Friday, June 17

Sabbatical wrap-up and final discussion with Mike Cope and Fiona Strawbridge. Packing, returning keys, and farewell…

What a fantastic 5 weeks-stay in UCL!

Bye bye UCL, going to come back soon!

Thursday, June 16

Follow-up meeting with Donna Haugh, and the FISOs (Faculty Information Support Officers) of the following faculties: Art and History, Life Sciences and Engineering, and Built Environments. The FISOs are appointed by ISD and should bridge the gab between central and de-central IT, and support the services delivered by ISD. This role needs to be empowered and recognized both by the faculty and local IT managers on the one side, and by ISD on the other side. Currently, FÎSOs are sort of frustrated because they just have no means of achieving this bridge function. Sometimes they act mostly ad Zope/Silva content managers and supporter. Or try to have live@ucl adopted by staff. The meeting clearly showed that de central / de-central issue and the difficulty in governance are a common problem to many institutions in higher education.

In the afternoon, I “Lync-attended” the presentation and workshop about Microsoft FAST with the Search working group of the ETH Web Re-launch project in Zurich.I could experience for the first time the Lync federation ETH-Microsoft Peter Imhof just established. Brilliant. FAST is definitely another class of product and much more than just a search appliance. Serious candidate!.

I spent the rest of the day in preparing a wrap-up ob my stay here at UCL for Mike Cope (CIO).

I invited Fiona’s team for a farewell dinner at Camino, a Spanish restaurant near King’s Cross, And Mike Cope joined Fiona, Anora, Rob, Mat, and myself.

Wednesday, June 15

Here is a draft a possible future org chart for LTSS:

I suggested Fiona to draw another view of the LTSS team organisation along the value chain and handed in this one:

Tuesday, June 14

Provost’s presentation: The Provost’s Green Paper – Academic Board and Town Meeting. The UCL President and Provost, Professor Malcolm Grant,

The presentation was a summary of the Green paper with the following analysis:

1. From 1826 prospectus.
   “Finally, the Council trust, that they are now about to lay the Foundation of
   an Institution well adapted to communicate liberal instruction to
   successive generations of those who are now excluded from it, and likely
   neither to retain the machinery of studies superseded by time, nor to
   neglect any new science brought into view by the progress of reason; of
   such magnitude as to combine the illustration and ornament which every
   part of knowledge derives from the neighbourhood of every other, with the
   advantage that accrues to all from the outward aids and instruments of
   Libraries, Museums and Apparatus; where there will be a sufficient
   prospect of fame and emolument to satisfy the ambition, and employ the
   whole active lives of the ablest Professors. . .”
2. UCL in 2011
3. Tight budgets for stable finances
4. Where’s the competition coming from (rest of the world rapidly catching up)
5. Not business as usual
6. Enhanced focus on teaching and learning
7. String strategies already in other key areas.

and the following agenda:

1. The context
2. Principles for a 10-year strategy
3. A comprehensive university
4. An open institution
5. Transforming education
6. Research
7. Enterprise
8. Creating value
9. Key actions

With strong charisma and a good sense of (British) humor, the provost enumerated 10 visionary points followed by guiding principles and strategic aims. Social aspects, cultural diversity, sustainability, producing benefit for the society , being a good employer, a good neighbor for London, building trust are recurring accents of the green paper.

More than half of the presentation and a large part of the discussion were devoted to the quality of learning and teaching. “Everybody should teach. We don’t need these research stars publishing brilliant papers but keeping reluctant to teach” the Provost said. Answering a question about the development of distance learning, the Provost explained that UCL is considering this offering in the long term, first for continuous professional development. “We are not ready yet to provide distance learning to the students. We do LectureCast and so, but Learning is not Watching, it’s a two-way process”, he said. It’s interesting to note that UCL is slowly considering “semesterisation” (semesters with end-of-term exams) in order to enhance the compatibility with other universities and facilitate mobility, both for students and staff. The biggest challenge will be the financial stabilization in the current budget cuts period of time.

Monday, June 13

Meeting with Donna Haugh. Donna reports to Maria Darmon, Head of central operation services and customer relations. She is in charge of completing the deployment of live@ucl (Arts & Humanities- Built Environment- Engineering Sciences – Laws – Life Sciences– Mathematical & Physical Sciences  – Social & Historical Sciences. Faculty of Biomedical sciences has already been migrated, some other faculty in part, but a lot has do be done to complete the migration. Currently, 25000 students have a live@ucl account and more than 2000 staff. I believed that mailbox storage was in Microsoft datacenters in the UK, but there are actually in Dublin with mirrors in Amsterdam. This link provides some Q&As about the project. It has been decided that mailbox content do not get migrated. Instead, users will access their old mail accounts from Outlook or Outlook WebApp and transfer their mailbox themselves. The project did not encounter dramatic difficulties, the most common one being to access old POP3 Eudora mailboxes. The new mail system is well accepted.

