- Upcoming budget tightening? Opportunity to cut software licensing costs
- Costs of cloud storage
- Structured content in Sakai
- Basic workflows in OSP e-portfolios
- Drupal as portal
Upcoming budget tightening? Opportunity to cut software licensing costs
As endowment funds continue to get clipped in a volatile market, now is the time to consider how much your institution spends on software licenses. Just the licenses. The right to use the software, not including hardware to run it or people to support it. Just the cost of the licenses.
There are no licensing costs for open source software. Open source software, carefully selected and fully supported by your staff or an experienced contractor, may be part of a solution if you are concerned about your software licensing costs. Many open- or community-source applications have matured dramatically in the last two years.
Open source software provides a compelling opportunity to redeploy license fees to better support your users and to cut costs in preparation for academic year 2009.
Costs of cloud storage
Several of Longsight's clients have asked us about the use of bulk mass storage solutions to support learning management systems and institutional repositories. The possibilities sound especially attractive for putting large image and video files online. Providers such as Amazon's Simple Storage Solutions (S3) are charging as little as $0.15 per Gb per month. At first blush, these solutions look like inexpensive examples of cloud computing.
There's much more to the story, however. Some good and some not so good.
Cost:
You pay to store the content ($0.15 per Gb per month), for transfers in ($0.10/Gb), and for transfers out ($0.17/Gb). Let’s assume that 1Tb of content is stored and accessed at levels typical for an institutional repository or 10-20 times per month for the “average” content object [This approximate access rate is calculated based on DSpace usage statistics provided by the Universidade do Minho, Portugal. This access rate is probably lower for content in an institutional repository than for content presented in a learning management system where students are directed to the content more intensely than in an open, general use repository.] Let’s use 15 times per month for our calculation here. Let's also assume that the 1Tb of content is being maintained so about 10% of the collection is uploaded anew each month.
Amazon S3 will cost you $2710 that month or $32,520 per year, according to Amazon’s rate calculator.
Reliability:
Amazon’s service level agreement (SLA) promises a credit to your account if outages exceed 43 minutes per month. In the example above, we’d get back $271 (10%). It’s unlikely that this or any fee refund will mitigate the impact of an outage, depending of course on all kinds of factors such as timing, the nature of the content and who was denied access to the content for which you are steward.
While Amazon’s S3 is designed so that “…failures must be tolerated or repaired by the system without any downtime” it’s clear that there are single points of failure although they do not provide any details. Case in point: on July 20, 2008, Amazon S3 experienced an outage lasting at least six hours. You can learn more by searching for “S3 outage” at http://news.google.com or other new sources.
The high availability required by mission-critical applications has inherent costs that can't be eliminated with this sort of bulk mass storage or simple reliance on a cloud computing approach.
Consider the architecture of RAID arrays. RAID stands for "redundant array of inexpensive devices." The key word is redundant. Each array is comprised of several hard drives each holding copies of your data. If one drive fails, the others take over automatically and you are alerted to swap in a new hard drive, a process that usually doesn’t even require a reboot. If we used a single device without redundancy, our data would always be at risk.
Cloud computing has many parallels to the design of RAID arrays for mass storage. If you store your mission-critical data in the cloud in only one location, your data are at risk. Redundancy is the key both for RAID arrays and for successful use of cloud computing.
If you want to adopt a cloud computing strategy for mission critical needs, eliminate or certainly minimize single points of failure. For instance, are you relying on a cloud storage solution that is accessible only in a single block of IP addresses? That’s an often-overlooked single point of failure.
Transparency:
Any cloud computing service that is presented by the provider as a black box may contain hidden risks. If you can’t get answers to your technical questions, can’t determine how robust a service is or if problems aren’t immediately and comprehensively reported (as was the case with the Amazon S3 outage in July), you should keep looking for better solutions.
Bottom line:
Longsight has used Amazon’s S3 to store second and third copies of backup sets, and as a temporary storage area for large files. In a limited context, cloud storage services work well if you’re comfortable with their privacy policies and don't expect to have the backup set accessible all the time. If you want to leverage the value of cloud computing strategy, make certain that you have eliminated all single points of failure. Given the state of cloud computing today, we don't recommend commodity mass storage systems for learning management systems or institutional repositories.
