Annual Report 2001
Title Page
Part A: Project Status
Part B: Progress of Partner Organizations
Appendix A
LEARNING ANYTIME ANYWHERE PARTNERSHIPS (LAAP)
TITLE PAGE
ANNUAL PROGRESS REPORT
GRANT NUMBER: P339B990294
PROJECT TITLE: Beyond the Administrative Core: Creating Web-based
Student Services for Online Learners
GRANTEE INSTITUTION: Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education
(WICHE)
NAME(S) OF PROJECT DIRECTOR(S): Sally Johnstone, Director, Western
Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications Pat Shea, Assistant
Director for Member Services, Western Cooperative for Educational
Telecommunications
ADDRESS OF PROJECT DIRECTOR(S): P.O. Box 9752 Boulder, Colorado
80301
PHONE: (908) 608-9084 FAX: (303) 541-0291
E-MAIL(S): sjohnstone@wiche.edu; pshea@wiche.edu
PROJECT YEAR (2)
GRANT PERIOD 1/1/00 - 12/31/02
Beyond the Administrative Core: Creating Web-based Student Services
for Online Learners
Partner Organizations and Contacts Project Web site: http://www.wiche.edu/telecom/Projects/laap/index.htm
Lead Partner: Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications
USPS Mailing Address: FedEx or UPS Mailing: P.O. Box 9752 2520 55th
Street Boulder, CO 80301-9752 Boulder, CO 80301
Contact: Pat Shea, Assistant Director for Member Services Phone:
908.608.9084; Fax: 303.541.0291; pshea@wiche.edu
Other Partners:
Kansas State University 128 Bob Dole Hall Manhattan, KS 66506-6902
Contact: Mel Chastain, Director, Kansas Regents Educational Communications
Center Phone: 785.532.7041; Fax: 785.532.7355; Chastain@ksu.edu
Kapi'olani Community College 4303 Diamond Head Road Honolulu, HI
96816
Contact: Michael Tagawa, Dean of Instruction Phone: 808.734.9518;
Fax: 808.734.9828; Tagawa@hawaii.edu
Regis University 7600 E. Orchard Road Denver, CO 80111
Contact: Ellen Waterman, Director, Distance Learning Phone: 303.964.5447;
Fax: 720.489.1310; Ewaterma@regis.edu
SCT 4 Country View Road Malvern, PA 19355
Contact: Peggi Munkittrick, Senior Director, Teaching and Learning
Strategy Phone: 610.578.6053; Fax: 610.578.7564; pmunkitt@sctcorp.com
LAAP Project Beyond the Administrative Core: Creating Web-Based
Student Services for Online Learners Progress Report June 2001
Part A: Project Status
Kansas State University
Kapi'olani Community College
Regis University
SCT
Collaborating Within and Among the Partners
Staying in Communication
Addressing the Hurdles
Focusing on Successes
Evaluating Project Progress
Sustaining the Project
WCET's LAAP project, Beyond the Administrative Core: Creating Web-Based
Student Services for Online Learners, is mid-way through its three-year
grant period. All partners, Kansas State University, Kapi'olani
Community College in Hawaii, and Regis University in Colorado as
well as SCT, are still involved. Since the project progress report
last June, the partners have moved from the assessment and planning
phase, where they largely worked independently, into the design
and development phase where more collaborative activities are underway.
Moving forward on a joint timeline By June 2000 each of the institutional
partners had their vision teams in place. These teams, charged with
oversight for the project, consist of representatives from student
services, the faculty, the registrar's office, marketing, human
resources, the budget office, IT and other relevant offices. This
broad representation is intended to:
- facilitate the development of a holistic vision for integrated
student services by taking advantage of the Web as an infrastructure
to do so-rather than create a Web version of the current services
in the existing silo model;
- facilitate the design and development of modules for services
that are customized and individualized for each student.
To do the latter, integration with the campus student information
system is critical.
During the summer and fall, WCET organized site visits to each
campus by experts in student services and organizational change.
They met with the vision teams as a group and then interviewed some
of the team members, plus many others, separately. The goals for
the meetings were to increase awareness about using the Web to provide
student services beyond those in the administrative core and to
look at some best practices in this area; to develop some consensus
about what services should be offered via the Web; to determine
satisfaction with the current services; and to select a service
area or suite of services to be the focus of this LAAP project.
