Inclusive of:
1. Stellar Brand Collaboration Services
2. Content Services
1. Stellar Brand Collaboration Services
Definition
The Stellar brand provides an enterprise-level environment enabling:
- Team collaboration - asynchronous ans synchronous
- Course management functionality
- Discovery (search) and Social Networking functionality
..via a set of secure, complimentary, cross-linkable tools. Stellar brand tools can be used alone or in combination.
Goals/Vision
Vision: A branded Learning and Collaboration environment, including..
- A moodle-based course management component
- A coherent, complimentary, and secure set of tools for asynchronous and real-time collaboration:
- within DLC's and classes
- across DLC's and classes
- for extra-Institute collaboration -- including access for the extended community (non-MIT colleagues, alumni, the world)
- 'Discovery' tools to facilitate collaboration across the Institute
- enterprise tagging
- for research and admin communities
- secure search across all components, integrated with enterprise search
- social networking functionality
- A Content and Collaboration portal
- Pedagogical Tools
- Content creation and sharing
- Discussion boards
- Visual display of leaning materials
- Support for participatory/active learning
- Assignment Submissions
- Access to Learning Resources
- Textbook information for classes
- E-books
- Library resources
- Evaluation and Assessment
- Evaluation of course effectiveness
- Assessment of student learning and achievement
- Exams
..implemented in accordance with..
- core concepts..
- on-demand, user actuated provisioning wherever possible
- automatic provisioning of default 'Course Management' set of components
- simplicity and ease of use
- seamless transition among components
- exploitation of integration points and linkages among components and with CCS components that live outside the 'Stelar' umbrella (e.g. adding Clearspace 'Community Anywhere' functionality to QuickPages)
..with all integrated with well-defined and stable core user identity, group, and authorization services.
Value / Benefits
- Collaboration tools make all participants more productive.
- Science and engineering increasingly span multiple disciplines. The ability to collaborate across disciplinary, administrative, and institutional boundaries is key to future progress.
- Facilitate communication between students working abroad and campus and international initiatives such as MISTI, SMA, MIT-Portugal, MASDAR.
- Involving alumni and mentors in classes.
Current State
- Blog - no current enterprise service
- Discussion forum - no current enterprise service; former service (MIT Forums) was decommissioned without replacement
- ad-hoc Web conferencing - no current enterprise service
- ad-hoc video conferencing - no current enterprise service (Openfire plugin?)
- Instant messaging
- Openfire (Jabber) - in production
- Social networking - no current enterprise service
- Wiki Service - enterprise service in production
- increasing usage
- loose integration with current Stellar
- users and groups stored locally, mirroring Moira
- Clearspace - going into pilot
- wiki, blog, discussion, lightweight document management, social networking
- Stellar core functions
- users and groups are maintained in application
- Web page creation - current enterprise service is inadequate
- do it yourself - AFS lockers, Dreamweaver
- Digital media management - no current production service; Thalia in pilot
- @Stellar - portal-like entry point to course management system
- Course Guide - discovery mechanism for courses
- Mobile access to resources - currently limited (some Stellar functionality)
End State
The 'Stellar' Content and Collaboration environment is recognized Institute-wide as a suite of powerful, reliable, and easy to use services.
- a Moodle-based course management system is in production
- preserves and builds on level of functionality currently available in Stellar
- each course site is provisioned with components from the C and C suite (discussion forum, blog, etc)
- Clearspace is in production and serves as the core platform for Enterprise level collaboration and social networking functions. Includes:
- Discussion forums
- Blogging
- Document-based collaboration
- Social networking
- ad-hoc Web conferencing service is in place (e.g. dim-dim); pluggable in Clearspace and Wikis
- ad-hoc video conferencing - service is in place (e.g. extension of Openfire)
- Instant Messaging (Openfire) remains in production
- QuickPages is in production providing easy web page production for the community
- Digital media management - Thalia is in production
- @Stellar has expanded to be a general-purpose content and collaboration portal
- Enterprise Google search includes secure search across components
- Components are accessible from mobile devices
- Enterprise search (Google) includes secure search across all components of the Stellar Content and Collaboration environment
Members of the community use components of the environment in their everyday work, classes, and social groups.
Gaps
- Need to do continue investigation, evaluation, possible pilots re:
- Social bookmarking (e.g. Scuttle)
- Enterprise tagging options
- Web conferencing (e.g. dim-dim; local instance?)
- ad-hoc video conferencing (e.g. Openfire plugin?)
