VSPC Minutes September 26, 2005 2
Vista Strategic Planning Committee
Minutes for April 19, 2005
Attending: Michael Blocher, Paul Brynteson, John Campbell, Don Carter, Lorraine Elder, Chris Johnson, Marc Lord, Larry MacPhee, Patrick Martin, Matt McGlamery, Tom Paradis, Kathy Savage, Brian Sawert, Edward Smith, DanStoffel, Laura Taylor
1. Report on Recent Activities
Don/John reported that the systems are physically in place and training is scheduled to begin on our own servers. At this point, we no longer need the hosted environment. Larry reported that about 30 courses have been selected for Phase I.
2. Report on project and system build
Again, we have all the hardware purchased and, starting yesterday, we turned over build.vista.nau.edu to CTEL so they could get started on a local server. This is a limited support environment and backups, etc. will need to be done locally until we have our Vista VPAM training scheduled for May 2.
We’re using a lot of consulting at this point—about $490K of the budget is estimated to be spent. About $230K for hardware, $125K for software and maintenance (prorated from old contract), close to $120K for consulting and the rest is for miscellaneous linux training and contingencies. [Editor note: we actually finished the budget year spending about $462K.]
3. Project Team Reports:
The following reported on their team activities:
· Vista Technical Build (Tobias Kriedel, Brian Sawert)
· System Integration (Brian Sawert)
Ø Operational business plan decisions that need to be made
· Teaching & Learning Planning (Don Carter)
Ø Determine members of this working group
Ø Report on Phase I planning (Pilot courses & faculty)
Principles for VISTA in the future and access during Phase I
Ø Overview of scale issues for Phase II
Ø Library and shared asset management
· E-Learning Asset Migration & Management (Larry MacPhee & Lorraine Elder)
Ø Phase I – new courses
Ø Phase I – migration courses
Ø Issues & Bottlenecks
· Training (Erin Shelley)
· Support (Erin Shelley & Dan Stoffel)
· Communication (Don Carter)
4. Issues
During the meeting a number of issues were raised and discussed. Larry was asked how many faculty could be accommodated in Spring 2006 since it seemed there was a lot of pent up demand already. Larry and Don talked about doing a massive move using the migration tool. Don mentioned that it might be as many as 4-500 courses and he has available about $500 per course to help as an incentive to help faculty undertake the effort. Training will clearly need to be a focus.
Larry talked about a course self-evaluation tool to help faculty consider a self-reflective course redesign rather than a pure migration. Kathy mentioned that bad courses should be redeveloped and asked if multiple people are using the same shell will there be just one incentive.
Lorraine warned we have a 50-60 course backlog already. Fitting the redesign, new courses, and migrations in all together will be challenging. With luck, the backlog might get down to 0 by January (many are being worked on for Phase I). Larry said that a new support model is planned for Vista—allowing instructors to work more on their own and freeing CTEL staff to work with larger number of instructors.
John noted that desktop integrations might be important to assure the faculty could work easily in the Vista environment.
Don is also bringing on a group of student workers and hopes to have the professional project managers train these students to assist faculty. Larry hoped that, with all this in place, we could have a complete migration to Vista, with many courses “vanilla,” finished by Summer 2006.
Erin reported on efforts to develop and teach the 3-4 hour “Vista Basics” course and their intention to build a “Vista 101” online course with other online components to come later.
An open question was posed about templates. Those working with the product explained that templates were a misnomer and we were still working to figure out our best practices related to template ahead of the training sessions for those who will teach in the fall.
5. Future meetings
It was agreed VSPC meetings need to have faculty attendance. Unfortunately a lot of implementation won’t happen until summer, after faculty are gone. Don and John agreed to pull administrative areas from the VSPC together as issues arose during the Phase I implementation efforts, but a full meeting of the VSPC probably wouldn’t happen until faculty returned in the Fall.