In the post SMART-IT organization, Donna will be in charge of coordination the FISOs: the Faculty Information Support Officers. ISD will take advantage of the FISOs in order to better coordinate the use and the alignment of the central shared services with the de-central IT. Same issues, same challenges, and same solution when compared with the central/de-central debate. The model of “Delivery Manager” and federated IT with the embedded IT Supporters in D-BIOL is of great interest to Donna. The FISO should become sort of a ISD Delivery Manager, but in another governance context. How are the FISOs goring to accept their new role? I think that SMART-IT is reaching a crucial momentum, that of taking the de-central IT Managers on board and getting a storing commitment of working together with ISD. In FBS, the IT staff has been assimilated with ISD. this is one strategy. What will be strategy with the other faculty, what will be the role of the FISOs? Donna will organize a follow-up meeting with FISOs attending.

In the afternoon, LTSS group meeting: In the SMART-IT phase 3, all departments of ISD get reorganized. So is it for LTSS as well. LTSS staff will increase from 8 to 13 in a first stage. The group meeting was about finding the optimal organization chart for the group. All members agree that new products and services cannot be developed on the cost of the core services such as keeping Moodle fit, up and running. The new org chart should address the needs for more teacher-facing advisory specialist in the form of an advisory board and embedded spokes. A student task force as content assistant for Moodle could be an interesting option, as long as quality insurance is provided. Placing 0.5 FTE, dedicated for e-learning tickets, at the central helpdesk would be a relief for the group. Another challenge is how to adequately staff horizon scanning, innovation, and evaluation of new technologies, and how to insure reporting and quality control. Finally, there are needs for working on the improvement of physical learning spaces at UCL.

Saturday, June 11 and Sunday, June 12

Rainy weekend, but with Kathi and Caroline:-) Shopping, Museum, Hyde Parc, the Queen’s birthday and parades, Concert, Thai food…

Friday, June 10

Paper work, writing blogs (mechanism and parameters of CSC and offline wiles in WIn7), coordination of my IT team in Zurich, and Lync VC with the “Institutsleitungsitzung” in Zurich.

Thursday, June 9

Informal Meeting with Matt and Jason, LTSS, and Thomas Piendl and Daniel. The discussion was about how to implement a process for deciding what new, cutting edge technology should be explored, incubated, and eventually invested in, implemented and supported within LTSS. We spoke about core duties vs. nice-to-have, portfolio lifecycle, and criteria for decision making. We all agree that a uncomplicated process should be in place to insure informed decision making. Important criteria include an realistic evaluation of the needs, the value for money aspect, the impacts on support and maintenance, as well as the required resources.

Meeting with Samuel Massiah, IT Manager of FBS, and  Anthony Peacock, Head of Research, Teaching & Development, FBS. Anthony is building up a small group that will be in charge of establishing an FBS-wide research-related IT support and delivery, support for learning¬teaching technology, and web technologies. Historically, research IT has been done in an ad hoc, sometime quick&dirty manner at the research group level. This pragmatic approach is reaching limits because of lack of coordination, sustainability, and professionalism. It also might be a waste of resources in the long term. The challenge is to steer delivery and support of research-related IT at the Faculty level, and by doing so, to bridge the gap between shared services provided by ISD and research-related IT requirements. The right structure, governance model, and resource allocation scheme are critical success factors. It has to do with a layered offering portfolio concept that shares similarities with a current tentative to establish a “Computational Tools Facility” for DBIOL.

Wednesday, June 8

Meeting with Gavin Mclachlan, Director of Technology Services and Director of Research IT Services, ISD. Gavin is managing quite a large spectrum of ISD services and project, ranging from datacenter, storage, and HPC to UCL Desktop and VDI services. He is strongly implicated in the Smart-IT reorganization, had a leading function in the live@UCL project. Gavin has a very deep understanding of the processes and services, as well as visions of ISD. We discussed the new UCL desktop project and I could demo our managed client concept at ETH and Microbiology as well as our App-V service including the self-service App-V kiosk. Gavin confirmed the central role the new Active Directory forest is going to play as the primary foundation for Identity and Access Management at UCL, as well as the Federated Identity Management Project. This FIB project has more to do with synchronization from AD of all other Identity directories at UCL that federating AD and Shibboleth using ADFS 2.0 and SAML 2.0 – a crucial, strategic foundation in my opinion. Then Gavin shortly presented a centralized data storage private cloud concept for UCL, addressing the currently extremely de-centralized, uncoordinated storage ecosystem at UCL. I got his slide and I will have to go through them carefully.

Skype Meeting with Matt, LTSS, and Thomas Piendl and Daniel Schneider. ETH LET, on SEB. Safe Exam Browser is an open source project published with SourceForge and funded by Switch.  Thomas Piendl is the project manager and Daniel Schneider is part of the developer team at ETH. Matt is interested in evaluating and implementing SEB in order to deliver safe e-exams with Moodle. The meeting was un great opportunity to put in contact  e-learning of both universities. The discussion was about usage experience with SEB in Zurich, the reaction of the students, the needs and expectation of the teaching staff, the further development of the project, as well as about some technical aspects of the software such as language support and robustness of the safe environment on non-managed private devices.

