Tag: EDUCAUSE

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Technology

Web Portals

Presenters:

  • Jody Couch, Program Director, Student Administration Systems, University of Texas at Austin
  • This is a Constituent Group Discussion
Jody:  our campus is currently on a mainframe-based ERP and Portal.  She then went around the room and asked some “campus demographics” questions, i.e. what kind of schools are you from, what kinds of systems are you using, etc.

What is the Most Useful Thing About Your Portal?

  • Single Sign On
  • Access to registration, payment, viewing grades.  Students want more purposeful uses for the portal – a platform for actionable tasks.

Q&A

  • When students are involved in the design of the portal, adoption rates go through the roof; we find that they often “live in there.”
  • How many groups are using student input?  Many accept student input via UserVoice, focus groups?
  • Killer features?  Adding other constituent groups, a “My Checklist” feature, parent portal.
  • Anyone else grown beyond students?  Most said yes, and many said they support alumni too.
  • One or multiple portals?  Seems like a mixed bag, although role-based views makes this question a bit superfluous.
  • Who is doing customizable portals?  A couple are, but there are concerns about overhead.  Some provide a single customizable tab, others allow for movement of pagelets.

How many are allowing for customizing content within the portal?

  •  CA Community College is using uPortal with an angular front-end “recommendation engine” style approach.
  • Others are using their content management system to pull content in.
  • Some put all their stuff that would normally live on the portal on their public sites.

What are positive / negative learnings about the usage of your portal?

  • Many are using it as a bookmark farm so they can get to email and other services.

What are people using for SSO?

  • Mostly CAS and Shibboleth.
  • For some, it’s a “carrot-and-stick” approach for granting access to putting your stuff on the portal.  SSO seems to be the “killer app”

What do you hate about your portal / wish was better?

  • Self serve password resets are needed!  For those that don’t have, they make up the bulk of some orgs’ ticket requests.
  • Person in charge of network security makes it hard for changes.
  • Mobile-friendliness

What’s Your Mobile Strategy?

  • Responsive web design
  • Put some functionality into a mobile app
  • Our mobile app functions as a portal
  • Some doing both an independent mobile app AND portal

What About Accessibility?

  • We learn via the school of hard knocks!
  • Use students with disabilities for testing
  • We do accessibility testing like security testing

Support Models?

  • Some do not have full-time dedicated staff to support their portal
  • I have 2 full-time Luminis developers that deploy on a 6-week release cycle
  • We have a LifeRay intranet to engage employees and we’re looking for an organizational home for it, but are having trouble.  Does anyone have a blog from the provost?

Vendors

  • Are people moving to cloud yet?
  • Very few are hosted off-site, CA Comm Colleges is working with Unicon on hosting uPortal at AWS.
  • rSmart is another option.
  • CampusEAI is not as great a vendor as we were led to believe when we first contracted with them.
  • Folks on Datatel sound like they’re not receiving the same level of support they used to.
  • Luminis 4 to 5 migration question:  did anyone else look at other options?  There doesn’t seem to be a clear path forward.  Luminis 5 only handles 500 concurrent users, so you’re gonna need lotsa servers!
Categories
Technology

The 2015 Campus Computing Survey

Presenters:

Resources:

This is the 26th year of the National Survey of Computing, eLearning, and Information Technology in US Higher Education.  It’s the largest survey of it’s kind in the US.  This is a survey that I’m aware of, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually read (although I might have attended this session last year, I can’t remember).  I figure this is the year that I change that.

