1. Online Course Evaluations Don Carter

Provost’s Academic Computing Advisory Committee Minutes for March 4, 2009 March 4, 2009 PACAC Agenda

1. Online course evaluations – Don Carter 2. After Blackboard Vista – John Campbell 3. Update on PACAC guidelines for sustainable budgets – Angie Golden 4. Microsoft Live Meeting roll-out – John Campbell 5. Thin client update – John Campbell

Meeting Minutes

Attending: Robert Alban, Kris Andersen, John Campbell, Tom Carpenter, Don Carter, Rodrigo De Toledo, Eck Doerry, John Eastwood, Fred Estrella, Angie Golden, Chris Gray, Jill Koelling, Casey Machula, Georgia Michalicek, Wally Nolan, and Chih Tu.

Online course evaluations

Don Carter informed the committee that online course evaluations were now the responsibility of the e-Learning Center. However, Academic Computing still runs the systems, and Chris Gray’s team is developing a new Pentaho reporting tool. He said that NAU Yuma will be using online course evaluations for all courses. Currently, that creates a problem because course reports are separated by prefix and not by location. He will be discussing this with the Chairs Council next week. Pentaho, (an open source reporting software) will be piloted this summer and Don hopes to roll it out this fall.

After Blackboard Vista John Campbell said faculty were receptive to the email he sent regarding open source learning management system (LMS) options. In that email he notified members that our locked-in Blackboard Vista license cost expires in 2010, and Vista itself is going to reach its end-of-life in 2012. He recommended that if we want to critically examine other options, we should begin doing that now. John said there is no choice since we will be getting off Vista at some point.

He said Blackboard Vista is very important to NAU and very expensive. With the current 4.8% price increases expected to be raised to 7% in 2010, it would be good to look at open source LMS options. The two biggest packages are Sakai and Moodle. He shared that Sakai does not have the market share that Moodle has and that it has had complexity problems with development.

Chris Gray reported we already have the new Blackboard version in-house. After reading the white paper, he believes migration might actually work from our version of Vista to the new version of Blackboard. He also said he has the Sakai wiki running, but only one professor is using it. John said he is well aware that Moodle is favored by faculty. Wally Nolan added that Moodle is easier to use but the wikis have the same functionality. However, building blocks and

PACAC Minutes for March 4, 2009 – Page 1 Provost’s Academic Computing Advisory Committee Minutes for March 4, 2009 learning modules would take a little more work. He said faculty would need to learn how to use the tools.

Chih Tu said faculty in the College of Education were looking forward to using Moodle. He had also used Sakai and reported the interface was difficult to follow. John Campbell reported that Google and Moodle were developing what they call Moodlerooms to create more social interaction, and Don Carter offered that Vista had the best gradebook.

John said we could move forward with making a decision by resurrecting some of the criteria we used the last time the campus evaluated LMSs. Chris Gray could collect data on the tools that are used the most in Vista. Don Carter said he would not recommend going to the current Blackboard Version 9 as it is missing both the Vista File Manager and WebDAV interface. Chris Gray said version 9.2 will be out in 2010. Fred Estrella said Blackboard claims version 10 will be as good as Vista is now. Don Carter said that means no progress.

Fred said he is currently paying $173,000 for Vista, it will be $182,000 next year, and they want to add on 7% with the new contract. He said he thinks we could leverage the money better with an open source product. John said the number of CIOs who have chosen an open source strategy is encouraging.

Angie Golden has been working with students who have to use both systems: Vista at NAU and Blackboard Enterprise running at ASU. She reported NAU students say nothing is organized in the Blackboard Enterprise system. From a student perspective, Vista is much easier to use. She reminded the committee that students at NAU have been using Vista for years now and it won’t be just faculty who have to face a huge learning curve.

Fred Estrella shared that we don’t even know how well the new version of Blackboard tools will work. He said he wants to get started early with the LMS evaluations, and have a Moodle pilot up next year. Don Carter explained we need to be off Vista by 2011 to facilitate the archival of courses and those who need to keep courses up an additional year due to incompletes. Questions were asked about e-Packs from publishers, e-Portfolios, and how well Sakai and Moodle will integrate with PeopleSoft. Chris Gray said the product to look at right now is Moodle because Sakai is being rewritten. He also recommended exploring Sakai 3, the new rewrite, as soon as it becomes stable.

