MEETING NOTES. December 3, :30 A.M. 1:30 P.M. Wells Fargo Place, World Trade Room, St. Paul

Instructional Management System Advisory Council MEETING NOTES December 3, 2007 10:30 A.M. – 1:30 P.M. Wells Fargo Place, World Trade Room, St. Paul NEXT MEETING:

Date: January 18, 2008 Time: 10:30 A.M. – 1:30 P.M. Location: Conference Room 3304, Wells Fargo Place, St. Paul

ATTENDEES: David Bouchard, Carol Lacey, Lesley Blicker, Chuck Morris, Zala Fashant, Nancy Black, Alfred Essa, John Rohleder, Michal Moskow, Penny Dickhudt, Karen La Plant ITV: Rhonda Ficek, Louise Mengelkoch, Kim Priener. WebEx: Sara Hoffman, James Falkofske, Mark Johnson, Dawn Leech, Mike Condon, Ali Serrioz. 1. Announcements: - David Bouchard will send out an announcement to inactive Council members asking them if they would like to continue on the Council and start participating. - James Falkofske suggested replacing ITV with WebEx. We will try this instead of ITV for the next meeting. - Some of the workgroups have not yet had an opportunity to develop a charge. Some time has been set aside at the end of this meeting for a couple of the workgroups to meet. - Lesley Blicker suggested that, at the next meeting, we take some time to discuss North Hennepin Community College’s report about the Competencies and Rubrics Tools. 2. Help Desk Issues: Lesley Blicker Last week, Karen Wenz, Chuck Morris, Lesley Blicker and two members of the D2L Helpdesk staff met to go over the resolution that was passed at the last IMS meeting. Some people were confused on the motion we passed last time. The motion stated that as faculty find their way to the help desk, they would need to do some form of a sign-off. When they come to the helpdesk by way of telephone, we are hoping that reading faculty the notification and noting their approval will be sufficient. Nancy Black suggested that, to those faculty members who give verbal consent over the phone or do not submit a sign-off form, we send a follow-up email confirming their consent. In many cases (opening up PDF files or movies), the same need to get into courses to help Faculty exists for helping students. This raises the issue of whether the Helpdesk can effectively manage students without having access to the courses. How do we get this permission without a barrier (the time it takes to get permission from the faculty). Al Essa stated that this is not an issue about intellectual property. This is about recognizing that Faculty members are the owners of their course space. In order to help students, there will be occasions where the Helpdesk will need access to a particular course space. There are 4 options for this area: 1. Faculty would not be consulted and the helpdesk would be allowed to enter a course in order to solve a student’s problem. 2. The ticket would be passed on to level 2 support. 3. Notify faculty member and get permission. 4. Pass the responsibility of supporting students back to the campus. (Faculty concern would still exist in this case.) 071203IMSMinutes.doc