Intent of the project has been to provide insight for IT planning and policy.  There are 35 corporate sponsors of this project – none of which have ever seen individual campus stats.  Here are some top-level details about the survey’s data collection:

  • 417 campuses
  • Web-based data collection
  • Survey period:  9/17 – 10/21
  • 75% of participants also participated last year

Highlights

  • Priorities of focus on instruction, staffing, user support, advancing campus completion agenda, IT security
  • Big diff in CIO assessments of the things we do/provide vs. the things we buy
  • Great faith in adaptive learning & digital curricular resources
  • Transition to cloud

Challenges

  • Talent retention
  • Digital curricular resources make learning more efficient & effective for students
  • 3rd party cloud services are an important part of campus plan to offer high performance computing services

Top Priorities

  1. Assist faculty integrate tech into instruction
  2. Hiring / retaining qualified IT staff
  3. User support
  4. Upgrading / enhancing network security
  5. Leveraging IT resources for student success

Some High-Level Details

  • Among the range of priorities that we all have, there are lots of service items, and not nearly as many related to the things we buy.
  • CIOs Have Great Faith in the Benefits of Digital Tech for Instruction.
  • Rating the IT Infrastructure:  lowest rankings are services, highest are hardware.
  • CIO Assessments of Digital Resources and Services for Disabled Users:  only 50% have a strategy for ADA/Section 503 compliance.  This is litigation waiting to happen.
  • Mobile technologies over laptops!
  • CIOs rate the effectiveness of campus investments in IT.  Most scores are rather low.
  • Challenge of Effective IT User Support:  we think we’re doing better than our users think we are.
  • Budget cuts are still pervasive and affect us deeply.  Cuts versus gains across investments are interesting (refer to the report).
  • Disaster Plans:  most campuses have plans and even update them regularly.  22% DO NOT have a strategic plan for network and data security (this is an amazing stat to me).
  • Declining Confidence in MOOCs.  Completion rates are atrocious (although enrollment is voluntary).  Infrastructure could be a problem here.
  • We’re experiencing major cost over-runs / unexpected costs in our ERP deployment activities.
  • Two Views of the Cloud:  things may happen faster than we expect, but less than 25% think we’ll have mission critical systems in 5 years.  IT pros affirm the strategic importance of cloud computing.  There’s still significant concern over the security of the cloud.  Migration to the cloud is slow due to perceived risk, trust, control, limited options.  Interestingly, LMS has largely moved to the cloud. No mass movement to the cloud in 5 years.
  • Growing use of video lecture
  • Encouraging Faculty to Use Open Source / OER Content for Courses
  • Institutional demography of LMS providers:  decline in Blackboard, Canvas growing fast.  Market is volatile.  The LMS largely does not affect learning outcomes, but is used as a material delivery service.
  • Mobile apps are huge and an expected service.

Wonderful quote by Casey on his experience:  “In my 25 years of doing this survey, IT appears to be driven by epiphany and opinion, not evidence.”

Vendors: What You Need to Know

  • Partner is Not a Verb
  • Trust is the coin of the realm
  • No “logo buddies”
  • You are not your client
  • Your price is not your client’s cost
  • It’s a neural network
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Technology Uncategorized

Opening Up Learning Analytics: Addressing a Strategic Imperative

Presenters:

  • Josh Baron, Assistant Vice President, Information Technology for Digital Education, Marist College
  • Lou Harrison, Director of Educational Technology Services, NC State University
  • Donna Petherbridge, Associate Vice Provost, DELTA, NC State University
  • Kenny Wilson, Division Chair-Health Occupation Programs, Jefferson College

This is actually a follow-up to one of my recent posts about a webinar I attended by Unicon on learning analytics.  We have representatives from three different LMSes:  Moodle, Sakai, and Blackboard.  Looks like Lou and Josh from that webinar are here…I’m looking forward to learning more about this effort!  Word of warning:  they moved fast, so I missed some detail, particularly around the workflow and data-heavy slides.  My Student Affairs colleagues will want to tune into the question I asked at the end…

Open Learning Analytics:  Context & Background

OAI, or the Open Academic Analytics Initiative:  EDUCAUSE Next Generation learning Challenges (NGLC).  Funded by Bill & Melinda Gates foundations, $250,000 over a 15 month period.  Goal:  leverage big data concepts to create an open-source academic early alert system and research “scaling factors”

LMS & SIS data is fed into a predictive scoring model, which is then fed into an academic alert report.  From there, an intervention is deployed (“awareness” or Online Academic Support Environment – OASE)

Research design:  rolled out to 2,200 students in 4 institutions:  2 community colleges, and 2 historically black colleges and universities.  More detail on the approach and results here.

