e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Academic-Enterprise-Initiative

  • Kuali: A Primer for Community Source Administrative Systems in Higher Ed

    I was recently invited to attend a user conference – Kuali Days in Austin, TX – and was struck by the disconnect between Kuali’s relatively low profile and the excitement expressed by the institutional representatives attending the conference. Before getting to any analysis of Kuali and its prospects, however, I need to lay out the basics to help me keep the terminology straight.

    My focus in consulting and writing is on educational technology – those systems that directly impact a student’s educational needs. While there are a range of administrative systems within the Kuali portfolio of projects, I will place more emphasis on those systems which are closer to the student experience.

    Based on interviews at the conference, the core value that Kuali provides are:

    • Administrative systems designed for specific needs (for higher education, by higher education); and
    • Dramatically lower hard costs for administrative systems.

    What is the Kuali Project and Foundation?

    In 2004, a group of technologists were looking to collaborate on a shareable Financial System based on a homegrown system designed at Indiana University. Within the CIC (a forum for technology collaboration mostly amongst the former Big 10 schools), there were several discussions about the nature of sharing. Even though the source code and design would be shared, who would own the software and intellectual property? Who would manage common development? These questions led to the concept of a third-party organization.

    The Kuali Project was created in early 2005 based on founding partners Indiana University, The University of Arizona, the University of Hawaii, Michigan State University, San Joaquin Delta Community College, Cornell University, NACUBO and the rSmart Group.

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  • Nice Plug for the Oracle Academic Enterprise White Paper

    Thanks to Sakai Foundation Executive Director Michael Korcuska for providing a nice review (with some thoughtful analysis good suggestions) of my team’s (relatively) new white paper.

  • Oracle's New Academic Enterprise White Paper

    The product group I’m in at Oracle (Academic Enterprise Solutions, or AES) has a new white paper out on the company’s vision of the future of the academic enterprise. A lot of this is aspirational, but it does give you a sense of the general direction that the company would like to take in terms of product development. Also, being Oracle’s vision, it focuses on Oracle’s view of academic IT and how Oracle products fit in. If you don’t like enterprise-y approaches or you don’t like Oracle products, then this document probably won’t be of much use to you.

    I’d like to acknowledge the influence of a number of outside folks on the thinking behind this paper:

    • My former colleagues at the SUNY Learning Network, especially Patrick Masson and Bernie Durfee, were co-creators of the Learning Management Operating System (LMOS) concept that the white paper specifically invokes.
    • Much of Oracle’s specific vision of the future of learning environments is heavily derivative of the excellent work begin done in the Sakai community around Sakai 3. 
    • Oracle’s thinking about academic analytics has been enlightened by the work of John Campbell’s team at Purdue University.

    I apologize to any others I may be missing; there are a lot of smart people working on these problems, and the AES team has tried to listen closely to as many of them as possible.

  • Oracle AEI at the Sakai Atlanta Conference

    Here, thanks to the magic of SlideShare, are the slides from one of the Academic Enterprise Initiative (AEI) presentations at the Atlanta conference:

    A few comments on the presentation are in order:

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  • A New Job, Part II

    In my last post, I announced that I will be taking a new job at Oracle and explained that the move will not affect my blogging. Now I’d like to take a moment to talk about why I’m so excited about this new opportunity to make a difference in the world of online learning.

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  • A New Job, Part I

    And now for some Big News.

    I am delighted to announce that, effective December 1st, I will begin my new job at Oracle as a Product Manager for their Academic Enterprise Initiative (AEI). (I have previously blogged about AEI in a two–part series.) I want to tell you why I am so excited about this new adventure. But before I do, I first want to tell you how this is going to affect my blogging at e-Literate.

    Short answer: It won’t. (more…)

  • Oracle, Sakai, and the LMOS–Part 1

    It’s been a while since I’ve written a post about the notion of a Learning Management Operating System (LMOS). There’s some news out of the Sakai world that’s as good an excuse as any for doing returning to it.

    Apparently Oracle, with the help of Unicon, is going to do quite a bit of work on Sakai in the form of something they call their “Academic Enterprise Initiative” (AEI). According to Oracle’s white paper on the topic, the work includes (but is not limited to) the following elements:

    • Building batch and real-time integration between Sakai and Oracle’s student information system (SIS)
    • Creating flexible integration between Sakai and Oracle’s teaching-related products (most notably their portfolio and gradebook).
    • Making it possible to swap in Oracle collaboration applications (e.g., their discussion forum, calendar, chat, etc.) to replace the analogous Sakai tools
    • Presenting the whole thing through Oracle portal or any other JSR-168-compliant portal (like uPortal, for example)
    • Creating a student data hub that allows for disparate applications to share data while providing a single “source of truth” to avoid duplicate and conflicting content versions

    There’s a lot here to unpack. In this post I’m going to look at some of the specifics of what Oracle has in mind and why this advances the LMOS cause significantly–even for those institutions that will never use a single Oracle product. In a follow-up post, I’ll drill down into some of the specifics of Oracle’s approach and their implications for teaching and learning.

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