New Screencasts from the ATLAS Pilot!

The ATLAS project has posted six new screencasts highlighting the different aspects of our Fall 2011 pilot of Sakai OAE on the ATLAS Network channel on YouTube. As a group, these screencasts show the range of interest and innovation in NYU's pilot: academic networking, graduate nursing courses, writing courses, interdisciplinary humanities courses. We'll be looking at each of the screencasts in individual posts, but a sense of the larger vision at NYU can be gotten by looking at them collectively as well.

A big thank you goes out to ATLAS support lead Simon Pinter and ATLAS project manager Madan Dorairaj, both of NYU ITS, for their help in making these screencasts possible.

The OAE Collections Tool: Extending Portfolios to Scholarship and Academic Networking

Coming in the December 15 1.1 release of Sakai OAE, the Collections feature offers an innovative way to extend portfolio principles such as collecting, organizing, synthesizing, and sharing across the academic spectrum, from research and scholarship to teaching and learning.

While Collections is a great foundation for portfolios, it works equally well for organizing and sharing scholarly research projects within and across institutions. A faculty member or graduate student can now have one location from which he or she shares content from a long-term research project to courses, to colleagues, and to the public.

Perhaps most notable about the Collections feature is its approach to organizing content. OAE Collections act as a kind of lasso around content that continues to be active in the environment (in courses, groups, other collections, etc.) rather than a pigeonhole into which frozen versions of content are stuffed. Moreover, the feature allows for collections within collections, and each piece of content keeps its native permissions, so viewers of a collection can see only the items the creator has given them permission to see.

The Collections feature is an important addition to OAE's academic networking capabilities that also offers institutions the exciting potential to build a portfolio culture.

Watch a short demonstration of Collections from the pre-release software here:

A Second Demo on Writing Portfolios in ATLAS/Sakai OAE

Here is another screencast from the Liberal Studies Pilot of Sakai OAE, on using ATLAS to teach portfolio-based writing courses. In in, Master Teacher of Writing Chris Packard illustrates a very simple system he's been able to set up in ATLAS for facilitating peer review and commenting using native OAE tools.

Pedagogy Screencasts: Using OAE for Portfolio-based Writing Courses

This is the first of several planned screencasts showing how participants in the Liberal Studies pilot are using ATLAS to achieve specific pedagogical goals. This screencast discusses how ATLAS's flexible structure and ability to handle multimedia content are helpful for a professor teaching a portfolio-based section of first semester Freshman Writing.

In a traditional LMS, it would not be possible for students to contribute their work as pages in a course space or to use pages native to the environment as a multimedia palette for composing and displaying work. 

For a freshman writing course, these are critical capabilities because they ask the students to take their own work seriously, as texts for the course, and to extend their analytical skills across forms of media (such as videos, images, and web pages) that they might otherwise treat uncritically. 

It's a wonderful example of technology enhancing pedagogy rather than obscuring or undermining it.

The ATLAS Pilot of OAE 1.0 Is Live!

Watch a demo of our pilot environment:

Grouper Groups Management Software for Provisioning ATLAS/OAE

This guest post is by NYU ATLAS manager Madan Dorairaj, who has been handling integration between ATLAS, Peoplesoft, and the Grouper open source group management software, which we will be using to provision courses in ATLAS, among other functions.

NYU has a large set of applications and typically the application administrator may assign user roles within an application and it resides locally.  These roles are not shared between applications and localized group management does not help resources that could potentially share the same roles. Certain roles are more universal and lend itself to a common academic model, roles such as instructor, advisor, mentor, and student could benefit from centralized group management. This establishes a need for centralized group management that has university-wide reach.

In a large university, such roles may be assigned from hundreds of sources, and any range of policies may govern such assignments. Some roles are official, and others are ad hoc. To make matters more complex, collaboration between departments, schools, and even institutions around the globe necessitates roles that cut across boundaries that have traditionally been rigid in higher education. Likewise, every information system has its own notion of how those institutional roles should translate into access control within the system. Academic use cases also demand that we be able to provision groups and roles with flexible lifetimes. Some memberships have a fixed timeframe, such as a single section of a course, others may be open-ended, and still others may be perpetual.

Grouper

Grouper, an open source product from Internet2, is a centralized group management toolkit that has the necessary capabilities to store canonical groups and roles. It provides individuals across the campus to manage group memberships to the groups that they steward. The integration between Grouper and SIS will allow class roster information to be stored in  Grouper and downstream academic systems can source this information for provisioning access to their applications.  Such systems will include Xythos for file sharing, Kaltura for audio/video content, Echo360 for class recordings, Confluence, and of course ATLAS – Learning Management Solution

Registry

NYU Registry is a RDBMS database that contains information about all the students, faculty, employees, alumni, affiliates etc. Apart from various uses of the Registry, it functions as the source for Blackboard where course shell is provisioned for students and faculty during the beginning of each semester. The information contained in the registry provides a basic set of roles such as student, instructor, employee, and an affiliate. All the necessary work to keep the registry up-to-date is already in place and thus provides a stable source of information to create basic roles and role memberships in Grouper.

