Meeting Notes 3 Oct 2002

UCLA Instructional Tech Forum Meeting
Thursday, 3 Oct 2002 3-5 2041 Public Policy Bldg.

Emailed agenda items:

  • pros and cons of the course management system you currently use
  • interesting instructional website ideas that can be duplicated
  • major frustrations
  • ISIS4 (new campus authentication system)

Ruth Sabean will be at EDUCAUSE, but had one suggestion:
  • One agenda item I have is develop a strategy to effectively handle the dozens of requests which come to UCLA to demo new software for instruction. It would be great if we had a software review capability which let us find what's useful from among all the onslaught of marketing hype.

Patrick Masson - Dentistry:
  • As far as agenda items, I suppose I would like to start off by getting an idea of what types of projects others are doing and how project and group fits into their administration. I really hope this group will be composed of developers and not administrators (policy makers) as many of the issues/conflicts I run into are with administration. I'm not looking for a group that wishes to develop or implement policy (i.e. which application(s) to use, what services to provide, how to implement technology, etc.), but rather a working group of peers that I can go to on both technical and administrative issues (i.e. where can I find resources, how did you get funding/approval. who can we parner with, etc.).

Jose L. Hales-Garcia - Statistics
  • My agenda is specific but could be part of a larger software evaluation discussion as proposed by Ruth. I would suggest a discussion on e-education portal technologies. Our department will be getting more involved with it and is currently evaluating solutions. I would be interested in sharing our opinions and experiences in this area.

Margaret Eversole - Office of Clinical Trials, Med School, Dean's Office
  • The topic I'd like to discuss is the promotion and use of newsgroups on campus.

Baojing (Lucy) Lu - CDH
  • design concerns for instructional web sites, abstraction, templates, design patterns? how to reduce maintenance by design?
  • programming language/database selection
  • client side vs. server side computing

Mike Franks - Social Sciences Computing
  • possible web tools for this group

Yasi Behpour - Mathematics Dept:
  • freeware web content management systems that could be adapted for use as course webpages, collaborative web development, or knowledge bases.
  • new/innovative uses of macromedia products, solutions to using non-IIS web connections to MS SQL Server, web design ideas.


Attendees 14 (by affiliation)

Center for Digital Humanities (CDH)
Michael Cohen, Bruce Dumes, Zoe Borovsky, Lucy Lu, Chris Salvador
Law School
Wes Holland, Daniel Salazar, Martin Callan
Math
Yasi Behpour
Med School - ARC
Maroon Tabbal
Physics and Astronomy
Martin Simon
UCLA Extension
Bill Epps
Social Sciences Computing
Mary Johnson, Mike Franks



Notes (please add or correct, it all went pretty fast and I know I missed a lot - Mike Franks)


