IT just reported a short downtime for the my.scranton servers this weekend. The downtime will be on Saturday, April 28th and run from 7AM till 9AM for hardware replacement. Angel, royaldrive, and royalmail will still be available, but the portal interface will not be.
Any questions? E-mail your local tag representative, tag-members@royallists.scranton.edu, or the downtime point of contact Chris Krall (christopher.krall@scranton.edu).
The Information Management Advisory Committee (IMAC) has invited faculty review on a draft of a Privacy and Confidentiality policy being proposed by the Division of Planning and Information Resources (PIR).
This policy, like the Incidental Use Policy, is part of an ongoing effort to update and revise the Code of Responsible Computing. Other policy updates will be forthcoming.
IMAC has asked TAG to circulate this document among faculty members for early input. Please read through the draft, and if you have comments or concerns, send your feedback to TAG (tag-discussion@royallists.scranton.edu) by May 8 so that we can share it at the next IMAC meeting on May 15.
Just a (belated) note to let everyone know that the email sent out to faculty on Friday from servicedesk@scranton.edu (titled “Technology Support Center Satisfaction Survey”) was sent in error. The link it includes is safe, but you don’t need to follow it or fill out a survey. IT Services sends their apologies to everyone for the inconvenience, and I send my apologies for posting about it three days late! :)
Text of the email in question:
From: Technology Support Center (servicedesk@scranton.edu)
To: faculty@scranton.edu
Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2012 11:43:00 -0400Dear faculty faculty:
Your feedback is important to us! Please take a moment to fill out the attached Satisfaction Survey regarding your recently resolved issue 23706, General Information Inquiry. The information you provide will help us improve our services.
To access the survey please click the Complete Survey link in the email and complete the survey.
Thanks,
James Franceschelli
Director, Information Technology Services
An important update on the Learning Management System search, courtesy of LMS Work Group leader Connie Wisdo:
The LMS Evaluation Working group members have been actively testing Desire2Learn, Moodlerooms and Blackboard Learn over the past few weeks. On Monday, March 26th, an event significant to our group occurred. You may have read that Blackboard, Inc. has acquired Moodlerooms, and even more significant, has announced “indefinite” support for the ANGEL LMS.
You may read more at http://www.blackboard.com/About-Bb/News-Center/Press-Releases/Strategy-Update.aspx?cmpid=HB_EOSS_032612
CTLE and ITDA conducted conference calls with the sales reps from both Moodlerooms and Blackboard last week. During these calls, we were assured first, that Moodlerooms would remain a viable LMS, would operate independently, and would honor any sales quotes that had already been provided to potential customers. We were also assured that ANGEL would be supported past 2014, and would not remain stagnant during the next few years.
From Blackboard’s “Open Letter to the Education Community” (found at http://www.blackboard.com/About-Bb/News-Center/Press-Releases/Strategy-Update/Open-Letter.aspx) come these quotes:
1. “Blackboard is becoming a multiple learning platform company that supports both commercially developed software as well as open source solutions.”
2. “… at the behest of ANGEL clients that continue to find this product the best fit for their needs, we will extend our maintenance and support indefinitely. We will evaluate this decision on an ongoing basis and provide sufficient notice of any future change to plans for support. We will also continue to build ANGEL features into future releases of Blackboard Learn 9.1 and into the Moodlerooms joule product. Both represent positive future destinations for ANGEL clients who wish to upgrade to a newer product line.”
Obviously these two moves by Blackboard give our group reason to pause and think. However, organizations such as Educause suggest that institutions of Higher Education should review their Learning Management Systems once every five years, to be sure the LMS is still adequately matching the needs/context of their teaching and learning efforts. We have been using ANGEL for approximately 5 years, so our evaluation is still a worthwhile effort.
After considering the above, and consulting with the VP for Planning/CIO, our plan is to carry on with the evaluation of the three finalist products through mid-April. Our group is scheduled to meet April 19th, and at that time we’ll discuss the findings and observations of our group members regarding these three products. However, since we are now not being forced to move away from ANGEL, I will ask the group to consider the possibility of the University staying with ANGEL, for at least two more years, to (1) see how the Blackboard strategy pans out, and (2) to see if any of the newer LMS products (such as Canvas by Instructure) evolve to a point where they could be considered as possible replacements at that time . If we decide to stay with ANGEL for two more years, we can relook at the LMS market next year at this time. It should be noted that an AJCU LMS working group is starting negotiations with Instructure and other LMS vendors to try to obtain more affordable, consortium pricing. It will likely take a year to settle these negotiations.
As always, I welcome your input. If you have any comments or concerns, please let me know.
At today’s IT Forum, Andrea Mulrine from Development showed a demonstration of event management system RegOnline. RegOnline is a web-based service that provides online registration and attendee tracking and reporting as well as tools like customizable event websites, customizable registration fields and questions (e.g., t-shirt size, dietary preferences), invitation and automatic reminder emails, automatic name badge creation, credit card and payment processing, etc. Judging from the demo, I was impressed – it looked like a pretty sharp but user-friendly tool.
