Evaluating Project Progress

As of May 31, 2001, the evaluation for this LAAP project is proceeding as planned. Project objectives include development of a model for the creation of student service modules that is transferable and useable in a variety of institutional settings. Therefore, project evaluation focuses on organizational and cultural change issues, rather than on specific student learning outcome data. Site visits to each of the partner institutions in early 2000 formed the baseline for case studies of institutional change that are an explicit project deliverable.

Evaluation data are collected when appropriate based on the rhythms of the project. For instance, the evaluator is conducting short interviews with participants at various points in the scenario process to document the advantages and disadvantages in order to improve the process for other institutions. The evaluator attends project meetings, monitors project listserv postings, and interacts with project personnel regularly. No problems have been encountered gathering evaluation data for the project. No changes or delays to the evaluation plan have been made.

Sustaining the Project

It is hoped that the scenarios developed in this project, after their refinement and review by the respective IT staffs, will serve other institutions in two ways: as models for modules in these selected services to be adopted or adapted as appropriate; and to illustrate a methodical process for redesigning student services and making them Web accessible. In reference to the last, KCC has already used the process outside this project to specify requirements for other student service modules, currently under development by a third party.

As indicated earlier, WCET has expanded its LAAP listserv to other WCET member institutions. It plans to offer this special topic listserv on student services indefinitely as long as there is participation.

WCET just received a grant from the Hewlett Foundation that will allow it to build on what it has learned in this project to provide a comparison Website for technologies supporting online student services. It anticipates that this will be a further resource to those institutions designing or acquiring online student services for their institution.

WCET has developed a searchable database structure for storing resumes of those with expertise in student services so that it can offer consulting services to institutions needing specialized help in this area in the future.

Finally, some initial guidelines for other institutions to follow in creating student services are being compiled. These will be refined, added to as the project progresses, and published upon the project's conclusion.

Recognizing project efforts and impact Information about this project has been widely disseminated during this year in various venues. It was featured in the June 2001 issue of NCHEMS' newsletter and articles have appeared in all three issues of WCET's Communiqué. More than 25 presentations discussing this project in the U.S. and abroad (Brazil, Canada, China, Japan, Germany) have been made before higher education audiences including such conferences as the Sixth Annual Teaching in the Community Colleges Online Conference, the International Council for Open and Distance Education Conference, the Association of International Education Administrators Conference, the Council for Higher Education Accreditation Annual Conference, the NASPA National Conference, and the American Federation of Teachers' National Higher Education Issues Conference. The project will also be the focus of a workshop on best practices in services for distance students to be sponsored by IBM in August 2001. A chapter in a book on student services to be published by The Society for College and University Planning in winter 2001 also features the project.

Part B: Progress of Partner Organizations

Kansas State University
Kapi'olani Community College
Regis University
SCT

Kansas State University — submitted by Mel Chastain

Our role over the past year. At K-State, though all would agree to a degree of inter-relatedness between all types of advising, the initial task was to focus on a single aspect of advising, simply because the global advising environment was too large a task, given the confines of the grant project. Because academic advising seemed to us to be at the heart of all interactions between the institution and the learner, that became our focus. Valuable leadership in making this determination was provided by the project management team and the project consultants, following a three-day on-site visit and debriefing.

The Development Process
Probably the most significant single development since one year ago was the Kansas State University administrative decision to "locate" all data bases related to student academic profiles under the authority of the University Registrar. While a seemingly minor adjustment to place at the top of the list, information on students enrolled at K-State could previously be found in seventeen different data base programs, each with its own access, authentication and verification process. Using such an environment as a base for providing electronic digital advising to online learners would assure an early failure in any proposed system. While the transformation to a single "virtual" database is still some distance away, the decision represented a significant step in the right direction.

