Introduction:
Abel set the tone for the discussion by
referring to the recent EDUCAUSE Core Data survey which reported
that 35 percent of all institutions use a course management
system for virtually all of their courses. The report also stated
that 99.5 percent of all institutions use an enterprise course
management system. The question then becomes: what's next? What
form will this learning environment take? And how can we leverage
the data going on in those academic learning systems and
integrate them with administrative systems?
Abel said that integrating enterprise
course management and administrative systems is an interest of
IMS Global Learning and that the consortium has had an active
work group, Learning Information Services (LIS), studying this
issue for at least the past two years.
The forum discussion centered around four
major questions. The first question posed was:
What is the single most
daunting challenge today for your customers or your organization
in terms of enterprise integration of learning and/or
administrative applications? Why is this an important and
critical challenge? How is your organization addressing this
challenge?
Feng said Oracle sees this issue as one of
the biggest challenges in the market today, that for their
customers, there are increasing expectations from students and
faculty, not only for demands on their academic ecosystems, but
also demand for integration between the two systems to be real
time and kept up to date with new functionalities being
introduced. Along with that, it becomes harder for the IT staffs
to keep up with those emerging technologies, coupled with their
fear that applying upgrades to their existing systems will cause
the integrations to break. Seeing this integration as an area
that needed to be worked on, Oracle came together with other
vendors and with IMS Global in order to try and reinvigorate the
standards for this integration to occur seamlessly.
Feng added that Oracle's interest in this
area, and the standards work being spearheaded by the LIS working
group within IMS Global is primarily in response to customer
requirements. And the goal, she said, is to speed product
integrations.
Leonhardt said that if he could summarize
the question into a single most daunting challenge, the word he
came up with was complexity. Many of the applications used by
Georgetown make his life complicated, he said, and the
integration work currently underway hopefully will gradually
eliminate some of that complexity. "There is still a void of
standards in some spaces and there still is the need to do point
to point or specialized interfaces in many ways. I think it's
going to take a while for modern technologies to become prevalent
in higher education and in the key administrative spaces."
In terms of dealing with the problem,
Leonhardt said he thinks most institutions and vendors are
investing in the types of integrations that make the most sense
and offer the most payoffs. The path is there to reduce
complexity, he said, but that there is still much work to be
done.
Fontaine reminded the audience that we are
continually moving into an instant world where people expect
things to happen magically at the snap of their fingers. More
specifically, they enroll in a class and expect it to show up in
their course management system instantaneously. As a result,
there is a need to provide a more real-time environment. At the
same time, the data that needs to be shared among those systems
is getting broader. IMS Global initially focused on the user, the
enrollment and the course provisioning on the system. There
wasn't a lot of specialized capability. "Now we're seeing a lot
of demand for greater information back into the SIS. What grades
are actually going to be defined for a course? What types of
grades are going to be defined? The need for additional status.
That bridge has to get wider."
Another challenge Fontaine raised is the
fidelity of the data. Blackboard has been doing a lot of batch
integration work for many years and one of the things they've
found is that there are two constituent groups on campus, the
academic side and the back office folks. Many registrars used to
have the attitude that as long as a student's enrollment record
was correct by the end of the semester, then that was all that
was needed. If drop/adds and other interim data weren't processed
in a timely manner, then that was okay. In this instant world
where disparate systems are integrated, however, the data has to
be good. And it has to be correct in real time.
With regard to fidelity, Fontaine pointed
out that standards have to matter. "In this new security world
that's out there, you're going to get patches from everyone of
your software vendors. The standards have to validate so that you
can have a solid and reliable bridge. That data needs to move
back and forth in such a way so that when you upgrade, you're not
worried about the reliability of those integrations."
Fontaine sees a diversity of practice in
the way that teaching is delivered through these different
systems, and he thinks that's a good thing. "There's a lot of
experimentation going on with a varied range of systems. How you
tie these systems together that give the academic side the
diversity they want, but pull that information back in and make
it a good usable experience for people is really important."
Moon said the two themes he associated with
the question were complexity and cost of ownership. The first
challenge he said is in the variability of institutions, ranging
from two-year community colleges to research institutions, each
with their own variety of requirements. And at some single
institutions, he said it is not uncommon to find three or four
different learning systems in use. "As an administrative system
vendor, it makes it all the more challenging to go in there and
figure out how you're going to interface your student information
system with these various systems on campus."
Higher education can drive down the cost of
ownership by having a standardized interface, Moon said, and
having LIS 2.0 takes everyone in that direction.
Abel summarized the discussion by
mentioning themes he heard raised in the panel's answers: the
handling of upgrades, complexity of IT, the ability to exchange
outcomes (from learning to administrative systems), fidelity of
data, flexibility of support for various teaching and learning
scenarios, and total cost of ownership.
A member of the audience cited fear as one
of the biggest challenges facing the integration of data across
the two systems. Fear that systems will not be compatible and
that the data contained therein may be flawed. There also is fear
between the academic and administrative sides of the institution
that each other cannot be trusted. When there is an environment
where the academic side can trust the IT department, then
everything works well.
Leonhardt added that when you think about
how IT has evolved within colleges, two decades ago many did not
even have a CIO in place. Only within the last 10 to 15 years
have CIOs come into their own on college campuses. Leonhardt also
thinks that the line between the administrative and academic
sides of institutions has largely disappeared. Where CIOs can
push the two sides together and bring about natural
collaboration, you see good things happening.
Institutions also fear the fidelity of the
data, said Fontaine. Many schools have built defense mechanisms
into their LIS systems for fear the real time exchange of data
may not be accurate. "We need, as an industry, to provide some
best practices for schools that will offer ways in which they can
best manage this data and how they should implement the exchange
of information."
Moon believes that as the industry moves
toward service oriented architectures (SOA) and exposing business
services to academia, there will be an attempt to bridge the gap
between the two sides. "You'll see academia having access to this
functionality through various things like Web 2.0 and mashup and
all the rest of it. They will feel more in control of what they
need to do."
Feng added that a lot of times the fear of
the unknown results in a sort of paralysis and academicians would
rather "deal with the devil they know" than take risks to work
through the issues they face. She also believes that now that
there are applications in the landscape that are going to become
compelling to students and faculty, offering better teaching
tools, the result is going to force the shift to a better set of
infrastructure that is service based. That speaks to the need for
a new standard contract that deals with that new
architecture.
Someone from the audience asked when the
market would begin to see SOA. Moon replied he thinks higher
education will begin to see major movement within the next
18-month timeframe. Most applications, he said, are already
exposing multiple services. Many of SunGard Higher Education's
products, for example, such as the Banner SIS and Luminis
platform have many services they are exposing. Once you have
services, how do you orchestrate those services and combine them
into composite applications? He predicts major movement in this
direction by the end of 2009 and 2010.
Abel said that IMS Global has just started
a workgroup on service oriented architecture that is being
chaired by Oracle and IBM. At the moment, it looks like the group
is going to focus more on providing definitions as to what is
SOA, what does it really mean, and what are the projected
timeframes for implementation?
