Turning the tide: How to Switch LMS Without Stated Strategy or Defined Demand

Turning the tide: How to switch LMS without

a stated strategy or defined DemandJan Bidner, ICT Services and System

Thomas Fritz, Centre for Teaching and LearningUlf Sperens, Centre for Teaching and Learning

The most northern Sakai-installation in the world

Our ”mission” in 2008:

- Houston, we have a problem…


- Houston?Come in Houston..?


*working*


- Houston?Problem

solved… :-)


- We read you, good job!


Umeå University

• 5th largest univ. 37,000 students (2011)• 2,000 teachers/faculty.• Concentrated Campus – many distance

students.

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Umeå University

• No 1. in distance education 8,260 students (2009)• 406 distance courses (2009)• Teachers responsibility from start to finish. No tech-

rangers.• Centre for Teaching and Learning.• Network of ICT-coaches. Different conditions.

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LMS/VLE-history

• Distance Learning since the 1980’s• From 30/70 2000 to 70/30 2010.

Technical platforms for e-learning 2000-2009• PING-PONG • First Class• Moodle • (SharePoint etc.)

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THE SWITCHPoint of departure…

A new LMS instead of old ones: Arguments

• Discussion going on for a long time• Open source – ownership.• Integration of different administrative

systems.• uPortal was already in the application

catalogue at UmU• The Faculty for Teacher Education and

also their LMS (First Class) was going to close down.

• “Not to save money”.

Why SAKAI?

• A one-man committee was more or less responsible for the choice of a system; no benchmarking was really done and what the one-man committee came up with was SAKAI!

• Decision in June 2008

The initial implementation phase

• Low user involvement in the implementation process

• A technical implementation project.• A weak organizational implementation • A wider scope – collaboration/projects.• Collaboration with Stockholm University

What we did in 2008-2009, - trying to handle the situation

• Timely information to teaching personnel on changes to come and how to migrate course material.

• Test installation of SAKAI fall 2008.• “Real” installation of SAKAI/Cambro (v. 2.5) Dec 15th 2008.• Head start with Stockholms’ adjustments• Massive amount of workshops on ”Teaching and learning

with an LMS” during 2009.• “Hot line” phone support for teachers, one person full time,

fall 2008 – spring 2010.• Ping Pong and First Class shut down Oct 1st 2009.

• What was the outcome?

DISCONTENTA Tidal Wave of…

emerging

Why things went bad with Sakai

• Old systems had problems but people had grown familiar with them (expected behaviour and functionality)

• Low motivation in organization to re-learn • Teachers felt annoyed not to have been involved in the

transition• People were confused about the lack of arguments

Open source Integrations Our own system

• Lost in space – no clear strategy for web and VLE

• There were a lot of bugs!

Yes okay… But is it better?

2010: Crisis handling

• PIKTUM-project (Pedagogical Use of ICT at Umeå university)

• PIKTUM:• More pedagogical support through local ICT coaches • Mapping the support needs of students and

teachers through a reference group AND engaging a test group (from bugs to possibilities).

• The technical aspects (all technical platforms)• “Defect Race project” started February and ended in

early June 2010• The re-release was in late June 2010

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Main target of the project

• ”To enhance the perceived quality of the system”

• Sub targets: To upgrade To fix a lot of bugs To involve teachers/users To implement missing and new

features To implement a QA-organisation

Also…

• More Actively work with the SAKAI-community:

Participation in the community with documented suggestions and requirements for tool improvements (Assignments 2)

Contributed testresults from boundary-testing SAKAI (to the Sakai QA-group)

Submitted quite a few patches to the SAKAIcommunity

What we did

• Upgraded from 2.5 to 2.6

(Still building on Sthlm Sakai isntallation)

• Fixed bugs (120), Usability improvements (45), New tools (4)

• General graphical GUI-enhancements

• New tools:

• Course Evaluation (Eval Sys)

• Results (Gradebook)

• Questions and answers(QnA)

• Portfolio (OSP)*

*) Not yet in use 22

How we did it

• Using professional tester and a test manager to manage seven hired user representative functionality testers

• Informing the organization what we were doing and why on a frequent basis

• Regular meetings with a reference group consisting of IT-coaches and Centre for Teaching and Learning

• A scrum team of developers focusing on the target and working closely together and towards deadline

• Keeping in mind: it’s just as much (or even more) a mindset issue or an organizational issue as it is a technical one

Right now – next steps

• Upgrade to ver. 2.8 late (fall 2011).• Keeping up the speed in maintenance by

community involvement• Wish to cut maintenance costs• Still a project (!) = unsafe situation• Have an established test organization• Actively avoiding local code-adjustments in SAKAI

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What more now?

• Involving pilot users In parallell testinstallation of Sakai 2.8

• Upgrading tools with newer ones (Clog, profile2, assignments2 etc)

• Engaging teachers to discuss functionality• Capacity testing the system• Handling Scalability and capacity issues • Finding out what the students really want• “Better connections” to local depending systems

(better support in 2.8)

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Happy landing on the moon!

• Things are quite well in our Sakai-universe today• Not many complaints• Most complaints related to integrated services, rare

exceptions or capacity issues• Very little regular maintenance or bugs• Sucessfull landing after spacedrifting!• 2.8 i still to come…

Questions?

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[email protected]@[email protected]

Thank you!

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[email protected]@[email protected]