Other development activities included identifying the varying "types" of advisors at K-State (full-time professional advisors; part-time advisors who are also full-time faculty or research professionals; and departmental or college-level "process" advisors, who assure a smooth flow of student progress through the academic and departmental requirements involved in the process). Once the types were identified, a select group of more than a dozen advisors, representing each of the types and most of the colleges (including the Division of Continuing Education) were brought together. The purpose of the LAAP project was explained, and the task of analyzing the similarities and differences in the process of providing academic advising was initiated. Early on, the decision was made that advising online, or distant learners should be a process which is as identical as possible to that provided resident learners. (At K-State, 89 percent of the online learners are resident students). The next major development was to try and build an "esprit de corps" among the advisors, since their first and most natural inclination in a group setting was to explain and defend the differences between their college/department's approach to advising, rather than to concentrate on the commonalties in the process between academic units. Finally, involving the National Academic Advising Association (NACADA) in our efforts was a major development. The NACADA home office is in Manhattan, KS.

Hurdles and Setbacks
The differences between advising processes was a major difficulty which had to be overcome if the goal of a single online advising system were to be realized. After several failed attempts at achieving consensus, "flow diagram" was developed which described the general sequence of events through which a learner and an advisor interact during the matriculation process. Some tinkering and modification yielded a process for which there was general "buy-in" from the cluster of advisors.

The next hurdle was comprehending the Unified Modeling Language (UML) used by computer programmers to describe interactions ("scenarios") between individuals and "systems" of hardware, software and data that constitute the information needed by both advisor and student to successfully navigate the higher education process. With great help from Burnie Blakeley, a LAAP consultant from IBM, the process was explained in a way that enabled the K-State advisors to write "scenarios" for a small sub-set (three or four) of the forty-plus scenarios that constituted the "common" interactions between advisor and student, as represented by the aforementioned flow diagram. Using that sub-set as a guide, the rest of the scenarios were completed by the campus project coordinator and circulated to the campus advisors for reaction and modification.

The most significant remaining hurdle is convincing a "volunteer work force" of advisors who are already full-time employees to expend the considerable time and energy required to develop this body of work. Some effort on the part of the project management team to secure additional funding to support this endeavor is ongoing. Without additional support, one doubts the chances for a successful conclusion to the project.

Evaluation Progress 
Evaluation comes in two forms: formal evaluation from Karen Paulson, the NCHEMS third party evaluator; and informal evaluation from the project consultants. Both are invaluable. Karen's printed summaries validate what we already know, but are reluctant to correct until underscored by an unbiased observer. The informal evaluation from the consultants comes in the form of comparison of our progress and problems with that of our academic partners in the project. This process is not only helpful, but provides us with a greatly needed "reality check." Finally, we're deadline oriented at K-State, and without the evaluation processes, and the accompanying "calendar of things to do" from the consultants and project management team, we'd get nothing done.

Plans for participation in the project over the coming year. The next step is to submit the UML scenarios to the programmers at K-State, so they can translate the interactions into the appropriate lines of program language that will be required of the data base system. A "build/buy/partner" decision-making matrix will be used to determine the best way to accomplish each interaction. A budget will be drawn from that matrix to determine the cost of developing the system. All along the way, information from each institutional partner will be shared with the others for validation and comparative purposes. The final step will be to move the process from breadboard stage to partial implementation.

Kapi'olani Community College — submitted by Mike Tagawa

Summary of Activities Year 2000
Last year, the College focused on developing scenarios for orientation. This was in part due to recommendations from the project group that identified orientation, advising, and tutoring as priority areas for supplementary online services at the College. Fundamental concepts from the scenario development process proved to be useful, as it enabled the College to identify fundamental areas of functionality that were desired with respect to orientation. These efforts also suggested that these basic elements would be applicable to advising and tutoring. Some of these critical elements identified in the project included authentication, messaging, tracking, assessment, and content (learning objects) development systems. A major conclusion of these efforts were that these services a) were applicable to all students, and b) should service a student over a student's entire academic lifespan.

Toward the end of the year, funding for development of an online job placement service became available and elements of the scenario development process were employed to develop the project. This lead to rapid development of the project which is expected to go online during Summer 2001. At the same time, the College embarked on planning for a one-stop student services center that will ultimately deliver services through traditional methods (phone, face to face, mail) that would work in conjunction with the online services being planned. These planning efforts also made it clear that our current information technology and telecommunications infrastructure were less than ideal.

The major challenges to the project remain as follows: 

1. integration of services with the core student information system (SIS) remains a challenge due to a desire to implement a system-wide SIS while still operating with a legacy campus-based SIS; 

2. inability to adopt a portal system to house these elements due to a desire to develop the portal in-house at the system level; and 

3. an aging technology infrastructure and limited technical support.