At the conclusion of the visits, the experts made presentations
to the vision teams summarizing their outside perspective on the
campuses' current resources and needs in student services. They
followed their visits with more in-depth reports containing recommendations
for next steps in the project.
These site visits to each campus played out in slightly different
ways. Follow-up activities led to each partner selecting an area
of focus for the LAAP project.
Kansas State University
At Kansas State University (KSU), a large decentralized institution,
the vision team consists of high-level administrators from across
campus. Their site visit meetings were formal with tight timelines
respecting their busy schedules. Discussion with the experts at the
initial meeting centered on KSU's limited resources (funding and staff
time), the nature of their student information system consisting of
multiple, stand-alone databases, and ownership rights for technology
solutions developed in the project. Their student enrollment for the
coming fall would be at an all time high and an increasing percentage
of these students would be taking online courses. Although these students
would be campus residential students, they would register in two systems
and pay two different tuitions-one for traditional classroom courses
and one for online (distance) courses. Their student support services
for these courses would also come from two different parts of the
institution.
Clearly, this practice created an obstacle for designing online
student services that could serve both the online and traditional
classroom student. By the second meeting, one month later, however,
the KSU administrators had made the monumental decision to move
all of the student information databases under the registrar and
to begin integration into a single unified system. This single decision
is likely to be one of the most important for the future of online
student services at KSU.
During the second visit, it was determined that KSU would focus
on academic advising in the LAAP project. Project leadership held
the opinion that finding solutions to this very important service
would not only enable them to better serve their students, but also
provide a model process for redesigning other less complex services.
By choosing academic advising, the vision team would work with one
of its greatest challenges in designing Web-based student services
at KSU-the decentralized nature of the institution. In order to
develop a viable service, the team would have to identify the commonalities
and differences in the provision of academic advising among the
colleges. Then the team would have to seek technology solutions
to support the commonalities, while offering the opportunity to
customize certain functionalities necessary to accommodate the differences.
Kapi'olani Community College
Kapi'olani Community College (KCC), one of seven community colleges
in the University of Hawaii system, has a number of challenges to
overcome in designing Web-based student services. Its recent reorganization
moved its distance and continuing education courses into relevant
academic units, which-with the exception of library and tech support
services offered centrally-provide their own student services. Although
it more closely ties these two student populations together, it means
that the vision team must work carefully to design solutions that
accommodate the needs of the different units. The KCC student information
system is not Web-enabled and it now appears that the Buzzeo effort
to develop one for the University of Hawaii system will not come into
fruition. A deepening recession in Hawaii further restricts KCC from
devoting much funding to innovative projects.
Nevertheless, KCC is making progress. Two site visits were held
with its vision team. The initial visit highlighted one of KCC's
greatest obstacles to moving student services into a Web environment-communication
among its disparate parts about student services in general and
an understanding of the difference between student services designed
from the student's rather than the institution's perspective. For
that reason, the second site visit was designed as a two-day retreat
with representatives of each academic unit invited to join the vision
team in a role- playing exercise where each assumed a different
student profile. The outcome was a better understanding of the types
of services needed, when they were needed most, and which services
were the highest priorities for Web development.
After much further deliberation by the vision team, KCC decided
to narrow the focus in this project primarily to tutoring with a
secondary interest in orientation. The team's rationale is that
by tackling tutoring first, it may spawn technical solutions to
be used to support other services-such as academic advising and
orientation-which, if one thinks about it differently, may just
be special use cases of tutoring.
Regis University
For Regis University, only one site visit was held. The grant is housed
in the School for Professional Studies (SPS), whose programs are offered
at a distance and whose enrollment is triple that of the traditional
undergraduate college. Initially, the project director formed a vision
team to focus on the SPS students, but soon realized that the entire
college would be better served by developing a holistic vision for
Web-based student services. Within that context, Regis determined
a service for this project.
The traditional college had some initiatives underway that underscored
the need to work together. One effort focused on putting registration
online and the other on exploring the use of a campus portal. The
project director broadened the vision team, which increased campus
awareness for the LAAP project and established a working relationship
between the two different sectors of the university. To this relationship,
SPS brings a strong understanding of what is needed to respond to
its just-in-time and anywhere, anyplace students. The college, with
an increasing number of faculty using the Web to enhance their courses,
recognizes that there will be increasing pressure to provide services
to students via the Web as well.
