Educause 2006 - Accessibility Roundtable

Educause 2006
Dallas, Texas

Accessibility Roundtable

How is accessibility defined? Standards vs. Is it functionally usable?

Bring in real users.

Vendors don’t understand how assistive technology works.

Current Issues of group:
-How to raise awareness in university management.
-Captioning.
-Student Resources must be usable, not just compliant.
-Consortiums to support vendors with feedback (this has been done with Elluminate and BlackBoard).

Keep accessibility in mind while you’re building it.

BB received a white paper of complaints from a GROUP of universities. This gave the paper and complaints lots of credibility and it worked its way into the hands of those who could make changes.

Athenpro.org = higher-ed consortium to discuss accessibility.

Most problems: XHTML must be well formed – 90%, content of alt tags, color issues.

Steps to accessibility
1- use a validator, even though they only only measure 20% of web accessibility. (Some use “lift” as the code validator)
2- Perform a manual general check
3- Do a more specific, detailed check.

Add requirements to RFPs.

Are you accessible? Vs. Are you compliant?

It isn’t about disabilities – its about different learning styles and multiple approaches. (Think “I’ll teach more students, better!”) It’s the right thing to do.

It would be nice to have awards for accessibility – help the “cool” factor. Faculty culture “What’s in it for me?”

Connect.educause.edu
Google:
Lift – a tool - http://www.usablenet.com/
webct accessibility interest group
Freedom Scientific – University of Illinois

Educause 2006 - Change Management

Educause 2006
Dallas, Texas

Change Management
Robert Renaud – Dickenson College
Dennis Trinkle – Valparaiso University

Divided this into Personal issues with change management and Institutional issues.

Personal issues:
Moved from help desk to finance
Changing roles
Many hats
Balance work/family
Travel/school/work/family
Leadership change
Flux in organization affects career
Transition in leadership

Institutional:
ERP conversion
IT Reassessing
Pushed to standardization to fit the form for budgeting
Restructuring Institutional efficiencies
Common computing invironment
Change without funding
Reorganization and conversions while budget is shrinking
Leadership – lack of knowledge and strength

Notes:
Strategic plan is communications plan.
Any communication should increase credibility.
“Client first and mission second” decision making.

Of help:
College of Charleston’s strategic plan: http://crmc.cofc.edu/plan/isp.htm
Article: The Neuroscience of Leadership (from CIO Magazine)
http://www.strategy-business.com/press/freearticle/06207

Educause 2006 - Juggling Open Source and Vendor Software - Sakai & BB

Educause 2006
Dallas, Texas

Haute Software – Juggling Open Source and Vendor Software
Kim Gausepohi & Jeshua Pacifici – Virginia Polytechnic Inst. and State University

They use Sakai and OSPI. - https://scholar.vt.edu/portal
Blackboard is the Enterprise System:
3,000 courses (3/4 of total)
24/7 help desk
26000 Users (students)
1600 faculty

Audience responses to why to go with vendor systems:
Dependability is #1 requirement
Stability
Data integration
Support – help des, help pages, documentation, user training
Relationship with vendor support managers
Ability to leverage your university’s technical team

Audience responses to why to go with open source:
Vendor license fee
Control over features/ functionality
$$$ can go to what you want
Long term plans and costs
Faster maturation of tools and features
Bug fixes when you need them
Community builder
For and by the university (ies)
Open source is non-proprietary code, which leads to building a tool belt.

Open source, whether you use it or not, keeps the vendors honest – so all benefit.

He told a quick story regarding their BB 6.0 conversion. Their campus was having difficulty –they were down for weeks. An enterprising student did some digging and called other institutions to find out if they were having the same problem and they were, so this added to the credibility of the university’s IT staff – the vendor was the scapegoat.

Taking on Sakai while on BB: Management Implications
Additional support for overlap
Scalability of enterprise
Cast of ten
Release cycle was faster
Lack of accountability
Runaway development
Sink or swim
Paranoia re: conversion

System engineering – new concept, new roles, new user requirements.

They used:
JIRA as a bug tracker
Confluence as the project Wiki

Strong QA effort included a team of “Scholar Fellows”, 20 faculty members as a test group. They use it first and talk it up (early adopters).

Findings:
Community can solve problems faster than the vendor.
If you aren’t ready, don’t release – be patient and wait until pieces are ready.
Upgrades are conversions.
Rename the product – their version of Sakai is Scholar (https://scholar.vt.edu/portal)


Concerns:
Migration
It’s not free; Open-source 'is free like a puppy is free'. (Originally from Sun chief executive.)
Transitioning users – understanding their fears
– ease of use
– stability and reliability
Part of being new is the stress on support: 10 new users to a new system = 25000 on a known, reliable system.

Educause 2006 - My Academic Plan

Educause 2006
Dallas, Texas

MAP – My Academic Plan
Jim Gaston
South Orange Community College District (includes Saddleback College in Mission Viejo and Irvine Valley College = 35,000 students)

Jim is the Associate Director of Information Technology and they were charged with coming up with an electronic version of the individual students progress to meet GE requirements. (His blog is at http://digitaledu.blogspot.com/.)