Angie asked what is needed from PACAC. John Campbell said a formal evaluation is needed. Don Carter and Chris Gray agreed that a Moodle pilot could be up and running by fall. Angie asked about faculty support. Wally Nolan said free video training software is available, and the e-Learning Center would help faculty. Since there won’t be any vendors to do demonstrations of the open source products, it was suggested that Moodle classes could be found for faculty to view and evaluate instead.

It was recommended that the pilot include a small group of faculty. Angie Golden, Robert Alban, and Chih Tu volunteered to have existing courses moved from Vista to Moodle. Angie asked about the same courses being migrated and tested in Sakai as well. Chris Gray said Sakai

PACAC Minutes for March 4, 2009 – Page 2 Provost’s Academic Computing Advisory Committee Minutes for March 4, 2009 Version 3.0 will be available this summer, but it would not be possible to have it up until December to run a pilot. He thought Blackboard might be available by then also.

Don Carter said the main motivation is not financial. Any open source LMS will need to be flexible and customizable while working in collaboration with other university communities. Paying for Blackboard is not the majority of the cost; supporting it has costs also. Don said it’s important to make sure the things we do, such as accessibility, work well. John Campbell agreed; we want to stay successful.

Fred said the long-term license is what he is concerned with, but the benefit of moving to open source is in the community support and getting away from the vendors. He said we will have to sign a new license in 2010 and they will want multiple years, but he might consider signing a one-year license. His plan is to make the comparisons and have a decision by next spring.

Update on PACAC guidelines for sustainable budgets Angie Golden reminded the committee she had asked for volunteers at the February PACAC meeting who were willing to serve on an Academic Computing sustainability subcommittee. She did not receive much response. John Campbell said he, Georgia Michalicek, Jill Koelling, and Don Carter will write a draft document that will provide guidance to the Office of the Provost for sustaining academic technologies, such as webcasting applications and Elluminate. They will then present the document to PACAC to discuss and decide upon at the next meeting.

Microsoft Live Meeting roll-out John Campbell reported that Marc Lord has expressed an interest in using Live Meeting for distance classes. Although it is not currently running at NAU, it could be made available by April 15 to Don Carter’s group and Marc Lord’s group for testing. Elluminate will still be available. However, he and Marc spoke about scheduling, and the use of Live Meeting could help them better meet the 100-seat-license limitation in Elluminate. There is no way of knowing now whether there will be too many sessions at one time. John said there will be license issues to figure out for Live Meeting, too.

Members were informed there are no breakout rooms in Live Meeting. There were severe limitations for Macintosh users in release one, but this problem has been partially addressed in release two, which is the version we will be running. Macintosh capabilities will need to be tested. Alternative access methods, such as terminal server or VMware, might be options used by session leaders who use a Macintosh. Eck Doerry moved to have Live Meeting tested by early adopters. John said anyone interested should contact him. Don Carter will contact all recent Elluminate users to survey their interest in testing Live Meeting and select some likely candidates. There is a possibility it could be accessed by PACAC members by May 15 to work with for summer courses.

Thin client update John Campbell reported ITS had deployed thin clients in the South Learning Resource Center computer lab. He said at first, there was a problem encountered with packets being passed, but they had worked with Cisco and Sun to get all switches on campus to work. Interestingly, older switches already deployed in other areas worked fine. PACAC Minutes for March 4, 2009 – Page 3 Provost’s Academic Computing Advisory Committee Minutes for March 4, 2009

He noted that thin client technology breaks down when viewing videos. Although this was not a problem in Engineering where thin clients are deployed, he said ITS is very Windows-centric and a four second delay occurred on the Sun clients running Windows products. However, some web sites work fine for videos depending on which plug-ins they are using. He reported video on CNN.com was the worst, but thin clients will work well for ninety percent of what people want to do in the labs.

Fred Estrella explained that ITS will be taking the computer labs out of Residence Halls due to budget cuts. He and John met with Residence Life and offered to support thin clients in those areas for student use where they will be unattended and locked down. ITS will pay for the backend servers and Residence Life just pays for the thin clients. Fred is currently working with Sun to obtain discounts, and said they could also be deployed when it’s necessary to replace the public workstations in the library.

John said Academic Computing is also experimenting with a charge-back printing service for the Residence Halls and the library. They were told that this is one of the reasons students use the ITS labs in the Residence Halls. Each printer will have a release station and billing service. Fred said they will also be able to allow students to print from their own rooms. John’s team will develop the code needed over the summer. Robert Alban asked if this service could be made available to Arts and Letters; John said to ask him again this summer.

The next meeting of PACAC will be postponed until April 24 to allow for work to be done on the guidelines for sustainable budgets.

PACAC Minutes for March 4, 2009 – Page 4