Longsight is committed to reliability through redundancy at every level – multiple data centers, electrical power, data feeds, IP assignments and redundant DNS, Internet connections, mass storage, monitoring and transparency in reporting. We achieve reliability by managing our systems directly, eliminating single points of failure and ensuring that our clients’ data and applications are securely distributed among systems with automatic failover. The costs of the technology to achieve this are dropping each year and we're passing along the savings, but in the end, it’s redundancy that will save the day.
Structured content in Sakai
Sakai is not a box or a set of predetermined pathways into which you plug in your content. Sakai is a highly flexible and capable framework that works best when you approach Sakai with a vision focused on outcomes. Sakai will support your vision for teaching and learning but it’s important that you understand how content is stored and presented to your audience.
Sakai stores content in an internal repository. Sakai can store the simplest, most fundamental pieces of content (an image, for instance) and it can store very complex pieces of content (an entire textbook in PDF, a link to an external program or even a complete web site). [If you store file types that are understood by your web browser, they can be displayed directly by your browser. If you store file types that aren’t suited for display in a web browser, your browser will offer to download, save or open the file with a desktop program of choice.] Sakai can even create and present highly structured lessons based on international standards, but let’s hold off on that discussion for a while.
The Resources tool in Sakai provides a means to manage content in the repository. When the Resources tool is added to a worksite in Sakai, a separate “container” for that worksite’s content is created in the Sakai repository. So the content managed by the Resources tool in “My Workspace” is kept separate from the content managed by the Resources tool in “English 101.” Learners in English 101 can’t see the content in your workspace unless you explicitly grant permissions for the content on an item-by-item basis.
Instructors have a decision to make when setting up courses. They can place curricular content in “My Workspace” Resources and share each item with their courses, or they can place content related to a specific course into the Resources tool of that course in which case, by default, the content is accessible to students in that course. [There are other options as well. Course content can be drawn from any web site or from any Sakai worksite as long as the permissions are properly set. Instructors can keep master copies of content in My Workspace and copy content into each course Resources tool. Disciplines can create Sakai worksites that operate as a master site from which course content is shared and drawn. And any content can be released and withdrawn from access based on time.
] Typically, an instructor will upload content (PDFs, text documents, images, media clips, etc.) into the Resources tool in their private workspace or in a course, then optionally describe the content and set permissions on who can read the content. The process of uploading content is dramatically streamlined by the use of drag-and-drop technologies. [This process is based on WebDAV technologies that are described fully under “Upload-Download Multiple Resources” in the Sakai Resources tool.]
Turning learners lose in a repository of disorganized content is rarely useful. Content in the Resources tool can be hierarchically organized in folders and subfolders but often more structure than that is needed to guide the learner. Sakai provides many tools that create a learning workflow based on the content stored in the Resources tool. For example, the Assignment tool can link to content in Resources. Announcements, tests, discussion postings, e-portfolios and messages can draw on content in Resources.By drawing on the content stored in Sakai, these learning workflow tool s create a rich authoring environment to assemble diverse learning experiences. In fact, the tools in Sakai are designed with this workflow model in mind. Store content in a repository – draw upon that content to create a learning workflow. A Sakai learning workflow might support an online course with highly structured lessons that use time-released assignments and assessments. A Sakai learning workflow might support collaborative, problem-based learning with a relatively unstructured pool of resources combined with tools for communication. A Sakai learning workflow might supplement in-class experiences with ad hoc announcements, pre-class online discussions and spontaneous quizzing. Sakai is a framework – bring your vision!
Because Sakai is a flexible framework, it’s not limited to these methods for authoring learning workflows or lessons. By adding some additional tools, Sakai can present highly structured content that can come from other authoring and learning management systems. Let’s examine two options that are based on international standards – SCORM and Content Packaging.
SCORM, or the Shareable Content Object Reference Model, was adopted in 2004 by the US Department of Defense which led to refinement of the standard for e-learning content. In its latest version, SCORM sets standards for adaptive sequencing of content by the learner (learning pathways that adjust to the learner). It is possible to author lessons in third-party tools (such as Authorware or Dreamweaver with the Manifest Maker extension added). SCORM packages can also record data to assess the learner’s performance. The SCORM Player in Sakai 2.5.x allows you to import lesson packages [compliant with the current SCORM 2004 (1.3) standard] into the Sakai repository and play them but it does not, for example, store grades into the Sakai grade book.