Andrea is the chair of the Event Management Committee, a subcommittee of IMAC (Information Management Advisory Committee). The Event Management Committee, which included representatives from IR, Development, Alumni, the Library, CTLE, and Finance, reviewed seven event management products and recommended RegOnline as the product that would best serve the needs of the University. Today’s demonstration offered a chance for the broader University community to provide feedback on the product.
At this time, there’s no budget set aside for a product or service like this. Pricing is volume-based, so the Event Management Committee’s next step is to gather information about how many departments on campus need something like this and how often they would use it.
I’d like to find out if there is a need for this kind of tool among the faculty, so if you think you, your department, or a committee/group that you serve would be interested in an event management service, please let me know:
I’ll put our feedback together and send it along to Andrea. Thanks, all!
**At this point in the process, the Event Management Committee is thinking big, so send me anything you’re thinking about. Some past or recurring faculty-driven events that occurred to me: Biology Dept Pig Roast, MELUS, disAbility, Ready to Run, Education for Justice trip to the 9/11 memorial, guest speakers…
An update on the Learning Management System search, courtesy of LMS Work Group leader Connie Wisdo:
In February, the three chosen LMS vendor finalists presented their products to the University Community. Roughly 30 people in total attended each vendor’s presentations. Of the 30, about a dozen faculty members consistently attended all three demonstrations, and engaged in meaningful Q & A with the vendors. CAS, PCPS, KSOM and WML faculty were represented. Members/leaders of the Faculty Technology Advisory Group, and 4 of the 6 faculty from the LMS Evaluation Working Group were among them. A handful of students also made up the audience, mostly CTLE Tech Cons.
The vendors covered the 15 most important features identified by our faculty in the survey conducted last December/January , and attendees completed evaluation sheets which were based on those 15 features. Preliminary analysis of the evaluations indicated that Blackboard and Desire2Learn had comparable ratings and both were rated higher than Moodlerooms. On a scale of 1 to 5, Blackboard’s average rating overall was 4.71 and Desire2Learn’s overall average was 4.64. Moodlerooms’ overall average was 3.71. (However, it should be noted that technical skill deficiencies of the Moodlerooms presenter hampered the overall demonstration, and her technical support dialed-in to the demo through Webex, rather than being here in person. We believe this may have had a negative impact on the ratings for Moodlerooms.)
The LMS Evaluation Working Group met this past week to review the evaluation results and the comments provided by attendees. Members were in general agreement with the overall evaluation ratings, but obviously want to reserve final judgment until we’ve had the opportunity to work in the test sandboxes being provided by each vendor. Two of the three sandboxes (D2L and Moodlerooms) have already been set up, and we expect Blackboard will have its sandbox available for our group next week.
The group members will conduct their testing over the next 6 weeks, using rubrics based upon the group’s original list of required LMS features, and will meet in mid-April to compare results. If you should have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me.
As a reminder, there are six faculty representatives on the LMS Work Group – Maureen Carroll (math), TAG member Teresa Conte (nursing), Tara Fay (biology), Julie Nastasi (OT), Wesley Wang (economics/finance), and Keith Yurgosky (communications, part time).
Many thanks to Connie and the rest of the Work Group for arranging the demonstrations and giving us the opportunity to see the products!
Two quick updates on the campus directory this week.
First off, print copies of the campus directory will not be distributed this year – we’re encouraged to use the online directory – but you can request a print copy. Excerpt from an all faculty/staff email from Tricia Day, Jerry DeSanto, and Gerry Zaboski:
While we remain committed to adopting an environmentally sustainable solution, we also recognize that some members of the University community would still like to have a printed copy. We have decided to print a limited number of copies of the directory. To gauge the demand, we ask faculty or staff members who wish to receive a printed directory to complete an online request form by March 31, 2012:
Login using your My.Scranton identificationComplete and submit the online form
Secondly, TAG has been exploring whether faculty can be listed in the campus directory (online and print) with two different departmental affiliations (e.g., World Languages and Latin American/Women’s Studies). At our February meeting, it looked like the question had been tabled due to difficulties with adding fields to the Banner database – but we’ve just heard that it will be on the agenda for a joint IR/HR discussion later this month. Many thanks to Anne Marie Stamford for pursuing this issue on TAG’s behalf.
TAG held its second Spring 2012 meeting on Tuesday.
Online Course Evaluations:
Standing Committees:
IRAC
Learning Management System (LMS) Work Group
Information Management Advisory Committee (IMAC)
Previous Action Items
Incidental Use Policy
Academic Technology Plan
New Business
Leahy Hall and classroom technology
Networking computers and desktop sharing
Having run out of time (as usual!), we adjourned. The next TAG meeting is scheduled for Thursday, April 12, from 10:00am-11:15am in WML305.
IR will be migrating a number of systems over the next few weeks due to a required hardware upgrade. Thus, quite a few services will be experiencing very brief downtimes. Most of the downtimes that affect the faculty have been scheduled at times of low system use. A summary of the services that are likely to affect the faculty, and their downtimes, is listed below. For a full list of services, see this excel spreadsheet.
As always, if you have any issues or problems, call the help desk at x4357 (xHELP), or contact your friendly TAG representative: tag-members@royallists.scranton.edu
