UW-ACEEvolution:Update to UCIST

See previous updates:

Summary for 30 November 2007 [Previous update 16 February 2007]

  1. Growth: Peaking?
  2. Over 24,000 students in UW-ACE in F07 (largest yet)
  3. 899 UW-ACE course entities
  4. That makes 32% of “total classes” (up about 1.5% from last fall) and 49% of “total courses”.

UW-ACE “courses” / UW offerings
Term / # Campus
/ # DE / Total
/ Total classes / Total courses / % of
classes / % of
courses
Fall 2007 / 803 / 96 / 899 / 2802 / 1836 / 32% / 49%
Spring 2007 / 342 / 83 / 425 / 1558 / 1076 / 27% / 39%
Winter 2007 / 734 / 81 / 838 / 2743 / 31 %
Fall 2006 / 664 / 62 / 726 / 2784 / 26 %
Spring 2006 / 256 / 48 / 304 / 1458 / 21 %
Winter 2006 / 571 / 59 / 630 / 2784 / 23 %
Fall 2005 / 475 / 51 / 526 / 2795 / 19 %
Spring 2005 / 128 / 1516 / 8 %
Winter 2005 / 318 / 2821 / 11 %
Fall 2004 / 222 / ~ 2780 / 8%
Course numbers by Faculty for Fall 2007
Faculty / # DE courses / # Campus courses / Total
AHS / 8 / 50 / 58
ARTS / 63 / 345 / 408
ENG / 1 / 146 / 147
ENVS / 0 / 63 / 63
MATH / 9 / 84 / 93
SCI / 15 / 115 / 130
  1. Student email in UW-ACE (discussed at UCIST April 27th, initiated by Robert Park)
  • UCIST wanted to keep student access to Email the Entire Class (including professors) but to remove student access to All Students. These cannot be restricted individually so must either both be available or not. In that case, UCIST wanted both turned off, i.e., change the default access to disallow.
  • A complication arose with the return of the class list to the email dropdown list which had disappeared as an unintentional repercussion of restricting student access (in V6.2) to other student profiles (FIPPA concerns). In V7.1 we found a better way to restrict that access (without database changes), and returned the student list to the email dropdown.
  • This introduced another way that students can send email to the entire class, that is, via a "select all" from this dropdown list.
  • In late June we realized that we now could not restrict access to "all students". Also, the team felt that flipping the default access was more disruptive than educating instructors on the situation.
  • For the July Ops meeting we investigated whether the upgrade at the end of April to V7.2 would offer new ways of restricting access which may cause another change. It turns out that we have the same scenario in it.
  • Instead, Jan worked with the Liaisons on a document to explain how to turn off the All Students and Entire Class, and the repercussions. She sent this to the Liaisons on August 27th. Some of them have forwarded it to all of their faculty members, but perhaps not all of them have.
  • See the document in the UW-ACE Help. Use Help's Index, and look under "Info & Help for INSTRUCTORS" for the file called "UW-ACE Course Mail Settings Guide". It shows both how to restrict access, and also talks about the repercussions.
  1. Bringing back course data for student grade appeal.
  2. Recent request for 2005 (v6.2, archive failed to load in V7.1, had to go to backups, took 3 days).
  3. Questions posed of Associate Deans of Computing:
  4. What is the deadline for a student to initiate a grade appeal in your Faculty?
  5. Is that deadline the one that should determine our UW-ACE student data retention duration?
  6. What should be our procedure with regard to communications with the Faculty when we have a request for data for an appeal?
  7. UW-ACE Ops topics:
  • Students dropped for non-payment.
  • Faculty survey
  • Policies and communications
  1. ANGEL “add ons” under investigation/pilot
  • Turnitin – Bruce Mitchell’s pilot for plagiarism software. The “plug-in” to ANGEL is installed on the development system.
  • Horizon Wimba Voice Tools – After the DE/IST pilot, DE decided to purchase the integrated voice tools. At last check, no significant uptake outside of DE.
  1. What’s ahead?
  • Upgrade– Tentatively set for Tuesday, April 29th. Need to send feedback to ALI.
  • License renewal in May 2007, for 3 years (until May 2010)
  • LMS review plans
  • Plan is to stay with ANGEL unless there is a compelling reason to move!
  • However, there are changes afoot in the LMS and online learning space, including the rise of the social networking tools and the open systems (Moodle and Sakai gaining confidence of market, and making inroads). We want to go into next negotiation with knowledge and an understanding of those spaces.
  • D2L demo
  • LPS input