The IMS Content Packaging standard (currently 1.1.4) helps us exchange learning materials among disparate authoring and learning management systems. Authoring systems such as Reload or Dreamweaver (with the Content Packager for IMS installed) can create structured content that can be imported into the Modules tool in Sakai (called Melete
). 
The Sakai Modules tool itself can author hierarchical lessons that incorporate a variety of media (text, video, audio). Modules can create two-tiered lessons with timed release of content sections, a table of contents and previous/next navigation links. In the near future, Modules will enable conditional release of content (aka adaptive sequencing) and links to assignments and assessments. There’s a tradeoff in using Modules, however: it doesn’t draw upon content in the Sakai Resources tool and its repository is “hidden” so you have fewer options for managing the content directly.
While the content packaging standard is well specified, not all tools produce a perfectly compliant package which means that to achieve interoperability among different systems, you may need some XML skills to tweak the packages you want to use. Many of these plug-ins are created and maintained by individuals which often means that they fall behind the latest release of the tool they are supposed to extend. Bottom line: if you want to author Content Packages outside of Sakai, make sure you need to use an external authoring tool then pick an authoring tool carefully and be prepared to work out the details to get started.
Be cautious about commercial systems that offer “extensions” to the IMS standards. While it may sound like an enhancement, these proprietary extensions usually break the import process and trap your content in the legacy learning management system.
So here’s the bottom line:
It’s easy to author lessons directly in Sakai, but if you want to create complex, sequenced lessons, consider authoring your content in the Modules tool. If you need to create even more complex lesson structures, or if you simply prefer another authoring tool, export your content in the IMS Content Packaging standard and be prepared to work out some kinks in the process at first.
Basic workflows in OSP e-portolfios
We’ve heard from several of our clients that there’s a need for better end-user instructions for interacting with the matrix model in OSP. The matrix isn't the only area in need of explanation. Here are some suggestions for understanding the OSP interface:
There are usually two groups of people involved in ePortfolios. Each group has a different role. Portfolio coordinators design the portfolio process. Portfolio participants create and revise their own portfolios according to the coordinators' design. Coordinators are often faculty or project administrators and participants are often students.
1. Forms
Regardless of your role, you can't start using OSP without forms that gather data. Unfortunately, prepackaged forms don't come with OSP (the current OSP library has very few). Coordinators must plan and create them, then the forms are used to gather portfolio data. The lack of forms has been a barrier for those who wish to get started with OSP. [Contact Longsight for help with this design and implementation process].
2. Wizards
Then come wizards. Wizards are simply guides for using forms to gather data. Portfolio coordinators usually design and create wizards with the wizard tool in Sakai. Wizards define the order in which forms appear. For example, a simple sequential wizard could present three forms in order – one form to gather personal information (name, address, etc), another form that gathers a statement of work, and finally a form into which the participant enters a reflection on their experience. Ultimately, the portfolio participant runs the wizard to guide their entry of the data.
3. Matrices
Many portfolio projects are based on gathering diverse types of information from participants over an extended period of time. In fact, most portfolio projects can't use one, simple wizard to gather all the data needed for a meaningful program. Most portfolio projects will be based on many wizards, and while it is possible to name or number wizards in some logical sequence (wizard one, week one, etc), a more visual tool for organizing wizards is in order. It is called the matrix.
Each matrix is made up of cells (two by two, ten by three, and so forth) and there's a tool in Sakai for creating matrices of nearly any size. The key is to recognize that each cell of the matrix presents one or more data gathering forms. It's simple, really. Forms gather data. Wizards put forms in order. Matrices put forms in a visual order.
You can set up a matrix so that your portfolio participants can gather data (artifacts, statements, reflections….virtually anything digital) they want at any time simply by clicking on a cell in a matrix that you, as coordinator, have designed and published. Or you can require your participants to complete all the cells in the first row of your matrix before they can move to the forms in the cells in the second row. The same control by columns is possible, and you can even require that their entries be evaluated before they can move on to the next steps in filling out the wizards in the cells of your matrix. (Word of caution: if you’re running any evaluations, you must have set up evaluation forms and specified a list of users that have the evaluator role. If you don’t, “submit for evaluation” is a dead end!)
