Systems Evolution

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August 2005

Scholarly information systems are transforming academic delivery and posing new requirements for business continuity.

By H. David Lambert

Add scholarly information systems to the list of critical applications that chief information officers lose sleep over if these systems are badly—or even briefly—disrupted. The deployment of networked technologies in recent years has not only generated interest in using the Web to complement the classroom experience, it has also unleashed a new breed of applications to support core academic and scholarly functions in research, teaching, and learning. Scholarly information systems (SIS) such as course management systems (also called learning management systems) are rapidly maturing technologies that cater to the growing demands of colleges and universities for enhanced communication and collaboration among faculty and students and for increased pedagogical and research opportunities. So quickly have these applications grown in sophistication and use that they have become essential to business continuity for many institutions.

Not surprisingly, information technology services to support SIS initiatives must compete for institutional resources typically earmarked for traditional enterprise services such as administrative, financial, human resource, and student management systems. Chief business officers are therefore instrumental in identifying resources to support new SIS technologies—increasingly vital to institutional mission and competitiveness. Business officers also can ensure that a stable support model is in place for managing the challenges associated with operating this unique class of technologies. Such challenges range from compliance with regulations for posting digital and copyrighted materials to coordinating integration and interoperability with other campus systems and architectures to maintaining operational capacity and availability of services for all users.

An Everyday Tool

The extent to which SIS technologies have become the academic lifeblood for a growing number of colleges and universities cannot be ignored. One example that illustrates how course management systems have evolved into essential tools for everyday course delivery is found at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. In 1998, when Georgetown became the first doctoral research university to partner with Blackboard, the university had 200 registered users and 15 classes. Today, most of our 13,000 students access content in at least 1 of the more than 1,000 courses offered with online content each semester (see Table 1). Most professors at Georgetown use these systems to distribute digital readings and multimedia content. Some integrate class discussions, group work, and tests with their course curricula. Our course management system packages these services with administrative tools for professors and teaching assistants to build custom online courses.

In June 2005, we upgraded our Blackboard system to the latest software release on a robust enterprise class server with more than a terabyte of mirrored data storage. Our system upgrade team strategically selected the traditional lull between spring and summer semesters to minimize the number of faculty and students affected by the data migration and conversion to the new environment. While only a small number of faculty depended on Blackboard during this time to run their Web-based course environments, the effort nonetheless involved a balancing act to minimize disruption of courses that spanned the two semesters while providing systemwide improvements to benefit the entire community.

Indeed, SIS technologies are redefining enterprise applications. For instance, the course management system market has quickly matured since WebCT—the first commercially available system—was developed in 1997 by a University of British Columbia professor for his computer science class. EduTools (www.edutools.info), a project sponsored by a nonprofit cooperative, publishes an online database listing more than 60 products offered by dozens of companies and organizations collectively reaching millions of students at thousands of colleges and universities around the world.

Table 1 Blackboard Course and User Statistics at Georgetown University

Even as course management systems continue to gain traction in the classroom, a number of vendors, groups, and community collaborations have developed other scholarly system technologies that both complement course management systems and enable new academic services (see Table 2). For instance, today’s SIS applications support a variety of faculty and student activities:

• ePortfolios provide students and faculty with digital representations of their academic work for purposes ranging from assessment of student progress and resume building to collecting data for reaccreditation.
• Content management systems enable staff to write, organize, update, and publish content to a Web site.
• Digital repository systems allow search and retrieval of academic papers, electronic journals, institutional documents, and library collections that libraries can use to develop digital archives and catalogs.
• Scholarly publishing delivers low-cost campus distribution of research literature to the community, replacing expensive traditional journal publication models.
• Peer-to-peer file sharing connects individual users to a digital resource-swapping network.
• Personal information managers integrate e-mail, address books, calendars, contacts, task lists, and other daily productivity tools.
• Portals provide customized and personalized gateways into student management systems, administrative systems, institutional services, and news and announcements. Many portals can pull content from other SIS applications, such as ePortfolios and course management systems.

