Keeping Up With Moores Law Course Management Panel

Keeping Up With Moore’s Law: Course Management Panel Robert Cartolano Manager, Academic Technologies, Academic Information Systems Columbia University, rtc@columbia. edu Keeping Up With Moore’s Law 1

Background • Prometheus - Commercial, community source, open database running on Oracle; also used at Teacher’s College and Columbia Business School. • Over 20, 000 users, 2, 500 courses per year • Common Login ID (same as E-mail) • Secure web servers, Kerberos login • Registrar, HR data feed for faculty, student, course information • Integrated Library Reserves (Voyager) Keeping Up With Moore’s Law 2

Rollout Challenges • Extensive campus communications – Partnership between Academic Computing, Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, Libraries, Registrar, schools and departments. – Open and transparent planning for entire campus • New feature development to support administrators as well as faculty. • Mass migration of course materials Keeping Up With Moore’s Law 3

Current Status • Course. Works is stable, widely-used • Local customization was crucial to product acceptance and success • Meets diverse needs among many schools (Dental, Nursing, Social Work, Engineering, etc. ) • Long list of requested new or improved features, ranging from facebook to digital repository support. Keeping Up With Moore’s Law 4

Next Challenges • Prometheus is end-of-life product • Need to select a New System – Must be open source, open database, extensible, unrestricted – Must offer significant new features that meet our requirements and provide a migration path off of Prometheus. – Community support as well as commercial support for development and sharing of learning and administrative tools – Must scale to 30, 000 users, and meet user expectations over the next 5 years and beyond. • Transition Planning – Extensive campus communications and feedback – Technology planning, resource and staff planning Keeping Up With Moore’s Law 5

Sakai Project http: //www. sakaiproject. org/ • MIT, Indiana U. , U. Mich, Stanford U. are core institutions. Mellon and Hewlett funded. • Sakai has potential to meet many of our requirements, in a community source model. • Is it right for Columbia? We are gearing up for an extensive evaluation and assessment effort. • Columbia joined as a Partner (SEPP) along with over 40 peer institutions, attended developer’s conference in June 2004. Version 1. 0 released. Keeping Up With Moore’s Law 6

Summary • Course management systems today are robust, dynamic systems catering to diverse academic audiences, with an ever growing need for tools and features. • More effort is needed to adapt technology to meet curricular needs. – Collaboration is needed Keeping Up With Moore’s Law 7