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Helpdesk response: Mark Johnson replied that if the Helpdesk staff can only go into courses under a student role, they will only be able to make one level of diagnosis. If we went with option 3, they would then need to contact the faculty member to get permissions. It could take days to turn around. A decision was made to try option 3 and collect data on how long it takes faculty to respond. Carol Lacey suggested that faculty have an option to sign off at the beginning of the semester giving the helpdesk faculty-level permissions in order to help students. Lesley Blicker, Carol Lacey and Karen LaPlant will work on developing a D2L system guide for Faculty which would include the opt-in/opt-out document. Lesley will ask the Helpdesk and the Core Team as well as Al Essa for their input. 3. D2L System Status: Chuck Morris We have a Maintenance Release 6 which we will take into QA on December 4th. The goal is to test it and have the fixes implemented by Spring term. Quizzes: In the month of October, over 330,000 quizzes took place. The majority of quizzes, 270,000, were successfully completed, but we do continue to have problems. Archive Purge: Al Essa D2L had promised that the first version of the Purging tool would be ready by the end of this year or by early January at the latest. They are still on-track. The first release will only be of use to the System Administrators. The tool should have no effect on the operation of the systems or performance. It will get rid of deleted data, obsolete data, mostly system-level data that is not of any use to anyone. We still need to define a policy regarding what kind of data we are going to archive and what we are going to purge. Needs for a Streaming Media Server: Al would like to do a pilot for the Spring term. Intellectual property issues will arise here. The idea is to create a repository for rich media files. We are looking to build an infrastructure so that we can provide a space where faculty can upload their content (audio, video or documents) and set their own permissions. This is more of an individual file space for faculty rather than a learning object repository. -Currently people upload these files into D2L. There are 3 problems with this: 1. The files are too big. 2. From a technology perspective, we want to make video and audio available to multiple people and the D2L environment is not right for this. 3. D2L does not have a good mechanism for managing permissions and copyright. We are proposing a content management system for primarily video and audio assets. We would provide a server attached to a streaming server that will manage bandwidth. Content owners will be able to assign permissions. We will re-visit this topic at the next meeting. 4. Status re: Respondus Motion: Al Essa The Respondus LockDown Browser is the most critical license. It costs approximately $50,000 for the first year, $55,000 for the second year and $60,000 each following year. Al would like to start negotiating with Respondus for this piece. The goal is for us to pay approximately $50,000/year. In discussions with Ken Niemi and ITS Leadership, buying licenses for all three products (Respondus Lockdown Browser, StudyMate 2.0 and Respondus 3.5) is not the plan unless there was a strong sentiment to do so. Based on surveys, it seemed that there was a strong desire to also buy the Respondus Quizzing tool. Al will start negotiation for both the Respondus Lockdown Browser alone and the Respondus 3.5 Quizzing Tool. 071203IMSMinutes.doc

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5. D2L V. 8.2 Implementation: Karen LaPlant Karen made a motion to upgrade D2L Version 8.1 to Version 8.2. Nancy Black asked: If a faculty member has their courses in 8.1 and the upgrade is made, will they still have access to their courses in 8.1? Lesley Blicker responded that they would not have access to 8.1, but the courses would be included in the 8.2 upgrade. - Downsides to the upgrade: Downtime, Changes to the interface. Our goal is to have training materials available by February so campuses can get their Site Admins. trained by May. We will also implement an 8.2 upgrade webpage and a guide. We have not committed to a deadline yet, but we will try to have a timeline drafted by the next IMS meeting on January 18th. From a technical perspective, this is feasible, but a lot of issues revolve around faculty training and readiness. -

Zala mentioned that the RSP/ITeach conference is coming up in late Feb/early March. We usually bring in D2L trainers to do hands-on training. In the past, around 1100 faculty members have attended. We need to make a decision about the upgrade by then so we can bring in the trainers if needed.

Things to do differently this time around: - If we go ahead with the 8.2 upgrade, we will coordinate with the University of Wisconsin system and other large state systems so our upgrade times do not overlap. - We will also make sure that we ask D2L for their A Team. Carol Lacey seconded the motion. Motion passes. We will make a Go/No-Go decision in January. 6. D2L Excellence Plan Update: Al Essa -

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The focus over the next few weeks is to establish a one-stop website and dashboard. Karen Wenz will be working with our Web Team to develop a mock-up of this website. The first version should be ready in a couple of weeks. Incident Management: One of our major challenges is that when a problem comes in, it is classified as either a 1, 2 or 3. Level 1 and 2 are solved by first level helpdesk and Level 3 incidents are sent to D2L Team (Chuck, Karen, Mike, Ben). This plan is not granular enough. We are hoping to develop a scale that accommodates more granularity. Once this is in place, we will need to develop a practice of escalating problems that we cannot solve to D2L Canada. When we open up a ticket with D2L Canada, we would classify it according to our own categories. This would become the basis of our Service Level Agreement with D2L Canada. The plan is to begin this process and let them know our expectations beforehand. And then we track their performance. We are going to be looking at testing software. This is high priority, particularly Regression Testing. We would like to have a Regression Testing environment in place by March. Failover for D2L: We have a primary data center where the D2L hardware exists. The Secondary Data Center in the Centennial Office Building will be mostly ready by the end of this calendar year. Starting in January, we will physically bring on the hardware for the D2L failover environment and start rehearsing failover scenarios. The goal is to have essentially real-time failover capability. Al would like to add more infrastructure staff to serve D2L and other systems. Penny is working with the PMO office to look at D2L in terms of its functions. They are delineating what they need to do in order to meet goals and objectives.

