Gusday 10 rundown

Carleton was very hospitable and Hawaiian on a cold Minnesota Friday.  It was a good day at Gusday 10.  We had some tweets going on throughout the day as well.  I snapped some pictures too at facebook.

Here’s a rundown of my takeaways:

• Creating Engaging Online Courses – Luther Seminary
  • they offer 60 courses online or hybrid
  • been doing it for 10 years
  • they are running the Jenzabar LMS which is limited so they build most course sites in HTML with the LMS page as the hub
  • they have 3 people in the Learning Design and Technologies area
  • they think of the learning objectives first, the technology second
  • they build the courses for faculty, the faculty are the content experts not the builders
  • they use a lot of flash movies from flip video cameras – faculty introductions and the like
  • “Multi-Media Learning” by Mayer: 2 channels – audio and video, overload one and the other shuts down, too much visual in powerpoint and the audio part is lost too
  • use camtasia studio for annotated ppt
  • courses use small groups of 5, conference calls with group and instructor, group forums and course forum
  • adobe connect to enhance call experience
  • be specific in online courses, always
  • use mid-course check-ins, critical incidents
  • trying eportfolios this term
  • http://www.luthersem.edu/ldt/
• Off-Hour On-Call Support – Bethel
  • A Saturday outage got the attention of the administration
  • Bethel has grown 20% in 5 years, new campus in Bloomington
  • issue vs outage
    • issue – (my monitor doesn’t work) not good for on-call, resolved during regular hours
    • outage – (Blackboard is down again) right for on-call reporting
  • using a definition from Georgia State
  • providing 57.5 hours of on-call coverage (until midnight during the week and evenings Fri-Sun
  • have a purpose statement – conduit for communication through a liaison to other staff, level 1 and 2 issues
  • compensation? – 6 person rotation, 1 person / week, 1/10 flex time before next rotation (6 hours)
  • equipment used
    • netbook with mobile internet
    • bomgard.com hardware remote access
    • shared PDA phone
    • phonetag.com – transcription and SMS / email creation of ticket with WAV
    • phone tree on campus to get into off-hours VM
    • started 10/1/9, about 2 calls / week
    • process: someone calls regular number, it’s off-hours so they pick that option, it rolls to phonetag number and the leave a message, an SMS is sent saying someone called, in a few minutes a ticket is created with the message and another SMS is sent with the message text.  The on-call person then decides it is an outage and does some initial triage and calls in the appropriate person if needed.
• Document Imaging – Carleton
  • using Onbase from Hyland Software for 11 years
  • being used in silos, not consistent use of fields
  • not sharing documents across departments
  • isn’t a replacement for the business application, just a place to store files like virtual filing cabinet
  • the goal is not that it be easy to put documents in, rather it should be easy to find things in it
  • ties to RP through another little app
• Project Management – Carleton and St Cloud State
  • St Cloud started, they have a position that just does project management
  • project vs operation work (sometimes fuzzy — are annual rollouts a project?)
  • project has beginning and end
  • 5 steps in process
    • initiate – idea
    • plan – scope
    • execute
    • monitor / control – check in w/stakeholders, watch scope creep
    • closing
  • project management – one project
  • program management – managing group of related projects
  • portfolio management – managing collection of all
  • charter is entry point to process
  • routine meetings to prioritize
  • reach decision point – document and sign off
  • communication plan for updates
  • completion document, lessons learned, future projects, document what was done
  • first create a process then find a tool to support it
  • Carleton – just enough project management
    • team of 4 ITS staff, shared, vet projects through group
    • big P projects (large organizational projects, often external driven, by leadership, $$, visible, higher risk)
    • little p projects (smaller team projects, by team leads, little $, little risk)
    • they’re using a wiki to track – opened to key ppl outside of ITS
    • charter is useful for people to organize thoughts about why it was great idea
    • have different states for projects
    • considering dotproject
    • update projects 1/month

I really enjoyed Carleton’s approach to just enough project management — they provided the slides too.  I think it could work for us as it’s enough to organize things but not too much to be onerous to people. The document imaging put a good perspective on the role of document imaging.  The Off-hours session provided a cool system for capturing reporting of incidents and getting them resolved.  Luther Seminary is doing some interesting stuff online and I noticed it is a full-service department — faculty record their video and drop off the flip.