Presentation for JasigSakai2012. Session description as follows: Duke's move from Blackboard to Sakai involves much more than simply planning and executing a mass migration: it serves as a key step in Duke's larger eLearning strategy which hopes to shift the focus away from the LMS as a one-point solution for all eLearning needs, and instead leverage the LMS as an integration point for a suite of available Duke and non-Duke tools.
Participants attending the session will be better able to assess and plan similar transitions or implementations. Through a review of Duke's experiences and lessons learned, participants will be able to adapt successful models to their own campus culture and manage priorities to better align their projects with broader institutional goals.
3. Who
◦ Technical Working Group
◦ Functional Working Group
◦ Faculty, staff, students
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4. Approach
◦ Faculty input – focus groups, teams
◦ Identify and create use cases
◦ Environmental scan – what are other schools doing,
why?
◦ Detailed analysis – functional comparisons;
technical documentation and resource needs; costs
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5. Duke’s strategic priorities
◦ Internationalization
◦ Knowledge in the Service of Society
◦ Interdisciplinarity
◦ Collaboration and Connection
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7. Central component – most heavily used
system other than email and SISS
Gateway to other systems
License with Blackboard coming up for
renewal
The one technology that most faculty used
(even for non-teaching related tasks)
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14. “The schedule is awesome! One of my
professors just loads everything
needed for the day onto the
schedule ‐ lecture notes, links to
readings, things that are due, etc. It
makes the site very user‐friendly.”
– Nicholas School student
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21. Organize teams to address different aspects
of the migration
Teams reported to a larger Duke Sakai team
comprised of members of all sub-teams
Sponsors: executive group overseeing the
project address issues of scope, budget and
high level communications
Members of teams comprised of staff from
different units
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22. Technical & Hosting Strategy
Integrations
Migration Planning
Communications
Training & Documentation
Support Model
Governance
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24. New Partnerships Bring New Opportunities...
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25. …and New Challenges
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26. You still need local staff:
◦ Research Sakai community resources
(Jira, Confluence, listservs)
◦ Troubleshoot, identify and communicate issues
to vendors
◦ Design, test and approve fixes and developments
◦ Define roles and permissions
◦ Manage roster and integration issues
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28. Looking at the integrations more holistically may
have been beneficial.
Involving the right business and technical people in
integrations
Testing is critical.
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29. Kaltura media gallery
Bb Parity
◦ Wimba voice tools using Basic LTI
◦ Ereserves
◦ Respondus LockDownBrowser
◦ Export Official Grades to PeopleSoft
◦ Eliminated some integrations (Library Guides)
Finding Post’em useful in some cases
SISS, Shib, LDAP
Toolkits*
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34. Last 4 years of Bb content
Worked with Longsight to use existing Bb-Sakai
import tool
Multiple modifications to import tool code
When is the quality of the migrated content “good
enough”?
Also employed workarounds (bFree, WebDav) .
Size of archives, a number of sites over a gig
Total # of sites migrated – over 28,000
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50. Model based on Blackboard support
Partnership between Duke OIT and CIT
Local monitoring in additional to vendor-provided
monitoring
Emergency response / vendor vs. local-hosted
differences
Instructional Designer specifically hired for the
project.
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52. Project managers brought decisions to Sakai Team
and sponsors
Transition Advisory Board
Working on permanent governance model – people
shifting out of transition roles
Standardizing a process for new development
requests, bug fixes and integrations.
IMPORTANT: open-source means different things
to different people. Set expectations.
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53. June 30th is coming… then
what?
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54. Self-service (course creation)
◦ So far, so good
◦ Benefits – do not have to wait for administrators, no middle
man; combine sites the way you want (instructors); open up
project sites to campus community
◦ Some pushback from professional schools
Toolkits
◦ Facilitating some batch creation of courses for professional
schools (ex: all Law courses)
Course content linking problem
Better streaming/media management
Other bugs that need to wait for 2.8/2.9
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55. Partnering with Fuqua School of Business (and
other Duke developers)
◦ Team assignments
◦ Improving the schedule tool
Exploring Sakai Portfolios
Sakai 2.8 or 2.9 in 2013
OAE?
