January 18, 2006

Owned by Lisa Wilson
Last updated: Nov 01, 2006Version comment
3 min read

CERE - Collaborative Educational and Research Environment, is the program name for the production implementation of sakai for the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. CERE will rely on kerberos authentication and will integrate with VM specific systems including ILIOS and Athena for curriculum information.
Notes from two meetings - technical and campus implementation - are included here.

Technical Meeting

(not all notes attributed as I'm new to this group)
The planned implementation of Sakai 2.1 is underway:

  • Beau Patrette reported several bugs being worked out prior to the rollup, most importantly a distauth issue in collaboration with Scott A.
  • other issues noted in testing included a known 'out of memory' issue and poor performance in gradebook
  • faculty clients with special needs may require custom design requests for VM sakai instance beyond the current scope
  • tear-down/rebuild scheduled for late 1/18/06 after the Vet School Computer Committee demo

Fall 2006 implementation:

  • getting hardware quotes from Sun & Dell
  • importing course and session data specific to VM, i.e., the hierarchical group structure needed to deal with course sections offered at differing times
  • multiple templates will be used for courses and projects as well as student, staff, and faculty based templates.

Other outstanding issues:

  • Quizzing limitation in the feature capabilities btwn quizzes existing in MyUCD, existing features in sakai, and desired features.
  • Computer Assisted Learning Facility (CALF) will need accounts in JIRA to submit the problems gathered from the previous quarter
  • Lisa will follow up with Rick to identify quiz shortcomes/feature requests and how they into the existing (wish) list for quizzing in sakai
  • the webdav features in Resources are being demoed to faculty and are a high priority; existing issues w/Mac 10.4.4 when following instructions to load multiple files. If a single file is loaded first, then the system allows the user to load the remaining files.

Beau demoed JIRA http://mediaworks.ucdavis.edu:8080/jira and the group discussed ways to enter, resolve and close bugs.

CERE Implementation

Per Jan Ilkiw, Associate Dean - Academic Programs, Vet Med is proceeding with their own instance of sakai at this time to meet the needs of their school. Kirk Alexander, Mediaworks, is acting as the conduit between faculty and programmers to ensure that these needs (and the needs of the campus at large) are met.
Jan is currently focused on the many decisions being make regarding curriculum and content for the new db system which will integrate w/sakai.
January 18th is the launch date for the CERE campaign which include using screen shots of CERE for presentation demoing to faculty.

Rick Hayes spoke of the plan to use Captivate to train faculty on using CERE. The recordings will not include the skinnable parts of the screen (i.e., header identifiying CERE vs. My) so that the results are generic enough to be shared
across campus. An initial recording would demonstrate to faculty how to migrate content (webdav). Faculty feedback is requested to determine what defaults should appear on the left-hand menu.

Further discussions included:

  1. determining the best time for pilot release to both new students in the fall and existing students; it's critical to point returning students from iWeb (the VM intranet) to CERE.
  2. brief mention of the 2 courses scheduled for spring pilot: 414C, Veterinary Toxicology, and 405, Vet Parasitology.
  3. Help Desk support (within the school) for any users who encounter difficulties and the possibility of using VM first/second year students for additional support.
    Fall 2006 classes start September 11 with orientation the week prior.