After much deliberation with this enlarged team, Regis decided
to focus on orientation with a vision for personalized, just-in-time
modules delivered appropriately over the student's entire relationship
with the University-rather than the more traditional, one-time data
dump. In terms of design and implementation within this project,
the team will limit its focus to orientation modules for academic
advising.
SCT
SCT completed its development of its data-brokering product, the Integrator,
which allows its student information system clients' to exchange data
in real time with other third-party data systems such as Campus Pipeline
and WebCT, two of its partners. The Integrator is IMS-compliant and
the intention is to build messaging interfaces to other third-party
products supporting a wide range of student services. In addition,
SCT is developing additional functionality for academic advising in
its Banner student information system product.
Collaborating Within and Among the Partners
In the initial assessment and planning phases of this project described
above, institutional partners worked independently within their campuses
to develop awareness for the need for Web-based student services designed
from the student's perspective that might not necessarily be congruent
with the current structure of the institution. To ensure that the
service modules developed in this project would be widely adopted
and sustained, they focused on collaboration within the institution.
The service each selected for focus was the one identified by their
campus stakeholders as the best place to start. Although each of these
is different, the solutions may have a closer relationship in the
final outcome of the project.
To make it possible to collaborate in this second phase-design
and development-the partners are using the Unified Modeling Language
(UML) and scenarios for envisioning their services and defining
the requirements for the technical solutions. UML is a graphical
language that allows one to display complex ideas in a simple and
systematic way. By using this language and developing scenarios,
student service experts can describe what the services should be
like without trying to define the technical solutions. See
Appendix A. Once they have these scenarios developed, they can
use them for discussion with a wider group of stakeholders, modifying
them as necessary to increase their quality and acceptance. When
complete, the IT staff can review them and ask for more detail in
certain areas (such as what data needs to be displayed and where
it is stored) and then make recommendations for acquiring solutions.
These might include using existing software, or buying, building,
or partnering in obtaining a solution(s). The IT staff can also
provide an estimate for the costs and time necessary to implement
solutions supporting the service.
At the time of writing this report, the institutional partners
are just now completing their scenarios. The current plan calls
for posting these in the project Collaboratory, where student services
experts at the other partner institutions will review them. In addition
to making suggestions for changes, they will evaluate them for adoption
or adaption at their own campus. Because the campuses are so different,
it will be interesting to see how much commonality there is in the
student service processes. It will be interesting, too, to learn
if any of the technology solutions will work at multiple campuses
given their very dissimilar infrastructures.
Staying in Communication
WCET initiated several methods of communication that continue to serve
the project internally. These include: the LAAP Collaboratory, which
is a password protected Web environment using K-State Online where
project documents are posted and a threaded discussion feature is
available; a listserv; an email broadcast list; and conference calls.
In addition, all project directors met in November 2000 for a brief
status meeting at the WCET annual conference. All attended a two-day
Partners' Meeting in January 2001 where the calendar and tasks for
the design and development phases for this year were confirmed. Externally,
the public is kept informed on the WCET Web site where the LAAP pages
have received 5,149 hits this year. Finally, the WCET staff and evaluator
field many inquiries from other institutions on the status of the
project.
Addressing the Hurdles
There have been a number of hurdles to address in the project this
year. Most critical was the need to scale back the scope of the project
(originally calling for each campus to develop a suite of services)
to one that would be manageable within the time and funding available.
Given the decision that the new services would be best designed to
serve both online and on-campus students, it has been and will continue
to be necessary to involve more people on each campus, requiring extra
time for each phase. In addition, the funding provided by the grant
does not match the high costs of IT solutions. Therefore, each institutional
partner will scale back its effort to the development and implementation
of one or a few modules (depending on their complexity) within a single
service. However, SCT still intends for its commercial solution to
offer a suite of services using its Integrator product to access services
offered by third-party providers, as described earlier.
Delay in implementing the Collaboratory also impeded progress on
the project. SCT originally agreed to provide this service, but
ongoing delays made it necessary to seek an alternative provider.
KSU offered its course management software for this purpose in fall
2000 and project documents have been stored there for easy reference
by all partners.
All institutional partners have struggled with what the KSU project
director refers to as the "volunteer workforce." Despite
a high interest in participating in the project, staff members at
these institutions have so many competing demands for their time,
that it is hard to secure their ongoing participation. To envision
new services designed from a student's perspective requires several
creative brainstorming sessions. These are time consuming and do
not always yield tangible outcomes showing progress. The pressure
is high on the project directors to keep these colleagues committed
to the project and to focus on one of the most difficult tasks:
defining what the services should be like, rather than "Webenizing"
current practices and ignoring the new possibilities offered by
the Web environment.
