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.
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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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