Meeting with Samuel Massiah, IT Manager of FBS, and  Trevor peacock, our Head of Central Operations, FBS.

 

Tuesday, June 7

Meeting with Samuel Massiah, IT Manager of FBS, and  Ric Passey, Head of Service Infrastructure, FBS. Ric is currently working in integration the several Divisions, Institutes, and Departments of FBS, to create a managed IT environment and join FBS to the new UCL Active Directory Forest. Ric has a Biological Sciences background. Before being assimilated with ISD, he used to work as an de-central IT manager for his Institute.

Video conference with the Search Appliance work group of the ETH Web Re-launch project. In the context of the Web Re-launch project at ETH, the work group “Search” is in charge of evaluating the search appliance for the new web. Will it be Google Search Appliance (GSA) without evaluation, just because it’s the industry leader? Is Microsoft FAST going to be evaluated? Or another one? It turns out that GSA would be very expensive. As you can read from the Monday, June 6 post, UCL just dropped GSA for economic reasons and for for funnelback. As a member of the Search working group, I assisted to the meeting via Lync, and Reto and myself could report on last Monday’s funnelback marketing presentation. Reto reviewed the selection criteria for the different stakeholders.

Video Conference with Jim Alexander, Funnelback project leader at UCL and Reto Ambühler, Web Re-launch Search work group. Just after the previous meeting, I had the opportunity to put Reto and Jim in contact, over Lync. This meeting was excellent for us, because we could speak to the funnelback implementing guy here and UCL and get a pretty unbiased opinion about the product. Jim confirmed that funnelback is definitely not a turnkey appliance such GSA, but has to be carefully implemented, tuned, AND maintained!

 

Monday, June 6

Marketing presentation of the funnelback Enterprise Search Appliance.
Webcast by Phil Widdop [mailto:pwiddop@funnelback.com], London, with the ETH Web Re-launch Search Team. It was a classical marketing session with slides, case example in higher education and a presentation of the management interface. First experiences here with funnelback are lukewarm. The implementation and tuning seems to be laborious and quite time intensive. I’ll try to get in touch with the funnelback guys here and organize a chat with ETH…

Attending the LTSS group meeting today, I found the following offering quite interesting: The UCL Library gives the opportunity for teaching staff to publish reading lists onto the TALIS Aspire system. The listed papers are linked to the electronic papers and students can check them, mark them as read, make annotations, … This idea now is to integrate these reading lists  in Moodle and Reference Manager…

Saturday, June 4 and Sunday, June 5

St. Paul – Millenium Bridge – Tate Modern – Charing Cross- Tate National Gallery- Soho,
St. Martin in the Fields Concert:

Handel – Zadok the Priest; Mozart – ‘Coronation’ Mass; Handel – Coronation Anthem ‘The King Shall Rejoice’; Mozart – Requiem
English Chamber Choir – Belmont Ensemble of London
Elizabeth Weisberg Soprano
Vanessa Heine Mezzo-Soprano
Richard Rowntree Tenor
Philip Tebb Bass
Peter G Dyson Conductor

East London – Liverpool Street – Brick Lane – Shopping
St. Georges Bloomsbury Church Concert:

Schumann: Adagio and Allegro, Britten: Lachrymae, Faure: Après un Rêve, Brahms: Sonata in F minor Op. 120 No.1
Jennifer Edwards – viola; Stephen Gutman – piano

Friday, June 3

Meeting with Harry Goldstein, Ross Martin, and Simon Farrell, all three reporting to the CIO Mike cope.
Harry is a business process analyst and bring the “think-out-of-the-box” touch in the office of the CIO. We spoke about governance structure as well as strengths and weaknesses of the Smart-IT project.

Ross works on the implementation and maintenance of new shares services. He was implicated in the live@UCL project. Simon is a System Architect. Both Ross and Simon have a deep technical understanding of the ISD former and current service architecture. We compared the network design and identity management at UCL and ETH. Our ETH NetNG concept with the Virtual Private Zones, the docking network concept, IEE802.1x, Machine Authentication are of high interest for them. Like at ETH, Identity Management and Personnel Databases have grown organically: too many directories, to many databases, too many sync cron jobs. The system gets dangerous to maintain and synchronizing passwords can take up to 24 hours to be done in every system. NIS, LDAP, and other Oracle directories are being to replaced by a central, primary source which will be the Active Directory single Forest/single Domain of UCL. This consolidation will require an advised concept and solid naming convention as well as secure management interface. Everybody seems to agree on the crucial importance of AD for most of the projects that have to be realized at UCL, including federation with Shibboleth and claims based authentication. We also discuss the trends in managed/unmanaged clients and the New UCL Desktop project. Ross and Simon share my opinion that clients should be fully, or not managed at all. Mutual management of PCs or Mac, or Linux boxes are a wrong good idea and just not sustainable.