4. Portfolio Templates
So these wizards and matrices are guides that wrap the data gathering activity with instructions, a rationale and examples. Importantly, this guidance can be edited directly and easily by coordinators. Instructions, rationale and examples should be stored outside of the forms and templates that your programming staff created so that non-coders can make adjustments. You can embed guidance into forms and templates, but if you do, then you’ll need some expertise to change them, and may take control of the eportfolio out of the hands of the curricular specialists and coordinators. The portfolio itself comes next.
When your participants are done entering their data (even before they are done if they wish), they are ready to publish their portfolios. The portfolio itself is rendered by a template. These reasonably technical XSLT documents gather up the right pieces of information and render the appropriate data for viewing in a web browser. [Again, contact Longsight for help in designing and implementing templates].
Portfolios could contain all the data they have gathered or just selected pieces that are “chunked” by the wizard or matrix used to gather them. You can even develop a template that draws directly on forms (bypassing the wizard or matrix and the associated guidance).
Templates are fairly tightly associated with a specific set of forms, wizards and matrices. The more generalized the template is, the less flexible it may become. Flexibility comes at a cost for developing and testing the template.
These are design decisions by the coordinator who works with technical staff to design your portfolio templates, and it’s a good example of the myriad options that OSP provides. So many in fact that confusion abounds! Like Sakai, OSP is a framework that provides support for many different workflows. It facilitates your curricular decisions rather than constrains or guides your workflow which may be good or bad depending on your goals and audience.
A portfolio coordinator could give their participants the option to use several templates each designed for a different purpose or a different style of presentation. The design might also allow the participant to select which data are presented or not. And the participant, as the owner of the intellectual property, can be given the right to determine who can view or comment on the portfolio once it is published.
These are just a few of the options. There are many more. Many options at each step of the process can make the e-portfolio tools in Sakai look daunting. It is not as difficult as it seems at first blush. We hope these tips and the graphic below help you see the relevance of these tools to your program.
Drupal as portal
Guess what? There’s a lot of content being authored for the web, and there’s no end in sight. Perhaps the oldest challenge of the modern web is how to bridge the gap between those who are creative and have content and those with the means to structure and present such content in a web browser. There are creative writers and artists with no interest in the technology and there are structured thinkers who command the technology.
To the rescue comes the nearly ubiquitous content management system (or CMS but not a course management system…that’s a different breed of application).
Content management systems are torn between two fundamental poles: one hand wishes to preserve creativity and flexibility, while the other hand aims to make things simple. These goals, more often than not, are opposed to each other. As one increases the simplicity of a CMS, the ability to tweak, move, modify, and control the result all diminish. Alternately, if one is given complete freedom inside a CMS, it begs the question: why have a CMS at all if creating content is as complex as it would be without one? It is in this light which Drupal sets itself apart from other CMS's.
Drupal has a near-perfect blend of structure and form with freedom and creativity. By providing a structure that addresses 90% of the problem space, and a lightweight development environment for the remaining 10%, it becomes easy not only to manage content, but keep it current as well. However, this built in flexibility allows for Drupal to be used in ways that would be much more difficult for other CMS's, and radically changes the way things can be presented on the web.
Web technologies evolve quickly. Drupal – with a very large population of users and developers – is keeping pace. With a low barrier of entry into Drupal development, this CMS constantly grows with the addition of modules each providing new functionality (see the list of modules at http://drupal.org). Drupal’s flexibility can be leveraged as a front end that can be adapted quickly and provide an up to date interface to existing applications. An example is Longsight’s recent work for the Liberal Arts Scholarly Repository in which DSpace serves as the archival engine while Drupal provides a strong user interface including the ability to harvest metadata from disparate and distributed repositories.
Drupal goes well beyond a content management system by providing tools for social interactivity, fine-grained access control of database resources, strong graphic design and extensibility. Drupal combines the best of creative and structured thinking!
Some of Longsight’s Drupal-based projects include:
The Longsight Group produces this newsletter on behalf of those whocan take advantage of fully-supported, open source software. We providehosting, support, development and training for Sakai, the collaboration and learning environment, for Drupal to create dynamic web sites, and for DSpace for archives and institutional repositories.
Longsight’s comprehensive support:
- Project planning
- Installation and configuration
- Training and documentation
- Hosting and remote management
- Custom development and support
- Management services for local installations
- Troubleshooting, upgrades, security, backups
- Data migration and integration with systems
- Performance monitoring and assessment services
Contact Longsight for more information:
http://www.longsight.com| toll free: 866-224-5721 |information@longsight.com
