise agreement, direct billing and enterprise support services, laid technical foundations, brought on early adopters, developed cloud strategy.
  • 2016-?: Implementation. Accelerating adoption at all levels, i.e. labs, initiatives, schools, and central IT; shared service roadmaps; early adopters beginning to focus on optimization.

The Case for Cloud

  • Quality, cost, reliability, speed.
  • cloud.huit.harvard.edu
  • Our goal was to have 75% of our infrastructure at AWS by 2017. We’re currently at 31%.

HBX: Can We Deliver the Rich Interactive Experience of the Business School Online?

  • LET’S TRY
  • Move fast – 90 days to build, implement and launch application and registration system, < 1 year for complete course platform
  • Run independent of HBS IT – minimize impact on eisting services, enable new approaches to new needs
  • Be able to scale up or down rapidly – prepare for success or failure of the experiment

AWS Service Mix

  • 17 VPCs, 23 ELBs, 135 EC2 instances, 345 EBS volumes, 18TB instance storage, 4 Redshift Clusters, 18 RDS DBs, 30+ TB loaded via snowball, 78 TB object storage
  • Storage is a very small part of our spend (data transfer is 1%)
  • EC2 is about 58% of our spend

Notre Dame’s Journey to the Cloud

Why move at all? For us, we were sitting on an aging data center infrastructure. A capital investment – particularly cooling – had to happen if were going to continue. Tech demands from students, faculty and administrators outpaced our time and budget. In 2012, emergency communications were a critical concern.

2012

Originally we moved the web site as part of an emergency mitigation effort – “can we move the site in the event of an emergency?”

  • www.nd.edu
  • 3 web servers
  • load-driven autoscaling
  • Geographic diversity
  • It was really an easy move for us

2013

  • 435 web sites
  • 4 million monthly views
  • db as a service
  • ElastiCache

Cloud First

  • In 2013, we began having conversations about “why don’t we move everything over?”
  • We wanted to take advantage of what the cloud offers: 80% by the end of 2017; we’re at 59% today.
  • SaaS first, then PaaS, then IaaS, then on-prem.
  • Setting a goal created “a line in the sand,” that made it real for our people.

What We Learned

  • Rethink technical roles. NOBODY IS GOING TO LOSE THEIR JOB! However, you might not be doing the same job three years from now…
  • We were a very siloed organization prior to the cloud move. As a result of our move, those silos are breaking down.
  • Rethink security processes and tools (this was hard for us). We’re not mapping THINGS 1-to-1, we’re mapping OBJECTIVES.
  • Leverage automation – we’ve used ansible
  • Practical financial engineering. Our data center manager is now the guy who is our financial expert, who gives us insight into our costs. We’ve standardized on regions, instances (T2 class – about 3/4 of all our instances), use of reserve instances, etc.
  • Make a few choices and just go with them!

Cloud Transformation Maturity Model

  • Project Stage: limited knowledge, executive support, inability to purchase, limited confidence, no clear ownership or direction.
  • Foundation Stage
  • Migration Stage
  • Optimization Stage

Blake Chism from AWS: we developed this model to help you figure out where you are in the process. We’ve found that for most of our customers, procurement conversations are getting easier, but they’re still a challenge. If the central IT team helps take ownership, it can help organizations move forward more effectively, i.e. central IT not perceived as “being in the way.”

If your team has good processes now, your move will be much easier.

Project Stage

No matter what, you need to have a business case, a reason why you’re doing it. The roadmap helps describe how you’re doing it. Governance models evolve, and you get better at understanding them. Services change, and you need to have a plan about how you’ll integrate them (or not).

POC are much easier because if it doesn’t work, you can simply shut it off and you’re only out a few bucks. Try things out!

During the Project Stage, establish a “Cloud Center of Excellence” or “Cloud Competency Center” to get the organization moving in the right direction.

Foundation Stage

Lack of a detailed organizational transformation plan can be a challenge. Do a staff skills gap analysis to help you here.

