November is off to a great start as we work to roll out our new teaching and learning environment.
The team has carved out five immediate action items, and we’ve gotten started on those already. The action items are:
- Set up the test and production instances
- Enable UTORauth
- Enable ROSI data flow
- Coordinate with Divisional partners on roll-out strategies
- Pick a name for the new environment
Setting up the Instances
We are pleased to let everyone know that as of this writing, our testing and development instances, as well as our production instances, are all up and running. Each has many settings that need to be tweaked and configured to maximize appropriate usage, but the team is excited to be meeting with our suppliers team when they come to spend several days with us on-sight next week.
UTORauth
As with almost all other systems, including our current Learning Portal, the intent is to use the common weblogin (UTORid and password) for the new system as well. Of course, the new system doesn’t come out of the box enabled for UTORids, so the team will be focusing some of its initial energies on getting that set up.
ROSI
Of course, being able to log on to the system is only the first step. Once you log in, whether you are a student or an instructor, you will likely want to see your course website. To enable that, we need to get the data about courses and enrolments from ROSI (aka ACORN) into the new system. That is also a primary immediate task for the team.
Roll-Out Strategies
We continue to receive eager requests from instructors to start using the new system, which is very exciting. We are devising roll-out strategies on a division-by-division basis, so that instructors and students can get local, contextual support. That includes scheduling and training and content migration strategies. The central team has already started meeting with divisional leads, and we will soon be publishing the contact information for those, so stay tuned.
A Name
As we hope you’ve seen, we are working with the Office of the Vice-Provost Students, who are running a student naming contest. If you think you’ve got a good name for new teaching and learning environment, feel free to make a submission by following this link.