Minutes - October 14 2005
1:30 - 3:00 pm - I. G. Greer Hall - Room 224
Persons Present:
Ex Officio members: Doug May (Acad. Computing Serv.), Michael Moore ( Faculty Senate)
Voting Members: Joseph Cazier (for Donald Amoroso, WCOB), Brian Brown (Student Services), Kevin Howell (F & A A), Emory Maiden (A & S), Tom McDonnell (Music), Ed Pekarek (A & S), and Bill Ward (Academic Affairs).
Visitors: Steve Breiner (Instructional Comp. Serv., ITAC Recorder), Tony Grant (F & A A), Mick Kreszock (Instructional Tech. Ctr.), Elaine Gray (Instructional Tech. Ctr.), Greg Simmons (Instr. Comp. Serv.), Jeff Church (Instr. Comp. Serv.), Tom Van Gilder (Arts & Sciences), and Pamela Graham (Arts & Sciences).
1) Welcome, Opening Comments
Doug May greeted the group, noting that this was the charter gathering of the Academic ITAC Subcommittee, as suggested in by Jeff Williams at the September 9 ITAC meeting and called the meeting to order at 1:35.
2) Election of Academic Subcommittee Chair
Due to a need on the parts of some members to attend other engagements, May suggested revising the original agenda to address the issues related to the future of course management systems (CMS) at Appalachian before addressing the issue of a Subcommittee Chair. The membership showed no objection, so election of the chair was postponed.
3) Future Directions re: Course/Learning Management Systems
Steve Breiner (Instructional Computing) provided comments about the proposed merger of the WebCT and Blackboard companies. He suggested that WebCT was rather strongly pressuring its customers to move to WebCT Vista, the purported “enterprise” level successor to the WebCT Campus Edition currently used by Appalachian, and that a move by Appalachian in that direction would be an expensive and labor-intensive pursuit. He stated that the experience he and his team have had with the product (Vista) had not been particularly encouraging, noting that he and Greg Simmons (an ICS consultant) attended 13 person-days of WebCT training on Vista and its administration. In addition to his perception that the product is extremely expensive (the up-front cost figures provided by WebCT indicated a one time payment of 850% of our current annual license cost, with additional annual maintenance fees amounting to 170% of our current annual license costs), the product seemed too buggy and complex (especially the user interface) and would not provide a usable migration mechanism for moving existing Campus Edition sites into the new product. His major concern was that administration and support of the product, and noted that the campuses which have already purchased the Vista product had greatly larger personnel pools that would Appalachian for addressing their migration to and support of the newer product.
Jeff Church (Instructional Computing) distributed a handout and presented an overview of WebCT usage at Appalachian, based on extensive statistics compiled from usage logs collected since fall semester, 2004. He identified the functionalities within WebCT that received significant usage at Appalachian and noted the usage of WebCT had increased from spring 2004 to spring 2005 about 37% and that he anticipated a larger growth rate when the current fall semester is compared to that of 2004. He showed that the number of credit hours for classes using WebCT had (without considering Applied Music courses) increased from 15½% to over 21% of the semester credit hours offered during those respective terms and that the number of faculty using WebCT (i.e., with one or more active WebCT classes) had increased from 151 to 220 for the corresponding terms. Church remarked that similar analyses would be conducted at the end of the current semester and that those results would be made available soon thereafter.
Greg Simmons (Instructional Computing) then addressed the membership to ask that ITAC propose mechanisms to insure that any strategic decisions being made as regards Appalachian’s CMS reasonably address the pedagogical and technological needs of the community. He noted that that CMS usage had become truly mission-critical and that the impending decisions were too important for ICS (Instructional Computing Services) to try to make on its own. He then asked for guidance from ITAC on what course ICS should take—how we should evaluate CMS systems, whom should be asked to participate in the discussions, whether we should investigate open source (OS) offerings as possible solutions.
Breiner proposed that, since we Appalachian will likely need to move to a different CMS solution than the current one, it would be prudent to explore open-source options that might be made to provide accessible and functional equivalents to our current usage of WebCT— and that such a system might be made to allow us to migrate existing course content without the difficulties he had seen with the WebCT Vista product. He emphasized that any possible open-source CMS solution would not be cost free, or even inexpensive. Adapting any of the currently available OS systems to Appalachian’s needs would involved significant up-front costs, including programming, management, and support resources, as well as the need to support the existing CMS during any migration. He suggested that diverting the would-be cost increases for the WebCT Vista product toward internal and collaborative development of an OS solution would likely more than repay those up-front costs and, over time, would leave Appalachian with the ability to continue to use the resulting product without the historically exponential cost increases of the commercial products, seemingly driven by market pressures rather than by educational necessity.
Breiner further mentioned that, whatever direction Appalachian takes with respect to a new CMS, there would be a need to enhance or create the support structure that would be necessary to move to the new solution.
Discussion of the CMS issue then ensued. Mick Kreszock (Instructional Technology Center) suggested deploying a survey of faculty and students through AppalNET to identify what students and faculty need from a CMS, what they like and dislike about our current CMS, and what they would like to see in a future CMS. Ed Pekarek (Arts & Sciences) mentioned the importance of having representation from diverse groups and abilities on any advisory group that we create to deal with this issue and that it would be important to include even those who have shied away from CMS usage in the past.
Bill Ward (Academic Affairs) suggested that ICS be the focal point for the upcoming discussion. Breiner tentatively agreed but cautioned that it must not be ICS alone that makes the decision.
Breiner closed by stating that ICS would begin assembling groups of discussants to address the CMS issue and would keep ITAC abreast of developments. By consensus, the group agreed to participate in a poll asking the the college consultants to identify one “power user,” one “intermediate user,” and a student representative from their respective areas to participate in some opening forays to begin the discussions.
4) Other business
As the meeting time drew close to 3:00, no further business was discussed and the issue of electing a subcommittee chair was deferred until later.
5) Adjournment
The meeting adjourned slightly before 3:00 PM.
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