 

Fiona, head of LTSS, has to re-apply for her own post, like all other managers in ISD in the Smart-IT process. Fiona had her interview today.

I cross my fingers for you Fiona

 

 

Meeting with the Smart-IT lead team: Harry Goldstein, Ross Martin, and Simon Farrel.

Thursday, June 2

Meeting with James Hargrave and his team, Client Platform Services.

In the context of Smart-IT, the New Desktop project aims to replace the Citric-based WTS Cluster and the Myriad Desktop infrastructure which are now getting obsolete.

The Myriad service is based upon Windows XP workstations and works in a very different way to WTS (Windows Terminal Services). On Myriad, the available software runs locally and users are not sharing the computer with any others, which gives enhanced performance. On WTS users are connected to a remote server where all your software is running. Though the servers are very powerful users are sharing the server with other users so the performance for certain types of software is not as good as if the software was running on the local computer.
Myriad is available in most student computer workrooms.

In getting prepared for this meeting, I read an interesting blog post by Brian Madden about “Consumerization of IT”. This led me to think about the implication of this new reality on the desktop environment in higher education and I just post my thoughts in my blog. I’ll appreciate any comment.

Wednesday, June 1

Meeting with Andrew Dawson and Adrian Barker, Datacenter services. The discussion was about identity management, Active Directory, and Shibboleth. UCL uses Shibboleth mainly for providing single sign-on to most of it’s web services to its own users. Active Directory infrastructure has grown organically and in a sometimes uncontrolled may. Every one realizes the necessity for consolidating a single forest and repatriate de-central forest in a  OU hosting mode. Naming conventions have to be designed and adopted. ADFS and Shibboleth links is also a theme at UCL. Currently, among the many different identity databases, NIS (AIX) still seems to play an central role. Voices claim for giving AD a more central role in Identity Management. The New UCL Desktop, SharePoint, Federation with Cloud Services and other University will heavily rely on an central Active Directory Infrastructure.

Tuesday, May 31

Meeting with Maria Darmon, Head of Central Operation Services and Customer Relations. This department shares similarities with our ID-SDL division at ETH: Customer relationships, first and second level helpdesk (BMC Remedy), training…

The first channel in order to get help on IT issues at UCL is to pick the phone and wait for 0 to 10 minutes. It is also possible to go to the service desk for a face-to-face information with the first level supporter which might be students. Another canal is Email. All cases will be entered in the BMC Remedy system and dispatched. The response time is not satisfying, the systems is sometimes described as a “black hole” by some users. There are too many cases on password changes or logon problems. The action plan to address these issues include:

• Reduce the response time by reducincing the volume of the cases.
  • Better Change password scripts, better identity management
  • The “New Desktop” project, including managed OS and Software provisioning (App-V)
  • Better self-help documentation such as knowledge bases and FAQ
• A new Service Desk portal. The portal will be used to report a problem, make a request, and follow problem resolution. It should be searchable and linked to KB and FAQ. This will be done with the update of BMC Remedy to the latest version called now BMC ITSM.

 

 

Maria was very interested in the implementation of the DBIOL IT Strategy and the organization of the decentralization of our commodity service delivery & support. She asked questions about the role of the Delivery Manager and the identification of the embedded IT Supporters with their users in the Institutes. I presented her the three pillars of our DBIOL IT Strategy – (1) Portfolio and layered offering of commodity and specific IT assets – (2) IT Delivery Support Organisation – (3) Resource allocation processes for commodity and specific IT.

 

In the afternoon, I met with Jo Matthews, Academic Technical Services, and attended her group’s progress meeting. The Academic Technical Services group is in charge of running the shared middle tier applications used for Research and Teaching & Learning. They are in the “middle of the pyramid” and rely on the Central Operations, DB, Servers, and Datacenter guys while providing the web applications to the customer facing services such as LTSS. I reported last Thursday on the Virtual Group Meeting on Video & Learning Environments and Web Application: Jo and one of her collaborators (Peter) attended this virtual group meeting.

During this session, each of the 4 members presented an update on the ongoing work as well as the planned activities for the two next weeks. Topics included issues, maintenance, and update works on Moodle (LMS), Opinio (survey), Mahara (MyPortfolio), Confluence (wiki), a discussion forum & message board application, Colabnet (SVN Subversion system), WordPress 3.1.3 (http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk), integrated booking system for Echo360 (LectuteCast), Shibbolethization of the applications…

Then I was invited by Mike Cope and his Smart-IT Team for a drink and a nice dinner in Soho.

Saturday, May 28 to Monday, May 30

Bank Holidays in London. Laurent & friends were here.