Use of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) had its own learning
curve that slowed the timeline for the project. Some individuals
immediately understood it, while others found it more difficult.
Eventually, a subset of the student service experts at all three
institutions worked on developing the scenarios for review by the
larger group. At KSU, the project director used an LCD projector
to display the scenarios and incorporate changes immediately during
review sessions with the larger group. This proved to be a quick
way to keep everyone's attention and to identify differences from
one college to another while pointing out their commonalities.
Other setbacks, such as the strike at the University of Hawaii
system and a second reorganization during the life of this project
for SCT, have caused some deadlines to slip.
Focusing on Successes
It is too early to say that the scenario process with UML is a success,
but it is clear that it has provided a way to describe complex interchanges
between users (faculty, students, and staff) with an undefined technical
system. It also has provided a way to identify requirements for technical
solutions supporting these interchanges. KSU has used this method
to develop a context diagram and more than 40 scenarios supporting
academic advising. Regis has developed a context diagram and 11 scenarios
supporting orientation to academic advising. Kapi'olani is using the
scenarios process to map out components of the tutoring system and
these scenarios are currently under development. None of this work
would have been easy without the expert instruction and coaching from
an IBM solutions architect, whose time was donated to the project.
Interest in this student services project and Web-based student
services in general have been growing among the WCET membership.
Just recently, WCET opened its LAAP listserv to all of its members.
Within a few days, there were 100+ subscribers. It is hoped that
the weekly LAAP research posts will generate discussion among the
subscribers and that this listserv will also serve as a resource
to the LAAP partners as they begin to evaluate existing software
or build solutions supporting their modules.
Perhaps one of the not so obvious, but nevertheless, important
influences this project has had on the institutional partners was
the incentive to create vision teams with cross-campus representation.
Campus leadership at one institution remarked that it was the first
time that such a group had assembled to focus on the topic of student
services. On all of the campuses, it highlighted that there were
pockets of progress in the development of online student services-but
no comprehensive vision. Without a watchful eye, these and other
institutions will follow the same silo path of the past, missing
the opportunity to create the integrated and hybrid services more
desired by students.
Evaluating Project Progress As of May 31, 2001,
the evaluation for this LAAP project is proceeding as planned. Project
objectives include development of a model for the creation of student
service modules that is transferable and useable in a variety of institutional
settings. Therefore, project evaluation focuses on organizational
and cultural change issues, rather than on specific student learning
outcome data. Site visits to each of the partner institutions in early
2000 formed the baseline for case studies of institutional change
that are an explicit project deliverable.
Evaluation data are collected when appropriate based on the rhythms
of the project. For instance, the evaluator is conducting short
interviews with participants at various points in the scenario process
to document the advantages and disadvantages in order to improve
the process for other institutions. The evaluator attends project
meetings, monitors project listserv postings, and interacts with
project personnel regularly. No problems have been encountered gathering
evaluation data for the project. No changes or delays to the evaluation
plan have been made.
Sustaining the Project
It is hoped that the scenarios developed in this project, after their
refinement and review by the respective IT staffs, will serve other
institutions in two ways: as models for modules in these selected
services to be adopted or adapted as appropriate; and to illustrate
a methodical process for redesigning student services and making them
Web accessible. In reference to the last, KCC has already used the
process outside this project to specify requirements for other student
service modules, currently under development by a third party.
As indicated earlier, WCET has expanded its LAAP listserv to other
WCET member institutions. It plans to offer this special topic listserv
on student services indefinitely as long as there is participation.
WCET just received a grant from the Hewlett Foundation that will
allow it to build on what it has learned in this project to provide
a comparison Website for technologies supporting online student
services. It anticipates that this will be a further resource to
those institutions designing or acquiring online student services
for their institution.
WCET has developed a searchable database structure for storing
resumes of those with expertise in student services so that it can
offer consulting services to institutions needing specialized help
in this area in the future.
Finally, some initial guidelines for other institutions to follow
in creating student services are being compiled. These will be refined,
added to as the project progresses, and published upon the project's
conclusion.
Recognizing project efforts and impact Information about this project
has been widely disseminated during this year in various venues.
