School Portal - Solution Evalution Review 3/12
Submitted by Erik on Sun, 03/09/2008 - 11:44pm.
03/12/2008 - 8:00pm
03/12/2008 - 10:00pm
Etc/GMT-5
When: Wed, March 12, 8pm
Where: Erik's home - for those in person
120 Woodchester Drive, Chestnut Hill
Erik's dial-in: 877-250-4302, code 7564535#
Erik's WebEx: Click here; password: portal
Who: School Portal contributors
Expe
Agenda:
1. Review revised Use Cases and Key Requirements
2. Review evaluations of School Portal Solutions
3. Determine next steps and timeline
Signups closed for this event
suggested alternative agenda
As far as I can tell, the use cases and key requirements are pretty simple:
- assignment/grade oriented communication (assignments, grades, plus calendar and email)
- content management (teacher created web pages, forums, etc.)
- easy integration w/ Chancery (automatic account and class setup, grade transfer - though grades seem to be getting a lower priority)
And, the solution space has already narrowed significantly:
- The folks at North seem to be all set to go forward with Edline? if we don't suggest an alternative (at least if the articles in the Newtonite are to be believed).
- K12 planet does the integration w/ Chancery for account setup, and does the assignment, grade, calendar, email stuff. But doesn't seem to do content management. (Open question: does it have any CMS? capabilties?)
- Moodle? seems to do all the CMS stuff we want, in spades, and is already in-house. But, we don't have an approach for automatically setting up accounts.
So... it seems to me that we don't need to spend much time at all on use cases key requirements, or general discussion of solutions. What we need to spend a LOT of time on are:
1. Approach to Content Management - either using as yet unknown capabilities of K12planet, or Moodle.
2. Approach to automatic account setup and other data transfers from Chancery.
3. Project plan to achieve what's needed on North's time frame.
I suggest that those be our agenda items.
Wednesday Agenda
Miles -- We won't spend much time on Use Cases. From a stand-point of solution evaluation, those are aggregated into a couple of evaluation categories anyway.
To your other comment? about whether we're close to recommending a solution, yes, I think we are. However, we still have a little work left to complete our "story" as to why some solutions are OUT and others are at the top of our list. I really want to have the evaluation template completed for each solution option we have considered, so that we can summarize our conclusions in our written report and presentation.
If we finish with our selection conclusions, then we can focus on the three topics in your comment above (CMS? integration, account setup, implementation project plan).
I respectfully disagree.
I respectfully disagree. We've already pretty much worked through the choices and solution - we can write up the "story" later. What's needed are the implementation details - those are what will make or break a solution, and what have to be committed to by the IT folks. Without those details, we can have the greatest story in the world, but our results will be useless and not actionable. We've been spending 80% of our time on process and "story" and about 20% of our time (at most) on substance - it's time to reverse that our you're wasting all of our time.
Please refer to earlier meeting notes
Just my 2 cents--We all have been very generous with our time evaluating the options on many different levels. Please remember that this is a team and we must be flexible and respect other approaches and structures. We all agreed at the last meeting to put something on paper and it is important to be accountable to our commitments in order to continue to move forward. As it is, we have made remarkable process, and this is no time to stop and argue about who is driving the train.
I for one feel it is extremely important to document this process and this story as part of our responsibility as advisors and leaders. In fact, writing the story is part of the decisions making process. It will add clarity and help those of us who are visual learners and not quite so technical. Hope you will understand and work with the team. We need your valuable input and critical thinking put down in a consistent manner.
Moodle account management
Miles said:
We do have a way of managing accounts in a potential Moodle installation. Moodle supports a variety of authentication mechanisms, including LDAP. Bob Rainville said at the last meeting that most of the students in the city, including all Newton North students have Active Directory accounts. Active Directy supports authentication via LDAP, and this is fairly easy to set up -- we did this a couple of years ago at my office.
This is even better than transferring account information nightly, since all authentication happens in real-time against an authoritative source.
The only information that would need be transferred from Chancery SMS would be class list information (including the teachers). For the kind of pilot program that the people at North now say they're interested in -- perhaps just three or four classes, it seems to me that the class lists could even by done manually, especially if the pilot classes have technically adept teachers who could manage their own class lists.
Also, in a scenario where the grades are in k12planet, but content is posted is Moodle, the security and access control requirements for the Moodle part would be much less severe if grades aren't posted in Moodle. I would think it would even be permissible to have parent volunteers assist with the administration of the Moodle portion -- particularly if it is desirable to set up parent accounts.
So does that say we are
So does that say we are very close to a recommendation?
a. if K12planet has some CMS? capability (which we haven't seen yet) - then that's a full solution, otherwise
b. k12planet for everything but CMS, Moodle? for CMS
and our real focus needs to be implementation planning?