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Transcript of Connected Learning
Solutions
WCET
presents a Webcast Series: Providing Student Services to Distance
Learners
PAT:
Hello, and welcome to the WCET
webcast series, “Providing Student Services to Distance Learners.”
I am Pat Shea, the Assistant Director for WCET and I’m coming to
you today from our east coast office in Summit, New Jersey. Also
joining us from WCET’s headquarters in Boulder, Colorado, is my
colleague Sue Armitage. Hi. Sue. I see you’re saying it’s pretty
cold and gray there today.
SUE:
Oh, it’s terrible. I mean, I looked
at the forecast. Snow is not predicted, but it’s a very cold, gray
day. I’d like to say hello to everybody who’s joined us today. Looks
like we’ve also folks from Oregon, Montana, Pennsylvania and if
other folks would like to tell us where they’re from, please go
ahead and enter that where it says “send a message.” Just type in
where you are, hit enter and it’ll show up in the chat box.
LAAP
Project Demonstration: SCT’s Connected Learning Solutions
PAT:
I see we have a couple of members
from Arizona with us today. Our special guest is Peggi Munkittrick,
SCT’s Senior Director of Teaching and Learning Strategy at SCT in
Towanda, Pennsylvania. Welcome, Peggi.
PEGGI:
Thank you, Pat. I’m really happy to be here
today.
SUE:
Just so we can get an idea about
you in the audience, but, mostly we’d like to find out how familiar
you are with this webcast environment. If you have participated
in a WC webcast before, please click the green “yes” button —
you see it’s sort of in the lower right hand corner of my picture
— click “yes” if you have participated in a webcast before,
or “no” if you have not. And that will give us an idea about how
much direction we need to provide you to be able to participate
in the webcast.
So go ahead and click now,
and you’ll see, I just clicked “yes” and a “Y” came up by my name
in the box of names to the left.
PAT:
Well, during today’s session, we
invite you also to make comments related to this presentation in
the chat box. Many of you are experts in this field of integrating
technologies with student information systems and using other types
of third party services. And so this is a good opportunity to share
your knowledge and experiences with other people in the audience.
If you do have connectivity
problems during this presentation, please click on the “help” button
and send an email message to tech support, and someone from U Live
and Learn will be in contact with you.
SUE:
And I can tell by the quick tabulation
in the gray bar down at the bottom right, we have eight people who
said “yes” they have participated and three who said “no.” So I
think we’ve got a pretty good level of comfort in knowing how to
participate in the webcast.
One thing that may be new
to people — in the black bar there’s a little icon that says
“IM,” that’s for “Instant Messaging.” If you click that, you pick
someone who’s name you see in the box and your message will go only
to that person. I’d also like to mention a quirk of Internet technology.
This webcast is not a television program where all the content —
that’s the voice and visuals — is broadcast in one stream.
Instead, our voice and visuals are broken up into packets, so travel
the Internet backbone at different rates and reassemble on your
computer. So if what you see and hear don’t match up exactly, please
be patient knowing that it’s our intent that they will all align
shortly. But everybody’s on a different connectivity system so probably
everybody’s going to have a slightly different experience, in the
webcast anyway.
LAAP
Project Partners/Deliverables
PAT:
Okay, thanks, Sue. And I’d like
to take this opportunity, too, to thank our technology sponsor and
webcast producer, U Live and Learn, Denise Easton and John Pine,
help us bring you this monthly webcast series, and we really appreciate
all of their efforts.
This webcast series is now
focussing on our LAAP Project, “Beyond the Administrative Core:
Creating Web-based Student Services for Online Learners,” which
is funded by the US Department of Education. In July we heard from
Burnie Blakeley, who helped the LAAP Project partners begin creating
their new web-based student services from a technical point of view.
Over the last three months,
we’ve heard from each of the institutional partners and now we’re
hearing from our corporate partner. So those four partners in the
project are Kapi’olani Community College, which has about seven
thousand students, and it’s one of seven community colleges in the
University of Hawaii system; Kansas State University which is a
large land grant university with more than twenty thousand students;
Regis University is a private Jesuit institution located in Denver,
Colorado, and it has about ten thousand enrolments in its School
for Professional Studies which was a target audience for this project;
and then SCT and we’re going to hear all about their approach today
from Peggi.
The schools are very different
in size and admission and the types of students they serve, and
in addition each of them has a different student information system,
and when we began this project none of them had an SCT system. So
our big challenge was to find a way to help one another through
the process of designing new services when we didn’t have all the
same commonalities. There are four deliverables in a three-year
project which ends at the end of this month. They are commercial
solutions for student services developed by SCT, a set of home-grown
solutions developed by the institutional partners, a set of guidelines
for other campuses developing student services, and case studies
tracking the changes that occur as a result of implementing new
web-based services.
WCET:
The Cooperative advancing the effective use of technology in higher
education
For those of you that are
not familiar with WCET, it is a cooperative of higher education
institutions, agencies, non-profit organizations and corporations
involved in distance learning. And our focus is on advancing the
effective use of technology in higher education, and you can see
some information about us now on the screen, and I hope you will
visit our website to learn more. We just had our annual conference
this last month in Denver, Colorado, and we had several sessions
that focussed on online student services and the slides and other
materials from those session are now up on our website, so you might
want to check those out.
LAAP
Project Demonstration: SCT’s Connected Learning Solutions
And now it’s time to tell
you a little bit more about Peggi. Peggi has twenty-two years experience
in the education field, sixteen of them using distance education
technology. She is a skilled administrator of distance education
programs. Peggi implemented compressed video conferencing and web-based
programs for Marywood University which is in Pennsylvania. Is that
right, Peggi?
PEGGI:
That’s correct. Scranton, Pennsylvania.
PAT:
And that’s where she was the Director
of Distance Education. She joined SCT in August 1999 as SCT’s Senior
Director of Teaching and Learning Strategy. And she plays a pivotal
role there in defining SCT’s connected learning strategy and in
contributing to SCT’s vision for an e-learning infrastructure.