It was featured in the June 2001 issue of NCHEMS' newsletter and
articles have appeared in all three issues of WCET's Communiqué.
More than 25 presentations discussing this project in the U.S. and
abroad (Brazil, Canada, China, Japan, Germany) have been made before
higher education audiences including such conferences as the Sixth
Annual Teaching in the Community Colleges Online Conference, the
International Council for Open and Distance Education Conference,
the Association of International Education Administrators Conference,
the Council for Higher Education Accreditation Annual Conference,
the NASPA National Conference, and the American Federation of Teachers'
National Higher Education Issues Conference. The project will also
be the focus of a workshop on best practices in services for distance
students to be sponsored by IBM in August 2001. A chapter in a book
on student services to be published by The Society for College and
University Planning in winter 2001 also features the project.
Part B: Progress of Partner Organizations
Kansas State University
Kapi'olani Community College
Regis University
SCT
Kansas State University – submitted by
Mel Chastain
Our role over the past year. At K-State, though all would agree
to a degree of inter-relatedness between all types of advising,
the initial task was to focus on a single aspect of advising, simply
because the global advising environment was too large a task, given
the confines of the grant project. Because academic advising seemed
to us to be at the heart of all interactions between the institution
and the learner, that became our focus. Valuable leadership in making
this determination was provided by the project management team and
the project consultants, following a three-day on-site visit and
debriefing.
The Development Process
Probably the most significant single development since one year
ago was the Kansas State University administrative decision to "locate"
all data bases related to student academic profiles under the authority
of the University Registrar. While a seemingly minor adjustment
to place at the top of the list, information on students enrolled
at K-State could previously be found in seventeen different data
base programs, each with its own access, authentication and verification
process. Using such an environment as a base for providing electronic
digital advising to online learners would assure an early failure
in any proposed system. While the transformation to a single "virtual"
database is still some distance away, the decision represented a
significant step in the right direction.
Other development activities included identifying the varying "types"
of advisors at K-State (full-time professional advisors; part-time
advisors who are also full-time faculty or research professionals;
and departmental or college-level "process" advisors,
who assure a smooth flow of student progress through the academic
and departmental requirements involved in the process). Once the
types were identified, a select group of more than a dozen advisors,
representing each of the types and most of the colleges (including
the Division of Continuing Education) were brought together. The
purpose of the LAAP project was explained, and the task of analyzing
the similarities and differences in the process of providing academic
advising was initiated. Early on, the decision was made that advising
online, or distant learners should be a process which is as identical
as possible to that provided resident learners. (At K-State, 89
percent of the online learners are resident students). The next
major development was to try and build an "esprit de corps"
among the advisors, since their first and most natural inclination
in a group setting was to explain and defend the differences between
their college/department's approach to advising, rather than to
concentrate on the commonalties in the process between academic
units. Finally, involving the National Academic Advising Association
(NACADA) in our efforts was a major development. The NACADA home
office is in Manhattan, KS.
Hurdles and Setbacks
The differences between advising processes was a major difficulty
which had to be overcome if the goal of a single online advising
system were to be realized. After several failed attempts at achieving
consensus, "flow diagram" was developed which described
the general sequence of events through which a learner and an advisor
interact during the matriculation process. Some tinkering and modification
yielded a process for which there was general "buy-in"
from the cluster of advisors.
The next hurdle was comprehending the Unified Modeling Language
(UML) used by computer programmers to describe interactions ("scenarios")
between individuals and "systems" of hardware, software
and data that constitute the information needed by both advisor
and student to successfully navigate the higher education process.
With great help from Burnie Blakeley, a LAAP consultant from IBM,
the process was explained in a way that enabled the K-State advisors
to write "scenarios" for a small sub-set (three or four)
of the forty-plus scenarios that constituted the "common"
interactions between advisor and student, as represented by the
aforementioned flow diagram. Using that sub-set as a guide, the
rest of the scenarios were completed by the campus project coordinator
and circulated to the campus advisors for reaction and modification.
The most significant remaining hurdle is convincing a "volunteer
work force" of advisors who are already full-time employees
to expend the considerable time and energy required to develop this
body of work. Some effort on the part of the project management
team to secure additional funding to support this endeavor is ongoing.
Without additional support, one doubts the chances for a successful
conclusion to the project.