They were asked to provide something to help students set goals, that could be reviewed and tracked by a counselor, and can provide automated assistance to help them select classes.

Team included: Counselors, students (paid $10 per hour) and articulation staff.

They made an interactive prototype – and had lots of feedback . . . back to the drawing board. He wishes he got the prototype to THE HANDS OF THE USERS EARLIER!

They used scrum methodology http://www.controlchaos.com/.
They used .net for testing and accessibility http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/default.aspx
They used ATLAS (Microsoft) for programming
They used a service layer between MAP and the Student Information System, Curriculum requirements, and information from Project Assist (http://www.assist.org/web-assist/welcome.html) which is a site for California articulation – they created a data feed for this, done on a monthly basis (that is how often the site is updated).

They ask questions (like the csumathsuccess roadmap): Where do you want to transfer? CSU, UC, Both, Out of State, I’m not sure. Answers prompt you to select your college, and your major – from dropdown menus – again, feeding from the Assist database.

Notes:
1)Information is personalized for each student.
2)Cross-checks via XML Transcripts of students.
3)Displays “select your courses” – general ed, and major prep (links to Assist, and just shows articulation agreement which keeps it all legal).
4)General Ed expands out to show: potential, in progress, and planned. They had many discussions with how this report should look, and the counselors won – it looks just like the paper one they’ve been using for years.
5)This is NOT a degree audit system. It will audit prereqs, and add courses required to plan – will also add co-reqs (like biology and a biology lab)
6)Allows you to plan when you’ll take the classes.
7)They would like to have the classes to be moved from ‘required’ to ‘planned’ be drag and drop, and use AJAX for some, but ATLAS doesn’t support drag and drop on Safari)
8)They would like to allow counselors to link equivalence – such as DVC history 167 = DeAnza History 153 – manual input once!
9)Paper transcripts are or will be possible using XML.
10)Centralize all transcripts in XAP?

He would be a good contact if we are involved in the interface development.

Educause 2006 - Time, Space, and History

Educause 2006
Dallas, Texas

Time, Space, and History

Edward Ayers – University of Virginia ela@virginia.edu
William Thomas – University of Nebraska-Lincoln wgt@unl.edu

These guys have been working on visualizing history . . . and using new technologies to make this happen. They compare the weather to history – how the weather sweeps along the nation and affects things.

They also related the development of the railroad to current technology – time, space, and conceptions of time . . . the railroad changed perceptions and technology is annihilating space/time understanding.

See http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/research.html, and the Southern History Database Maps are awesome! http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/SHD/maps/ They also mentioned AURORA, the Nebraska/Virginia project (see http://etc.unl.edu/thomas.html, although I couldn’t find anything specific online.) They are looking for collaboration, and were or are part of the ACLS Cyberinfrastructure (http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/cyber.htm). Also check out ‘History Mosaic’.

They want information to develop to be a national, sweeping view from country to town to family detail. They want history in four dimensions – and to capture time across the web. They are also working on search with token X, word frequency.

They felt talent and time was often wasted on class assignments, and saw an opportunity to use teams of students (a temporary community classroom), to populate the data.
• 10 brief narratives, 1½ pages each.
• Students wanted an example.
• Load up the back end data – mark sites on maps, and highlights keywords for search capability.
• They have 3,000 data sources now.
• Students use each other and review each other’s work.
• There are 2500 cases for law from 1820 – 1900 to put in.

They envision history for your cell phone. Transformative center for digital history.

Editors are leading scholars. They have a former history editor from Encarta on staff.

Questions: Is the map a tool? Is it open source? (I’ve e-mailed these questions.)

Educause 2006 - Kuali (open source financial)

Educause 2006
Dallas, Texas

Still Crazy – Kuali Project
Bruce Alexander, Michigan
Michael Allred, UC Davis (actually he couldn’t make it so Kris covered it)
Lee Balarmino, San Joaquin Delta College
Sally Jackson, University of Arizona
David Lassner, Hawaii
John Walsh, Indiana University

This was about Kuali (think koala bear, but with an ‘i’ at the end) http://kuali.org, the open source software for the financial/Admin end of higher ed.

A few management things they did which sounded interesting:
They have a Board, a functional council, and a technical Council – each of which has power and autonomy.
All sustaining member systems have representation and a vote on each council, and they have people working on the project – DEDICATED to the project, and reporting to the Kuali Project Manager.

They use norms and standards as drivers. Delta sees this product as being MORE SECURE than others, and looked at the life of companies selling commercial packages, and compared it to the 150 years Indiana U has been around, and the 100 years the other institutions have been around . . . he’s not worried about them going out of business. Being part of a Mellon grant forced deliverables and timelines.

The UC system was 25 years old and it was time for a conversion. Timing was important.
Davis, Irvine and Santa Barbara are all working on Kuali. They all had worries about standards, they were all using obsolete technology, and the options were expensive. Davis is set to go live July ’08.

This is higher ed focused, no license fee.

One interesting unforeseen advantage – by-product – of participation:
The institutions had a hard time attracting and retaining good people, and this option (open source) allowed the new (generation) staff to be part of a bigger project and a big team. The staff sees this as a professional development opportunity.