Summary of Directions 2001
In 2001, a partnership decision was made to shift development efforts away from orientation toward tutoring — but still employing the same functional elements identified with online orientation. It is desirable for the tutoring module to consist of assessment, delivery, tracking, and messaging elements. The objective of the module will be to increase the likelihood that students enter a program with prerequisite competencies (rather than just a prerequisite course).

At the same time, to address some of the problematic issues, decisions have been made to participate in development of LDAP directory services with the system office (to support authentication and messaging for a broader student population), enhancing the capabilities of the legacy SIS to integrate the web services being planned, to continue the upgrade of the campus' network and telecommunications systems, and slowly providing services online (reference librarian, limited counseling, job placement, admissions, and registration) — either through in-house or through system-wide development.

Regis University — submitted by Ellen Waterman

The single most challenging thing over the last year has been to find the appropriate focus for our own online student service project. During the first year, the greatest interest was to build a portal that would organize access to a wide range of student services. This came to be called "Orientation" and received with interest and support by the wider campus community.

When we were introduced to the UML approach, it fast became evident that to attempt to build the entire portal within the scope of the project was impossible. In a effort to satisfy the needs of the project as a whole while maintaining our strategic intent, Regis regrouped. We more narrowly defined our segment of the project as an intervention between the "Tutoring" entry components that Kapi'olani has built and the Academic Advising functions from Kansas State. This point of intervention would be to prepare students for Academic Advising. The intent is to provide the opportunity for students to come into the advising setting with some routine tasks already accomplished. In particular, these student services would provide access to Regis systems and also access to certain preliminary information in preparation to that meeting with the Advisor.

The goal, then, of the online service that Regis has built is to allow advisors to be use time in advising sessions addressing a student's own individual needs and choices for academic work, rather than routine tasks covered in the past. It is to eliminate the repetitive information-giving that took critical time in the face-to-face meeting with a student. By providing core background information, and access to an online functionality that will allow him/her to gain systems authorization to email, Regis general online resources, and library, the time used to do these tasks with Advisors will be freed up to use in direct interaction to meet the individual needs of each student.

On May 2, we presented the current LAAP project progress to the Regis Organizational Improvement group. They are the key administrative body at the University, and represent all segments in all schools. The discussion about the scenario building process was received with great interest by the group, and they are anxious to see the implementation phase begin.

At this time, we are finalizing those, and building the flow diagram that will lead into the Kansas State process. Five members of the Core Visioning Team have been very active in this phase of the project: Richard Boorom of Marketing and Admissions, Tom Riedel of the library, Sheila Carlon of the School for Health Care Professions, Cynthia DiScipio of the undergraduate advising faculty, and Ellen Waterman, project director. The next step for us is to complete the flow diagram that gives the context for the scenarios. We have had the VP for Information Technology on campus participate in our meetings this entire year. He is skeptical of the funds available to accomplish this implementation in the time frame we desire, but we are hopeful that we can facilitate that process anyway in the next 10 months.

SCT — submitted by Peggi Munkittrick

Throughout the timeframe of this reporting period, SCT has continued to research the evolution of online student services in American Higher Education. The need for this information was clearly supported by the research done by the Western Cooperative prior to this report period, and was further validated by doctoral level research and emerging market demands in higher education. This information was shared via several conference presentations (Innovations, SETA, and Summit), as well as in focus groups and during strategic meetings held at SCT Headquarters in Malvern.

A wide range of online student services were identified and placed into four service categories: Administrative, Academic, Social, and Personal. The following are examples of some of the identified online student services:

• Administrative
  admissions, financial aid, registration, records management, graduation, and bookstore

• Academic
  academic assessment, advising and testing, remediation, access to and training in the use of library and other learning resources, tutoring, academic testing, and computer services (including access to technical support)

• Social
  such as honor societies, clubs, discipline interest groups, and recreational opportunities (and other ways of establishing a sense of community among learners)

• Personal
  diagnostic testing and assessment, counseling (both personal and career), placement services, and health services

Additionally, SCT began to identify a number of vendors that were beginning to emerge in this space [see below]. As a result of this work it became clear that there would be a vast number of applications required to meet the needs of online learners. It also became clear that SCT would not be able develop applications to meet all these needs within a reasonable amount of time. SCT then proposed an alternative approach to that originally described in the grant.

