ISTAB Meeting: February 14, 2006

Student Input into Stellar

Student Representation:

• Eric Jonas
• Demba Ba
• Erica Peterson
• Jeff Arnold
• John Cloutier

IS&T Representation:

• Greg Anderson
• Paul Hill
• Chris Murphy
• Phil Long
• Oliver Thomas
• Jerry Grochow (briefly)

Guests and Hosts:

• Babi Mitra, Director of AMPS
• Mark Brown, Project Leader for Stellar Subject: Student Input into Stellar
  Note: Each of the students have used Stellar

Babi and Mark provided background and an overview of current activities with Stellar. There is a Stellar Roadmap, a wiki where they publish features, developments, etc. Currently there are four new tools in development: Gradebook, Updated Discussion Tool, Quizzing and testing tool, and an Images tool to enable federated searches across repositories. Stellar is migrating into the Sakai framework to increase the speed of the development cycle and to take advantage of development at other institutions.
https://confab.mit.edu/confluence/display/STLR/home

Discussion:

• Stellar support works well; attentive and responsive.
• Need better mechanism to manage and find large numbers of documents in folders. Students report trouble finding documents.
• Suggestions for increasing communications/interactions with students for Stellar improvements, experiences, feedback
• Reach out to TA's. They are the ones who put a lot of content into Stellar for their courses. Oliver can help provide a list of TA's for the Stellar team
• Surveys of those who don't use Stellar
• Try to get a Stellar question on the course evaluation survey at the end of the term.
• Can Stellar be used for student projects - Yes
• Can Stellar be included in the plans for Fall Readiness - Yes
• Stellar and Sloanspace; a few students have used both. Different feel - some like the Sloanspace interface better. Sloanspace has more of a portal-like feel.
• Once basic functionality of Stellar has been exercised, the choices of where to go next are limited - local web development, etc. With the Stellar migration to Sakai which is open source, there will be more local opportunities for development; the Stellar team will look to provide API's for local development. Looking to Sakai environment to accelerate the ability to build tools.
• Stellar enables activities that are unique to the academic environment when compared to other environments such as wikis. In Stellar is the power of integration of content, interaction, and community.
• Stellar performance issues were discussed. Eric and some colleagues have done some benchmark testing; at peak times such as beginning of term, Stellar can be very slow.
• Stellar stats: a number of questions about Stellar use, max, min, and avg of Stellar courses and content, etc. See:
  http://stellar.mit.edu/about/stats
• Intellectual Property issues. Stellar works with Libraries to explain Fair Use; there needs to be usability improvements to insure that content providers understand Fair Use as they determine which documents to share openly and which to restrict to the class. There is a Fair Use page, but it needs to be more prominent.

Other topics: Discussed the IST creation of a new directorate: Infrastructure Software Development and Architecture (ISDA). Wilson D'Souza is the new Director, coming to MIT and IS&T from Merrill Lynch. He will arrive on campus March 1 and get underway with his group later in the month after his orientation, etc.

Next meeting: Proposed Tuesday, March 14, 4:30 - 6:00. Possible topics: return to the November discussion on Athena based on feedback from student constituencies. Payroll Project presentation - what it means for students and how can that project become more visible to the student community.