Friday, May 27

Getting information about online exam and the ETH/Switch project.
ETH uses SafeExamBrowser (SEB) for all online examinations in the Learning Management Systems Moodle and ILIAS since 2009. It is also used since 2010 in the D-INFK Department with the SIOUX suite of examination.

From the SEB web site.

Important parts of this project have been carried out as part of the "AAA/SWITCH – e-infrastructure for e-science" programme under the leadership of SWITCH, the Swiss National Research and Education Network, and have been supported by funds from the ETH Board and the State Secretariat for Education and Research (SER).

SEB is currently routinely used in ETH Zurich and other Swiss universities and technical colleges as well in the University of Cologne, Giessen, Augsburg, … and in University of Texas. SEB is also used by Skyguide for the education of aircraft pilots. The SEB software, source code, and documentation is available for developers under  http://sourceforge.net/projects/seb/ and http://www.safeexambrowser.org/ . SEB is bow being re-launched and enhanced with the project SEB2012.

UCL is currently evaluating SEB as a promising solution. Caveats include sign-on and warning/error messages that still pop up in German in SEB. Also, parts of the documentation (e.g. SEB2010 project, SEB Outcome PDF documents) are difficult to find in English.

I’ll try to organize a video conference for UCL and AAA/ETH people on SEB in two weeks.

Usage of SEB @ETH so far:

Term	LMS	#Exams	#Students
Fall 2008	Moodle/ILIAS	2	137
Spring 2009	Moodle/ILIAS	8	410
Fall 2009	Moodle/ILIAS/SIOUX	5+2	220+270
Spring 2010	Moodle/ILIAS/SIOUX	5+4	220+580

Thursday, May 26

Virtual Group Meeting on Video & Learning Environments and Web Application:
This was sort of a progress and update meeting on all web apps and learning environments provided by UCL, including Moodle, student administration application Portico, Wiki (Confluence), blogs.ucl.ac.uk (WorldPress), Opinio (Survey app), MyPortfolio, MySQL state, PHP Updates, and more. For me this virtual group meeting was sot of an anticipated real life work style of the new structure of ISD putting together staff from4 to 5 different groups and departments.

Wednesday, May 25

The Smart IT project of UCL  
I just attended a two-an-half hours, monthly Whole Team Meeting where Mike Cope (CIO) regularly update the ISD staff on the progress of the Smart IT project.
Smart IT is an ambitious, thorough reorganisation of the Information Services Division (ISD) of UCL, both in the offering (shares services, infrastructure) as in the organization structure. The ultimate objectives of Smart IT are to provide UCL world class IT enablement for research and teaching & learning by implementing excellent common, standard shared services and focusing on strong customer orientation. The motivators are the following:

• Need to improve IT enablement of Teaching & Learning and Research
  • Key missions of a world class Research led University
  • Too low a percentage of budget and staff in this area
  • Students will demand better experience with higher fees
• IT services need to be more effective and efficient
  • Too many IT Services at UCL have slipped behind modern external organizations
  • Too much old technology and duplication
  • Organisation not shaped for effective service delivery
• Need a stronger customer focus
  • More responsive to customer needs
  • Overcome the need for local IT solutions

This multi-year transformation of ISD means deep changes in technology, process & policy, organisation, and culture. Starting with a clean sheet of paper, the org chart has been completely redesigned to address the enumerated challenges and better meet the objectives. The new org chart is looking like this:

 
The new org charts reveals the change taking place within ISD. The design of the new IT organization starts with customer-facing service provision. IT needs to see itself as a “service provider – not a technology provider”. The organisation is oriented around services rather than technologies. One can sketch the chart on a inverted pyramid:

In this structural reorganization, every staff will have to formally quit his/her current post and re-apply the new one and get assimilated in the new structure id possible. In a first phase nearly completed today the Directors of the 6 ISD Departments – the ISD leadership team -  needed be (re-)appointed in order to lead the work on the structure in their respective areas (Phase 2 and 3). In Phase 2 which is underway, the group managers are applying as “Head of” their own group, if continued, or for a new group. The posts are offered to existing staff, but if matching is not possible, the job is also advertised externally. The process including job descriptions and grading is made as transparent and open as possible. In order to prepare for Phase 3, informal consultation days will take place in July and August where the newly appointed Heads of the Groups will have the opportunity to present their respective group activities and organisation and to seek feedback. And most of the staff will in principle have to re-apply for their new job on the same, or different post.

I was quite impressed by the efforts of Mike Cope put into communication and management of uncertainties which might be an important threat for the success of such a radical reorg. And that in the context of a reduced budget. This was sort of a demonstration of  string leadership.

 

Tuesday, May 24

No meeting today, just a lunch with another member of CALT. I spent the day in digesting the information on CALT and CPM (see yesterday’s post) and in studying the material of the SmartIT project and getting ready for the Wednesday meetings.