Evaluation Progress
Evaluation comes in two forms: formal evaluation from Karen Paulson,
the NCHEMS third party evaluator; and informal evaluation from the
project consultants. Both are invaluable. Karen's printed summaries
validate what we already know, but are reluctant to correct until
underscored by an unbiased observer. The informal evaluation from
the consultants comes in the form of comparison of our progress
and problems with that of our academic partners in the project.
This process is not only helpful, but provides us with a greatly
needed "reality check." Finally, we're deadline oriented
at K-State, and without the evaluation processes, and the accompanying
"calendar of things to do" from the consultants and project
management team, we'd get nothing done.
Plans for participation in the project over the coming year. The
next step is to submit the UML scenarios to the programmers at K-State,
so they can translate the interactions into the appropriate lines
of program language that will be required of the data base system.
A "build/buy/partner" decision-making matrix will be used
to determine the best way to accomplish each interaction. A budget
will be drawn from that matrix to determine the cost of developing
the system. All along the way, information from each institutional
partner will be shared with the others for validation and comparative
purposes. The final step will be to move the process from breadboard
stage to partial implementation.
Kapi'olani Community College – submitted
by Mike Tagawa
Summary of Activities Year 2000
Last year, the College focused on developing scenarios for orientation.
This was in part due to recommendations from the project group that
identified orientation, advising, and tutoring as priority areas
for supplementary online services at the College. Fundamental concepts
from the scenario development process proved to be useful, as it
enabled the College to identify fundamental areas of functionality
that were desired with respect to orientation. These efforts also
suggested that these basic elements would be applicable to advising
and tutoring. Some of these critical elements identified in the
project included authentication, messaging, tracking, assessment,
and content (learning objects) development systems. A major conclusion
of these efforts were that these services a) were applicable to
all students, and b) should service a student over a student's entire
academic lifespan.
Toward the end of the year, funding for development of an online
job placement service became available and elements of the scenario
development process were employed to develop the project. This lead
to rapid development of the project which is expected to go online
during Summer 2001. At the same time, the College embarked on planning
for a one-stop student services center that will ultimately deliver
services through traditional methods (phone, face to face, mail)
that would work in conjunction with the online services being planned.
These planning efforts also made it clear that our current information
technology and telecommunications infrastructure were less than
ideal.
The major challenges to the project remain as follows:
- integration of services with the core student information system
(SIS) remains a challenge due to a desire to implement a system-wide
SIS while still operating with a legacy campus-based SIS;
- inability to adopt a portal system to house these elements due
to a desire to develop the portal in-house at the system level;
and
- an aging technology infrastructure and limited technical support.
Summary of Directions 2001
In 2001, a partnership decision was made to shift development efforts
away from orientation toward tutoring – but still employing
the same functional elements identified with online orientation.
It is desirable for the tutoring module to consist of assessment,
delivery, tracking, and messaging elements. The objective of the
module will be to increase the likelihood that students enter a
program with prerequisite competencies (rather than just a prerequisite
course).
At the same time, to address some of the problematic issues, decisions
have been made to participate in development of LDAP directory services
with the system office (to support authentication and messaging
for a broader student population), enhancing the capabilities of
the legacy SIS to integrate the web services being planned, to continue
the upgrade of the campus' network and telecommunications systems,
and slowly providing services online (reference librarian, limited
counseling, job placement, admissions, and registration) – either
through in-house or through system-wide development.
Regis University – submitted by Ellen
Waterman
The single most challenging thing over the last year has been to
find the appropriate focus for our own online student service project.
During the first year, the greatest interest was to build a portal
that would organize access to a wide range of student services.
This came to be called "Orientation" and received with
interest and support by the wider campus community.
When we were introduced to the UML approach, it fast became evident
that to attempt to build the entire portal within the scope of the
project was impossible. In a effort to satisfy the needs of the
project as a whole while maintaining our strategic intent, Regis
regrouped. We more narrowly defined our segment of the project as
an intervention between the "Tutoring" entry components
that Kapi'olani has built and the Academic Advising functions from
Kansas State. This point of intervention would be to prepare students
for Academic Advising. The intent is to provide the opportunity
for students to come into the advising setting with some routine
tasks already accomplished. In particular, these student services
would provide access to Regis systems and also access to certain
preliminary information in preparation to that meeting with the
Advisor.