Strategic Lessons Learned

Openness will play a critical role in the future of learning analytics.

  • Used all open source tools:  Weka, Kettle, Pentaho, R, Python, etc.
  • Open standards and APIs:  Experience API (xAPI), IMS Caliper/Sensor API
  • Open Models:  predictive models, knowledge maps, PMML, etc.
  • Open Content/Access:  journals, whitepapers, policy documents
  • Openness or Transparency with regard to ethics/privacy
  • NOT anti-commercial, commercial ecosystems help sustain OSS

Software silos limit usefulness

  • Platform approach makes everything more useful

NC State Project

  • Getting everyone moving in the same direction is a challenge.
  • The number one priority we have at NC is student success, and we know that data is going to help us get there.  However, we have different vendors approaching us independently, each with their own selling points on what they could do to help us.
  • Lunch and learn sessions, bring people up to speed on what questions to ask, and start thinking about who can generate answers.  It took us 10 months to get everyone together
  • Division of Academic & Student Affairs has purchased EAB; concurrently, we’re working on LAP.  Continued conversations with campus partners will have to happen.

From Proof to Production:  Toward Learning Analytics for the Enterprise

  • Initial steps:  small sample sizes, predictions at 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 points in course, multi-step manual process
  • Goal 1: make it more enterprise-y.  Use large sample sizes (all student enrollments), frequent early runs (maybe daily), automatic no more than 1 click
  • Currently in progress:  rebuild infrastructure for scale; daily snapshots of fall semester data; after fall semester ends look for the sweet spot.
  • Future goals:  refine model even more; segment model by population; balance between models and accuracy; refine and improve models over time; explore ways to track efficacy over time; once we intervene we can never go back to virgin state

Jefferson Project

  • Why is JC seeking LAP implementation?  First time pass rate of Anatomy and Physiology is 54%.  Only 27% re-take.  37% non-persistence rate (DFW).  Need to find ways to help students succeed.
  • How is it going?  We have a 4 year grant.  Compliance letter came in May of 2015.  Implement PREP program in October 2015, LAP roll-out in 10/1/2016, with one year to test.  We use Student Participation System data and feed it into the system.
  • Why use SPS data?  It’s readily available; part of HLC Quality Initiative; less politically charged; shown to correlate with student success; clear map of data schema; data is very robust, more data there than we are presently using; data is “complete” (better than Bb data; less complete than original LAP design).
  • Each instructor will receive an Academic Alert Report.

My question:  have you considered integration of co-curricular data into your models?  YES!  We’re very interested in integration of co-curricular data, because it’s often a better indicator for student success than LMS data.  Vincent Tinto’s research clearly indicates this, but our implementation of this is probably a phase 3 or phase 4 thing.

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Technology Uncategorized

The Science of Predictive Analytics in Education

Presenters:

  • Patrick J. Bauer, Chief Information Officer, Harper College
  • Scott Feeny, Director of Policy and Research, Independent Colleges of Indiana
  • Vince Kellen, Senior Vice Provost for Analytics & Technologies, University of Kentucky
  • Jon Phillips, Managing Director – Worldwide Education Strategy, Dell Inc.
  • John K. Thompson, GM, Advanced Analytics, Dell Inc.

This session will focus on innovations in using data insights in decision-making.  What are the dos and don’ts that we’ve learned thus far.  We’ll start with stories from each panelist, then go into Q&A.  All material will be made available later (more to come on that).

Background

Patrick

  • William Rainey Harper College:  NW suburb of Chicage, a 2-year institution. 40,000 full time equivalent students
  • “Project Discover” leader Matt McLaughlin.  We got a title 3 grant to help do this project.  Includes Inclusion, Engagement, Achievement, Onboarding, Intervening, etc.
  • Data has been collected over 6 years.
  • We originally used a proprietary data warehouse
  • Grad rate increase in 10% in 5 years
  • New reactive programs:  early alert, supplemental instruction, completion concierge, summer bridge.
  • These were REACTIVE programs, we wanted PROACTIVE solutions.

