July through September 2009
FY10 Q1 Metrics and Narrative.docx
April through June 2009
CCS Q4 MetricsandNarrative.docx
January through March 2009
October through December 2008
MIT's Thalia focused on preparing for the community release, with particular attention paid to making the functionalities and features within the application more self-serve for users. The development team made several settings editable through the Manage Domain area, a metadata wizard, and the ability to change an item's owner. There is also support for Unicode so that items may be tagged with foreign characters.
On the backend, several steps were taken to make the Thalia application easier to support, namely enhanced monitoring tools, simplified backup and restoring, and scripts to make installation easier. Thalia is also now integrated with MIT's Touchstone single sign on service for authentication. It also allows users to specify Moira groups to share items.
The team has finalized the terms of service for users and is in the process of finalizing support arrangements with training and the helpdesk.
Stellar 2.2.1 is slated for release in January 2009 for the Spring semester. A new interface for the survey tool, meant to improve usability and provide cleaner integration into the Stellar user experience, was released to the Sloan pilot users on December 20th. Spring 2009 features include spreadsheet upload and role-based access to the Gradebook, a new drag and drop Materials interface, which had been postponed from the previous release, and textbook information listing required and recommended books and their ISBN numbers for courses in the CourseGuide.
Peak usage broke another record on October 15, 2008 with 1091 concurrent Stellar users. Averages over the quarter amounted to about 400 users. Stellar is currently hosting 25 IAP 2009 sites (most of these are in the PE department) and 319 Spring 2009 sites.
The MIT Wiki Service was hosting a total of 1094 wiki spaces at the end of Q2, up from 952 in Q1 2009. Of these, 145 were newly provisioned and comprised 43 class related (i.e. linked to Stellar class sites) and 102 non-class related spaces. The Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments led with the highest number of departmental users (at 382) while IS&T remains the most avid departmental user of the wiki service, with the highest number of logins (20685).
July through September 2008
Stellar 2.2 was released on August 25, 2008 for the Fall 2008 semester. It included new features and usability improvements to the Gradebook, enhanced OCW and eReserves workflow options in the site request process as well as tighter integration with information provided to students by the MIT Libraries. The User Guide and other documentation were enhanced with additional screenshots, updates and training videos. Hardware was upgraded for better performance and users saw their file size upload limit increase from 100 to 250 MB.
On Monday, September 8, 2008 Stellar hosted 1101 concurrent users, a new record. In Q1 680 course sites and an additional 101 sites for the Physical Education Department were requested and provisioned. 623 non course related project sites were also created for use during the Fall semester. Currently 80% of possible Institute courses are on Stellar.
The MIT Wiki Service was hosting a total of 952 wiki spaces at the end of Q1, up from 719 in Q4 2008. Of these, 247 were newly provisioned and comprised 152 class-related (i.e. linked to Stellar class sites) and 95 non-class-related spaces. The Sloan School of Management led with the highest number of departmental users (at 448, up from 120 in Q4) while IS&T remains the most avid departmental user of the wiki service, with the highest number of logins (33604). The Wiki Service has grown 295% since July 2007.
The TeamSpaces pilot, based on Jive Software's produce, Clearspace launched during the second week of September. As of the end of Q1, 5 classes in DUSP, the Writing Program, Political Science and Sloan are using the service. Several projects have signed on as well, including the cross-departmental Concentrated Solar Power on Demand project and the Innovations in International Health initiative. TeamSpaces uses MIT Touchstone, including CAMS, exclusively for authentication. Of the Oct 1 user base of 282, 24 users, most of them Tufts and Harvard students participating in an MIT DUSP course, were holders of MIT Touchstone collaboration accounts.
