ALEX
Powered by Sakai, Guided by Faculty
By Max Whitney
Over the past decade, faculty at NYU have used a wide variety of tools to supplement the in-person time spent with their students. These have ranged from simple web pages, to free commodity services such as Yahoo Groups or Google Docs, to NYU-supported tools including Prometheus, Blackboard, and Docent. As of 2003, the centrally supported offerings were dominated by a single tool: a customized version of the Blackboard learning management system. By focusing on one technology, ITS was able to achieve economies of scale: enrollment management was automated, high-availability mechanisms were put in place, and interactive tutorials were written and produced.
With these features in place, several years passed in which incoming faculty requests for online tools tended to look like nails to be addressed by the hammer at hand. The Blackboard system has proven useful to a majority of our faculty, but it has become increasingly clear that there is a significant minority who are under-served by the existing offerings. With most of the needs of most of our instructors now satisfied, attention can now be turned to the rest of the needs of the rest of the teaching faculty.
ITS and the NYU School of Medicine are pilot testing the Sakai community source learning management system. The Advanced Learning Exchange (ALEX), as this service is known, is being built to the requirements of the pilot participants, and each step in the process is guided directly by faculty. The software framework is highly customizable, offering the ability to satisfy many of the unmet faculty needs of which ITS is currently aware. It is also uncovering unarticulated needs. Having such a diverse toolbox at hand allows ITS to offer exactly the right tools for the unique nails, screws, and thumbtacks of incoming faculty requests.
The NYU ALEX Dashboard
Community Source Software
For the most part, higher education institutions need a common set of online tools to complement classroom teaching: a list of students, a place to post readings and solution sets, and a means of distributing and collecting homework assignments. An electronic grade book is also a boon. Additionally, asynchronous discussion boards let students work with each other 24 by 7.
Beyond these basics, however, it turns out that every school, every department, and indeed every individual instructor has slightly different needs. Arts professors need highly detailed visual control of their online collections. Math departments require a way for students to show their work on the way to a solution. Film production classes are aggravated by the lack of an interactive calendar in Blackboard for booking a limited number of editing suites.
Enter Sakai. This rich, multi-faceted system has the capacity to be many things to many people. It is a framework for achieving the goals common to all higher education institutions. It is also a set of tools for satisfying the specific needs of a given instructor. Sakai is a community, and it is also a process by which that community achieves tangible outcomes. Each of these facets of Sakai has the potential to serve NYU well. In turn, NYU has the opportunity to contribute back to the higher education community.
Sakai was born out of homegrown software from the University of Michigan, Indiana University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University. Each of these institutions had developed learning management systems that met their specific needs. As time passed and their local systems experienced natural obsolescence, they individually realized that rewriting their systems on a rolling basis in perpetuity was cost-prohibitive. The four founding institutions joined together in 2003 on the Sakai Project, with the assistance of a Mellon Foundation grant. The grant's stated goal was to create both a set of educational software tools and a framework for their delivery.
The Sakai framework developed by the founding institutions provides an armature of commonly required elements: teacher support, student support, access to readings and other class materials, and a gradebook. Abstracted to the technical view, these are: a security model, a timing model, a submission model, and a data transfer model from a given tool to a grade book, and from the grade book to the University Registrar. The University of Michigan and Indiana University also contributed several core tools, including a roster, a content presentation tool, and a syllabus editor.
The Community in Community Source
In 2004, a grant from the Hewlett Foundation kick-started the Sakai Educational Partners Program, expanding the group of four founding institutions to 23 partnered institutions. Additional tools were quickly added by the early adopters, including University of California, Berkeley, the Etudes Consortium at Foothill College, and Cambridge University. Now, three years later, there are 100 partner institutions, including NYU, and 12 commercial affiliates, including Thomson Learning, Apple, IBM, Sun, and Oracle.
The community of Sakai participating institutions provides technical and user support for the software. Active mailing lists include system administrators in every time zone. It's not uncommon for a question posted at 3:00am to have an answer by 3:30am. User support documentation is written at many institutions and made available to all other organizations free of charge. Best practices are exchanged directly by peers at various schools, without having to be funneled through a commercial intermediary. As Sakai has matured, commercial providers have also sprung up, on the model of Linux support organizations. Companies like rSmart and Unicon, for example, now offer pre-configured Sakai installations and hosted services.
Multiple Paths, Many Tools
One major advantage of Sakai is that institutions can independently choose the tools they wish to implement. By contrast, when choosing Blackboard, an institution necessarily chooses Blackboard's grade book, discussion board, email interface, and so on. As of March 2007, for instance, the Sakai community offers three viable discussion boards and two different mechanisms for augmenting a class with email communication.