Integrated Infrastructure

In hand with the expansion of SIS technologies, the information architecture necessary to support SIS applications has also flourished—something not always characteristic of earlier generations of enterprise systems. Shibboleth, Active Directory, Kerberos, and Pubcookie are among the identity and access management middleware technologies used within the scholarly information architecture. These connect centralized authentication and authorization environments to provide access to user applications. Modular components that adhere to appropriate standards provide plug-and-play compatibility with applications, thus allowing developers to share, sell, or trade application functionality or information with other users. Portlets and object libraries fall into this category.

The diversity of and competition among SIS applications and architectures indicate that SIS technologies are hitting a critical mass and gaining widespread acceptance. Many of these systems are already integrated with other campus systems. According to one published source (“Integration Indicates Higher-Education E-learning Commitment,” www.gartner.com, May 1, 2003), more than 80 percent of institutions with a course management system have integrated these systems with student management systems to link student enrollment with online access to courses.

Increasingly, SIS applications are designed to function within larger scholarly information architectures. Several of the largest community source projects—uPortal, Sakai, and the Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI)—are designed for compatibility. The uPortal campus Web portal provides an environment for each user to create a personal view of online resources. Sakai can use the uPortal environment to display its collection of course management system tools. The next version of the OSPI e-Portfolio suite will function as a Sakai tool and will interoperate with the uPortal environment.

Unlike traditional campus enterprise systems that are also widely used by businesses and government, SIS technologies are developing exclusively within the educational community. Deploying them effectively on campus involves successfully addressing significant obstacles.

Five Clear Hurdles

The primary obstacles that those involved in advancing SIS applications and architectures must address include issues of funding, standards setting, decision making, compliance, and support.

1. Lack of funding. In general, college and university information services budgets have been battered by successive rounds of funding cuts. Likewise, scholarly systems often have made their way onto campuses at the departmental level, with little thought about how to fund them. Despite the importance of SIS applications to academic continuity, these systems are the first to be placed on life support during a budget crunch and often are the least likely candidates selected for new projects. Because SIS technologies are not low-level expenditures, careful thought and strategic planning and implementation are critical.

2. Poor coordination of technology standards. Legacy systems scattered throughout a campus network often cannot communicate with one another and are exceedingly difficult to maintain as they age and as vendors disappear or new standards displace older ones. Avoiding the mistakes of previous technology deployment experiences is critical at this early stage of SIS development. Identifying common standards, data definitions, and programming interfaces as well as engaging in interoperability testing upfront rather than after a system has matured can go a long way toward clearing this hurdle.

3. Failure to involve stakeholders in decision making. While faculty and student stakeholders are the primary constituency for academic systems, they typically lack an understanding of business systems and are often excluded from the process governing systems selection, design, and development. Conversely, business officers have a firm command of traditional enterprise systems, but they are not users of academic systems. This disconnect between important stakeholders and the decision makers increases the likelihood that traditional enterprise systems will be funded at the expense of academic systems.

Input by an eclectic group of stakeholders and decision makers will ensure that decisions are not made in an ad hoc manner and that they include an underlying budget strategy. The ideal collaborative decision-making team would include an institution’s provost, chief information and chief business officers, heads of instructional and audiovisual technologies, lead librarians, and senior faculty charged with setting direction based on demands for systems and specific academic classroom components. Involvement by budget directors, registrars, and academic deans likewise would enrich decision making by providing critical input at the departmental level. Business officers can serve a primary leadership role by raising issues related to fiscal responsibility, risk management, operational integrity, and system availability.

4. Burden of copyright compliance and other legislative issues. The emergence of a broad and rigorously enforced intellectual property regime pushes the burden of complying with Digital Millennium Copyright Act subpoenas and courtesy notices onto campus systems and network administrators. The TEACH Act provides opportunities for faculty to distribute course materials digitally, given that adequate mechanisms are in place that will restrict the use of course content to students enrolled in a course. The digital rights management technologies that provide these restrictions are notoriously easy to defeat and difficult to implement on a large scale.

Copyright litigation is threatening the vitality of open source software as an alternative model to proprietary software development and distribution. The most visible case today involves allegations by the software company SCO Group, Inc., that IBM stole proprietary code and inserted it into Linux open source software. SCO is seeking $5 billion in damages.

Security legislation is also of increasing concern. The USA Patriot Act requires colleges and universities to closely monitor a number of activities and broadens the requirements to comply with law enforcement requests. In addition, Congress may push tougher legislation on copyrights and security that could disrupt and alter the higher education agenda. Awareness and monitoring of these regulatory and legislative issues are the first steps toward addressing these ongoing concerns.