ATLAS

ATLAS is well suited for creating and managing informal groups because it allows the creation of ad-hoc groups and the management of memberships for more formal groups such as class rosters within ATLAS. ATLAS will be come an informal system of record for such groups and these groups will have use outside of Atlas. The ATLAS integration with Grouper should allow for two-way messaging that will allow ad-hoc groups created in ATLAS be stored in grouper for consumption by other academic systems that are integrated with Grouper.

You can learn more about Grouper here.

Get the Gradebook Out of the LMS!

This summer, NYU upgraded our student information system (SIS) to Peoplesoft. Building on this work, the ATLAS Network project has begun exploring the feasibility of integrating the separate Gradecenter module in that product (which NYU had purchased as part of its licensing package) as the gradebook for our OAE instance.

Our current vision of "integrating" is fairly light: a widget on users’ My ATLAS dashboard page that leads to a central "grade center" for all courses in the Peoplesoft gradebook. (We hope to have a screencast demo of this up soon!) This Gradecenter would be separate from the official final record of grades for a course, and instructors would still need to “send” final grades from the course Gradecenter to the Registrar; however, this would be an action happening within Peoplesoft.

From a student and faculty perspective, this solution puts everything in one place and in one system, giving consistency in user experience and eliminating the double-entry situation of putting grades during the semester in the LMS (or checking grades in the LMS in the case of students) then submitting final grades into the system of record (and checking them there). It also means not doing an expensive integration between the LMS gradebook and the SIS which may need to be redone when there are updates to either system.

It makes more sense to keep sensitive student information like grades in a secure repository made for that purpose, and there are many institutional advantages to having all student grades stored in the system of record. Moreover, moving sensitive student information like grades "out" of the OAE environment may also be important for encouraging institutions and instructors to use OAE’s public features for their courses.

One of the most compelling arguments for this arrangement, however, is the simplification of roles in the OAE environment it enables. “Roles” represent one of the key areas of overdetermination and rigidity in the typical LMS structure; and Gradebook is the tool most responsible for the complexity of those roles. At one NYU school, for example, there are five different roles associated with a course gradebook – each of those roles can do one thing but is prevented from doing anything else in the gradebook (ie, one person can enter grades, one person can only look at grades, one person can change grades AFTER they are entered, etc.).

Allowing an administrative system like Peoplesoft to manage the gradebook roles and permissions takes this unnecessary pressure off of the academic network/LMS environment and instead allows it to be a place devoted to collaboration and exchange.

On a design level, this solution meets the OAE goal of having grades as a service underpinning the entire OAE environment rather than an instance of a tool drawn into course spaces and specific to the space in which it appears (ie, instructors or students must go into each course space they are associated with to enter or check grades for that space rather than doing it centrally). In fact, looking at the OAE design work for an Assignments tool, slated for development in the next 12 months by the Managed Project, first suggested this solution to us.  Those designs very sensibly specify Assignments as a service that connects into a separate grading service, and Peoplesoft Gradecenter has an Assignments tab that we anticipate using to connect to the OAE Assignments service.

Designing Assignments and Gradebook as separate but connected services also gets rid of the necessity for instructors to access an assignments dropbox through the gradebook, something NYU users have particularly disliked about Blackboard 8 because it makes the assumption that all submissions are graded assignments, which they are not.  Many instructors who do not use the course gradecenter at all nonetheless have a need for a course dropbox.

Assignments in OAE could, one imagines, be configured for other purposes besides teaching and learning where submission and evaluation of content are required -- peer review situations in the case of the American Academy of Religion’s use of OAE for its Biosphere portal, perhaps.

In sum, the disaggregation of gradebook functionality is an important approach to simplifying the LMS structure, an issue gaining traction across the educational technology landscape. On a panel on the future of the LMS held last month at Campus Technology 2011, Phil Miller of Moodlerooms observed that complexity in the current LMS structure is partially a result of increasingly long requirements lists given to vendors by institutions (multiple roles in the gradebook being a prime example of an item on these lists).  Trying to build everything possible into the LMS has resulted in a behemoth that is doing nothing particularly well and ignores opportunities to leverage existing institutional systems to achieve solutions that are better from both an administrative and a user experience point of view.