7. Update on Establishing Performance Standards, Service Level Agreements (SLAs/ Expectations): David Bouchard David asked the Performance and Metrics sub-committee to begin discussing the metrics. What are the elements of performance that we need to work with? What are your initial suggestions for how we look at the issues on purging and archiving standards? (The group met after the Council meeting and will report back at the January 18th meeting.) 071203IMSMinutes.doc

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8. IMS of the Future / Next Steps: David Bouchard & Rhonda Ficek The Futures group has developed a general charge stating that they will meet to research information about the use and effectiveness of current IMS in colleges and universities in order to assist the IMS AC on future systems purchase and use at MnSCU. Goals of IMS of the Future: - How to improve the IMS of the Future - Identify future pedagogy needs - Suggest parallel implementation - Establish pilots early - Look at budgetary needs The group also developed criteria that may be useful when looking at IMS features: 1. Basic feature sets 2. How does it integrate with registration systems 3. Interoperability 4. Scalability 5. Administrative Tools 6. Support Services and Service Level Agreements David suggesting putting together a D2L Course or discussion board for the Futures Group so we can gather input. -We want to look at a strategy for where we want to be in the upcoming years. We would like to develop a wish list of capabilities that people are asking for as well as alternative models. The Edutools site provides an extensive product comparison of systems (including Blackboard, Moodle WebCT, D2L etc…) that we will be taking a look at. Lesley Blicker suggested that perhaps we need to bring in more campus-based people to help make decisions regarding the IMS of the future. David Bouchard responded that the Futures Group is just working on initial fact-finding and organizing. We would eventually like to involve a wider audience in the decision. Collecting information periodically is a very powerful model. We could use this as input for the next version of software. We could gather information through surveys possibly every semester. Lesley stated that we tried this a few years ago and submitted the data to D2L but it ended up in a black hole. So instead we put a link on the D2L website for people to request features. Our list closely coincided with the multi-state group’s lists of pressing issues. At this point, the process broke down and we received no response. We need to change our relationship with D2L. It cannot remain as one-way as it is now. It is perfectly reasonable to request a process by which D2L responds to our requests. 9. Motion re: Moodle Pilot: Rhonda Ficek A Moodle installation has been running for several semesters at Moorhead. Rhonda suggested inviting a couple of courses from select community, technical and 4 year institutions to use Moodle. We would then have people who have tried Moodle to provide a defined viewpoint of the system. The goals of the pilot: 1. Explore Open Source options 2. Explore running parallel systems 3. Provide an opportunity to explore an IMS with a different focus than the others, specifically, collaborative learning. Reasons for the Moodle pilot: - It is important for us to gain expertise in Open Source applications as well as in parallel structures. Rhonda made a motion for the Council to endorse a limited pilot of the Moodle IMS at MSU Moorhead. Karen LaPlant seconded the motion. Motion passes. Rhonda, David and Al will work on the next steps. 071203IMSMinutes.doc

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Adjournment: Meeting adjourned at 1:10 PM. Meeting notes submitted by Smitha Pennepalli, [email protected]. IMS Workgroups: • User Support Models/Best Practices: James Falkofske, Lesley Blicker, Carol Lacey, Zala Frashant • Current Standards/Performance Metrics (crosses over several categories): John Rohleder • Risk Analysis/ etc… and Enterprise Data Management: David Bouchard, Mike Condon, Kim Priener, John Rohleder, • Future Directions: Rhonda Ficek, Nima Salehi, Lesley Blicker, James Falkofske, Sally Johnstone, David Bouchard, John Rohleder, Zala Frashant • Legal Issues: David Bouchard, Anne-Marie Ryan-Guest, James Falkofske, Karen LaPlant IMS Executive Committee: David Bouchard, Alfred Essa, Rhonda Ficek, Karen LaPlant, Gary Langer

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