Peggi serves on the Electronic
Student Services Advisory Board for WCET’s EduTools Project, and
on the WCET Steering Committee as the Corporate Vice-Chair. She
also remains active in K-12, serving as the president of the Towanda
Area School District Board of Education. Peggi holds an MF in Instructional
Technology from Marywood University , as well as a Masters and Bachelors
Degree in Education from Mansfield University . She is currently
pursuing her doctorate in Educational Administration at Temple University
. We’re very pleased to have you here, Peggi, to learn all about
what SCT has been doing in this project.
Agenda
PEGGI:
Thank you, Pat. The agenda today, as you can
see on the screen, is first, I’m going to talk about SCT’s participation
in the LAAP grant and talk about how that shaped our our vision
for an e-education infrastructure. And then after I talk about that
work, I’m going to actually share what we have contributed as a
participant in this grant in terms of the e-education applications,
the student service applications that we have brought and are bringing
to the market. And then, finally, some of the lessons learned that
we’ve learned, but also been able to share with the other participants
in this project. And of course, we’ll close with any questions or
comments that the rest of you might have.
“Companies
spent the 20 th century managing efficiencies. They must spend the
21 st century managing experiences.”
So the first thing I want
to share with you as we start this is sort of our guiding principle
for how we stay focussed on the things that we believe are most
important. And I’ll read this to you first: “Companies spent the
20 th century managing efficiencies. They must spend the 21 st century
managing experiences.”
Now, I have found this particular
quote particularly compelling, and for those of you that are familiar
with SCT, you recognize that we have built a strong reputation on
our ability to develop software and bring to market software for
higher education that enables them to manage their business processes,
their back office requirements. And so that was a way of managing
efficiencies. And we positioned ourselves very well doing that and
served the market very well.
However, the market,
higher education, is changing, and as such we need to do the same.
And what we’ve recognized is it’s really no longer about managing
those efficiencies and just offering back office administrative
solutions to higher education. In fact, we really need to think
about how we provide a total solution that meets both academic and
administrative needs of higher education, and enables the end user,
whether that be a faculty member or a student, staff or administration,
alumni, whomever your constituents might be, that enables them to
be successful and provides them with an experience that will cause
them to return and take advantage of the services and the information
that you want to offer. So we really let that be our guiding principle
and I found that to be a particularly powerful statement that I
wanted to share with all of you today.
Initial
Challenges
As Pat indicated, there were
some initial challenges when we first began this particular project.
And the first, as she mentioned previously, was that none of the
partner institutions were using SCT solutions. In fact, none of
those institutions were even using the same ERP. And by ERP I mean
the back office administrative system, whether that be a student
information system, financial aid, human resource, finance, whatever
that might be to manage those administrative tasks for an institution.
None of these were using either an SCT system or even the same system
between them.
There was also some initial
distrust of SCT and vendors in general. And that was based upon
an experience that said that they didn’t trust that we had the ability
to offer non-proprietary solutions. So, for example, when I sat
at the table with our three institutional partners, they could not
understand and, in fact, it was a struggle for us to recognize how
we would work together. Because typically, what a vendor does, is
they offer solutions that expand the value proposition of their
own market segment. So, you know, we typically don’t bring to market
something that’s going to work with a competitive system. Right?
So that was the way it used to be. And, again, none of them had
an SCT system, so that they really did distrust our ability to be
able to offer them something that would be valuable for them.
There was also an existing
frustration with campus solutions that didn’t talk to each other.
So, for example, they had systems in place at that time, student
information systems, that did not talk with their e-learning systems.
And by e-learning systems I’m referring to the WebCTs and the Blackboards
and others that offer that type of functionality. So those were
two separate systems on a campus and they were facing a very real
world, where they had to maintain those two technologies, maintain
those two databases, often required different sign-ons, different
passwords, different URLs. And so they were very frustrated because
if that was a nightmare to manage those two systems, we would begin
thinking about all the other systems that would offer services that
they wanted to provide to their students and faculty. It really
became a very daunting task to consider.
PAT:
And, Peggi, just to kind of emphasize
that, at Kansas State University, for example, they had student
data in seventeen different databases that didn’t necessarily talk
to one another.
PEGGI:
Uh huh. And just to emphasize that a point
further, we have a client right now that has one hundred and forty-four
different databases. And we’re working with them to make sure that
they all talk to each other. So, at that time, the systems didn’t.
And so that was a challenge. And so, you know, just bringing student
service applications to the market, for example, just giving them
another twenty student service applications, was not going to solve
that problem. In fact, it made the problem worse. So that was an
initial challenge. Even if we were to bring these student services
to the market, these student service applications, the fact of the
matter was are institutions going to want to take advantage of those
when it only made the problem worse? When you talk about integration.
SCT
Connection for WebCT
So, I went back to Philadelphia,
which is actually, Malvern, where our home office is, and we began
to brainstorm about what we could do to help alleviate that and
knit that core basic problem of integration and interoperability.
And what you’re seeing now is what we first brought to the market
and we call it the SCT Connection for WebCT. And if you look on
the far right of this picture, in the orange box, that’s where the
SCT Banner or Plus student information system would reside. And
does reside. On the far left, in the blue box, is where WebCT Campus
Edition would be.
So as we started thinking
about how can we make an e-learning system talk to a student information
system, or an ERP, of course, we looked at our own system, which
is Banner and/or Plus, and then looked at initially WebCT to kind
of see how this would work. So there’s your two separate systems,
your orange box and your blue box, and what we did then was develop
what you now see in the middle, in the yellow. And that’s a middleware
technology that’s based on standards and, in fact, this is based
on the IMS standard which I’ll talk about a little bit more about
in the presentation.
But, imagine, if you will,
this works very much like your post office works in delivering your
mail. So what this technology does, this technology, and that in
the middle, is that it actually takes messages from the Banner information
system. Those messages occur when you change a piece of information
in the database, okay? So when that piece of information is changed,
there is a trigger, it triggers an event, and that event is picked
up by this message gateway and delivered to the application that
cares that that piece of information was changed. And in this case,
it’s WebCT. WebCT picks up that piece of information and applies
it to its own database. And that works in the reverse as well. So
much like a post office does, you can send mail or you can receive
mail and the goal of the post office is to make sure it’s delivered
accurately and as quickly as possible to the people who need to
have it, okay? So this was our first attempt at trying to make two
disparate systems talk to each other. And we were very successful
in doing that. We brought it to market and the first thing that
we had to do — it’s bulleted out on the slide for you —
is that students are successfully registered, for example, in the
Banner or Plus system, it automatically sends a message to WebCT
and they are added to the roster within the WebCT course environment.