As needs for modifications or additions to Sakai are identified, tools to meet those needs are developed by freelance contributors enamored of the technology, by individual schools for whom the tool is an absolute must-have, or by the Sakai Foundation, when the need is sufficiently broad and the tool's complexity exceeds a single person's or institution's resources. Given a world-wide network of academic institutions, software development could easily become chaotic, to say the least. The Sakai process focuses these efforts. The Sakai Foundation, led by an Executive Director, has five full-time employees. Each Educational Partner, regardless of size or endowment, has a single formal vote in prioritizing system requirements. Most recently the decision was made by the Partners to dedicate fresh effort to unifying the look and feel of the various tools deployed in the Sakai framework. Now that the underlying code base is stable, a big challenge in Sakai is usability. Each new tool seems to bring a fresh learning curve with it. As a result of this consensus, the Foundation is hiring a user experience design lead.
Swaying the community to vote is not the only means of getting things accomplished with Sakai, nor even the preferred one. The process encourages orchestration from above and action from below. Individual institutions are able to modify the Sakai system by application of effort: build it and they will come. Anyone can build any tool and submit it to the community for use. Three levels of tool categorization indicate the relative sustainability of a given piece of code: Contributed, Provisional, and Supported. Contributed tools are of varying quality: anyone can offer a Contributed tool to the Sakai community, but no guarantees are made about functionality, maintenance, or support. To obtain Provisional status, a tool must be in production at a minimum of two institutions; it is then included in the source and issue management systems of Sakai. Dedicated individuals take responsibility for maintenance of the application code. These tools are then included in the quality assurance (QA) process for each new release. Supported tools are provided by default in every Sakai distribution. These are truly the ready-for-prime-time tools. To earn Supported status they must be in production in more than three sites, and meet rigorous QA and support criteria. The Sakai Foundation makes a commitment to maintain all Supported tools in each release cycle.
ALEX: Guided by Faculty
New York University is currently conducting a pilot test of ALEX, our implementation of the Sakai software. The ALEX project at the Washington Square campus is headed up by Rich Malenitza, Co-Manager of ITS' Faculty Technology Services. Last fall, 16 faculty members agreed to run at least one Spring 2007 course in ALEX instead of NYU Blackboard. Twenty-three classes went live at http://alex.nyu.edu on January 16, 2007, with 899 student participants. Together with Ethan Ehrenberg, an ITS faculty technology specialist, Rich is in regular contact with the faculty who are participating in the pilot. Every suggestion, question, and complaint they receive, whether in person, by phone, or via email, is entered into Remedy, the ticket-tracking system used by ITS. Also destined for Remedy is every entry made in the online support and suggestion form in the ALEX pilot space. Finally, calls from students and faculty received by the ITS Client Services phone support team are entered into the same system. Every ticket gets broken down into its actionable parts and tagged with the related area of functionality in the software, and the requestor's name. At the middle and end of each phase, all of this feedback is reviewed by the full Sakai pilot support team. The requests become the direct basis for modifications and augmentations.
By the midpoint of the first phase, some 75 suggestions had been gathered. Throughout the ALEX pilot, teaching will always come first, and the ITS support team was grateful to hear details on how the deployment did not meet specific needs, so we could prioritize addressing those requirements. From the pilot participants, we received 15 requests for improvements to the look and feel of the pilot system. This level of feedback in a 16-instructor pilot meant the interface changes were extremely important. The two clearest messages were: too much screen real estate was consumed by visual 'fluff,' leaving insufficient display space for content, and faculty needed to be able to upload their own banner images, instead of being stuck with the single banner provided. We received requests for improved email functionality, specifically, the ability to send email to individuals or groups with a single click. Blog and wiki functionality also topped the list.
In response, the ITS ALEX team recently created and released ten new design "skins" for ALEX courses, one of which removes all excess space consumption and maximizes the area for course content. A second email tool was enabled alongside the default tool included at the pilot launch. Sakai's RWiki system was also added to ALEX. A tool to create custom banner displays tops our list for the next modification and augmentation cycle, and the upcoming NYU Blogs service pilot will be offered to the ALEX pilot faculty as a possible solution for their blogging needs.
The ALEX team will soon be going back to each faculty pilot participant with the full list of feedback we've received from them and a summary of what we've done in response. The remainder of phase one will be spent gauging how well we've responded to the feedback so far and prioritizing what we should address in the next phase.
As exciting as the Sakai system is, the framework, tools, and support mechanisms are largely about possibilities. Sakai is not shrink-wrapped software. In building ALEX on Sakai, we are counting on the faculty and students to determine what is right for the NYU community. While implementation choices are being made, ITS is simultaneously developing internal expertise on the system, faculty support, and client services fronts. With each phase of the ALEX pilot, we will develop more internal ITS supports for the system and introduce more tools for use by faculty and students. We are learning and creating as we go, and hope that you will join us in this process.
For more information about the Washington Square campus implementation of ALEX, visit www.nyu.edu/its/alex/, or explore the system at http://alex.nyu.edu/. If you are interested in participating in a future round of pilot testing for this version of ALEX, please fill out the application form at www.nyu.edu/its/faculty/pilot/. For information about the NYU School of Medicine version of ALEX, see http://alex.med.nyu.edu, or contact Marc Triola at marc.triola@med.nyu.edu. For more information about Sakai, see http://sakaiproject.org.
Author Biographies
Max Whitney works in the eServices department of NYU's Information Technology Services and is the technical lead on the ALEX project.