Migration Stage

Should be as short as possible to get over the hump of hybrid and duplicate hosting. All-in will allow you to BEGIN doing new and exciting things. Imagine a space where the default state of, say, development environments, is OFF. All in is just the end of the adoption journey.

Were your enterprise systems like LMS, SIS, HR, Financials and the portal viewed as special and treated differently from smaller apps? Have you moved them yet?

  • Cornell: our KFS (Kuali) finance moved first (we dockerize ours) high availability on file shares was an early challenge (EFS – Elastic File Services are out now)
  • Harvard: IdM was first, we do Peoplesoft now, Oracle e-business is happening now
  • ND: ERP and LMS  – do not separate db servers and application servers!

AWS Cloud Adoption Journey

ALL: we use our AWS solutions architects extensively, and we’ve relied on AWS consulting almost exclusively for our migrations. These interactions have helped to accelerate our staff learning, because our staff are the ones who will need to maintain it long-term.

The professional services unit can help you figure out the high-level ecosystem you need for your particular situation. Enterprise support services is a bit pricey, but it’s useful in many cases.

SC: at Cornell, we created a 100 day training program that includes getting Amazon Solutions Architect certification. This is a good way to assure a certain level of competency. Some schools are using our model for training up their people, and they’re also using it as a way to network and learn new things, i.e. get names of people at other institutions that are going through the same problems.

Building the Roadmap – “Cloud Adoption Framework”

More details here: https://aws.amazon.com/education/movingtothecloudworkshop/

Organizes and describes the perspectives in planning, creating, managing, and supporting a modern IT service. Provides practical guidance and comprehensive guidelines for establishing, developing and running AWS cloud-enabled environments.

Don’t try to use all the components at once! Have your Cloud Center of Excellence (or whatever you choose to call it) do it in sprints by taking five or six of the elements and working through them.

In the private sector, the push to move to the cloud typically comes from the top. In higher ed IT, the push to move to the cloud typically comes from below. What we’ve often done is break off a small part of our budget, and use it to fund an “engineering SkunkWorks” where we can do the POCs and get staff buy-in. If the “where you do computing versus how you do computing” equation doesn’t click in your leadership’s minds, you’re going to have a hard time going anywhere.

Categories
Technology

The 2015 EDUCAUSE MEGA POST

Hello, friends!

As part of my normal conference coverage, I publish a post of posts, which I call a “MEGA POST.”  It’s my attempt to capture all the different sessions I attended.  The 2015 EDUCAUSE annual conference in Indianapolis had so many great sessions, I often found it difficult to pick one over another.  The increased use of data to drive campus decision-making was a hot topic at the conference this year.

I do my best to capture the content of ever session, but I am human…any errata, misstatements or omissions are totally mine.  I hope you find some benefit from my conference experience.  Enjoy!

Tuesday, October 27

  1. EDUCAUSE 2015!
  2. Building an Emerging Technology and Futures Capacity in Your Organization
  3. Cloud 101:  Tools and Strategies for Evaluating Cloud Services

Wednesday, October 28

  1. KEYNOTE:  The Cascade Effect:  How Small Wins Can Transform Your Organization
  2. A View from the Top: Taking the Mobile Experience to New Heights
  3. The Science of Predictive Analytics in Education
  4. Opening Up Learning Analytics:  Addressing a Strategic Imperative

Thursday, October 29

  1. The 2015 Campus Computing Survey
  2. Web Portals
  3. KEYNOTE:  The Second Machine Age:  Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
  4. Optimizing Business Intelligence at Lehman College/CUNY:  A Road to Change
  5. Predictive Learning Analytics:  Fueling Actionable Intelligence
  6. Unifying Data Systems to Turn Insights into Student Success Interventions

Friday, October 30

  1. How to Use the EDUCAUSE CDS to support Student Success
  2. Progress on Using Adaptive Learning Technology for Student College Success
  3. KEYNOTE:  If You Build It:  The Power of Design to Change the World
Categories
Technology Uncategorized

If You Build It: The Power of Design to Change the World

Presenter

Emily Pilloton, Founder and Executive Director, Project H Design

 

Project H Design was created out of a sense of frustration.  Emily began as an architect and after 3 years, was “totally over it.”  She was designing doorknobs and lighting fixtures and found it extremely dull.  It was disconnected from what the things that made her fall in love with architecture in the first place:  getting dirty and solving interesting projects with other people.  Project H is in it’s 8th year.  MacGyver was Emily’s first crush, not just because he’s cute, but because he solves problems in unconventional ways.  Her two grandmothers were very strong and creative women (and librarians!), who invested a lot into their professional practices.