Approach - e.g., working with community and others in IS&T
- Work with IS&T Identity management team to identify and implement standard services (LDAP, web service)
- Work with IS&T Identity management team and relevant Institute entities to identify and address FERPA and MIT policy/privacy issues with regard to collaboration tools
- Identify and work with academic, research, community and administrative stakeholders
- Take better advantage of research being done at the institute
- Facilitate community development of individual tools that interoperate with our core applications
- support the best outright
- re-do and implement others that are promising but need work
- Engage more directly with experts in the community
Drivers (Tech trends/Biz trends, etc)
- Online Collaboration
- Social Networking
- Synchronous and asynchronous e-learning modes
- Extending the campus community
- Relationship with OCW
Dependencies/Assumptions
- Well-defined, standardized, and stable core user identity and authorization services
- user info and user presence information availability
Risks
- Velocity of development, quality, convenience and availability of hosted services and/or of commercial and 'cloud' products can make our efforts seem to be a barrier
- Cost
- Brand dilution
Conceptual Architecture
( Craig to fill in )
Ending slide: twist on Values/Benefits
Comments (Hide)Craig says:
What the separation of content services as independent loses is that most of the used function in current Stellar is around materials / content. We could say it's collaboration between instructors, presented to a potentially limited audience, but the ideal would be for all content: Stellar, Thalia, and Quickpages, to share a common content store, so we need to clarify that overlap. Posted by Arti Sharma at Jun 18, 2008 10:00 | Edit | Remove | Reply To ThisAdd Comment
2. Content Services
Definition
Content Services are a set of web-based tools and web services for sharing, organizing, and storing content.
Goals/Vision
Vision: An environment for sharing, organizing and storing content, including..
- A coherent, complimentary, and secure set of Tools:
- Thalia for digital media management
- Thalia API providing media management capabilities to other applications
- QuickPages for publishing websites
..implemented in accordance with..
- core concepts:
- on-demand, user actuated provisioning wherever possible and appropriate
- simplicity and ease of use
- plug in other CCS tools where possible and appropriate (e.g. adding Clearspace 'Community Anywhere' functionality to QuickPages)
- make content and content services available to other applications
- we match the way users do their work
- simple, usable, useful
- we'll keep up to date with web application design patterns
- user requests/usability given significant weight in development plans
- we encourage content use and re-use
- e.g. exporting digital resource collections for other services to import (images in Stellar -> OCW -> Libraries)
- e.g. direct URLs for users to paste images etc. into their own blogs
- e.g. tagging, to help users discover items
- e.g. RSS feeds from Thalia and QuickPages, and RSS reader as a component on a QuickPages site.
- e.g. encourage use of good taxonomies by demonstration and education
..all integrated with IS&T's common services for user identity, group management, and authorization.
Value / Benefits
- Secure and stable digital resource storage
- Encourage use and re-use between applications
- Easier, more efficient creation and maintenance of web content for the community
- Sharing and privacy control
- Keep prestigious content in an MIT site, which adds credibility to the author and more prestige to MIT (i.e. don't make your Nobel prize winner use Flickr)
Current State
- Web page creation - current methods are inadequate
- do it yourself - AFS lockers, Dreamweaver, consultants
- consultants usually costs departments $2K-$7K
- DIY makes a big project out of a simple site
- Digital media management - no current production service; Thalia in pilot
- Departments currently each create one-off solutions
- Most common is a server under someone's desk
- No standards of metadata
- No means to collaborate, publish or share content
End State
- QuickPages is in production providing easy web page production for the community
- Digital media management - Thalia is in production
- Thalia back end services are consumed by other applications like Moodle
- Thalia goes open source and is further developed by outside community
Gaps
Approach - e.g., working with community and others in IS&T
- Work with Stellar and other IS&T teams on integration
- Work with academic, research, community and administrative stakeholders. At present these include PSB, DCAD, ACCORD and others.
- Use IAP, IT Partners, ACCORD and other venues to publicize content services for broader adoption.
- Assist MIT developers in building applications which consume our media APIs
- Consult with Kerberos team for best practices in making a project Open Source and building outside community involvement.
- Partner with DCAD, PSB and the Help Desk for customer interaction and support
Drivers (Tech trends/Biz trends, etc)
- need for stable, secure storage
- this is how people do their work now
- web is the medium of choice
- people throw up millions of images on flickr
- it's impossible to keep track of digital resources without tools
- these digital resources have an intrinsic value to the Institute
Dependencies/Assumptions
relies on:
- network operations being able able to support services at the level they need e.g. Thalia redundancy
- common services being available and stable
- where 3rd party software in use, presupposes that it may be adapted to use our common services
- users being aware of content services
Risks
- see above
- Shared services we integrate with might be confusing or difficult to users -- e.g. managing Moira groups is not intuitive or user friendly
- Standard risks from using third party or open source components
- Ability to scale to meet demand, given limited resources
- Losing focus - many customers with divergent needs
- Dependence on multiple services create more potential points of failure
- More consumers of our services requires more resources on our part for:
- maintenance
- new functionality requests
- support
- infrastructure: equipment, power, overhead
- Technologies change. That's a given, not a risk. We need to anticipate and plan for that.
Conceptual Architecture
Ending slide: twist on Values/Benefits