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57. Duke Sakai Team
Yvonne Belanger Dwayne Marlowe
Cara Bonnett Mark McCahill
David Bracken Chris Meyer
Neal Caidin Shawn Miller
Deborah Deyulia Elise Mueller
Samantha Earp Lynne O’Brien
Ed Gomes Josh Quan
Laurie Harris Christine Vucinich
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Notas do Editor
Bb - about 1600-1700 active courses each semester
Flexibility: open source = can be coded, developed for, changedOptions: several vendors and support unitsCommunity: several peer institutions: Stanford, Yale, Columbia, Rice, UNCGrowing Global: Bb licensing was per FTE - $$$ whenever we need to add more people; Understanding the constraints of the license for who we wanted to add was not clear
Initial experience with Sakai; some of the feedback “tainted” by manual management of roster, lack of integration with SISS; sorting based on email accounts instead of last name,etcFindings from UNC pilot:Spring 201111 faculty, 11 coursesFeedback and survey results were favorable. Most issues with integration/logins, etc.
We decided to do this transition in 1 year. (Feedback from other schools showed that faculty and students disliked having parallel systems running for too long).Limited Phase 1 in Fall 2011. Even with only 200 faculty, Phase 1 ended up affecting nearly 5000 students.Choosing faculty for a limited releaseData from surveys -using feedback to improve support and SakaiLooked for power users, faculty with experience in Bb that had tests, quizzes, assignments, used tools. Basically – getting the people that would be hardest to please/move onboard earliest – and using their feedback to support changes and improvements
Students responded favorably (note Spring comparison is to student results from Spring pilot on UNC system). student n=400
Sample from student response. Key difference with Sakai - Bb didn’t have a ‘schedule’ tool at all.
Faculty response - tools mostly meeting their needs.Noted pain points: blog and wiki were inferior to Bb tools (we used Learning Objects blog and wiki tools in Bb). SAMigo (tests&quizzes) was a big shift for users. Lots of issues, re-learning, etc.
Migration of Bb content - what migrates is outlined on the support sitePart of the strategy - as requested by faculty groups. Bring over last 4 years (starting with F2007) of their stuff. We brought over everything up to Summer 2011. Lines up with data retention policy.Migration is not perfect - we’ll discuss later
Phase 2 - open to all – started much broader communication push(borrowed the ‘checklist’ idea from UNC-CH)Reiterate these three things as much as possible:Change is coming and whenFaculty have to take actionThere is help and where to get it
Also – 1155 Sakai Project sites since we rolled them out in Nov 2011During the first open semester, over half of courses now taught in Sakai. LMS use up overall – half as much in Bb)
Looking to Summer – we shut Bb off on June 30th. Lingering question: what happens with users who didn’t move to Sakai in the Spring?
We benefited from two vendors working together.Uniconhandled aspects of planning and key integrations (ex: SISS) plus developments, and Longsight handled hosting and support.Working with vendors allowed us to gain knowledge quickly without spending time researching, re-training staff, and setting up new systems. This was crucial to allowing us to focus more on the migration and faculty training efforts.
Our core challenge working with vendors: coordination. We heavily relied on our own internal project managers to keep up with vendor communications, and to help make sure all Duke staff involved in the efforts understood proper escalation channels, responsible parties, etc.
Looking at an integration holistically:for example: understanding the relationship between site title, site id, roster connections, APIs, external integration calls, and SISS identifiers for sitesConsider whether/how to do source code reviews, load testing, checking for memory links, in addition to the criticality of functional checking. Who does these functions? At what cost?You don’t always have the resources to do full regression – so what are the areas that could be affected.
*see next two slides
Integrating Duke Toolkits was an essential part of the eLearning strategy moving forward. Using Toolkits, we can manage groups and access to several Duke provided/supported tools. Tech note: Toolkits is based on Grouper.