It also gives them immediate access to that e-learning environment.
So immediately upon successful registration a student can go into
their course environment and begin to review the syllabus. It also
synchronizes in real time the drop/add process. So, as students
drop or add a course, it will automatically keep updated in real
time that course roster.
It also enables in WebCT
for faculty members to actually submit their grades, so they can
go into the WebCT environment, track grades throughout the duration
of the course and then, at mid-term or final, they submit that grade,
it’s passed over to that middleware technology, that SCT Luminis
Message Broker, and it is then delivered to the SCT Banner or Plus
system where it’s processed and posted. Okay? That happens in real
time, eliminates the manual data re-entry, eliminates downloading
and colouring in bubble sheets, eliminates the need for the technology
people to worry about passwords and separate URLs and single and
multiple user IDs, all of that, because it tracks all of it automatically
and in real time.
Now, we brought this to market,
as I said. It was very successful. We’ve already licensed over a
hundred and fifty or have sold a hundred and fifty licenses to this
technology. And so we’re real happy about that because it really
was a proof of concept, whether using standard space technology
you could get two disparate applications talking to each other.
But our goal was always not to stop at two. We recognized that there
were many applications that campuses had that they needed to have
talk to their student information system.
PAT:
Peggi, one thing. I was just thinking
about that and one of the early ideas that SCT had about this was
that there would be an increasing number of institutions that wanted
to collaborate in the delivery of either programs online or services
to students, and they would need some kind of technology that would
allow them to exchange data from unlike systems in real time, and
so this responded to that early vision.
PEGGI:
Absolutely. And if you look on the next slide
coming up...
New
SCT Connections
PAT:
It would be interesting at this
point to ask how many campuses out there have an SCT system.
PEGGI:
Absolutely. If you’re using an SCT student
information system, or in fact, any of the SCT products, if you
would click “yes” and, of course, if you’re using any other system,
including a home-grown or legacy system, click “no.”
SUE:
And if people don’t know, they
can click the question mark.
PEGGI:
So while those responses are coming in, let
me explain the slide as you see it. And I’m actually going to talk
about that left hand side first, and then we’ll talk about exactly
the point that you just made, Pat.
For example, our vision was
always that this technology would support multiple campus applications.
So if you look again back on the left, you see that I now have three
campus applications. They could be anything. It could be a library,
it could be a parking system, it could be a bookstore. It could
be any type of service application that you would be using at your
campus. And if that application had the ability to communicate with
standards-based messages, those IMS messages, then there would be
nothing to technically prevent them from being able to use that
same middleware technology and communicate with the back office
system, in this case, a Banner or Plus.
Our vision was always to
be able to support those multiple campus applications. But what
Pat made a point about, it’s very true, is because that middleware
was based on standard technology, then it could also be potentially
supportive of multiple student information systems as well.
PEGGI:
You’re exactly right, though, Pat. If every
campus had a different student information system and they wanted
to talk to, let’s say library system, or they wanted to be able
to exchange messages between themselves, then that technology should
be able to support that, because, again, it’s just like a post office.
It can take that message from any one of those systems and be able
to deliver it to any other institution or any other application
that cared about that particular message.
PAT:
So if we’d had this at the beginning
of our project, we could’ve all worked together in a different way.
PEGGI:
That’s very true.
SUE: I
think we have some polling results — just one. A member of
our audience says they have an SCT system. The others don’t have
one or don’t know.
PEGGI:
Okay. Very interesting. Very interesting. Well,
for those of you who don’t use an SCT system, I’m particularly glad
that you were able to join us on this call and hear more about what
SCT is doing.
New
Challenges
Okay. Well, we brought this
to market and sure enough there were new challenges that we now
had to face. One was that we recognized that it didn’t fully satisfy
the intent of the FIPSE LAAP grant. So, for example, one of the
things that we were trying to do, where we were hoping to do as
part of this grant, was to bring to the market a suite of student
services. Well, certainly this technology enabled an institution
to take advantage of offering in a very interoperable way that suite
of student services. But it didn’t actually bring that suite of
student services to the market. So it didn’t really fully satisfy
the intent.
The other challenge was that
we still had two years remaining in the life cycle of the grant.
So we had done this in our first year. And so we have two more years
where we could explore further how we could support higher education
in offering student services in an integrated way.
Finally, as a company, we
were facing the challenge that we were transforming ourselves as
we were trying to meet these evolving market demands. So higher
education was becoming more and more attuned to the need for integrated
systems and the need for delivering services to all of their students.
Not just distance ed students but for their traditional on-campus
student population as well.
And as students became more
demanding of the services they wanted access to, higher education
institutions were becoming more demanding of us and vendors like
us in terms of the technology that we could offer them in order
to accomplish and meet those needs.
So we were needing to transform
ourselves. We were no longer an ERP company. And we really had to
look at what was it really that we needed to think about in order
to bring higher education, the total solution that they needed,
to meet all of the demands of all of their constituents, not only
on the administrative side of the house, but on the academic side
as well.
SCT’s
e-Education Infrastructure: A User-Centric Approach
And so, what we were able
to do was to go back to the table and talk about where we needed
to be moving as a company and where we needed to be moving in terms
of how we offered solutions to the market. And what we developed
was input from the western cooperatives and the institutional partners
in this grant was the e-Education infrastructure.
Now, before I go and explain
this particular graphic, I want everyone on this call to recognize
that this is a vision for how SCT needs to think about how we bring
solutions to the market for higher education. We really need to
look at that whole big picture and how it all fits together. Each
of you, as you look at this, really should promote a level of discussion
on your campuses about how you set priorities for your technology
planning. So I do not want you to walk away from the next few minutes
of this conversation thinking that you have to do each and every
thing that I talk about in this picture.
What it means to do is prompt
you to have those kinds of discussions at your campus to talk about
what is the mission of your institution, what are the important
services that you need to provide to your faculty and to your students
and how are you going to prioritize them?
PAT:
Peggi, we might want to point out
here that your slides are actually on our site. So if people are
having trouble reading this, they can get a copy of the slides later.