The goal, then, of the online service that Regis has built is to
allow advisors to be use time in advising sessions addressing a
student's own individual needs and choices for academic work, rather
than routine tasks covered in the past. It is to eliminate the repetitive
information-giving that took critical time in the face-to-face meeting
with a student. By providing core background information, and access
to an online functionality that will allow him/her to gain systems
authorization to email, Regis general online resources, and library,
the time used to do these tasks with Advisors will be freed up to
use in direct interaction to meet the individual needs of each student.
On May 2, we presented the current LAAP project progress to the
Regis Organizational Improvement group. They are the key administrative
body at the University, and represent all segments in all schools.
The discussion about the scenario building process was received
with great interest by the group, and they are anxious to see the
implementation phase begin.
At this time, we are finalizing those, and building the flow diagram
that will lead into the Kansas State process. Five members of the
Core Visioning Team have been very active in this phase of the project:
Richard Boorom of Marketing and Admissions, Tom Riedel of the library,
Sheila Carlon of the School for Health Care Professions, Cynthia
DiScipio of the undergraduate advising faculty, and Ellen Waterman,
project director. The next step for us is to complete the flow diagram
that gives the context for the scenarios. We have had the VP for
Information Technology on campus participate in our meetings this
entire year. He is skeptical of the funds available to accomplish
this implementation in the time frame we desire, but we are hopeful
that we can facilitate that process anyway in the next 10 months.
SCT – submitted by Peggi Munkittrick
Throughout the timeframe of this reporting period, SCT has continued
to research the evolution of online student services in American
Higher Education. The need for this information was clearly supported
by the research done by the Western Cooperative prior to this report
period, and was further validated by doctoral level research and
emerging market demands in higher education. This information was
shared via several conference presentations (Innovations, SETA,
and Summit), as well as in focus groups and during strategic meetings
held at SCT Headquarters in Malvern.
A wide range of online student services were identified and placed
into four service categories: Administrative, Academic, Social,
and Personal. The following are examples of some of the identified
online student services:
- Administrative
admissions, financial aid, registration, records management, graduation,
and bookstore
- Academic
academic assessment, advising and testing, remediation, access
to and training in the use of library and other learning resources,
tutoring, academic testing, and computer services (including access
to technical support)
- Social
such as honor societies, clubs, discipline interest groups, and
recreational opportunities (and other ways of establishing a sense
of community among learners)
- Personal
diagnostic testing and assessment, counseling (both personal and
career), placement services, and health services
Additionally, SCT began to identify a number of vendors that were
beginning to emerge in this space [see below]. As a result of this
work it became clear that there would be a vast number of applications
required to meet the needs of online learners. It also became clear
that SCT would not be able develop applications to meet all these
needs within a reasonable amount of time. SCT then proposed an alternative
approach to that originally described in the grant.
SCT proposed to develop an integration platform that would allow
multiple service application providers to establish real time data
integration with the student records maintained by SCT's student
information system. The result of this would be a larger number
of services being made available to learners in a shorter amount
of time than the original approach would have allowed. It would
also provide real-time synchronization of the data maintained by
the service application providers and the data maintained by SCT's
student information system.
SCT worked with the LAAP grant partners to refine this approach
– including the requirement that the technology be standards-based
so it could be used with other student information systems –
and in March successfully demonstrated the viability of this approach
with the release of the SCT Connection for WebCT (integration technology).
Though this first release announced integration to a specific course
management system (WebCT), it is actually a demonstration of an
integration technology that will allow multiple vendors to integrate
to an administrative system using a message broker and message gateway.
The next steps in this approach are to work with the LAAP grant
partners to prioritize the vendors that can provide the most important
services within each of the categories identified. SCT will work
to develop the best approach to help those vendors prepare their
end of the transaction set using this standard integration approach.
Using this strategy, we believe that we will be able to quickly
and efficiently bring to the market a wide range of integrated online
student services that will not only meet the demands of learners
today, but into the future as well.