Vince

  • University of KY
  • What have we learned?  We’ve integrated virtually everything we can, and are now moving into personalized learning and messaging.
  • Respect complexity in learning analytics!  I recommend reading “Arrival of the Fittest,” a book by Andreas Wagner.  Their research on genomics highlights and models that can help our process.  Instructional complexity is at least as complex as that of genomics.  We don’t have just one paradigm of instructional theory, but dozens.
  • Structure is important:  get the right people on the bus, remove rivalries within your organization, give groups distinct and clear missions, align with organizational strategy.
  • Engage the community:  transparency makes a big difference; democratize analysis; enforce community etiquette, bring in students & faculty researchers; engage the broader higher education community.
  • Use the right tools and techniques:  speed enables fast thinking, fast group decision-making, fast everything; maximum semantic expressiveness and rich detail improves data quality, analytic flexibility; visualization is important.
  • Conclusion:  respect complexity, attend diligently to the very human aspects of this puzzle, ignite the passion of the community, choose and use your tools wisely

Scott

  • I represent the Independent Colleges of IN
  • A statute required student record information needed to be shared back with the state
  • I needed to know how our institutions compared to others
  • We worked with vendor partners (Dell & Statistica) to run descriptive and predictive analytics against the data we had
  • We wanted to do card swipes, meal plans, and more for sub-group comparisons.

John

  • The Statistica product has been made free for higher ed faculty and students
  • I run the Statistica group at Dell
  • We’ve done a lot of work in universities and hospitals
  • We’re moving toward using data for real-time decision-making.  A specific example was given about reduction in surgical infections…pretty powerful stuff.

“Maslow’s Hierarchy of Data Management”

  • The spectrum:  Data Management > Business Intelligence > Analytics
  • The specific levels:  Data Foundation > Basic Reporting > Performance Mgmt > Predictive > Prescriptive

Challenges and Observations

  • Master organizational and technical planning, orchestrating organizational adoption.
  • Bringing in the “executive management hammer” can be useful
  • IR, advisor and counselor pushback, i.e. “you’re coming to take our jobs!”  Dashboards and forms are actually a value-add for these folks that let them do their jobs more effectively.
  • Usability testing and adoption feedback from students were interesting:  “Why do you give us a number?  Why don’t you just give us feedback and actions we can take?”
  • ROL (“Return On Learning”), how can we quantify what you’re seeing?  There is no control group!  Profound payoff is that you’re able to make informed changes to policies that have real impact.
  • Student subgroups with a GPA lower than X (not specified) were much more likely to stop out.  This challenged many people’s beliefs, i.e. “how is this even possible?”
  • University of Iowa cited an avoided cost of $31 million

Next Steps

  • Data sharing with school districts for a full life-cycle on our students as they go through our system
  • Classroom on realtime analytics, such as triggers set by faculty
  • Get a handle on what our students do when they leave, i.e. wage data
  • Improving the advising process
  • Sharing findings with our institutions
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A View from the Top: Taking the Mobile Experience to New Heights

Presenters:
  • Hilary J. Baker, Vice President & CIO, California State University, Northridge
  • Santhana Naidu, Associate Vice President of Marketing Communications, Indiana State University
  • Andrew Yu, Founder & CTO, Modo Labs, Inc.

Full disclosure:  CSUN is my home campus, so I have some knowledge of the Modo Labs product…they back our mobile app.

Andrew kicked off the session by talking about Modo Labs.  The whole thing started out of MiT in 2010, but had it’s beginnings in 2007 in the MiT mobile framework (this was back before the Apple iPhone and app store).  At that time, only about 2% of the web traffic at MiT was from mobile devices.  m.mit.edu took about six months to create.  Modern campus mobile apps must serve multiple constituencies, and serve many purposes…as a result, the mobile app charge at MiT required leadership!

Why WAS mobile Important?