PEGGI:
Absolutely. And thank you for reminding me
of that.
SUE:
The slides are currently up at
the wcet.info site. And just follow the links to the LAAP Student
Services Project.
PEGGI:
Okay. So the first layer that you need to think
about in the e-Education infrastructure is where you think about
the type of constituents who are going to take advantage of the
services that you want to provide.
For the purposes of this
grant, we were really focused on students. But what SCT recognizes
and what all of you recognize is that it doesn’t stop there, that
once you make a service available, there are all kinds of people
who might want to take advantage of that service or get access to
the information that you want to provide online.
You really need to think
about who are the populations that you’re trying to serve. So beside
your students, you know, it’s the faculty. It’s administration and
staff. It’s prospective students. It’s alumni. And the list goes
on and I’m sure that this particular list is not comprehensive.
But any time you think about
any particular service that you want to offer, you really need to
think from all of these different perspectives, you know, is this
a service that they might want to take advantage of as well, and
does that have implications about resources, okay?
PAT:
I think, Peggi, that’s a lesson we
learned at the campuses, in this project, is that we initially thought
of the students as being our primary audience, and in a way they
are the primary audience. But sometimes designing new student services
means designing new electronic tools for the student service personnel
so that they can provide better services to students.
PEGGI:
That’s absolutely true. And what we’ve learned,
and you can tell from my title – I’m the Senior Director for Teaching
and Learning Strategy – what we found is that there’s really no
service that we’ve discovered that that you can offer to students
that your faculty aren’t also going to want access to. It’s just
very limited, or an advisor or a student development officer, you
know. But there are always going to be in any given service multiple
people who are interested, maybe in a different way and we’ll talk
about that more as I talk about exactly the services that SCT brought
to market.
In the next layer is the
presentation infrastructure. Now, in the presentation infrastructure,
this is where you start thinking about exactly what is that visual
presentation, the visual representation of your campus online. This
is also where you think about role-based access for your constituents.
In the case of a portal,
do you want, when people come to your site, that it recognizes their
role? And then is able then to offer them different information
or different levels of access based on whether they’re a faculty
member, whether they’re a parent of a student, whether they’re a
local community member, etcetera.
You also want to think about
whether this presentation layer needs to be personalized. Do you
want it to recognize people by name? Okay, so not only by role,
but specifically by who they are.
You obviously want it to
be secure, so you need to think about security issues. Single sign-on,
and what levels of access that they’re actually going to be given
to what information.
And another really important
piece of this infrastructure to think about, the presentation infrastructure,
is this whole concept of customization. So do you want to be able
to give the people who come to your site the ability to customize
their experience in some way? Okay? So can they actually sign up
to receive different pieces of information or request access to
particular groups?
So those kinds of services
become important to think about in terms of the level of customization
you want to offer to people who would come to your site.
Then we get to the middle
layer which is the application layer. This is where a great deal
of my time is spent at SCT. This is where we really start to think
about what are all the different kinds of applications/services
that might fit into this technology or this e-Education infrastructure.
And we’ve actually identified four major categories of applications
And this is a direct result of the work we did with the Western
Cooperative and this grant. What we found is that, for the most
part, it fits into these four broad categories: either academic,
administrative, personal or community. Now, before I talk a little
bit about what types of applications would fit under each of those
categories, I want you to also take note of those blue arrows, because
those blue arrows mean that that list goes on and on. It is not
exhaustive.
Now, under personal, there’s
not just three. There are many. So I’ve given you samples of what
might fit under each of those categories, but at your own institution
– and this is where part of that discussion needs to take place
– you will decide for yourselves, under each of those categories,
are there applications or services or information that we should
be providing in an online format to our faculty, to our students,
to parents, to whomever? Okay? And what should they be? Do they
clearly tie to our mission and our culture? Okay? And then how do
we prioritize them, then? Based on that. So this is where that discussion
really becomes rich and actually becomes a critical part of the
dialogue that should be happening on your campuses.
So, in the academic category,
this would be those applications that directly support the teaching
and learning process where the primary user would be a faculty or
a student. Okay? And we’ll talk more about examples of these later
on.
In the administrative category
this is typically where SCT has built its reputation up ‘til now.
So this is your ERP system. Your student information system, your
financial aid, your human resource system, those kinds of things
that you want to make available, maybe more to your administrators
and your staff.
In the personal category,
these are the kinds of applications that a single user might want
to take advantage of. So I, Peggi Munkittrick, want to access a
counselling resource at your institution. That’s sort of a one-on-one
kind of experience, and it’s something that I want that’s personal
to me. So it would fall into that category.
In the last category, community,
this is where you provide services that enable students to be able
to engage in the social life of your institution. So where can I
actually meet with others in my peer group and participate in some
activity or some club. So, generally, this is a many-to-many kind
of organization or service that you want to provide.
PAT:
This might also be, like, where
your alumni fit.
PEGGI:
Absolutely. Or at least, all in my applications.
And then shared applications which is the red box that kind of goes
underneath it, classes all of those because these are the kinds
of things that support communication, so your e-mail system and
how you’re going to provide that service to everyone at your institution,
or calendaring, or payment processing. So those kinds of things,
again, that support communication or some sort of technology that
will run across all of the applications and all of the services
that you might want to offer.
This whole section is also
where we really get concerned and pay a lot of attention to how
we support the integration and interoperability of all of these
applications, because again, as you make decisions about which of
these are important at your institution, the secondary question
needs to be how do you make sure that the technology is in place
to support a very tightly integrated system, so that you’re not
managing all of those disparate databases. You know, so the experience,
once again, for your end users is a very seamless, intuitive experience
for them. They don’t care about how many vendors are helping you
to support this environment. They don’t care that they’re in WebCT
or they’re in the SCT self-service products or they’re in a campus
pipeline. They don’t care. They want to know they’re at your institution,
taking advantage of the information and the services that you
are providing to them and that their relationship is with
you, it’s not with us. So that becomes very critical at this layer.
As I’m going to go through
the next three very briefly. The data storage infrastructure is
where you begin talking about the databases that you have on campus
and what your strategy is for choosing and maintaining those databases,
as well as your directory servers, you know, e-mail systems, you
know, etcetera, etcetera. So you do need to think about what the
implications are for those decisions are for at your institution
and plan for those in the future.
