2013-05-16 Incubation "Call"

Open Two Factor

UCB Registry project should get rolling anytime now...expect that will
re-communitize the project,  get us finally to a 1.0 release, and out
of incubation.  Couple of presentations on this in June.

Student Success Plan

Pete was interviewed by Patti about the incubation process and he has taken the survey.

They've gotten some more faculty interested and one may be going to the Provost to get money for a TS2.0 pilot.  They already have $60K and have the underlying architecture built.  It is a whole rewrite with some UX people involved for a change (HTML5/CSS/JS/Ruby).  This time they are outsourcing to a local company and so far it is going well.  They plan to deliver a product where almost all the transactions are in the browser, syncing with the server at appropriate times. Some applications might be able to run off-line.  It is all open source so is Apereo-friendly.

There is a competition in Des Moines of all places on Jun1-3 called HacktoSchool(http://www.hacktoschool.com/).  The developers would like to use TS2.0 core as the framework to build an educational app.  This could actually get visibility at the Iowa Lt. Gov level.

From a recent email from Steve:

"With the recent graduation of the Scheduling Assistant from Jasig graduation, I'd like for my portlets (Sakai connector portlet, Basic LTI portlet) to be reassessed and have the same criteria and advantage applied - that is, bundling these portlets with the core release of uPortal eliminates the problem of not enough adoption. "  SUSAN Susan send email to uPortal steering committee about bundling.

From a recent email from Steve:

"With the recent graduation of the Scheduling Assistant from Jasig graduation, I'd like for my portlets (Sakai connector portlet, Basic LTI portlet) to be reassessed and have the same criteria and advantage applied - that is, bundling these portlets with the core release of uPortal eliminates the problem of not enough adoption. " SUSAN Susan send email to uPortal steering committee about bundling.

Student Success Plan

• Russ is working on the governance document to be done ASAP.
• 1.2 is now released and the production build. 2.0 development is well underway and we should release SSP 2.0 Beta 1 at the beginning of May. It will be followed by a series of Beta releases until we hit production with 2.0 around August or September.
• Russ also has a new research study that will be done this week that connects the software to the literature as the "why/how" the tools support student success.

Pete Boysen

Pete put together the following information to get Ian Dolphin and potentially others up to speed with ThinkSpace:

Background
In 2006, three faculty groups approached me about how they might sustain their successful educational projects, based on real-world problem-solving,  after the grants ran out.
I suggested that if we could build a web infrastructure to support a wide variety of educational applications, it might be sustainable since all applications could share common services like authentication, authorization, file management etc.  ThinkSpace was born.
 
Activity in ThinkSpace is centered around spaces (much like sites in Sakai or portlets in uPortal).  Each space has a type that dictates its layout, functions, authorizations etc:
 
ProblemSpace – Students complete cases (assignments).  These cases have multiple “phases” which they complete as they move through the case.
UTEP – University preservice teachers are required to maintain a portfolio of artifacts to demonstrate competency in 12 standards
PDAPM – Professional Development for Algebra Project Monitoring -  High school teachers receive training in how to administer small tests (probes) and then track student progress through a variety of graphical tools.
Scenario – Time-based scenarios can be set up (usually for a few weeks) in which a group of students respond as a company team to a variety of office “controversies” in preparation  for employment.
 
Facts:
Users: 6148
ProblemSpaces (courses):  324
Portfolios:  1903
Federal Grants received:  NSF, USDA, Dept. of Education (>$3M)
 
A couple of short videos (2 minutes) give you a better idea of the applications:
 
Veterinary cases: http://screencast.com/t/5Gx99oRG0
(We also interest from dietetics interns, pharmacy and human medical colleges)
 
English/Journalism and Markup: http://screencast.com/t/CSsX3fVJs9V8
 
Professional Development – Algebra Progress Monitoring : http://screencast.com/t/azUDdwGxRZ9
 
Vision
Universities should not be dependent on the market place or the cloud to develop and deliver instructional applications.  Single universities usually don’t have resources to host these applications.
However, an Apereo-based cloud service might be sustainable.  Funding could come from membership fees and grant money could be used for development.  Integration with LMSes would be through LTI (already implemented in ThinkSpace).  The resulting community of practice could help support the development of innovative educational applications based on pedagogical needs rather than monetary ones.