Georgia Tech’s Road to Sakai

Donna Llewellyn

Director, Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning

Patty Wolfe

Project Manager, Unicon

Discussion Points• The Decision• Assessment and Planning

– Implementation Planning Session– Requirements Gathering– Getting the Campus Ready– Process Considerations

• Development– Customizations– UAT– Roll-out

• Lessons Learned• This Summer and Future Plans• Question and Answer

Decision Making

Making the decision to move to Sakai at GT

• Faculty Committee – basic needs assessment of CMS features

• WebCT license issues• Higher level CMS taskforce

GT LMS Taskforce Recommendation:

We recommend that Georgia Tech become fully involved with the Sakai Project, a community source software development effort to design, build and deploy a new Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) for higher education. We make this recommendation for three reasons:

• To maintain Georgia Tech's position as a leader in technology and innovation. • To ensure future LMS are suitably flexible for and supportive of those current

and new methods of instruction and assessment needed within Georgia Tech's educational mission.

• To explore opportunities to extend the usefulness of some of the LMS's developed at Georgia Tech within the Sakai Project.

Assessment and Planning

Assessment and Planning

What: 3-day onsite Unicon visit• Day 1 – Implementation Planning Session• Day 2 and 3 – Requirements Gathering

Result: • Consensus from the stakeholders and project

team on the scope of the project and what needed to occur

• Detailed technical specifications and associated costs for the requirements identified.

Duration: 4 weeks

Assessment and Planning Day 1 IPS

Philosophy

• Unused software is, well, useless

• Sakai is all about people

• Know what you’re in for

• Gaining consensus and buy-in from project team

• Identifying requirements

• Driving adoption is like traveling for Thanksgiving – start out early

Assessment and Planning Day 1 IPS

Sample Agenda• Demo• Introductions• Strategic Planning

– Goals and Success Metrics– Aligning the Organization– Looking ahead: Planning

• Tactical Planning– Account types, worksite types, and roles– Content/Tools– Templates– User Experience

Assessment and Planning Day 2 and 3

• Technical discussions and detailed review from GT subject matter experts on critical integrations and Sakai customizations

• Intensive sessions that identified procedural changes, policy considerations, and functionality requirements from various constituents on campus

Assessment and Planning Results

• Project Plan• Detailed Requirements and Specifications• Documented Goals and Metrics• Process Considerations• Driving Adoption on Campus• Configuration Decisions Document• Executive Summary with timeline and cost

breakdown

Process Considerations• File size limits • Sakai rollout/governance

– change mgmt – coordination – requirements definition & prioritization

• Instructor sandbox • Training plan • Help documentation • Faculty & support desk • Manage user feedback, esp. for Fall 2007

production rollout • Gap analysis of existing GaTech CMS's

More Process Considerations• Track support incidents even outside the confines of a

dedicated help desk - a "support provider network" • Usability testing • Audit by internal security group • Worksite creation process

– Need to define policies for group and club site creation – Need to analyze pros/cons for exposing site creation

functionality to end users • Document enterprise and Sakai role mappings and

processes • Data Back-ups... how to handle • How often will courses be archived from the Sakai site? • Overall, process back-ups, restoration, and migration. • Guest user account creation • GT to determine which email address to use

Timeline  Dec.06 Jan. Feb. Mar. Apr. May Jun. Jul. Aug.

Phase 0                                                                           

Phase 1                                                                           

GT Prep for Summer Pilot                                                                           

Summer Term Starts                                                                           

Phase 2 Scoping                                                                           

Phase 2 Development                                                                           

Fall Term Starts                                                                           

Preparing the Campus

Getting the campus ready:Structures

• Defining oversight committees and work teams– Governing Board: Higher level group consisting of

assorted Vice Provosts, Associate Deans, faculty, etc. This group will make the policy decisions for the project.

– Program Board: Group of assorted OIT Directors and representatives from functional users (enrollment services, library, distance learning, faculty) This group will implement most of the decisions made by the governing board.

– Sakai-Tech: All people involved with the technical aspects of the project. A list to keep people informed of decisions and actions.

Getting the campus ready:Hiring

• Received approval for seven new positions:– Director of Educational Technology (leader of

this and other ET projects, chair the Governing Board, etc.)

– 4 Developers (distributed around campus)– 1 System Administrator– 1 Database Administrator

Getting the campus ready:Nitty Gritty Stuff

• Name your collaborative learning platform contest– Over 800 entries from students, faculty, staff– Labored decision to come up with winner: T-Square

• Setting policies– Who can create new sites, how much space do we allocate to each

site, file upload size limitations, guest policies, …

• Doing the work– In the absence of a true team in place, various folks took on this

project on top of their regular jobs (Director of CETL, Director of Architecture & Infrastructure, IT support in CETL, many staff in OIT)

Getting the campus ready:Gathering Feedback

• Piloted Sakai with 10-15 courses• Student Town Hall meeting + survey• Feed and Feedback Sessions• Initial Training Sessions

Phase 1

DevelopmentWhat: Development of critical customizations

1. Banner Integration - Unicon2. User Identity Management - Unicon3. Email Whitelist - Unicon4. Assignment Auto-submit - Unicon5. Migration of courses from WebCT to Sakai - GT

Core Unicon Development Team:• 4 Developers• 2 QA• 1 System Administrator• 1 Project Manager

Duration: 12 Weeks

Development

User Acceptance Testing:• Cooperation between GT and Unicon for testing

critical customizations• GT Team of 8 individuals• 3 Week duration

Roll to production:

Unicon rolled customizations

Development

Environments:1. Vanilla Sakai 2.3 – utilized by GT team for

testing of native Sakai functionality and tool review

2. Subversion Source Code Repository3. Development Environment4. Quality Assurance – this was then upgraded to

the UAT environment that mirrored GT production

5. Production – 4 application servers, 1 database, SSL, and load balancer

Lessons LearnedWhat worked:• Weekly Team Meetings and Reporting –

GT/Unicon• Shared Issue Tracking System• Detailed technical specifications• Availability/priority of both organizations to meet

the deliverables identified in the timeline• Expeditious approval of changes, requirements,

etc.• Flexibility and Agility of Partner Relationship• Expectations Management

Lessons Learned in Working Together

Opportunities for improvement:• Extremely aggressive schedule• Under-estimated the QA effort for Banner

testing for both development and UAT• Building in time for documentation/transition• Following the work of the Sakai Community

Lessons Learned at Georgia Tech

• Joining an open source community– Deadlines and self interests versus the needs and directions of the

community• Collaboration across divisions

– Competing interests/scarce resources– Different management styles, different languages

• Managing expectations while marketing• Need to develop long-term strategies and procedures to

harness talent and desire to innovate while maintaining control of enterprise

• We have eliminated the fall-guy ----- all fingers now point at us!

Phase 2 – Summer 2007

Development

What: Development of critical customizations

1. Upgrade from Sakai 2.3 to Sakai 2.4 - Unicon2. User Confidentiality Considerations – Unicon3. Banner Worksite Naming Updates – Unicon4. Banner Performance Research – Unicon5. Phase I Ongoing Maintenance - Unicon6. Updating Gradebook Branch – GT

Core Unicon Development Team:• 4 Developers• 1 QA• 1 System Administrator• 1 Project Manager

Duration: 9.5 Weeks Duration

Future Plans

Phase 3

1. Conditional Release

2. Gradebook Publication

3. Wimba Integration

Questions and Answers

Contact Information

Georgia TechDonna Llewellyndonna.llewellyn@cetl.gatech.edu404-894-2340

UniconPatty Wolfepwolfe@unicon.net602-524-0390