Monday, May 23

Meeting with Samuel Massiah, IT Head of the Biomedical Sciences Faculty (UCL School of Life and Medical Sciences). Sami introduced me to the complex analytical IT budget of one large faculty at UCL. I needed a bit of nomenclature, just to know what is what:
Research groups usually belong to a Department. Departments are grouped in 9 Faculties which in turned get grouped in 3 Schools. The Life Science Faculty and the Biomedical Sciences Faculty are building the UCL School of Life & Medical Sciences (incorporating UCL Medical School). In those 2 faculties departments are grouped into an intermediate level called Division of Institute. The academic structure is not 100% homogeneous. Have a look to this to get a full figure of it.

Now there a 3 possible levels of IT Support: ISD (central IT Services), Faculty, and local. Department have to pay “taxes” to ISD and Faculty for the provided IT Services, but they cannot really decide about the service level and offering. They sometimes also own local IT service, sometimes local IT service has been overtaken or outsourced to ISD. SmartIT should clarify what is provided centrally and what should be done de-centrally, how the central and de-central support should be organized, as well as quality and quantity of shared IT services provided centrally. The idea is to increase efficiency and effectiveness the ISD portfolio of infrastructure and services in order to convince departments to make use of available shared services provided centrally. At the end of day, to do more with less, or to do better with the same. It really remembers  the challenges of our ID @ETH, and the pilot IT strategy @D-BIOL. In both Universities, it seems crucial to align the shared offering with the real needs of the departments and to convince the department to concentrate on what is very specific to their field and let IT commodity be delivered centrally.

In the afternoon, I had a video conference with the IT-Steering team of D-BIOL for the evaluation of 4 submitted applications for research-related IT strategic IT projects.

Later in the afternoon, I attended a joined LTSS-CALT (Center for the Advancement of Learning and Teaching). It was about the UCL accreditation framework for Continuing Professional Development (CPM) for teaching fellows and teaching assistants. This framework aligned with the UK PSK, the UK Professional Standards Framework for teaching and supporting learning in higher education.
”The UCL Academic Practice programme is a non-credit-bearing continuing professional development programme which provides flexible personalised support for professional workplace learning by academic-related teaching staff through the guidance of a mentor based in the participant’s subject discipline or area of work.”
”The over-arching aim of the programme is to enable participants to develop their knowledge and values so that their teaching and support is closely integrated with research, scholarship and/or professional practice and provides high quality university learning for their students. Four themes are integrated throughout the programme: (1) disciplinarily; (2) the research-teaching nexus; (3) internationalization of the curriculum and global citizenship; and (4) critical engagement with the research evidence base in pedagogy and professional development. The Academic Practice Programme provides a framework in which courses of work-based study may be tailored to suit the needs of individuals or groups through negotiation by participants and their mentor with the program director. It enables participants to demonstrate their achievement of the Professional Standards at an appropriate level for their role. It also enables individuals to return to the programme at a later stage if required in order to progress to the next Standards.”

The framework includes three levels of achievement or Standards:

• ”The Standard 1 programme and portfolio route is designed for a range of academic-related staff involved in teaching or supervision including Postgraduate Teaching Assistants, Postdoctoral Researchers, Research Fellows and Learning Technology Support Staff (LTSS). Standard 1 is the minimum level appropriate for theses colleagues and for any other staff teaching more than 50 hours per year.”
  The unit of this route includes:
  Designing effective learning activities; Problem-based learning; How students learn; Effective methods of teaching;, Lectures in large groups; Small group teaching; Principle and practice for learning; Personal tutoring; Supervising research students; Introduction to learning technologies; Student learning in online environments; The research-teaching link; The reflective practitioner
• ”The Standard 2 programme and portfolio route is designed for Teaching Fellows and experienced academic staff. Academic-related staff how have sufficient breadth of experience may progress onto the Standard 2 route having previously gained Standard 1.”
  The unit of this route includes:
  Curriculum design; Innovative methods of teaching; Assessment and feedback strategies including online assessments; Design of activities and content for e-Learning; Internet-based collaboration tools; Knowledge creation and academic writing in the subject discipline; Systematic evaluation of teaching and programmes; Teaching international Students; Internationalizing the curriculum
• “ The Standard 3 programme and portfolio route is designed for experienced academic staff and academic-related colleagues, with more than three years in higher education, who are providing leadership in academic development.”
  The unit of this route includes:
  Introduction to University Leadership; Strategic planning; Leadership management and approaches; Enabling a cohesive structure; Managing individuals and teams; Managing resources and time

Each module or unit is structured around a work-based learning workshop involving three phases of learning: Knowledge or content – Reflection – Application.
Currently, UCL has a compulsory Postgraduate Certificate Programme that is mandatory for newly appointed full-time academic staff with less than three years’ experience in higher education. This programmed should be aligned with Standard 2 and get UK PSF accreditation. Furthermore, the UCL Academic Practice Programme corresponding to Standard 1 is encouraged for all staff who make a significant contribution to teaching (>50 hours per year). Standard 2 is encouraged and available to experienced staff (>3 years in HE) as an alternative to direct application. Standard 3 is optional for experienced staff who are strategic leaders or aspiring leaders.