  • Mike Franks - welcome, passed out paper copies of Meeting1 Agenda, think this group should be meeting regularly, but don't care exactly what we talk about. Today goals are to get introductions and talk about collaborative software.
  • Maroon Tabbal - suggested we focus on commonalities and what we can do as a group
  • Mike Franks - started introductions. SSC, Classweb is home grown, now open source, uses Perl, PHP, MySQL, Modperl and Apache, on Solaris. About 330 undergrad class websites every quarter, and many requests for grad sites, including two depts that want them set up by default. Learning how to work with ISIS4. Mentioned my.gradebook link to my.ucla based on data feed of which classes use it. This is something we can all use.
  • Yasi Behpour - From Math Dept, uses Perl, MS SQL 2000, grad and undergrad,. about 80 classes per quarter. no authentication at all. bulletin boards don't work very well for Math. Looking into content management software. Zope, and other freeware. Anyone else using Zope?
  • Bruce Dumes doesn't feel that Zope or any others are very good yet.
  • Michael Cohen - CDH does about 800 classes/quarter. Big problems are language (70 different) and music. hybridized WebCT to pull it all together. Different writing systems. 60-40 PC/Mac. Can't restrict to any one platform on the client side.
  • Zoe - course management systems and a bunch of projects, including Chris Salvador's natural language processing (link to her project)
  • Yasi - how much actual use of the websites do they have?
  • Michael Cohen - biggest users foreign languages and music, not much in English. Classics has tons of discussion board use.
  • Bill Epps, Extension - we're a business, bottom line every year. Using Blackboard primarily for content management. Blackboard ASP startup cost was $140,000 serves all of Extension. 10% of revenue is from online. ?? millions of dollars. He does a lot of servicing students because he doesn't have staff to do it. Commonalities are language instruction and lots of people want to do distance education in Korea, especially after 9/11. What are the 80% that existing systems do? Math student complained they can't do Greek symbols in discussion board.
  • Maroon Tabbal - 80% that these packages do could easily could be done with templates. How to do the other 20%, and what are the things causing you problems. What could the priority for a group like this be?
  • Bruce - sees course management systems as portals, links to variety of different apps.
  • Bill Epps - what about Blackboard's building blocks?
  • Maroon - web services are also building blocks. My experience in elearning has been from looking at prescriptive systems (I missed some of this.) but then his contribution got locked up. There are web parts that could be broken down and we could work on sharing them.
  • Mike - don't forget OKI
  • Maroon - (I missed some of this.)
  • Bruce - wants to do ISIS4 and log students into my.ucla in background when they log into WebCT but ISIS4 won't allow that. Can't use ISIS4 ticket on WebCT because WebCT doesn't allow modperl.
  • Maroon - ISIS4 isn't a web service and we could go with our own middleware, directory services
  • Michael Cohen - all these treat course as a "thing" isolated from anything else. Are any of these packages curriculum based?
  • Maroon - Cisco Prescriptive Elearning system had concept of buckets. We're all building from scratch. Now Cisco called Virtuoso cli.org Profile based, all material presented in new way based on what students got right and wrong. Student centric. Perhaps less attractive in course. Still willing to give State of California free licenses. Can author in it. He can't recommend it because it's no longer open, now that it's successful.
  • Yasi - she's webmaster, tutorials to faculty, course webpages. System is working now, no complaints, but she thinks must be a better way. Worried that she won't be able to keep up with changes in the next few years.
  • Epps - anybody doing totally online class? In Extension, it's the ones meeting in classrooms who want to add stuff. No cost benefit though.
  • Cohen - lots of classes that use web for additional materials. Language classes, music, art history.
  • Epps - why don't people use publisher's material?
  • Cohen - our faculty is world-class and want to do their own things, not reuse other people's.
  • Martin Simon - lot of stuff out there is junk, someone has to make a judgement. Doesn't see much re-use. Except for reuse by faculty.
  • Cohen - intellectual property issues
  • Mike Franks promised to ut up Sandbrook's faculty retain ownership docs on group website
  • Martin Simon - faculty felt that textbook publishers were stealing some of their material. Some faculty don't want other faculty in other locations to see their syllabi. One person went ballistic when a prof at another institution found their syllabus on the web, emailed and complimented them on it, and asked permission to use parts of it.
  • Mike Franks - anyone else restricting search engines from indexing their class sites. We had to start doing that using robots.txt several years ago.
  • Epps - anyone have to deal with classroom scheduling?
  • Franks - mentioned SEASnet doing FTP uploads to OASIS.
  • Maroon - Authentication, scheduling, classroom environments could be areas for group to focus on
  • Franks - mentioned programmers parties http://programmers.ucla.edu and asked group to look at Sharing Model and sign up to listserv
  • Martin Simon, Physics and Astronomy - what they have is pretty local, Perl driven, some open source components, authentication Microsoft SQL Server which grabs from Registrar, then over to Unix. Own authentication not the same as anyone else. Looking for somethihg better. Understands a centralized courseware package, but has heard much mention of web services. What are they?
  • Maroon - answering what are web services, XML, UDDI, SOAP and described them. (I missed some of this.)
  • Mike Franks - to me web services can be as simple as Eric Splaver's my.gradebook URL or class URL posting website that he's done for some of us.
  • Martin Simon - use quizzing as an example. Also mentioned other quiz software KAPPA, open source, has a bunch of publisher questions.
  • Maroon - it becomes a web part if you didn't call the variables directly. Never make something hard-coded.
  • Martin - what happens in a distributed environment when something fails? Key question - editor's comment
  • Martin - doesn't want to hire someone to read APIs. He likes open source software because he can customize it. Doesn't see web services as solving his problems. He'd like a central server
  • Michael Cohen - XML becoming a standard, Quicktime now can understand XML
  • several people had to leave at 4 and the meeting broke up by 4:15. Consensus seemed to be that every two months is often enough to meet.



Potential Projects that seemed to come out of the meeting
  • see if we can rewrite Martin Simon's Quiz software to make it a web service. But first he'll check out Kappa (mentioned above).
  • directory access control using ISIS4 is something Mike Franks is working on and that Martin Simon needs. Will require Modperl though.
  • collaboration tools that we might use as a group
  • negotiate with ISIS4 for more flexibility