FY2010 Q4
CCS FY10 Q4 Metrics Narrative.docx
Stellar
This quarter the team focused on two main areas - Stellar 2.3 and providing information to the Faculty Advisory Committee for their decision on the new Learning Management System.
While there were no patch releases during Q4, the team worked on many tasks for Stellar 2.3, which is due to be released at the end of FY11 Q1. Stellar 2.3 updates include a new iCal (calendar) subscription, HASS icons for the Courseguide and major improvements to the performance and stability of the Stellar Gradebook. There are additional plans to gradually phase out the existing and aging Sakai-based jForum and replace it with a third-party tool (phpBB). CCS and SAIS also collaborated on the Institute’s Textbook Information Provision (TIP) project. The objective of the TIP project is to have the Registrar’s Online Subject Listing and Schedule call online textbook information from the OTI web service.
Over Q4, we completed our presentation of requirements and user ethnography findings to the Faculty Advisory Committee. In continuing preparation for Stellar NG, the team also built-out several key LMS Evaluation requirements on Blackboard including Touchstone sign-on, course and membership popula-tion and changes (skinning) of the user interface. A Blackboard demo was given to the FAC in late May. A completed Drupal proof of concept was also presented to the committee. An official recommendation from the FAC is forthcoming with their decision on the direction of Stellar NG. In the interim, we have begun negotiations with Blackboard for a limited pilot of Blackboard in the Fall term.
Stellar’s peak usage reached 1086 on May 17, 2010, the highest concurrent usage recorded for the month of May. This quarter, Stellar hosts 32 summer sites, 876 academic sites in the spring, and 895 project sites. Over 90% of Institute subjects continue to use Stellar.
Metrics & Narratives for FY10 Q3 (Jan-Mar 2010)
CSS Fy10 Q3 Metrics Narrative
Stellar
In Q3, the team continued to focus on automating and stabilizing Stellar. A significant amount of development time was devoted to improving the Courseguide by replacing several of its backend manual operations. The display of course information is now automatically synchronized with term dates, making Stellar a more up-to-date resource for students and administrators at the start of term.
In the two patches released during this period, the team updated the Gradebook, integrated an online textbook pricing information feed and addressed many bug fixes and improvement requests. For the Gradebook, developers provided more options for both the student grade display and the administrative exporting of grades. In partnership with the MIT Libraries, this March Stellar began pulling in publisher’s pricing information for course textbooks. This is a first step in fulfilling the Higher Education Act's new compliance requirements for textbook information. Other Stellar updates include user-suggested changes to the Stellar portal, Email interface and Materials page. Finally, a new version of the survey tool (Opinio) was tested and released to the Management Department.
The team has made consistent efforts to communicate to various stakeholder groups about the process and progress of the LMS Evaluation. These outreach efforts have included in-person meetings, roundtable events and news releases - with the objective of reaching a wide audience of students, faculty and staff. We continue to gather, organize and present requirements to the Faculty Advisory Committee’s bi-monthly meetings. In continuing the preparation for Stellar NG, the team has successfully installed the newly obtained Blackboard developer’s license and is continuing to research and test its integration points. An initial Drupal proof of concept is also in place. Once the FAC has provided a concrete recommendation, the staff will be busy building comparable instances of Blackboard and Drupal POCs for review by the Faculty Advisory Committee.
Stellar’s peak usage reached 1266 on February 3, 2010, the highest concurrent usage ever recorded for the month of February. This quarter Stellar hosts 48 sites over IAP, 1022 academic sites in the spring, and 851 project sites. Over 90% of Institute subjects continue to use Stellar.
Wikis
The MIT Wiki Service was hosting a total of 1,877 wiki spaces at the end of Q3, up from 1710 in Q2. Of these, 167 were newly provisioned and comprised 86 class-related (i.e. linked to Stellar class sites) and 81 non-class-related spaces. There were no major upgrades or patch releases during this quarter.
Detailed statistics on space usage: https://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/display/WBS/Wiki+Stats+Q3+2010
Monthly usage graphs: https://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/display/WBS/Monthly+Usage+Graphs
Thalia
This was the fifth quarter for Thalia in maintenance status and usage remained steady. There are currently 19 active external Thalia domains in production with two domains exceeding the 10GB of free storage. Three domains were provisioned during Q3.
Metrics & Narratives for FY10 Q2 (Oct-Dec 2009)
Update : FY10 Q2 Metrics Narrative.docx
CCS FY10 Q2 Metrics Narrative.docx
July through September 2009
FY10 Q1 Metrics and Narrative.docx
1. Automated semester transition
CCS developers spent many hours preparing Stellar components for the upcoming academic term. Most of the work involved changing term information using a laborious and error prone process of manually changing files (spread across many Stellar components) to update term mappings (ex: 2010FA -> fa09), term Strings (ex: 2010FA -> Fall 2009). This information took the form of static hashtables (in java code), hardcoded values in XSL, fremarker templates and javascripts and in shell/perl scripts. Moving this information to the database and providing a basic admin interface will reduce developer time dedicated to these ongoing tasks.