Obviously, to support that,
you also need to think about the hardware. Now, when you’re thinking
about your hardware and planning for hardware, you’re thinking of
things like the servers that you’re going to have at your campus,
how you’re going to support desktop use, how many computer labs
do you standardize on a particular type of computer, are you going
to support wireless devices, and do you need to worry about a wireless
network, for example? Speaking of networks, you’ve got to talk about
that. You know, hubs and routers and Internet access and broadband
and all of those kinds of things need to be planned for from an
IT perspective.
And then finally, up the
left hand side of this graphic, is where we really think about the
services that you need to think about offering in order to support
all of this and to ensure that your faculty, your students, your
administrators, your staff, are going to be successful in this online
environment.
Now, when I talk about these
particular services, I’m really talking about the training and the
support that you’re going to give to your users or provide to your
users so that they can be successful. So it might be product training,
to make sure that they’re comfortable with the products and the
tools that you’re going to offer them. But it could be all kinds
of other consulting services as well – academic planning, for example.
So you need to think about — it could be a help desk service
would be another one — so you need to think about what are
all the kinds of services. Another one that was particularly important
at Marywood University is instructional design and being able to
provide instructional design services to our faculty as they were
developing online courses.
So those are the kinds of
things you need to think about how you’re going to support those,
as well. It’s not a piece of computer, it’s a piece of equipment,
right? It’s not a wire, but it’s critically important to everyone’s
overall success.
e-Education
Applications: Academic
So, that’s the e-Education
infrastructure, that’s our vision for how we are thinking about
how all of this needs to fit in terms of how we’re going to bring
solutions to the higher education market. What I want to share with
you now in the next few slides are exactly some of the things we’ve
begun to do to actually meet that vision. And to help you tie back
to that, if you look in the lower right hand corner of this visual
you will see a very small snapshot of that e-Education infrastructure.
And if you look in the middle
section, again, the little box that’s got the purple lines in it,
and right above it there’s a white arrow. So right now I’m going
to share with you some of the things we’ve done to bring some services
to the market that support the academic category of that application
layer. Okay?
So the first thing we did,
and I’ve actually already talked to you about it is in the area
of course management we brought to the market the SCT connection
for WebCT. So working very closely with Campus Pipeline and with
WebCT we were able to take three disparate applications and bring
them into one integrated environment for higher education. And again,
I’ve already mentioned that we’ve licensed over a hundred and fifty
of these. People are up and running and it’s working very successfully
and we’re very pleased about that.
PAT:
And this is the Luminis middle
layer. That makes this possible.
PEGGI:
Yes. Then, we didn’t stop there, though. So
what we also did was we did some work in the area of academic advising.
Now, with academic advising,
and I will stop here just briefly to tell everyone that one of the
things we really had to think about as a company as we talked about
what we were going to do in each of these areas, we had to think
about whether it was a build, buy or a partner decision.
In every case, we had to
think is this a service that we want to build – actually build the
functionality into our existing applications or as a new product?
Do we want to buy or acquire the technology from someplace else
or do we want to partner and, via that partnership, bring that service
to the market?
So those were the kinds of
decisions and discussions we had to have at SCT. In the area of
academic advising we determined that we were going to build the
functionality, and the reason why is because we already had existing
applications — they’re the SCT self-service applications —
that had some academic advising capability in them already.
So, really, what we wanted
to do was to extend that functionality even further. And in this
case we built in “what-if” degree analysis. And with this functionality,
a student’s actually able to come into the online environment and
actually plan out what would happen if they were to change their
major. So if instead of being a Business Administration Major, they
wanted to be an Education Major, they actually could play that game
out online and see exactly what it would mean in terms of their
program plan. So they could see exactly how the courses that they’ve
already taken would map in that new major. And so they could actually
do that any number of times.
This became an example of
a tool that was not only particularly useful to the student but
also became very useful to the faculty advisor as well, because
they could do the same thing. They could go in for their advisees
and actually look at a “what-if” degree analysis in terms of making
an advising recommendation for a degree or major changes.
PAT:
Peggi, I have to tell you that
this is a very popular new application at my daughter’s campus that
happens to have an SCT system. She called about six weeks or so
ago to say, “Hey, Mom, we’ve got this great new thing here where
we can run these ‘what-ifs’.” And I think we’re now on the fourth
major that she’s decided upon using this system.
PEGGI:
And what’s really nice about it is that you
can play that as much as you want. It doesn’t change your major.
It just gives you additional information to think about.
And, of course, in some cases,
we have students who actually then go in and change their majors.
But, anyway, I’m glad to hear that. Thanks, Pat.
The other area that we’ve
worked on is in assessment. In this particular case, we’ve chosen
to partner. We’ve partnered with a company called NuVentive. And
with NuVentive we’re bringing to market a digital portfolio application.
And with this digital portfolio now any individual at your institution
can take advantage of creating as many portfolios as they would
wish and any number or variety of portfolios, and actually use them
to manage, to store, to document all of their personal and professional
learning achievements over a lifetime. So not only for the time
that they’re at your institution but they could start this at any
time before and carry it on even after they leave your institution,
and be able to not only manage those achievements but also have
the ability to give access to anyone that they feel is relevant
in terms of being able to review and/or evaluate any of the documentation
or the pieces of learning evidence that they’ve placed within their
portfolio.
An example of this is, as
Pat had mentioned earlier, I’m in a doctoral program at Temple University.
I’m actually ABD status — I’m working on my dissertation now.
And so I’m using this portfolio system for my dissertation. And
not only have I placed, you know, the progress I’m making on my
dissertation, I’m tracking within the portfolio, but I’ve given
access then to my portfolio to my dissertation committee. So they’re
able to come in whenever they want and see what I’m doing, see what
progress I’m making, make comment, provide evaluation, and it works
as a very nice communication vehicle between us.
At the same time, I’ve also
given access to my mother who lives in North Carolina and thinks
that she needs to know what I’m doing on my dissertation as well.
PAT:
Of course. Peggi, we probably should
point out here that while the “what-if” degree analysis is a component
or proprietary to SCT, that the assessment module is not.