5. Challenge of assembling and organizing a team of qualified staff. Scholarly systems still encompass a relatively new set of technologies, with few staff trained in configuring or applying specific applications. Most systems are built on the latest technologies with the newest languages and tools.

Colleges and universities have well-defined support groups for administrative systems such as student administration, human resources/payroll, or financial management systems. The technical support group for implementing, maintaining, and enhancing the SIS infrastructure must be as capable as any of these administrative support groups. Excellence in pedagogical innovation and support is also critical for members of this group, as is adequate funding to support an SIS team with the same kind of advisory structure and priority-setting authority required by traditional enterprise system teams.

Table 2 Examples of Proprietary (P), Open Source (OS), and 3 Community Source (CS) Scholarly Information Systems

Developing a Blueprint

Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (http://cndls.georgetown.edu) provides faculty, teaching assistants, and doctoral candidates with pedagogical development in educational technologies. The center has tasted success in leading national projects that improve the capacities to teach in increasingly digital environments, such as the Visible Knowledge Project and the JesuitNet distance education program. Advancing an institution’s ability to weave SIS technologies into everyday classroom instruction and research remains a key challenge for many colleges and universities. Developing a blueprint of campus information systems components and relationships can set the stage for all future development of academic systems.

The foundation of a coherent scholarly information architecture must begin with a detailed strategy conceived by an interdisciplinary information services team. The ideal team includes representatives from the administrative leadership and opinion leaders from the ranks of faculty. This team also consults with students through surveys, interviews, or other forms of information gathering. A carefully conceived blueprint likewise requires administrators and opinion leaders to provide for a cost-effective system capable of managing and transporting copyrighted digital content, communicating with other systems using interoperable open standards, providing information security, and scaling in a modular fashion for future expansion. With this kind of blueprint in place, an institution is free to explore all products within an application group, whether proprietary, open source, or community source software (see Table 2).

The next step for an institution is to implement and deploy the selected software products. Collaborative development is critical to this process. The information services staff need to coordinate activities at various levels of involvement with the software developers, institutions using the products, end users, and the broader academic technology community.

In Georgetown’s case, to ensure that adequate attention is devoted to foster an innovative SIS environment and to overcome many of the potential impediments, the university is working with several commercial vendors and organizations to form a center of excellence in scholarly information architecture. The center’s primary objective is to create a sustainable scholarly architecture built on the principles of interoperability in which technologies and infrastructures are developed as a series of incremental, connected steps that foster collaborative environments among institutions and vendors.

Staff from the center will work with university stakeholders and other centers of excellence established at Stanford, MIT, Seneca College, and the University of Michigan to assess the university’s academic technology needs, draft reference architecture blueprints, and encourage the use of open standards and open source solutions. The center will engage in interoperability testing of various scholarly systems as well as federated authentication and authorization services to promote a secure, unified platform for all applications, including course management systems, ePortfolios, portals, electronic theses and dissertations, and other digital rights management protected content.

Advancing SIS Success

Among key challenges going forward, colleges and universities will encounter an increasingly large burden from broad-sweeping legislation on copyrights and security. Future advancements of SIS applications and architectures depend on how government and the courts approach existing and new laws on copyrights, intellectual property, and surveillance. Policy developments have the potential to affect all levels of the scholarly information architecture, from the design of the reference architecture blueprint and the standards used to the cost and feasibility of deploying certain SIS applications. Some solutions—such as open source insurance indemnifying open source consumers from copyright litigation—are novel though untested forms of risk mitigation.

Cost remains the most challenging constraint to funding SIS projects since the applications compete for funding with numerous other priorities. The typical technology decision-making process and historical funding patterns at many colleges and universities are heavily weighted toward traditional administrative systems that support the academic process. In truth, these new scholarly systems are the academic process. Strong proponents are needed within leadership circles to champion the cause of SIS technologies and vocalize the contributions of these systems to the higher education mission of advancing teaching and learning. Engaging the leadership of the chief business officer is essential to an institution’s management of this new class of enterprise infrastructure.

Author Bio H. David Lambert is vice president for information services and chief information officer at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.
E-mail lambertd@georgetown.edu