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Georgia Tech’s Road to Sakai

Georgia Tech’s Road to Sakai. Donna Llewellyn Director, Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning Patty Wolfe Project Manager, Unicon. Discussion Points. The Decision Assessment and Planning Implementation Planning Session Requirements Gathering Getting the Campus Ready

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Georgia Tech’s Road to Sakai

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  1. Georgia Tech’s Road to Sakai Donna Llewellyn Director, Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning Patty Wolfe Project Manager, Unicon

  2. Discussion Points • The Decision • Assessment and Planning • Implementation Planning Session • Requirements Gathering • Getting the Campus Ready • Process Considerations • Development • Customizations • UAT • Roll-out • Lessons Learned • This Summer and Future Plans • Question and Answer

  3. Decision Making

  4. Making the decision to move to Sakai at GT • Faculty Committee – basic needs assessment of CMS features • WebCT license issues • Higher level CMS taskforce

  5. GT LMS Taskforce Recommendation: We recommend that Georgia Tech become fully involved with the Sakai Project, a community source software development effort to design, build and deploy a new Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) for higher education. We make this recommendation for three reasons: • To maintain Georgia Tech's position as a leader in technology and innovation. • To ensure future LMS are suitably flexible for and supportive of those current and new methods of instruction and assessment needed within Georgia Tech's educational mission. • To explore opportunities to extend the usefulness of some of the LMS's developed at Georgia Tech within the Sakai Project.

  6. Assessment and Planning

  7. Assessment and Planning What: 3-day onsite Unicon visit • Day 1 – Implementation Planning Session • Day 2 and 3 – Requirements Gathering Result: • Consensus from the stakeholders and project team on the scope of the project and what needed to occur • Detailed technical specifications and associated costs for the requirements identified. Duration: 4 weeks

  8. Assessment and Planning Day 1 IPS Philosophy • Unused software is, well, useless • Sakai is all about people • Know what you’re in for • Gaining consensus and buy-in from project team • Identifying requirements • Driving adoption is like traveling for Thanksgiving – start out early

  9. Assessment and Planning Day 1 IPS Sample Agenda • Demo • Introductions • Strategic Planning – Goals and Success Metrics – Aligning the Organization – Looking ahead: Planning • Tactical Planning – Account types, worksite types, and roles – Content/Tools – Templates – User Experience

  10. Assessment and Planning Day 2 and 3 • Technical discussions and detailed review from GT subject matter experts on critical integrations and Sakai customizations • Intensive sessions that identified procedural changes, policy considerations, and functionality requirements from various constituents on campus

  11. Assessment and Planning Results • Project Plan • Detailed Requirements and Specifications • Documented Goals and Metrics • Process Considerations • Driving Adoption on Campus • Configuration Decisions Document • Executive Summary with timeline and cost breakdown

  12. Process Considerations • File size limits • Sakai rollout/governance • change mgmt • coordination • requirements definition & prioritization • Instructor sandbox • Training plan • Help documentation • Faculty & support desk • Manage user feedback, esp. for Fall 2007 production rollout • Gap analysis of existing GaTech CMS's

  13. More Process Considerations • Track support incidents even outside the confines of a dedicated help desk - a "support provider network" • Usability testing • Audit by internal security group • Worksite creation process • Need to define policies for group and club site creation • Need to analyze pros/cons for exposing site creation functionality to end users • Document enterprise and Sakai role mappings and processes • Data Back-ups... how to handle • How often will courses be archived from the Sakai site? • Overall, process back-ups, restoration, and migration. • Guest user account creation • GT to determine which email address to use

  14. Timeline

  15. Preparing the Campus

  16. Getting the campus ready:Structures • Defining oversight committees and work teams • Governing Board: Higher level group consisting of assorted Vice Provosts, Associate Deans, faculty, etc. This group will make the policy decisions for the project. • Program Board: Group of assorted OIT Directors and representatives from functional users (enrollment services, library, distance learning, faculty) This group will implement most of the decisions made by the governing board. • Sakai-Tech: All people involved with the technical aspects of the project. A list to keep people informed of decisions and actions.

  17. Getting the campus ready:Hiring • Received approval for seven new positions: • Director of Educational Technology (leader of this and other ET projects, chair the Governing Board, etc.) • 4 Developers (distributed around campus) • 1 System Administrator • 1 Database Administrator

  18. Getting the campus ready:Nitty Gritty Stuff • Name your collaborative learning platform contest • Over 800 entries from students, faculty, staff • Labored decision to come up with winner: T-Square • Setting policies • Who can create new sites, how much space do we allocate to each site, file upload size limitations, guest policies, … • Doing the work • In the absence of a true team in place, various folks took on this project on top of their regular jobs (Director of CETL, Director of Architecture & Infrastructure, IT support in CETL, many staff in OIT)

  19. Getting the campus ready:Gathering Feedback • Piloted Sakai with 10-15 courses • Student Town Hall meeting + survey • Feed and Feedback Sessions • Initial Training Sessions

  20. Phase 1

  21. Development What: Development of critical customizations • Banner Integration - Unicon • User Identity Management - Unicon • Email Whitelist - Unicon • Assignment Auto-submit - Unicon • Migration of courses from WebCT to Sakai - GT Core Unicon Development Team: • 4 Developers • 2 QA • 1 System Administrator • 1 Project Manager Duration: 12 Weeks

  22. Development User Acceptance Testing: • Cooperation between GT and Unicon for testing critical customizations • GT Team of 8 individuals • 3 Week duration Roll to production: Unicon rolled customizations

  23. Development Environments: • Vanilla Sakai 2.3 – utilized by GT team for testing of native Sakai functionality and tool review • Subversion Source Code Repository • Development Environment • Quality Assurance – this was then upgraded to the UAT environment that mirrored GT production • Production – 4 application servers, 1 database, SSL, and load balancer

  24. Lessons Learned What worked: • Weekly Team Meetings and Reporting – GT/Unicon • Shared Issue Tracking System • Detailed technical specifications • Availability/priority of both organizations to meet the deliverables identified in the timeline • Expeditious approval of changes, requirements, etc. • Flexibility and Agility of Partner Relationship • Expectations Management

  25. Lessons Learned in Working Together Opportunities for improvement: • Extremely aggressive schedule • Under-estimated the QA effort for Banner testing for both development and UAT • Building in time for documentation/transition • Following the work of the Sakai Community

  26. Lessons Learned at Georgia Tech • Joining an open source community • Deadlines and self interests versus the needs and directions of the community • Collaboration across divisions • Competing interests/scarce resources • Different management styles, different languages • Managing expectations while marketing • Need to develop long-term strategies and procedures to harness talent and desire to innovate while maintaining control of enterprise • We have eliminated the fall-guy ----- all fingers now point at us!

  27. Phase 2 – Summer 2007

  28. Development What: Development of critical customizations • Upgrade from Sakai 2.3 to Sakai 2.4 - Unicon • User Confidentiality Considerations – Unicon • Banner Worksite Naming Updates – Unicon • Banner Performance Research – Unicon • Phase I Ongoing Maintenance - Unicon • Updating Gradebook Branch – GT Core Unicon Development Team: • 4 Developers • 1 QA • 1 System Administrator • 1 Project Manager Duration: 9.5 Weeks Duration

  29. Future Plans Phase 3 • Conditional Release • Gradebook Publication • Wimba Integration

  30. Questions and Answers

  31. Contact Information Georgia Tech Donna Llewellyn donna.llewellyn@cetl.gatech.edu 404-894-2340 Unicon Patty Wolfe pwolfe@unicon.net 602-524-0390

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