SCT proposed to develop an integration platform that would allow multiple service application providers to establish real time data integration with the student records maintained by SCT's student information system. The result of this would be a larger number of services being made available to learners in a shorter amount of time than the original approach would have allowed. It would also provide real-time synchronization of the data maintained by the service application providers and the data maintained by SCT's student information system.

SCT worked with the LAAP grant partners to refine this approach — including the requirement that the technology be standards-based so it could be used with other student information systems — and in March successfully demonstrated the viability of this approach with the release of the SCT Connection for WebCT (integration technology). Though this first release announced integration to a specific course management system (WebCT), it is actually a demonstration of an integration technology that will allow multiple vendors to integrate to an administrative system using a message broker and message gateway.

The next steps in this approach are to work with the LAAP grant partners to prioritize the vendors that can provide the most important services within each of the categories identified. SCT will work to develop the best approach to help those vendors prepare their end of the transaction set using this standard integration approach. Using this strategy, we believe that we will be able to quickly and efficiently bring to the market a wide range of integrated online student services that will not only meet the demands of learners today, but into the future as well.

Appendix A

Examples of Unified Modeling Language and Scenario Process and Resources

Figure 1: Institution Partitions and the Student Life Cycle

The KSU Student Life Cycle
The KSU student's life cycle is portrayed by the progression from Pearl (the Prospect) through Annie (the Alumnus) in the above diagram. For this exercise, we are concentrating on just the "serve"-the-student (middle) portion of the horizontally depicted student life cycle and we are concentrating only upon Frank (the Freshman) and Matty (the Matriculator) as representative "actors." We are assuming that a similar set of actors could be described for the Continuing Education and Graduate levels of education offerings, which are represented by the bars and the top and bottom of the above diagram.

Figure 2: Scenarios Record Interactions across System Boundary; 
Applications and IT Infrastructure Support the Scenarios

Education experts specify the dialog that they would like to see between the actor and the system by recording pairs of interactions from the actor to the system and from the system back to the actor. These steps are numbered in the diagram above so that odd-numbered steps originate from the actor and even-numbered ones originate from the system. The mechanisms for generating the system-originated exchanges must be figured out later by computer specialists.

For collaborative environments (even among these unlike institutions within the LAAP project), a set of scenarios that define interactions can be applied across the institutions since no application or infrastructure details are being specified within the scenario recording. The scenario is from "the view of the actor" in an outside-in manner so that details of the inner workings of the system are purposefully ignored. Such abstracted levels of specification promote sharing among institutions.

Figure 3: Example Scenario: Interactions between Actor and System

This scenario details the serialization of steps wherein the actor and the system alternately communicate with each other. This example scenario shows the interactions necessary to accomplish an advising appointment for a student. The scenario does not describe the mechanisms by which the advising system is able to respond; it only describes the response.

In the second section of the chart, the campus IT staff will recommend options for technology solutions supporting the specified functionality. These include using existing campus software, buying a new technology solution or outsourcing, developing a new campus solution, or partnering with another entity in the creation of a solution.

Resources

Unified Modeling Language

Quatrani, T. (2000, Addison-Wesley). Visual Modeling with Rational Rose 2000 and UML. 256 pp. This book contains a single case study example, spread through all the chapters, executed using UML and taken from the field of academia (course registration). Although the Rose modeling tool from Rational Software Corporation was used to illustrate UML in this book, other modeling tools (for example, Visio) also are available and the UML language can even be used in a handwritten fashion without any software tools. Much more UML information can be found at www.rational.com since the Rational Software Company initially sponsored the development of UML before control was transferred to the Open Systems Foundation (OSF) consortium.

Scenario Building Schwartz, P. (1996, Currency Doubleday). The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World. 272 pp. This book describes, in an excellent manner, the basic principles of large-scale scenarios based on several actual case studies that are easy to understand. These same principles can be extrapolated downward to the small-scale scenarios through which the LAAP institutions are able to communicate superbly in this project.