What we’ve done thus far:
a) Provide a common API for everyone to access this information. The location for this is the stellar-two-jar project
b) Make sure the transition is automated (see @Stellar for example) or where not possible, provide an admin interface so that support personnel can make the transition.
2. Enhance site request to include bulk site creation
This step will remove developer’s time to create these manually; first on test and then on production.
The above should also include special site creation request. For example: SMA/DMA and Leader-to-Leader sites.
PE bulk site creation will be the biggest hurdle to completely automate this process. https://jira.mit.edu/jira/browse/STLR-1387
Remaining automation tasks are being addressed in Patches 11 and 12 as follows:
- Complete semester transition tasks related to term mapping for standalone webapps: Course Guide, @Stellar and the Gateway site.
- Improve production logging to reduce logging and debug clutter on servers.
- Automate the warehouse data transfer script.
- Provide clean way to delete (not archive) course sites that have been created erroneously (either by user request or by support).
July through September 2009
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April through June 2009
CCS Q4 MetricsandNarrative.docx
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MIT's Thalia currently has thirteen DLCs as customers, up from 6 in January of 2008, with a total of 451 user accounts. Customers are using Thalia to store images destined for publications, images of MIT functions, and as a storefront to sell images. A total of 13,264 images, using 102.58 Gigabytes are stored on Thalia's secure servers. AP, HST, MISTI, PSB, and RD are the most active customers. Thalia has grown 600% while in pilot over the past twelve months.
Report - 2008 06.23 to 06.27
TBC - EOD 2008 07.02
LMS Development
User Interface and Design
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Community Outreach and Research
Report - 2008 06.16 to 06.20
LMS Development
- Calendar: Export vCal and iCal freemarker templates tested against dummy data from the backend
- Calendar: Modify template for schedule view to show short week names
- Calendar: Changes made to data model to accomplish the above
- Calendar: Compared and updated corrected templates and began testing on Amps-prog-5
- Gradebook: Merged ajax grade history into trunk to alleviate the script-too-long-http-500 error bug
- Gradebook: Refactored cumulative/weighted grade calculations to be done consistently and in one place
- Gradebook: Refactored all grade entry to be done consistently and in one place
- Gradebook: Normlized weighted cumulative grade in roster view and exported formats
- Gradebook: Enabled filtering of dropped students
- Gradebook: Fixed encoding problems with entering special characters
- Gradebook: Added warning for duplicate assignment titles or short names
- Gradebook: Diagnosed and fixed problem with amps-prog-5, classloader issues and incorrect db.properties settings in atstellar and courseguide
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- Reviewed and updated LMS feature comparison
- Generated end-of-term message to users
- Worked with Diane Webster on documentation needs
Report - 2008 06.09 to 06.13
LMS Development
- Gradebook: Freemarker templates handed off to UI
- Gradebook: jQuery UI date picker implemented
- Gradebook: Investigated jQuery flot for summary chart
- Calendar: Freemarker templates handed off to UI
- Amps-prog 5 set up for general access
- Deployed user password changes to database for Stellar-test
- Set cronjob for checking pre-registration and registration info for summer 2008
- Documented server support changes for issues now handled by OIS
- Investigated Safari certificate problem under Mac OS X 10.5.3. No repro.
- Completed Stellar 2.2 Wiki requirements
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- Stellar demo for Mark Wiklund and Diane Webster from IS&T publishing; Diane is going to help us with documentation for the 2.2 release
- Met with MIT medical about potentially using Stellar as a medium for disseminating health and wellness information to faculty/students
- Approved summer and fall'08 sites
- Set up and populated a Stellar site for Diane Webster (technical writer) to use
- Responded to a number of general support issues from SDM related to access to past sites and general awareness about archiving policy
- Investigated issue with certificates in Safari on Leopard
- Reviewed latest client satisfaction surveys and followed up with unhappy clients
- Met with PE regarding use of the Stellar Gradebook
- Meeting with Bryan re customer support and RT process
Report - 2008 06.02 to 06.06
LMS Development
- Stellar 2.2 workplan revisions made, based on new task breakdown
- Updated JIRA tasks based on above
- Gradebook: Implemented makeup grade functionality
- Gradebook: jQuery table sorter interacted badly with our original design for the makeup grade layout (i.e., makeup grades had their own row), had to be redesigned
- Gradebook: Implemented letter grades in the back end, began front-end work
- Gradebook: Cleared up issues relating terminology, button placement, etc.
- Freemarker conversion: done for changeevent, event, pageIntroText, delete and csvCalendar xsl files.
- Freemarker conversion: Jquery date and time picker used for setting the event date/time in the template.
- Freemarker conversion: Behaviour of time picker modified as suggested by Joanna.
- Freemarker conversion: Updated the schedule view template to show up academic events when clicked Show Academic Calendar in the tool.
- Kuali student post-conference evaluation
- Moodle, ATutor review planning and review
- Continued consultant resume reviews
- Researched Touchstone and Touchstone CAMS integration development
- Completed OTI Web services (both SOAP and RESTFul services over HTTP)
- Completed OTI RESTful services support JSON, HTML and XML output
- OTI Apache CXF dependency abstracted cleanly
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