You Let Them Do WHAT

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You Let Them Do WHAT?

• Distributed Administration and Organizational
  Architecture

The University of Iowa - ITS - Academic
Technologies http//at.its.uiowa.edu/
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You Let Them Do WHAT?

• Presented by Aprille Clarke
• CIC LTG Conference
• November 6, 2006

The University of Iowa - ITS - Academic
Technologies http//at.its.uiowa.edu/
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Background

• The University of Iowa
• Single campus
• Enrollment 30,000 in 11 colleges
• Desire2Learn branded as ICON (Iowa Courses
  Online)
• Adopted D2L in summer 2005

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Background

• Phasing out WebCT and Blackboard licenses end
  December 2006
• Supporting 3 systems during transition

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Background

• Daily administrative tasks handled centrally
• Guest account creation
• Enrollment management
• Site creation (outside auto-created sites)
• Site management and maintenance
• Faculty support (specialized Help Desk)

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Background

• High adoption rate of ICON. As of October 06
• 25,000 users have logged in
• 1900 active registrar-tied courses
• Most popular tools content (files) (76), news
  (58), gradebook (53)

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Collegiate Administration

• Demand increasing quickly
• Becoming impractical to handle centrally
• Many units have staff and interest necessary to
  handle administrative tasks locally

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Collegiate Administration

• The demand is old the solution is new.
• Previously
• Ad hoc in some units (co-instructors in all
  courses)
• Required course-by-course enrollment
• Service IDs bad practice

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Collegiate Administration

• D2Ls organizational structures advantages
• Can be tailored to mimic (or not) the
  Universitys hierarchy
• Individual, system-wide IDs
• Can happen at any node in the organizational
  architecture (College and Department most common)
• Cascading roles enroll once, get access to all
  sites in purview

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Collegiate Administration
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Collegiate Administration

• Why is this model better?
• Customized roles not exactly an instructor
• Collegiate Admins dont show up in gradebook or
  classlist
• Additional rights can be managed more granularly
• Better accountability

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Collegiate Administration

• Better for Colleges/departments
• Faster results small things handled in-house
• Local resource happier faculty
• Better for Central IT
• Fewer support calls
• Better relationships with stakeholders
  partners in support, not provider/receiver
  relationship

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Collegiate Administration

• The Collegiate Admins have found this new
  distributed/collaborative service model to be an
  opportunity to increase their own professionalism
  by building a community with Collegiate Admins
  from across campus who are struggling with
  similar issues.
• --Maggie Jesse, Director of the Stead
  Technology Service Group, Tippie College of
  Business

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Collegiate Administration

• This community has produced a creative
  problem-solving environment that would not have
  been possible given a completely central or
  completely local service.
• --Maggie Jesse, Director of the Stead
  Technology
• Service Group, Tippie College of Business

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Things that work well

• Limiting certain tasks to Central admin
• Rights/roles adjustment
• DOME (organizational architecture environment)
  management
• Integration issues (e.g., multi-section mapping
  into one course site)
• Counting on Collegiate admins for daily tasks and
  local support

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Challenges

• Technical
• Standards must be enforced
• Naming conventions
• Course IDs uniqueness not enforced
• Basic system literacy guest IDs
• All-or-nothing access to some areas
• Manage Users gt Enrollment
• Navbar templates and default homepage
• Bugs and design flaws

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Challenges

• Communication and training
• Group training sessions
• Check-in meetings
• Communications site
• Documentation (comprehensive quick guide)
• Listserv
• Online training modules

• Difficult to schedule
• Frequently-changing audience
• Different levels hard to address

• Low attendance
• Overlap with otheradvisory groups

• Good for distributing materials
• Not used much fordiscussion

• Does anyone read it?

• Good for infopush
• Not used muchfor discussion

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Lessons learned

• If I could do it over, I would
• Find an institution similar to Iowa using
  Desire2Learn and study its org. arch.
• Grill an admin there about buggy aspects of
  cascading roles

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Lessons learned

• If I could do it over, I would
• Let go of micromanaging tendencies
• Adopt the Google model (on a much smaller scale)

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Lessons learned

• Google model
• Use thousands of inexpensive, low-powered CPUs,
  and expect some of them to fail.
• Net gain will still be high, even when accounting
  for failure.
• Paraphrased from Michael Noth, software
  engineer, Google. Building a Computing System
  for the Worlds Information, presented at the
  University of Iowa Tech Forum 2006

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General Caveats and Tips

• Collegiate administrators
• Trust them--they want the project to succeed too
• Frequent communication listservs, meetings,
  continued training, discussion boards, competency
  quiz
• Damage control is easier than not having help

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Wrap-up

• Questions?

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Contact

• Aprille Clarke aprille-clarke_at_uiowa.edu
• ICON
• http//icon.uiowa.edu
• Academic Technologies
• http//at.its.uiowa.edu/