Hilary Baker

CSUN is a public & highly diverse university community of 41,500 students and 4,200 faculty and staff in northwest Los Angeles.  We came late to the mobile party.  Campus priorities:  student success and exemplary service.  We needed to develop and launch a CSUN app fast, and with Modo Labs, we were able to launch in just 10 weeks!

  • We used web services to reach into our PS instance to enable add/drop capability into the mobile app
  • Launched our app a few days before Fall semester 2013.  Our download profile was 6,000 1st week, 9,000 2nd week, 17,000 3rd week
  • Next step for us was to enable pay via mobile app and CashNet
  • We’ve since added lots of additional features, including outdoor mapping and wayfinding, dining, campus tours, indoor floor plans, campus shuttle & transportation services
  • Marketing was important, too.  We printed full-color postcards and distributed these campus-wide.  We also featured the mobile app at our new student orientation.
  • To date downloads:  34K Apple, 9K Android
  • Most used features at beginning of term:  schedule, campus map, class search, add/drop
  • Most used features near end of term:  Transit, dining

Santhana Naidu

  • IU is celebrating its 150 year anniversary
  • Located in Terre Haute
  • 13,500 students

Our mobile journey started about 6 years ago.  Leadership realized the importance of having a mobile app.  It was an internal project, driven by IT and the marketing team.  Unfortunately, students didn’t like the app, so we went back to the drawing board.  In 2012 we re-launched our app with Modo Labs.  Some highlights:

  • 22K downloads to date
  • Classes is by far our most popular module (Blackboard, Banner, Catalog)
  • About 75% of users are iOS, 25% Android

Recruitment is my office’s top priority

  • Growth in mobile usage among students: 20% of overall website traffic from mobile
  • 90% of incoming students carry smartphones
  • 40% of admissions traffic is from mobile devices.
  • Campus life content is very popular; students use this information when making a decision to come to campus
  • IT – MarCom Partnership was a major key to our effort’s success:  shared governance
  • Modo helped us with design, programming, app launch, etc.
  • Content entry through the admin console

How Do You Keep a Mobile App Fresh & Engaging?

  • Communication (messaging) – examples provided of University of Massachusetts, DelMar, and Georgetown, College of William & Mary, Massachusetts General Hospital, Notre Dame
  • Use of Publisher module for content management that can be handled by anyone…no coding skills required
  • Personalization with locations and roles
  • iBeacons can be used to highlight items you want people to know about, especially useful for tours and points of interest
  • Geofencing
  • QR codes can also be used to drive people directly to map locations

Why IS Mobile Important?

Hilary Baker

  • PeopleSoft student services (GreyHeller/Modo Labs).  Includes Financial Aid awards, emergency contact info.
  • Parking space availability
  • Indoor-outdoor maps transitioning.  We want to make this feature more seamless.
  • Matador patrol safety – coming in early Spring 2016.  Talked about the CSUN appjam event and shared a video of one of the winning entries in this event.

Santhana Naidu

  • Audience-based content.  Ability to group icons by audience is important for us.
  • Enhancing the campus visit and tour experience using iBeacons.  This really helps our yield activities.
  • Messaging.  We want to be able to target messages by categories and groups; customize how receive messages, message center in-app so users can refer to the messages, easy to use backend interface for the admin, ability for users to opt in or out of certain optional message types, promotions.

Questions

  • Does it integrate with other apps?  Naidu:  yes, we’re using it for maps and tours.  Hilary:  yes, we link out to other CSUN mobile web sites like the Rec Center, Public Safety.  Andrew:  we can work
  • Does your team do the work?  Naidu:  Modo Labs does the heavy lifting for us.
  • What about using the app for faculty and staff?  Hilary:  yes, we have versions for faculty and staff.  Alumni also have a view.  Naidu:  faculty use the Blackboard module, but we haven’t gone much further than that yet.

Visit Modo Labs at Booth #1930; other campuses will also be here at EDUCAUSE giving presentations about their mobile experiences.

  • Del Mar College
  • Dominican University
  • Notre Dame
  • George Washington University
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