I’m quite amazed how strong UCL seems to invest in quality learning and teaching, both in pedagogical training and reflection, and in new learning and teaching technologies. Do we have a similar program of for Continuing Professional Development (CPM) for teaching academics and and accreditation framework for it at ETH? I’m not sure.

Sunday, May 22

Walking in central London – British Museum (Australian exhibition) – Violin Sonata (Edward Elgar and César Franck)

Saturday, May 21

Relax – shopping – Portobello Market – long walk in central London – jogging in Hyde Park – pub – Umberto Eco’s “Le Cimetière de Pragues”

Friday, Mai 20

Just a small note to explain how I stay fully connected with ETH while working at UCL…

My ETH-Microbiology notebook is connected to UCL EduRoam (this was not very straight-forward the first day, reading configuration instructions was mandatory for that). The UCL EduRoam corresponds to the SSID “Public” or “EduRoam” at ETH. I can access public resources at UCL such as Web, some Intranet, Moodle, Email (live@edu), but i do not have access to printers nor storage/file shares. I’m using the ETH Cisco AnyConnect Client with “Preserve Local LAN” enabled. SSLvpn.ethz.ch/biol-micro is certificate-enabled and of course, my notebook has a AD-deployed Microbiology certificate, so my VPN connects me to the ETH Microbiology VPZ. Thus I virtually can work as if I would be at my desk, as you would expect in the 21rst century. Access to my roaming profile, group share, NAS shares is almost as fast as locally in the Science City HCI building. I’m using my normal user account with fully roaming profile and folder redirection with offline files enabled. It works like a charm.  Moreover, AppV and AppStore (the application self-service kiosk for AppV packages we share with D-AGRL) is fully operational: I registered Photoshop, Illustrator, and Matlab on the kiosk and got them streamed without any problem to my notebook.

I’m using Lync quite intensively. I use the instant messaging feature mostly, but VoIP, video conferencing, desktop and apps sharing, as well as whiteboards, file transfer, and, last but not least, presence information are just genial. Integration in Outlook and SharePoint is perfect. The video and sound signal quality and latency were comparable to (or better than) Scopia (vcmeeting.ethz.ch) and remote assistance is definitely superior to TeamViewer. Lync allows me to effectively and efficiently work with my team in Zurich, it’s definitely more than a gadget, it’s a real productivity tool. I cannot wait until I get my USB phone in Zurich By the way, UCL is going to use Elluminate as a web conferencing system.

Today I met with Mike Cope, UCL’s CIO. We had quite an interesting discussion about the main building blocks and determinants of the new SmartIT strategy, such as support organization, the new desktop project, SharePoint, Office 365, identity federation, and AppV. I’ll write more next week about this as I’m going to meet with the persons in charge of  evaluation and implementation.

I also wanted to experience the student computer rooms, called WTS Cluster and Myriad Cluster, respectively a thin client (Citrix/Win2000-based) and a thick XP client. Since this nice and powerful, but quite old infrastructure is going to be replaced by the new Desktop concept, I’ll write more about that next week.

I’m now ready to meet with Arthur Guinness in the next pub… Have a nice weekend…

 

Thursday, May 19

Alignment of Learning Technology vision and strategy with stakeholder expectations

Today I went through the different strategy and vision papers of LTSS and the survey they conducted with the students. I’m missing the same kind of survey with the lecturers, will see if this has been done.

Student expectations

• access to lecture material before and long after the lecture
• access to lecture cast
• consistent user experience across lectures and offerings
• notebook friendly spaces (tables, power outlets, pervasive WiFi)
• access UCL IS resources from the student residences, WiFi, on the move
• one stop shop “my study” for portico, helpdesk, mail, storage access, course catalog, e-learning offering
• printing access from notebook/WiFi
• more space for group work

Assumed teacher expectation

• provide course material easily and in a flexible way anywhere, any time.
• take advantage of new teaching technologies at lowest possible learning curve
• consistent experience across the different IT tools
• provide enriched learning experience, e-assessments
• get student feedback (content, speed, understanding, expectations)
• cannot extend the time devoted to teaching
• personal coaching and assistance

UCL challenges and vision

• limitation of available physical space > make space usage more effective and efficient.
• transfer non crucial face-to-face teaching to virtual courses
• meet expectations raised by increased student fees
• attract best students globally
• contribute with modern learning and teaching technology to UCL brand
• open “business opportunity” or just global presence with distance learning
• provide research-oriented learning and teaching. Bridge students with researchers, involve world-wide experts in master classes