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
Community Tools and Applications
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
User Interface and Design
- Code validation/QA of Calendar and skins
- Materials page reconfig and prototyping
- Modified CAMS login page layout
- Mobility: Made final tweaks to m.mit.edu before launch of v 1.0
- Surveys: Placed updated version to amps-prog-5 for crtitique. Can be reached via surveys link from http://stellar-dev.mit.edu/S/project/testforarti/
- Gradebook: Various tweaks to ftl files ( roster.ftl, details.ftl, dashboard.ftl, summary.ftl, summaryChart.ftl )
- Gradebook: CSS adjustments to Gradebook graph
- Gradebook: Functional spec updates and information pertinent to test plan sent to QA
- CoursePicker/Atlas: Usability testing update sent to stakeholders
Community Tools and Applications
- Wup description of wikis cert and touchstone authentication for Hermes project
- Consolidated Wiki collection of technical docs regarding Clearspace
- Contacted Dean Barnhart re social networking needs
- IdM steering group meeting
- Confluence upgrade readiness work
Community Outreach and Research
- 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
User Interface and Design
- Completed new semester image tweaks to Stellar home page
- UI CAMS meeting
- Completed Gradebook workflow diagram updates
- Began CAMS Login page layout redesign
- Began design of CAMS and core icon for WAYF login page
- Stellar 2.2 review meeting: https://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/display/stellar22/UX+Mindmeld
- Updated UI tasklist for Stellar Fall release
- OTI: PHP SOAP client completed.
- OTI: demo completed and shared with CCSS team
- OTI: Working on enabling JSONP (cross domain ajax) for RESTFul web services
- OTI: Started on unit tests for web services
Community Tools and Applications
- Met with Staff Diversity council regarding Wiki use
- Contaced Jive for more specific explanation of ClearSpace SSO integration
- Experimented with using php SOAP client to populate Clearspace groups and spaces
- Worked on new MIT Confluence theme for 2.8
- Began testing Moira web service
- Continued investigation of problematic scaffolding plugin in Confluence
- Continued working on modifications for Confluence MIT theme against 2.8
Community Outreach and Research
- 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
User Interface and Design
- UI SAIS meeting
- UI CAMS meeting
- Updated project files with all versions of Gradebook Makeup Grade mockups
- Completed version 2 of Stellar Dashboard design
- Reviewed Opinio UI work, Gradebook edits and Calendar front-end
- Stellar 2.2 review meeting: https://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/display/stellar22/UX+Mindmeld
- Stellar tutorial video v1 completed
- CAMS - brainstorm meeting for user workflow on main pages - several tasks coming up in early June
- OmniPlan / Daptiv update
- Discussed Materials page updates with OCW
- Daptiv automation review with Amon
- 2.2 UI workplan revisions made, based on new tasks
Community Tools and Applications
- Reset some configurations on confab http and tomcat servers so app can reliably find latex utils for plugin operation
- Wiki presentation at IT Partners conference
- Discussed Moira web service issues, possibilities for Confluence with Dave Tanner
- Put together environment for building new MIT Confluence theme for 2.8
- Clearspace meeting with IPS
- Investigated Jira data report in Thalia project
- Fixed a bug that caused some non-MIT users not to get permissioned properly in Confluence under the right conditions
- IDN Steering group meeting- MIT membership in inCommon is imminent
- checking of current installed Confluence plugins against v. 2.8. most ok so far; scaffolding plugin problematic -- broken in 2.8 default theme, but works properly with 'classic' theme
- checking, identifying necessary modifications for Confluence MIT theme against 2.8
- Got app certificate from NIST so begin testing Moira web service
Community Outreach and Research
- Sloan Opinio feedback session
- Stellar 2.2. Documentation discussion with Mark Wiklund from IS&T publishing
- Stellar and wiki overview with Mech Eng faculty
- Gradebook review with Bolek
- Approved a number of summer and fall'08 sites
- Addressed several Opinio questions from Sloan and SMA
- Worked on clarifying documentation about exporting materials
- Began compiling a comprehensive list of features supported in Moodle, ATutor, Sakai, and Blackboard
- Researched Moodle and social constructivism
- Got in touch with Lori Breslow, Director of TLL (http://web.mit.edu/tll/index.html) to find out more about prominent teaching/learning styles, processes and pedagogies we need to support.