15 Jul 2010 Meeting

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15 Jul 2010

DRAFT: Need to clean up strike throughs (unintentional)

Attendees: Yitna, George, Jacques, Keli, Daphne

Agenda

*Identify common themes for problem and vision statement
*Timeline: research, analysis and design before December 15 (push to next meeting)
*Early discussion of roles and institutional workflows, as well as differences within roles. What are the goals of each? (push to next meeting)

Themes we've seen from previous meetings

Many of these themes overlap. Need to formalize.

1) Semantics vs flexibility
-George wonders if any ontologies have been developed. Jacques has some from OSP – different sections of syllabus. Perhaps CSU will have more. What are the key elements? Best practices around syllabus (Indiana & Berkeley), also http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/UX/Syllabi+and+Subject+Outlines+in+Sakai http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/UX/Comparison+of+Syllabi+and+Subject+Outlines+in+Sakai
-Yitna: re semantics – important to feed institutional info, get reporting, etc. But also need to enable instructors to change language (label), needs to be room to expand the ontology, freedom of the editor work completely outside structure (possibly). Balancing act. Currently instructors are free to post whatever they want.
-Daphne: templates that take advantage of ontoglogy & known common structures along with allowing users to create their templates. Creating their own would allow them to take advantage of semantics by building their own & they can also resuse. Word doc upload for those that really push against structure but let them know that they can't take advantage that semantics?

2) templates for syllabus format: Default best practice, but maybe faculty can create their own
-need to study variations in format of activity list/outline

3) Visibility of syllabus or parts of syllabus to various audiences: enrolled, institution only, world)

4) Individual control vs. department or institutional control: either approval sought after changes or pre approved sections auto populated as part of instructor's syllabus
-Daphne: this exists @ Berkeley. Kuali is taking it on. Not sure what happens over time as syllabus changes. I think there isn't a need to go back for approval.
-Jacques: yes, common. Something submitted, has to be approved
-George: I think a course has two different kinds of structure: 1) external structure (the institution is intererested in this) 2)Internal structure (the instructor determinbes this)
-Keli: what about courses that evolve over time based on student feedback
-Yitna: master course, with variations. Course archive. Also archiving work of students from previous syllabi

  • former student role @ UVA - allowing instructors to give students long term access to course materials

4) Duplicating syllabus for own use and sharing with others

5) Who owns the syllabus: instructor, but can students see it later too? up to instructor.

6) Linking of text to actual content or activities
-George: also have to republish links currently at UVA for every new semester – need to create new instance of quiz, for instance.
-Yitna: unless have this, it will doom tool. No one wants to recreate every semester.

Next steps:

*Next meeting: more themes? talk about agenda items we didn't get to: timeline for research/analysis/design and campus roles
*Form working groups to compare and document: sections of syllabus (ontology?), syllabus formats
*Present to T&L?