| Academic.com |
Amazon |
America's Learning Exchange |
Ariba |
| Barnes and Noble |
BayLearning |
Blackboard |
Border Books |
| Britannica.com |
Campus Engine |
CAS |
Collegeclub.com |
| CommerceOne |
Common Find |
Community of Science |
Convene.com |
| CourseMetric |
Docent |
Dynix |
eCollege |
| Eduprise |
Embark |
Endeavor Information Systems |
EPOS |
| Epylon |
eWerkz |
Ex Libris |
Expedia.com |
| FastWeb.com |
Follett Book Store |
Harcourt e-Learning |
Higher Markets |
| highwired.com |
Homework Helper |
HorizonLive |
HotJobs.com |
| iBallot |
IBS (Interactive Business Systems) |
Infusion Group |
InnoPak |
| Innovative Interfaces |
intraLearn |
Intramurals.com (Genius Labs) |
iParq |
| JobTrac.com |
KnowledgeFirst.com |
Laureate |
LivePerson.com |
| LowestFares.com |
MBS |
Merlot |
MindEdge |
| Monster.com |
NCS Pearson |
NetLibrary |
Nuventiv |
| OpenMind |
Pacific Light Technologies |
Participate.com |
PowerPark |
| ProcureNet |
Promethius |
QuestionMark / Perception |
Saba |
| Semtor |
Simplexis |
SinoCDN |
SIRSI |
| SkillSoft |
slumberJ |
Smarthinking |
Study247.com |
| Sylvan Learning |
TLM |
Travelocity.com |
Tutor.com |
| Tutornet.com |
University Access |
University Planet |
Utahgroove.com |
| Uzone.com |
VarsityBooks.com |
Versity.com |
Vidyah |
| WebMD |
Windstar |
WiZeUp.com |
WWSL (web laboratory) |
| XanEdu |
XAP |
Yahoo!Groups |
|
Appendix A
Examples of Unified Modeling Language and Scenario Process and
Resources
Figure 1: Institution Partitions and the Student
Life Cycle
The KSU Student Life Cycle
The KSU student's life cycle is portrayed by the progression
from Pearl (the Prospect) through Annie (the Alumnus) in the above
diagram. For this exercise, we are concentrating on just the "serve"-the-student
(middle) portion of the horizontally depicted student life cycle
and we are concentrating only upon Frank (the Freshman) and Matty
(the Matriculator) as representative "actors." We are
assuming that a similar set of actors could be described for the
Continuing Education and Graduate levels of education offerings,
which are represented by the bars and the top and bottom of the
above diagram.
Figure 2: Scenarios Record Interactions across System
Boundary;
Applications and IT Infrastructure Support the Scenarios
Education experts specify the dialog that they would like to see
between the actor and the system by recording pairs of interactions
from the actor to the system and from the system back to the actor.
These steps are numbered in the diagram above so that odd-numbered
steps originate from the actor and even-numbered ones originate
from the system. The mechanisms for generating the system-originated
exchanges must be figured out later by computer specialists.
For collaborative environments (even among these unlike institutions
within the LAAP project), a set of scenarios that define interactions
can be applied across the institutions since no application or infrastructure
details are being specified within the scenario recording. The scenario
is from "the view of the actor" in an outside-in manner
so that details of the inner workings of the system are purposefully
ignored. Such abstracted levels of specification promote sharing
among institutions.
Figure 3: Example Scenario: Interactions between
Actor and System
This scenario details the serialization of steps wherein the actor
and the system alternately communicate with each other. This example
scenario shows the interactions necessary to accomplish an advising
appointment for a student. The scenario does not describe the mechanisms
by which the advising system is able to respond; it only describes
the response.
In the second section of the chart, the campus IT staff will recommend
options for technology solutions supporting the specified functionality.
These include using existing campus software, buying a new technology
solution or outsourcing, developing a new campus solution, or partnering
with another entity in the creation of a solution.
Resources
Unified Modeling Language
Quatrani, T. (2000, Addison-Wesley). Visual Modeling with Rational
Rose 2000 and UML. 256 pp. This book contains a single case
study example, spread through all the chapters, executed using UML
and taken from the field of academia (course registration). Although
the Rose modeling tool from Rational Software Corporation was used
to illustrate UML in this book, other modeling tools (for example,
Visio) also are available and the UML language can even be used
in a handwritten fashion without any software tools. Much more UML
information can be found at
www.rational.com since the Rational Software Company initially
sponsored the development of UML before control was transferred
to the Open Systems Foundation (OSF) consortium.
Scenario Building Schwartz, P. (1996, Currency Doubleday).
The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain
World. 272 pp. This book describes, in an excellent manner,
the basic principles of large-scale scenarios based on several actual
case studies that are easy to understand. These same principles
can be extrapolated downward to the small-scale scenarios through
which the LAAP institutions are able to communicate superbly in
this project.
Updated
12/10/2002
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