Toolkits can be accessed via Sakai through Site Info > Add Participants. Toolkits opens in an iFrame. Course instructors and project site managers can look up and add Duke users, add guests (using Open ID – yahoo, gmail, aol, etc), or batch add both Duke and non-Duke users. Mapping roles between Sakai, WordPress, Confluence and other tools has proven to be somewhat complicated.
We had to stage migrations of Bb content at key times. Weperformed a ‘mini-migration’ of all F2007-S2011 content for our 200 ‘Phase 1’ faculty. This gave us a chance to test the import process at scale.We staggered imports for concurrent semesters as we went along. We also had to decide on ideal timing for migrating Bb ‘ORG’ sites to Sakai Project Sites.
We kept terms organized – even with live Sakai semesters (ex: Fall 2011 for Bb migrated and live Sakai courses)Communication issues (Please check your content from the move!)Large files tended to fail
We followed a shared plan. Updated monthly so the whole team knew what had been communicated and to whom.
Change your gateway! We ended up creating a new HTML page linking to our support materials, pulling in multiple FAQs from our support pages, and linking to Sakai.
This is a page from our support site. Keep important information about the transition readily available and linkable. If administrators, faculty, or student groups ask – provide links for all info. Update as much as possible – at least after every milestone.
We added countdown timers in various places. The main summary for instructors and…
…we also added countdown timers and announcements in Blackboard itself. We also added information and links about the transition directly into the course template for the Fall and Spring semesters (during the transition) telling faculty and students that the change was coming.
Monthly updates on the CIT blog tracked milestones, made formal announcements, and were used for email newsletter content.
Try to base communication on data (newsletter stats, Bb usage stats, course creations)Update the university on the progress (Sakai Updates monthly, posting reports)
Sometimes the best approach is the simplest. We ended up refining the message (from ‘Sakai is here!’ to ‘Blackboard – Gone Forever’ to try to ramp up the immediacy of the move).We put up posters, sent out postcards and even affixed labels to coffee sleeves with the simple message: “All Blackboard sites – Gone Forever!”
We put up posters, sent out postcards and even affixed labels to coffee sleeves with the simple message: “All Blackboard sites – Gone Forever!”
Hardest part was training the ‘trainers’ (instructional technologists,etc) before we knew enough about how Sakai worked, would function, and even before integration and tools decisions were finalized.Training mostly took on two forms: formal workshops and drop-in office hoursNOTE: Bye Bye Blackboard was a special series we only offered in the Spring specifically for those wanting more help migrating content, saving Bb data, etc.
Sakai built-in documentation is a great start - but hard to update and often not written for your particular audience (not to mention tool names change, etc).Needed a separate place to update and maintain docs, instructions, videos, support info http://support.sakai.duke.eduUsing a blog technology (like WP) makes it possible to quickly add FAQs and documentation ---being responsive to needs. Whenever possible have support people write – or at least draft- the documentation since they’re answering the questions anyway (in our case, our Sakai Instructional Designer and several other CIT consultants wrote the bulk of the FAQs, guides and examples).
Sakai built-in documentation is a great start - but hard to update and often not written for your particular audience (not to mention tool names change, etc).Needed a separate place to update and maintain docs, instructions, videos, support info http://support.sakai.duke.eduUsing a blog technology (like WP) makes it possible to quickly add FAQs and documentation ---being responsive to needs. Whenever possible have support people write – or at least draft- the documentation since they’re answering the questions anyway (in our case, our Sakai Instructional Designer and several other CIT consultants wrote the bulk of the FAQs, guides and examples).
OIT = Office of Information Technology CIT = Center for Instructional TechnologyBb support - OIT Service Desk – first line of support; Teaching/Learning = Tier 2 CIT; administration and technical = Tier 3 (CIT+OIT)Inst. Designer - Helped ease CIT into supporting role, answering questions, writing documentation.
Open Source: Set expectations. Educate your users. Not everything can be – or should be –tweaked and changed overnight.