Integrated Curriculum Project (12/2/2008)

Aspects of the Proposal Related to Architecture

The Office of the University Registrar (OUR) proposes a joint development effort with Decision Academic to enhance their forthcoming Course Manager project for implementation at UC Davis. Course Manager would replace the existing UCD-developed Course Approval Form (CAF) system.
Catalog Navigator would also be acquired from Decision Academic to provide online access for students.
OUR already uses another Decision Academic product, Degree Navigator. An upgrade to Degree Navigator and the acquisition of Decision Academic's middleware product, AMANDA, would create an integrated environment and common database for all of these products.
The upgrade to Degree Navigator will enable distributed administration of the rules governing degree requirements, while OUR administers the institutional requirements.
The proposed project will develop an interface with Banner to eliminate the need for dual entry of course information in Course Manager and Banner.
200-45 Project Forum

The decision to join the Course Manager development effort has the potential to produce a result that addresses UC Davis's needs very well, but this is not without risk. I assume that issues like accountability and liability of the various parties are handled in the contract, but there are also likely to be competing needs from other colleges and universities in that development effort. If it hasn't already been done, it would be a good idea to assess these needs more specifically to identify the commonalities with the needs of UC Davis. A comparison with Kuali Student's community would be appropriate, since course management is an early (Q4, 2009) deliverable of that project, and it would integrate directly with UC Davis's planned Kuali Rice middleware infrastructure.

Amanda provides some functions that will also be provided by Kuali Rice when the campus has implemented that middleware software. These include workflow, access security management, and notification management, and the result can be greater than simple duplication of implementation effort. For example, since Kauli Rice will be used for workflow within MyInfoVault (Summer, 2009), many faculty will be forced to learn and interact with two different workflow engines.

At the top of page 7, it says, "Each college deans' office will also have the ability to interface with Degree Navigator and routinely use the XML output to support their internal operations with optimized student course completion data." If it hasn't already been done, an analysis of the deans' offices' operations should be done to determine the applicability of Degree Navigator's data and the appropriate interface that would be implemented by Degree Navigator and the deans' offices.

We will likely see more applications that are "wired" to their own middleware in the future. We need to develop a strategy for integration (or non-integration) of those application with UCD's middleware infrastructure.
Banner is not well-structured for integration of the kind proposed. The proposal seems to assume that AMANDA would provide an integration layer, which is probably appropriate for the OUR side of the integration. Some thought, though, should be put into the Banner side of that integration in terms of level of effort and maintainability required. Rather than developing an OUR-specific integration facility within Banner, it may be better to implement a more general-purpose integration facility with standard interfaces that could be reused by other Banner-supported departments.