Etudes Update
from Vivian Sinou - Etudes Alliance Director: -2/18/05
Lots of exciting work is taking place at Foothill. Although I
could wait to give you a detailed report in person at our upcoming
ETUDES Alliance Summits, I realize that not all of you will be
able to attend. Plus the focus of the agenda will be on migration,
training, and an early demonstration of ETUDES-NG.
QUICK SUMMARY
We are still in heads-down mode, working concurrently on many
tasks (see roadmap below). A major change is that we are no longer
working solely on our tools, alone. The work at Foothill is We
are in constant communication now with the
Sakai architects and developers as we are integrating and refining
our local implementation of Sakai (ETUDES-NG). We are also in
communication with folks from the U of Michigan and Indiana University
- two institutions that started pilots in September and January
respectively. We are positioned to be the third core partner to
run pilots.
Melete is the first external, lightweight Sakai tool that will be fully integrated and included in Sakai 2.0 in June for the entire higher education community. My team and I are very proud of this accomplishment.
We have a lot of work to do until June, but it is amazing how far we've come.
ROAD-MAP TO JUNE ETUDES-NG RELEASE
This is the rough schedule as we approach the release for the
spring pilots and the remainder of the activities that will lead
us to the final release in June - if things come up, we will adjust.
Jan - June: Develop FAQ, user guides, and tutorials.
December - February: Sakai Integration with Melete
February to mid March: QA testing and final bug fixes
February - May: Skin designs based on ETUDES and SOFIA.
End of March: Final release of ETUDES-NG (minus grade book)
End of March: Setup of production environment
Early April: Establishment of accounts for usability testing
April - June: Usability testing; gathering requirements.
April - June: Performance testing
April - May: Establish help desk/ticketing system/support
site.
*April - June: Add more features to Melete (lesson builder)
- 1 developer
*April - June: Develop migration tools (import/export)
- 1 developer
*April - June: Develop an admin tool to control skin choices
- 1 developer
June: Final release of ETUDES-NG (includes grade book)
* This is the primary focus of our development team (3 engineers) for the rest of spring. Of course this will evolve as reality happens, and if there are no glitches with our pilot production release.
INTEGRATION OF ETUDES TOOLS WITH SAKAI
The integration of our tools with the Sakai framework proved to
be much more complex than we had anticipated, especially because
we endeavored to make Melete (lesson builder) a fully compliant
Sakai tool. This required quite a bit of
re-factoring of our code, establishing roles and realms, and making
changes to our database tables at the expense of Melete features
that won't be in by April. Making these code adjustments now was
less painful (Easy for me to say!) than it
would have been later, when more code had been written. This didn't
occur without argumentative sessions amongst the developers and
architects! Taking turns requires making tough decisions, but
we were good citizens. We obeyed the
architects.
CUSTOMIZATION OF SKINS
We have been working with the University of Michigan in designing
a custom skin for ETUDES-NG to match the themes that faculty are
familiar with. For the spring pilots, all course sites will have
one skin; of course, the long-term plan is to
incorporate a function that will allow faculty to choose a unique
theme for their courses. We hope/plan to have this done by June.
PERFORMANCE TESTING - LINUX/MYSQL TEST BED AT FOOTHILL
At the recommendation of the Chief Sakai Architect, Chuck Severance,
from the University of Michigan, we will establish a test bed
at Foothill to conduct performance testing of the system on Linux/MySQL
to determine how well it
performs/scales. Considering that most of the Sakai implementations
will match our configuration, the results of this effort will
be of value to the whole higher education community. This effort
is separate from our internal QA process and pilot that will focus
more on usability testing.
PILOT/PRODUCTION SERVERS
In consultation with our data center manager, systems programmer,
and the production release folks from U of Michigan and Indiana
University (they are running pilots currently), we have firmed
up our equipment configurations for our spring quarter deployment.
Orders for application and database servers for the performance
testing and the production environment have been placed - two
application servers and a database server for each configuration
respectively - six servers total. In addition to these, we have
two more servers for internal developer and QA testing.
USER DOCUMENTATION/SUPPORT
Dedicated staff is working on FAQ's and user guides for the early
adopters who will be brave enough to check out the system in the
spring. I realize that we'll need a support person to handle inquiries
and trouble tickets from users in the
same manner that Kyong and Ari support the current ETUDES users.
There is no funding for such a person, however, but I am looking
for short-term solutions. This is something that must be built
into next year's funding model to help the
transitioning community until our current support staff can be
shifted over to the new system.
TALK TO YOUR PUBLISHERS
It is never too early to begin talking to your publishers about
making content available for ETUDES-NG (e-packs, cartridges, test
banks, etc.). If faculty from all thirty alliance member colleges
inquired about this, I trust that publishers would pay attention.
We plan to make Melete do SCORM** import/export, so this should
make it easy for publishers who follow industry standards. Similarly,
the assessment tool (Samigo) is QTI** compliant, meaning that
test banks that follow
the QTI specification (another industry standard) will import
smoothly into the system.
**Apologies for the technical jargon, but it is important for you to know the standards that the system relies on when talking to your publishers. They'll need to know this information.
ETUDES ALLIANCE SUMMITS
If you haven't registered for our summits, please do so soon,
especially the Northern California members as our meeting is scheduled
for next Friday, February 25:
http://www.foothillglobalaccess.org/phpcalendar/calendar.php?catID=3
ETUDES Alliance Summit: 2/25/05 @ Foothill, Krause Center of
Innovation
ETUDES Alliance Summit: 3/11/05 @ WLAC Colleges, Room ATA 116
--An agenda to the attendees will follow in the next couple of days.
SUMMER TRAINING RETREAT
Please notify your trainers, support staff, and early adopters/faculty
of our summer training retreat that will be held at Foothill:
July 11-14. More sessions and online courses will be offered as
well.
This news update has also been posted in the Alliance Private
forum (see link at the left navigation bar): <http://www.foothillglobalaccess.org/etudes2/>
http://www.foothillglobalaccess.org/etudes2/
Please register with your
institutional email address to gain access).
Vivian 'Vivie' Sinou
Dean, Distance & Mediated Learning
Foothill College
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