PEGGI:
That’s correct. Since we partnered with NuVentive
to bring that to market, it is available to SCT clients as a stand-alone
application, though obviously we also offer the value-add opportunity
to have it integrated with the Banner or Plus student information
system. But its value is still strong for any other institution
regardless of the student information system they’re using. Okay?
It truly again, because it’s the end user, it’s controlled by the
student or the faculty member who is maintaining that portfolio,
that person and this application doesn’t care what student information
database you’re using.
e-Education
Applications: Administrative
PEGGI:
Okay, so as we move on, and we’re going to
have to move a little more quickly, I’m going to go now into the
administrative category. And in the admissions area, we’ve actually
enhanced again existing functionality to support a Quick Admit process.
And this Quick Admit process actually enables students to come into
the web site, your web environment, your online environment, and
apply for admittance into the institution so that they can register,
typically, for some sort of non-credit or training opportunity that
you’re offering.
So very quickly they can
go through. They can fill out the form. It tracks where they are
in submitting the information that’s needed to make an admissions
decision, and then informs them at the end — typically the
decision — all of this can happen within, like, a three- to
five-minute timeframe — will let them know immediately whether
they have been accepted into the institution based on the rules
that the institution has set forth, and then give them immediate
access to register for some of those non-credit and/or training
applications, and even pay for them online so that they can immediately
get started.
PAT:
Now, I think you mentioned earlier,
though, that it would recognize if students needed to go through
the full admissions process, and would kick them over into that
more extended process, is that right?
PEGGI:
That is true. As they’re going through and
they’re talking, they have to identify, the kinds of things that
they’re interested in doing, and, of course, if they’re looking
for full-time admittance into the freshman program, then that’s
going to kick them over into a different process, and more information
is going to be provided or, going to be required in order to get
to that admissions decision, and that wouldn’t happen then as quickly.
Then you would be tossed over into your formal admissions process.
PAT:
Right. But the Quick Admit is good
for many distance students who are coming back just for enrichment
or, lifelong learning opportunities.
PEGGI:
Some institutions, for example, will enable
you to take up to twelve credits before you have to formally admit
into a program, so this would be a way to enable that to happen
as well. And it would do a check. It would know how many credits
you’ve taken up to that point, and would allow you to take, through
a Quick Admit process, up to those twelve credits. And then once
you tried to sign up for that fifth course, assuming that they’re
all three-credit courses, it would trigger you over, and say, you
have to go through the formal admissions process.
PAT:
Very nice.
PEGGI:
We also enhanced our academic advising functionality.
So now students can go online and request their transcripts. They
can indicate where they want their transcripts to be sent, so it
can be sent directly to them and in an unofficial capacity, or they
can have it sent officially to a graduate school or any other program
that would require an official transcript. They can have it displayed
on the web. If the institution chooses, they can attach fees to
those various methods of delivery and collect those fees online.
We’ve also enhanced functionality
through a degree audit and so now both faculty – and again, this
is a case where students and where, again, faculty also want to
access, to the ability to actually run either a comprehensive or
a summary report about where that student stands in their degree.
So you actually can go online at any time and request that summary
or comprehensive report and get a readout you can print it or you
can view it online, and see exactly how your program plan is going.
You can see where the courses you’ve taken are mapped against courses
that are required. You could see what requirements they fulfil.
You could see what courses or what requirements still exist that
need to be taken. And you can run that as many times as you want.
And it also saves. So you once you’ve run a degree compliance report,
you can save it and view it at your leisure if you so choose, or
pull it back up. When you need to, you can go ahead and run a brand
new report as well.
And then, finally, in the
area of administration, we also have institutional assessment functionality.
This again is a partner of ours. It’s NuVentive once again. This
tool, called TrackThat, enables an institution to manage all of
their academic planning processes and assessment processes for the
entire institution.
Now where this is particularly
important is if your institution is involved with any kind of an
accreditation review, whether that be for institutional accreditation
or program accreditation. This enables you to actually track all
of your goals, your objectives and be able to report, not only internally
on how you’re achieving those as an institution, but also be able
to report to those external agencies who are coming in for those
accreditation reviews.
From an internal perspective,
it’s a particularly nice application because it helps you to make
sure that you have aligned all of the learning activities and it
doesn’t have to be actually restricted even to academic. You can
actually align all of your administrative and academic activities
at an institution and make sure that they all marry up to the mission
of the institution.
So you would document the
mission statement and then look at different programs and identify
the goals and objectives at that level, as well as at the department
level, as well as at the course level, and make sure that they’re
all married up and so that internally you’re able to look either
across a particular goal or down through a the department program
and course to see how the institution is contributing to the achievement
of the mission. So it’s a very powerful application and one we’re
really excited to be able to bring to the market.
SUE:
Peggi, Gerard has a question in
the chat box about printouts being available regarding the institutional
assessment aspect.
PEGGI:
Well, absolutely. And I guess I would need
to ask a little bit more detail from him as to what he’s looking
for, but we can do a variety of different things. I mean, obviously,
we have more information available that we can provide. You can
go to the Nuventive website, which is www.nuventive.com and there
is a static demo that you can look at their web site, as well as
additional information.
But the other thing we can
do is we have the ability using technology much like this to actually
do live demos of the software. So virtually, so you can stay at
your institution and we can stay in Malvern and you can actually
look at the live software. We would be glad to provide you with
all of that information. You can take advantage of whatever it is
that you want in whatever form that you want. All you’d need to
do, and there is a slide here at the end, you’ll see my e-mail address.
Send me an e-mail and I’ll make sure that gets off to you right
away.
Nuventive is spelled N-U-V-E-N-T-I-V-E.
e-Education
Applications: Personal
Okay. I am going to go through
these real briefly. In the personal category, quite frankly, this
is an emerging category. We really looked to a lot of our client
institutions as well as our LAAP partners to help us identify what
is happening in this particular area.
There are a lot of best practices
out there that we try to monitor. We try to pay attention to the
kinds of personal service applications that seem to be coming to
the market from other vendors. And really look to see what is occurring
in that area.
One of the primary areas
is career, and there’s a couple of screen shots of institutions
who have offered some of these online career advising services online.
But also in the area of personal, the personal services there, you
can go out and see where institutions have begun to offer information
about a wide variety of topics that would support people who have
very personal needs in terms of information around alcohol abuse,
eating disorders, and that list goes on.
