EFFECTIVE PRACTICES DATABASE | ||
| title | Integrating Campus Systems | |
| background | The University of Pretoria (UP) is the largest residential university in South Africa. The academic offerings are organised into nine faculties. The university offers a total of 2,022 modules (or courses), including 463 undergraduate and 1,574 post graduate modules to approximately 55,000 students. Of these, about 16,000 students are traditional paper-based distance education students. The customary model of contact education at UP has been significantly expanded and new learning environments have been created. Today the web is widely used in combination with contact sessions and the role played by e-learning continues to grow in importance at the university. The effective implementation of e-learning is dependent on a complex technical infrastructure, which includes the universities network; corporate systems and various file servers. The reliability and availability of an IT infrastructure influence the availability and adoption of e-learning. WebCT was implemented as a Learning Management System. A Virtual Campus was also implemented in 1999. This system consists of a student and lecturer portal and includes an online application and payment system. The Virtual Campus system was not scaleable to accommodate the growing needs for enterprise use and did not fit into the new IT strategy. The integration with other enterprise systems was based on a batch file processing rather than a real time data integration system. | |
| practice | During 2003 the technology architecture of the virtual campus migrated and was upgraded from Perl and MySQL to Java. This upgrade provides for real-time access to data, single sign-on authentication and additional functions. | |
| benefits | To date more than 27,000 students use Student Online Services and a total of 24,150 students have access to web-supported courses. The new system is in line with the universities IT architecture and is secure and scalable. The non-functional benefits include a better performance in peak times, higher usability and the integration with the universities corporate look and feel as well as language policy. With the real time data integration, students can have access to WebCT as soon as they have registered on the campus student system. Single sign-on authentication is provided. | |
| shortcomings | Integrating with campus systems on a real time basis also means real time problems. The project team soon realised that the traditional support structure of IT at UP does not make provision for 24/7 support. If any of the servers used in Student Online Services becomes unavailable after office hours, no guarantee is given that IT will fix it before the next day. The backup of the 'mainframe' on every Tuesday from 21h00 to Wednesday 6h00 also is a problem because students and lecturers cannot access WebCT during that time. This, apparently, is a problem that a number of institutions have when implementing e-learning. Providing sufficient and timely support to online learners and instructors has always been a challenge for higher-education institutions, and current trends suggest that it will become even more difficult. The key reason for this is the rapid growth of e-learning use. Harris, Yanosky, & Zastrocky (2004). | |
| future plans | WebCT Vista is investigated | |
| other references | Harris, M., Yanosky, R. & Zastrocky, M. (2004). Higher Education E-Learning Support Trends, Gartner, Research Note, 14 June 2004 | |
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| costs | The upgrading of the system was outsourced at about 53 000 Euros. The UP-personnel costs for project management and programming have not been calculated | |
| replicability | 3 | |
| effectiveness | 4 | |
| notes | ||
| contact | Irene le Roux, Deputy Director Innovation / Dolf Jordaan, Project Manager Telematic Learning and Education Innovation irene.leroux@up.ac.za dolf.jordaan@up.ac.za>irene.leroux@up.ac.za dolf.jordaan@up.ac.za | |
