Helps Orchestrate the Student Experience by Unifying the Myriad Academic and Administrative

Introduction

When CalCentral, a campus wide portal and dashboard service, was launched in January 2014, it solved two critical problems for UC Berkeley. CalCentral

 Helps orchestrate the student experience by unifying the myriad academic and administrative web sites, systems, and applications key to negotiating campus life

 Provides an underlying technology, code-named Junction, which serves as a lightweight, rapid development and integration platform to support the campus’s enterprise educational technology systems.

The development of CalCentral was sponsored by the Vice Chancellors for Undergraduate Education (originally, Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, Academic Planning, and Facilities), Student Affairs, and Administration and Finance, and the Office of the CIO. The project required an unprecedented level of cooperation and collaboration among teams in different units across Berkeley’s federated central IT structure, including Student Affairs IT (SAIT), Information Systems and Technology (IST), and Educational Technology Services (ETS).

Background

Not unlike many other large research universities, Berkeley’s key online services have long been distributed across a wide range of providers and web sites, resulting in a fragmented experience that doesn’t serve students as well as it might. A few years ago, the division of Student Affairs conducted a series of workshops and focus groups with students that highlighted the opportunities to improve the usability, design, and overall coherence of offered services. Just as importantly, these sessions painted a broader picture of the student journey, from the post-admission onboarding process through graduation, and aligned with a high level commitment within Student Affairs to providing greater levels of support to UCB students. The crucial process of replacing the campus’s decades old Student Information System (SIS) also gained new momentum at this time.

While the issue of the overall student experience was receiving ever increasing attention, the campus also started the transition from a locally hosted open source Learning Management System (LMS), which had been highly customized to meet Berkeley’s business requirements, to a new cloud based and vendor-controlled system, Instructure’s Canvas. Although Canvas represents a significant leap forward for Berkeley’s online learning environment, bringing with it a superior student experience, major campus-specific enhancements to the base product were still required in order to replace the legacy LMS. The User Experience

The CalCentral project started in summer 2012 with the design and development of a personal dashboard that leverages the intersection among academic technologies, student information system data, and general-purpose collaboration tools. Specifically, the dashboard integrates the campus’s enterprise Google Apps for Education (GAE) suite (calendar, task list, email, and document management) with data from the SIS, and the Canvas LMS to answer four interrelated (if not overlapping) questions that guided the design process:

 Where do I need to be? [Single sign on to personal calendar w/ official class schedule]  What classes and groups am I member of (or who am I working with)? [Single sign on links to Canvas course and other group collaboration sites student belongs to]  What do I need to do? [Personal task manager integrated with Canvas LMS class assignments]  What do I need to know? [Message stream with LMS class announcements, SIS updates etc.]

Figure A

Additional development work yielded the “My Academics” section (Figure B below), which includes an interactive transcript with links to semester and summary pages for each class a student has taken. These feature a GPA calculator, and integrations with the library catalog, campus bookstore, and the lecture capture system. The “My Finances” tab provides an overview and detailed ledger of a student’s billing history, financial aid messaging, campus debit card balances, and links to financial resources. Finally, “My Campus” is a curated set of links to other campus resources. Figure B

A very brief video is available at https://calcentral.berkeley.edu/

The Platform and Other Integrations

The platform that delivers the entire CalCentral UI has been separately “branded” as Junction. It has been designed precisely to meet the requirements of the applications it supports. Junction comprises modern open source technologies that have been assembled to consume data from a wide array of sources, transform and merge that data, and then present it in a variety of contexts. The presentation technology enables the rapid development of well designed, secure, accessible, scalable, and responsive (i.e., the UI adjusts or responds appropriately to the device) web applications. It has allowed a small team to build out not only the CalCentral service, but to develop multiple additional tools that are embedded in external systems, all within a single technology stack.

This strategy has been critical to the success of the campus’s LMS Replacement Project. Essential workflows and tools unique to the Berkeley environment have been developed and integrated seamlessly within Canvas, the cloud-based LMS the campus has moved to. Junction also serves as an integration point for other educational technology applications, which work in concert with each other and CalCentral. For example, a single webcast application fed by the Lecture Capture system is embedded within both the LMS and CalCentral.

Figure C

Core Team and Collaborations

The core design and development team behind CalCentral is a part of Educational Technology Services, but the success of the project was predicated on broad collaboration and cooperation from across the campus, including many students who contributed designs, code, and guidance. Other key partners

 Contributed expertise in user experience research, design, and business analysis (SAIT)  Conducted intensive security reviews (SAIT)  Conducted thorough web accessibility reviews (IST – API)  Provided functional requirements (VCAF)  Provided access to essential data (SAIT, IST-API)  Developed an API and ESB infrastructure while working with the CalCentral team as clients (IST – API, EDW)

The Future

UC Berkeley is in the midst of implementing Campus Solutions as its new SIS. After due consideration, the SIS Replacement Project’s Executive Steering Committee made the decision to use CalCentral instead of the delivered Campus Solutions portal for the new student and faculty facing functionality. This validation of the approach CalCentral has taken, which places a premium on user centered design and closely tailoring solutions to the specific needs of the campus, opens up a wide range of possibilities.

The mash up of SIS, LMS and other campus data is helping to drive the conversation around “learning analytics,” the application of campus data to understand and improve teaching and learning. Combined with the richer functionality Berkeley’s implementation of Campus Solutions will provide, CalCentral is poised to leverage data from multiple sources to deliver a user experience that increasingly communicates the “What do I Need to Know and Do” in a way that empowers both students and faculty.

Submitted by:

Oliver Heyer Associate Director, Projects and Development Group Educational Technology Services

Project Stakeholders:

Jenn Stringer, Assoc. CIO Academic Engagement Angela Blackstone, Assoc. CIO SIS Replacement

Team Members:

Chris Tweney Bernadette Geuy Ray Davis Christian Vuerings Eli Cochran Rachel Hollowgrass