Alignment gaps

• vision goes far beyond primary student expectations, teacher time availability, and the limited physical space issue. Also the vision relies on a solid IT commodity infrastructure that needs first to be modernized and consolidated
• need for consolidating basic IT commodity services and increasing commodity standards:
  - pervasive use of Active Directory for users (staff and students) and computers
  - identity federation between UCL AD, live@edu, shibboleth + claims-based authentication
  - easy access to UCL student resources over WiFi
     (storage, printing, lecture administration, e-learning, helpdesk, mail…)
  - leverage the power of live@UCL (= live@edu) successor, e.g. Office 365 for
     cloud storage, collaboration shared spaces, messaging, presence, portfolio, blogs, wiki
     (exchange online, sharepoint online, lync online, skydrive) 
  - implement OS, and application life cycle management. self-service software provisioning.
• make it easier for students to use their notebook instead of IS-Cluster computers
• provide notebook-friendly spaces (Bloomsbury-campus master plan)
• embed e-learning technologists in the faculty for coaching, direct support, and assistance of the teaching staff

Wednesday, May 18 

Current LTSS offering

The UCL offering for learning support includes:

• A course administration platform called Portico
• The Electronic Library
• Moodle eLearning platform.
• LectureCast with echo360
• Videoconferencing equipped rooms
• Student Timetables
• Student Portfolio application
• PRS Personal Response System (like Clicker at ETH, but from www.turningtechnologies.com)
• Turnitin for deterring and detecting plagiarism
• Feedback & Evaluation (Moodle, PRS, Opinio)
• E-assessment (Moodle quizzes & assignments, Turnitin, Hot Potatoes, LAPT)

UCL Moodle is still the dominant tool for online teaching and learning at UCL. The students like it, but they complain about the unstructured look and feel and the inadequate use of it by the lecturers: in most of the cases, it is just used as a repository for the course materials.

Demand for Science Platform

It seems that both UCL and ETH students have a need for a sort of “Facebook of science”. At ETH, the demand is for a collaboration platform for students and scientist that would facilitate finding of who-is-who, who-knows-what, availability analytical devices, and research project databases. Some institutes already use global scientific social networks like Mendeley. Other units make intensive use of SharePoint for their Knowledge management System. Cloud solution are predestinated for hosting collaborative and social networks, but it is difficult to interface local, private resource stores and database with them.

UCL is also investigating in this area with http://www.innocentive.com and http://myportfolio.ucl.ac.uk/ (a mahara implementation at UCL). Interesting…

UCL physical space is a scarce resource!

I attended an very interesting presentation at lunch time that just address one of the most limited resource of UCL: space. The new master plan for the 15 next years was presented. It describes the growth strategy for a consolidated campus with focus on:

• Provide a long term, rational plan and stop one by one decisions
• Use space more efficiently and effectively
• Creating hub spots grouping popular offerings
• Provoke lucky accidental meetings
• Preserve flexibility and adaptability
• Consolidate all faculty libraries in one space
• Creating user-friendly routes between “villages”
• Create a student hub, enhance learning experience
• Strengthen the brand and identity of UCL
• Reduce carbon foot print

More on the UCL Master Plan >>

Tuesday, May 18 – eLearning visions and challenges for UCL

The first question that pops up after one day on the UCL campus is: How is it possible to have 22000 students within such a limited space. UCL is trapped in the heart of London, and it’s nearly impossible to increase the physical space capacity with new building. Furthermore, most of the old historical building ore protected and cannot be dramatically transformed.

Another given fact is that student yearly fees are about to be raised to £ 9000.-

This context help understand the drivers for the new eLearning Vision at UCL:

• The limited available space for face-to-face teaching and student group works makes it necessary to create virtual course and share space. This will release capacities for lectures and exercises where face-to-face is required, or of real added value.
• The student expect a world class offering for the learning experience and efficiency
• UCL competes on a global level for best students and faculty. IT enablement of learning and teaching is expected to raise the brand and image of UCL by offering a world-class learning experience on the campus on the one hand, and opening UCL curricula for distance learning on the second hand.

 

Monday, May 17 – First day at UCL – LTSS

Briefing and presentation of the Learning Technology Support Service. LTSS is team of 8 learning technology specialists with different backgrounds and experiences. The head of the team reports directly to the CIO of UCL. Starting from a E-learning strategic statement 2005-2010, there were ask to elaborate visions and implementation plans for the period 20010-2015. As part of Smart IT, the team should be given more resources in order to provide world class IT enablement and support of research oriented E-Learning offering.

The first day was devoted to presentation of the member teams on the one hand, and my background and experience, as well as expectations on the other hand.

The LTSS team members >>

And the LTSS Blog…

 

Sunday evening, May 16 – Arrival in London

It turned out that the studio flat I booked and got confirmed was a fake , so I had to find an alternative in emergency

It took me about 10 days to find a mock flat, and just 5 minutes to get a real, nice, of course expensive small studio with a mezzanine at 19 Linden Gardens in Notting Hill.

Quiet, charming, and just 20 minutes to UCL with the Circle Line… I’m now trying to get my deposit back…