One of the things that
I’ve already talked to you about, and I’ll just mention it briefly
here, that we believe is a very powerful personal tool, is that
digital portfolio. What’s important about this is that I as a user
can not only establish a wide variety of portfolios to meet my own
personal needs, but the institution can also set up portfolio templates
in order to meet needs of the institution. So different programs
can set up portfolios that meet, for example, and I gave you some
examples there, but the English department could set up a portfolio
for writing samples and be able to track how students are evolving
over time in their ability to write.
There are institutions who
are using the portfolio technology for admissions decisions. There
are institutions who are using the portfolio to ask students to
report on graduation requirements around community service, for
example. In the professional development area or the student affairs
area, they are using these portfolios for students to be able to
put together career or professional portfolios, and they supply
career advising around them. And that list goes on. So, again, we
found that to be a very powerful personal tool, but also extremely
powerful for the institution, as well.
e-Education
Applications: Community
In the community area, we
have a research and development project going on and we refer to
it as Project Socrates. And this is a dynamic community tool and
it actually combines instant messaging, artificial intelligence,
chat room technology, into one application that actually supports
serendipitous encounters or dynamic communities for your online
students.
So what happens is that as
I enter your online environment, I might go to a particular area
— let’s say the admissions area. And there’s a little indicator
in the corner of the web page that I can click on that will let
me know if there’s anyone else in that same place on your web site.
And if they are, I can actually engage in a conversation with them.
So I actually can talk to them about, you know, that admissions
area and ask them where do I go for certain information, or, you
know, can they help me with something. And actually, it began to
have those serendipitous encounters with people that normally you
get to experience when you’re on campus. An example is if you’re
standing in line at the registration window, you might start talking
to the person in front of you, or the person in back of you, but
when you’re an online student, you don’t get that same opportunity.
But with this tool, you do.
You also have the ability
to staff it, so it can help with your help desk functions for example.
So you can actually make people available and they could actually
then pose a question to your staff, and get immediate assistance,
and/or with that artificial intelligence, you can also make available
a virtual assistant. And in this case, it maintains a database of
the more routine questions and responses that students would typically
ask. And so they can go to the virtual assistant and ask, for example,
what is the prerequisite for Math 201? And it would be able to give
them that information.
PAT:
Without having to scroll a whole
list of FAQs, you can ask your question and it will provide the
answer.
PEGGI:
Absolutely. And it will either provide it to
you immediately online, so that you see it actually within a window.
Or it will e-mail the response to you.
PAT:
Great. Much more user-friendly
than the FAQ.
PEGGI:
Oh, yes. And then we’ve also been participating
with several professional organizations, and I’ve mentioned several
of them here. And, again, in light of the time, I think I’m going
to skip through these, other than to say you’re very familiar with
the Western Cooperative and the very important organization to SCT,
and helping us to really understand how higher education is changing
and using technology to support learning. And so it’s just been
a very important resource to us. Of course, the FIPSE/LAAP grant
has been very important and FIPSE itself, the fund for improvement
of post-secondary education does a lot through funding, to support
what colleges and universities are doing in this area.
The EduTools Project we mentioned
briefly and is actually a place where you can look at independently
reviewed analysis of selected course management software today but
it is also going to expand to cover the student services we’ve been
talking about, as well as e-Learning policies and other instructional
technologies.
HEKATE was formed – that’s
an organization that was formed to support an international exchange
of dialogue regarding the next generation of products and services
for the 21 st century learner. This organization is unique in that
it really makes its central mission to encourage discussion between
higher education institutions and vendors in order to kind of close
that gap between the needs of higher education and the technology
that vendors are bringing to the market.
And then finally the IMS,
PESC and others are those standards-based organizations that actually
recommend, defined and promote the use of technical specifications
and standards across all of these software applications so that
that whole vision of the e-Education infrastructure can be realized.
Lessons
Learned
So if we can skip now to
the lessons learned — some of the lessons we’ve learned in
the past three years at SCT and, for me particularly, is that commitment
and passion does not replace dependable processes and resources.
And this is going to hold
true for the higher education institutions as well. You can get
a lot of committed and passionate people, but you really do need
to have that plan and you have to identify the resources that are
going to be needed to support these efforts. They can’t happen in
a vacuum. And commitment and passion are wonderful things and you
want to have those kinds of folks on your teams, but if you don’t
have the right support, the right processes and the right resources,
both people and financial, then the project is ultimately going
to stall.
“Communication! Communication!
Communication!” And I put that down three times because I had to
constantly be thinking of communicating not only internally at the
SCT organization, but communicating also from an administrative
perspective to Pat and the folks at that supported the LAAP grant
funding. And then finally I needed to make sure that I was communicating
with the other participants in this particular grant. So I learned
a lot from them. And so I say the word “communicate,” and in fact
that last one probably should be “listen,” because the more I listened
to Kapi’olani, to Regis and to Kansas , the more we learned. And
it was a wonderful opportunity for SCT and I can’t thank them enough
for all of the open communication and all of the wonderful ideas
they shared with us over the past three years.
And then ultimately the lesson
we learned, that it is really about the user experience, not product
functionality. So it’s really easy to get caught up into the technology,
to be caught up in code and functional requirements, and isn’t that
cool? And user interface and all of that kind of thing. But the
reality is that’s not what it’s about. It’s about the user experience
and that’s what’s important and that’s what we need to keep our
focus on. And the more we do that, the better quality product we’re
able to bring to market.
Lessons
Shared
The lessons we shared with
the institutions and that we discovered together was that that build
by partner discussion, it’s a valuable exercise for institutions
and vendors alike. So even as institutions, whenever you identified
that there is a particular student service that you want to offer,
that you really need to think about whether that is something you
can build yourself or whether that’s something that you buy or even
partner with other institutions to offer. So that’s a very valuable
discussion for yourself as well.
The Universal Modelling Language
— and we really didn’t talk about that in this particular
presentation a lot, but it is a type of visual representation that
offers a useful framework for promoting dialogue between your subject
matter experts and the development team — the people that
are going to code or build that software for you. So it really helps
using that UML to actually use that as a way to bridge the communication
gap between potentially your faculty or your student affairs people,
and your programmers.
