Brock University 2009 Update

From OUCEL Wiki

The Centre for Teaching, Learning & Educational Technologies (CTLET) continues its partnership in supporting instructors and teaching assistants while Information Technology Services’ (ITS’) Research Support and Web Services group operates the servers and ITS' help desk provide student support. ITS has recently expanded to supporting other on-line teaching tools like the mathematics testing tool, WebWork; the web conferencing system, Elluminate. CTLET also administers the phrase-matching software, Turnitin.com. In addition, CTLET is involved in the development and maintenance of online courses offered through a partnership with the Faculty of Education.

The 2008-2009 academic year marked the last year that WebCT/Blackboard was available at Brock University; it also marked the first year where Sakai was used in production.

As it was a transition year, Brock University had to run 3 servers: WebCT (1), WebCT 2 and Sakai. Though not an ideal arrangement, this configuration has proved useful in its pragmatism as the primary WebCT server struggled to handle the load occasionally placed upon it by high-demand periods. Online courses or high usage courses were placed on the secondary server to ensure constant connectivity.

“Isaak” was chosen as the winning name of Brock’s new Sakai-based system. The name is an anagram of the product name “Sakai” and references Brock University's namesake, Sir. Isaac Brock. Issak made its debut in the fall of 2008 and was generally well received. Anecdotal feedback commended Isaak for its reliability and the fact that it quenched a thirst for anything-but-WebCT.

The CTLET hosted 25 workshops to help instructors with the transition to Isaak and contributed to Faculty and department-specific events in Business and Education. In addition to the CTLET’s normal one-on-one support over the phone, E-Mail and in person, Matt Clare also appeared in The Matheson Learning Commons Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10:00 AM to Noon starting Tuesday November 4th and continuing while the campus was open until late April.

A team of students was hired by the CTLET with funding from the Associate Vice-President Academic to convert critical courses from one system to the other.

A website developed by Matt Clare was used to track instructors preferences, the students job queue, and the amount of hours worked proved invaluable tool for coordinating the Course Content Converters work from their own computers and homes and ensuring that the project stayed under its allotted 720 hours. A total of 596 instructors were E-Mailed about the conversion with a custom URL to prioritize courses, resulting in 1193 courses to convert. The average course took three-quarters of an hour to convert.

More information can be found at http://kumu.brocku.ca/sakai