February 1, 2006

Sakai VetMed Technical Meeting

Some technical comments/issues were discussed prior to review of Chris Brandt's SVM Gap analysis for the Spring 2006 pilot.

  • Hardware: Dell option chosen as HW for VM
  • WebDav Issues: WebDav does not work for Macs; cause is the servelet is broken. Determination of VM programmer action dependent on whether the Sakai collab team makes this issue a high priority. Technical problems dues to addition of semicolon or the file name is too long. Another issue is that after upload 0 (zero) bytes are displayed - the correct file size is not shown.
    Estimate on VM population affected: about 15%
    Some recommendations from Sakai collab team to use Goliath http://www.webdav.org/goliath/ on MacOS, although some bugs remain w/this browser as well
    VM team will wait another week (pending Sakai prioritization) before assigning local programmer on a fix/hack
  • Request for Keith to provide an Ilios demo next week
  • Course Evaluations - progress report by Ben
  • Note on bug in JIRA: VMS1 - Students not appearing in Site Info until logged in for first time: Scott F. Implemented CourseManagementProvider - but it doesn't work unless you push the "update participants" button.
  • Skin/CSS update: looks good!
  • Rick and Dan are scheduled to meet with Nancy Olsen (Training & Support) and Chris Sarason (ET Partners) re: Captivate training for faculty and students
  • Rick, Dan and Chris B. are participating in the MW-hosted Unicon training sessions over the next 2 Fridays.
  • Discussion of technical reasons pro/con for pre-populating resources structure: originally proposed as a work around for the empty directory upload issue & for organization. Cons: faculty name directory structure will not work for team-taught courses or managed by person other than the instructor. Pro: possibly a simple structure will be accetable

SVM Gaps for Spring '06

  • View Course Roster: incorrect number displayed for actual enrolled students, i.e., includes dropped students. iWeb shows only registered students because it pulls realtime data. Ray will change his CRON job to include all enrollment status'/will check with Brian, so that student data can be filtered out later for pelping or dropped students. Note: Sakai users persist via their Kerberos login, although they will no longer have access to the courses they are no longer registered in.
  • MySpave Integration: Beau is currently working on this w/Scott A.
  • Playground Worksite for Faculty: per Chris, this will be a dummy course site which will allow faculty to try out features.
  • Import Schedule data for course from Ilios: Current process for spring is to move data from instructor's Outlook account to Scheduler to Ilios. The middle step is ndded for room check/facilities to avoid facilities errors. Steps will be takedn to define the business process, build & test a direct route into Sakai while maintaining the current flow.
  • Implement Defined Roles for Sakai: will implement 7-8 roles including CALF personnel. Chris to test - will work with Scott.
  • Course Syllabus Content: Currently, there is a long run-time required to write out course pages, syllabus or CF-generated pages. External tool (Ilios) to genereate as external content (i.e., not using Sakai syllabus). Questions remain re: need to continually update/pull up dynamically. Flexibility is the key here. Ray suggests building a supplemental page for clean delivery after the pull from Ilios, possibly a quick build with ColdFusion.

CERE Implementation Meeting

Dicussions regarding preparation for the Spring and Fall launches:

  • Captivate recordings to be used for training. Considerations of quality, fine-tuning of using Captivate for clip development.
  • Spring 2006 launch with approx. 240 students; orientation planned for use of CERE. Faculty training needed prior to launch. Identify training issues based on instructor reaction to spring quarter. Processes to consider include how to release lecture content - most production of content comes from CALF.
  • Creating PDF for .ppt with Acrobat issues: instructors are used to CALF doing this process for them; traditionally, CALF staff are stripping backgrounds, darkening text, doing size reduction processes, and password protection. Desirable to transition to faculty through training and ending support. Want to facilitate real-time posting by faculty. Plan to give help sessions through summer. Encourage use of digital releases to avoid ppt handouts.
  • Discussion of image repository investigation: Reviews include DSpace http://www.dspace.org/ and Artesia http://www.artesia.com/. Faculty needs to be able to enter large volume of photos via batch import of content and metadata and to set permission levels for access into the existing hospital image database.