Experience More Important Than Content

We have a responsibility to create learning experiences for our young people that are meaningful.

My partner and I were invited to a failing school district to use design “by any means” to help it succeed.  The results of this was Studio H, a class that takes place during the school day for which students earn credit.  Students create something that is architectural that has a public benefit.  The first project was to build a farmer’s market, which in Windsor, North Carolina was a revolutionary idea.  Now, a big part of architecture is to sell your idea to stakeholders.  This brought people together that would normally not speak with each other…a big win.

Constraints

  • $50,000 construction budget
  • Construction crew of teenagers
  • Hurricane zone
  • Flood zone

Construction

Construction began on the first day of summer.  When everyone else was going out on Jet Skis, my students showed up every day in extreme heat and humidity.  Labor law in South Carolina says that children under 17 cannot operate power machinery on a construction site.  As a result, we had only one student who could operate the chop saw.

RESULT:  this project created 4 new businesses and 17 full-time positions!

STUDENT QUOTE:  “I want to come back here with my kids someday and tell them that I built this”

Seeking is More Important Than Knowing

A constant state of inquiry is important to moving forward.  Our next project was done in Berkeley, California…pretty much at the opposite end of the spectrum from our first project.  Students here come from pretty much everywhere and span the range of experience.  These children wanted to build a library as their class gift back to their school.

The students wanted their library to be a space for discovery, not reference.  How to build a library that is meaningful to all 108 students in the 8th grade?  We use building blocks built by a CNC Router to build modular shelving, tables, etc.  While the project feels unfinished and uncomfortable to Emily, because it doesn’t feel finished.  However, it’s exactly what the students wanted.

Student quote to Emily about her unease:  “In algebra, X is the unknown.  The X-Space is where we go tot discover the things we don’t know.”

We is Greater Than I

I’m super-introverted and don’t like to work with other people.  However, I know that collaboration is important to creativity.  I’ve found that collaboration is less about democracy and more about trust.  The next project we worked on was to build two “tiny homes.”

I had my students build about 100 different models.  We did precedent studies that made students think through all the different reasons why they should include different design elements into a project, like space, lighting, flow through, etc.

We purchased trailers and reinforced them.  The day that we raised the walls was my favorite day.  25 teenagers had to work together to get it set up and squared together.  The students really wanted to use pallets, which I can tell you was NOT easy to work with.  The homes turned out beautiful!  One was auctioned, and one was given to a an organization that supports the homeless.

STUDENT QUOTE:  “I gave someone a place to live.  Oh, and I got an A in this class and know how to build a house.”

Curiosity is More Important Than Passion

Passion is big, often difficult to quantify, and hard to access for some.  Curiosity, on the other hand, is incremental, approachable and generates more creativity.

  • Learn to use a set of tools
  • How do you use this to express your own ideas
  • How do you use this to apply yourself to build something bigger with other people

STUDENT QUOTE:  “I’m a 10 year old girl and I know how to weld.  What can’t I do?”

Categories
Student Affairs Technology

Progress on Using Adaptive Learning Technology for Student College Success

Presenters:

  • Yvonne M. Belanger, Senior Program Officer, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
  • Jo Jorgenson, Dean of Instruction & Community Development, Rio Salado College; ALMAP Grantee
  • Douglas Walcerz, VP Planning Research and Assessment, Essex County College; ALMAP Grantee
  • Louise Yarnall, Senior Researcher, SRI International; ALMAP Portfolio Evaluator

This is the last concurrent session of the conference.  Most of this presentation will be about specific implementations of adaptive learning at a couple institutions.