PAT:
And, Peggi, we have a presentation
on UML, which Burnie Blakeley did, which has been archived. It’s
our July webcast. If people are interested in that they can still
click on to it.
PEGGI:
Great. Please, please, please use cross-functional
teams for your decision-making. That was the other important thing
that the more you can involve people from across the organization,
because remember, when I first started out, I said that it’s really
easy to think about a student service, and really just pull in the
people that what you believe to be directly impacted by that service.
The reality is that I’ve
yet to find a student service that doesn’t have an impact on a broad
range of people across your institution. So get their input right
from the very beginning. You know, so if you can involve your students,
do so. If you can involve faculty, if you can involve people from
student affairs, involve your technology people, involve administrators,
you know, and really try to put together a cross-functional team,
and that way you’ll be more successful in coming up with requirements
that are going to meet the broad spectrum of users.
And then finally, if you
do choose to build, ensure that your subject matter experts own
that functional requirement process. Again, it’s about the experience
and your subject matter experts understand what that experience
is like. They understand how the user is going to use that software,
how they want to get access to information. And what their motivation
is.
So it’s very important that
they own that functional requirement process. Do not pass that away
to your technical folks. Do not, you know, let them drive what that
user experience is going to be like. Do they need to be involved?
Absolutely. Are they important and critical to the success? Absolutely.
But make sure that the subject matter experts really stay involved
and if, in fact, you believe as I do that that user experience is
ultimately the strongest measure of success.
On the last slide...
PAT:
Peggi, keeping the focus on the
“what you want to do” versus letting the “how you’re going to do
it” lead the project.
Resources
PEGGI:
The perfect summary, Pat. On this last slide,
I give you some of the web sites for some of those organizations
that SCT finds particularly valuable.
And again, rather than expect
all of you to write those down, if you go to the web site, it is
there, and you can pull that up and use it.
For
more information
On the very last slide, is
my contact information. So, again, if there’s anyone who wants information
about any of the applications or any of the e-Education infrastructure
that I’ve talked about today, please feel free to e-mail me and
I will be glad to follow up with you with any other similar information
that you require.
This
is series is brought to you as part of WCET’s work on its Learning
Anytime Anywhere Partnership Project
PAT:
Peggi, on behalf of WCET and our
attendees today, thank you for an excellent presentation. I also
want to thank you for being such a wonderful partner for this three-year
period. We’ve been very fortunate — we’ve had the same project
directors at all three campuses and Peggi has been with us from
the very beginning. So I think we’ve all been very fortunate to
learn a great deal from one another.
Resources
PEGGI:
And I thank you, Pat. I would like to ask Sue,
if you could just pull up the URLs one more time.
SUE:
Sure.
PEGGI:
So that we’re ending this up, that people can
write those down if they want to. But, thank you, Pat, it’s been
a wonderful experience, and I know that SCT and myself, specifically,
have every intent to continue working with the Western Cooperative.
SUE:
I’d also like to once again point
to everybody to our WCET web site. Follow the links to the LAAP
Student Services Project, and in the webcast section, you’ll see
all the webcasts that we have done over the last year. They’ve all
been archived, and we are also in the process of having them all
transcribed. So all the information is there. This webcast has also
been recorded and will be archived on our site very soon. So it’s
just a plethora of information, so I encourage everyone to check
it out.
PAT:
And I’d like to say a special thank
you to Sue who makes sure that everything runs technically, so that
you can take advantage of this technology. And it’s time, Sue, if
you could put up the evaluation, we’ll ask people to give us a little
bit of feedback about today’s presentation, that will help us in
doing future presentations. We’re hoping to have another series
after this one. And we’ll keep you posted about what that might
be, and we’ll just give you a few minutes to respond.
SUE:
In the chat box, Gerard says, “This
is great, thank you.” Thank you for your kind comments, Gerard.
Does anybody else have some questions that they’d like to ask now?
Before or after they fill out the evaluation?
WCET
Evaluation
PAT:
We have Phyllis Wong here, from
North Dakota . Art Ashton, is from Arizona , and I think Ted Christenson’s
from Arizona . I’m not sure where Wayne Huber is from. We have several
WCET members there.
SUE:
Well, I have a question for you,
Peggi. I think a lot of people are interested in the emerging of
SCT and Campus Pipeline. Can you tell us a little bit more about
what’s going on with that?
PEGGI:
Well, obviously we have acquired Campus Pipeline.
If folks hadn’t heard of that yet, it’s true. We’ve reorganized
once more and that reorganization is now complete, and they are
actually part of our culture and our organization now. We’re working
very diligently to map a more closely integrated plan for how we
move forward our products. Obviously, this is good news for that
Luminis technology that sits in the middle. It’s going to continue
to be standards-based, and it will support not only what we’re doing
very closely at SCT with the student information products that we
bring to the market, but continue to support all the other disparate
databases that are out there, as well.
We recognized how important
integration was to the market, and so they’ve really become our
sort of business line for integration. And how that’s all going
to happen and how that’s all going to be supported, so it becomes
much more central and critical to SCT’s vision going forward, than
they did formerly as a partner.
Everyone should see that
as extremely exciting and very positive news for SCT’s direction
and for what we can bring to the market in the future.
PAT:
Peggi, there’s another question here
from Ted Christensen, asking about any experience involving SCT
products across consortial efforts involving multiple institutions,
using different database products.
PEGGI:
You know, my quick answer to that is yes, but
then, when you ask me to actually articulate is specifically what
they are, I would have to go back and do a little bit of research.
I do know that we have supported some consortial efforts and, in
fact, in some cases they were using different products. But in order
to get more detail I would have to go back and do that additional
research, which I would be more than happy to do. I apologize for
just not having that information directly off the top of my head.
So, again, Ted, if you would
please just give me an e-mail and just say, “Remember my question,
you know, what are you doing about this?” I would be glad to, again,
do that research and get that information to you.
PAT:
I know that, as we talked earlier,
that was one of the early visions, so it could be that in the licenses
that there are some institutions using it in that way. It would
be very interesting to know that.
SUE:
Well, I have gotten the word from
U Live and Learn that we need to wrap up. I wanted to thank everyone.
Peggi, you’re fabulous. You’ve done a great job at SCT. Thank you
very much. And thanks for everybody who was able to join us today.
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