Adaptive Learning Market Acceleration Grant Program (ALMAP)

  • 14 grants
  • 17 colleges
  • 9 adaptive learning platforms
  • 22 courses
  • 44% average % of Pell eligible students at grantees
  • 21,644 total students enrolled across 3 terms
  • 699 instructors

Adaptive Tech personalizes instruction and learning.  Courseware provides customized feedback to student on learning gaps.  Courseware tracks progress for instructor support.

ALMAP vision and goals

Expand and build understanding of how US higher ed programs are using adaptive courseware to support student success and completion.

ALMAP Evaluation Portfolio

  • 14 grantees conducted QED student impact evaluations.  Collected instructor / student survey data and cost data.  Collected over 3 academic terms (summer 2013 – Winter 2015.
  • Grantee studies featured 3 different types of comparisons:  lecture vs. blended adaptive; online vs online adaptive; blended vs blended adaptive
  • Evaluator checked rigor of local designs, extracted insights across portfolio.

What Did You Do and Why?

Essex County, 12,000 students.  Math sequence is the biggest barrier to success.

  • How did the adaptive courseware meet your expectations?  In the adaptive classes, students use labs with adaptive courseware, and we ask the students to set goals for the things they want to master.  Invariably, the goals student set for themselves are higher than what they actually achieve.  This is something that we then work with them on.
  • The software worked perfectly for us, did exactly what we expected of us.  However, the adaptive software took our instructors about 2 semesters to get fluent with.

Rio Salado, with 60,000 students.

  • Our courses were fully online, using Pearson’s product.  We looked at student learning outcomes, faculty/staff feedback, and cost analysis.  What we’ve seen in the past is that our students tend to drop out if they were less than successful with their coursework, or if the class was “too slow” for them.
  • We were mostly satisfied with our experiment with adaptive learning.  We had a fluid working relationship with Pearson, and they were amenable to working out difficulties we had with our pilot.  Our writing assessments needed more content for our students’ needs.  While we could pick content from what Pearson had to offer, we could not develop our own.  We had to take our material for the writing assessments to beef up the product.  We videotaped sessions and embedded writing into each lesson to help ensure completion.

Aggregate Evaluation Research Questions

  • What student impacts are noted and in what HE contexts/disciplines?
  • How does using adaptive courseware affect the costs of instruction?
  • How are students and instructors experiencing adaptive courseware?

ALMAP Evidence of Impacts

Significant positive course grade gains were noted when adaptivity was:  part of course redesign (lecture to blended) OR added to online courses BUT NOT when replacing another blended technology.

Product features linked with learning gains: progress dashboards, regular quizzes/feedback; referrals to remedial content and study tips; spaced memorization practice; vendor content (but 1 supported memorization of faculty content)

Course disciplines showing more learning gains:  50% of psychology courses; 42% of math courses; 25% of biology courses; 16% of English courses

Instructor Experience:  78% of instructors reported satisfaction; 57% devoted 1-9 hours to courseware training

Student Experience:  most students reported positive learning gains; students reported different levels of engagement.

Courseware Cost Drivers & ROI

  • Courseware based on instructor content had 8% to 19% higher development and training costs.
  • Most cost reductions occurred when adding adaptivity during course redesign, so cannot attributed to courseware.

How did you change your use of adaptive learning products over time and why?  What’s next for you?

  • In Essex County, we’re not changing our approach at all.  Students going through the adaptive developmental classes are showing greater signs of success in traditional COLLEGE LEVEL math courses later on, which for us are ONLY delivered in a traditional way.
  • At Rio Salado, we didn’t see much difference, but we’re still following the students who went through online versus adaptive classes.  We’re now doing “student learning cafes,” group sessions where students and faculty can share their experiences with using the adaptive learning material.  Students like the ability to move at their own pace, but faculty want improvements in navigation and assessments.  We have 3 grant opportunities that we’re pursuing to do more.
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