Admin & Trainer Debreifing Call 2-12-2007D2L Sys-Admin & Campus Trainer Conference Call
February 12, 2007
Trainers and Sys Admins Known Issues There are a number of bugs that are known in issues in D2L. The University of Arizona link (http://help.d2l.arizona.edu/known_issues8.1.htm) has a number of them. John has also started posting known bugs and Sys Admin tips and tricks on the Wiki. Everyone on this call should have access to the wiki and can post comments and edit pages if needed. Known issue: locking out of D2L. If you delete the My Admin widget from the homepage, it becomes difficult to get back in. Also, if you add html code to the title of a widget, you might get a server 500 error. This error prevents you from editing the homepage. John found the URL for the managing homepages frame. You can load that frame without loading the entire page. Please add any tips/tricks you find to the wiki. If there are spaces in the filename of pdf’s it will “blow up”. Be sure to remove spaces from filenames. Don’t add the “D2L News” to your widgets. It is no longer a useable widget and will cause you to receive a 500 error. Another known issue, adding a widget that cannot be removed. Don’t add your self as a student if you are an admin. It will lock you out. Help Desk D2L Help Desk, sys admins and back up sys admins are the ones responsible for sending in tickets. If you haven’t logged in yet, please do so, not only can you see your tickets, you can also see the other tickets from around the TBR system. Both primary and backup admin should have received a user name and password. The contract with D2L allows for 200 help tickets per month for the entire state of TN. So far, only 7 have been submitted. If we all try to limit ourselves to 10 help tickets per month, we should stay within the 200 mark. We should try to self-regulate ourselves if possible. At this point early in the transition, it might be a difficult thing to accomplish, depending on the size of campus, issues faced, etc. Another way to minimize help tickets might be to collaborate through the wiki and working with each other. Reminder: only the admin and back up admin can post help tickets. Question: if it is a D2L issue, does it count against our help tickets? John will follow up on this with D2L. One problem per ticket. D2L Community Has everyone registered for the community? Is membership in the D2L community open to anyone? It is open to any faculty/staff/admin/sys admin just not students. Anyone can register on the community but if you self register, it may take longer. Sys admins can do a bulk register and send to Cara Scott. Everyone has access to all the documentation. Just FYI- if there is a curious faculty member, they will have access to this information. D2L has also said we can take the PDF files and move them to our own sites. Worksheet #3. Campus chair is in the process of making some decisions. Some have already been turned in. Some of the thorny issues include: implementation of internal email only or implement internal and external email but lock them down to specific implementations. Email Is anyone choosing to do anything but internal only? There are no spam filters. RODP will choose to do full but lock it down so no one can use external email. The lockdown ability is in the roles and permissions area. SSL- John met with the computer center directors for their recommendation. Consensus was that we should be using full SSL. Question- who issues the certificate? D2L issues some type of form to provide a certificate. It is sent to the school, signed off and then D2L purchases the certificate. Also, which company will issue the certificate? Verisign? Geotrust? GoDaddy? TBR will buy one certificate from GoDaddy (cheapest), test it out and then make recommendations.
Jackson State uses Geotrust for all their websites. Question? Is anyone using WebCT with full SSL right now? Southwest is. There appears to be no problem with speed when using full SSL- Question about SSL- Portal Choice- SSL on just user name and password
Full SSL- on every transaction WebDAV Is anyone choosing to implement WebDav? I believe that Vol State is going to- not sure if we are taking the locking feature. Many schools will be choosing WebDAV without locking. It appears that most will be using WebDav without locking feature. WebCT export Has everyone decided what method to use yet? James Kachell at Memphis has experience using the migration tool. Lisa at Southwest has successfully migrated individual courses but hasn’t tried group migration yet. Contact Barnes at 901-333-4662. Troy at NSCC was not successful. He was trying some type of scripting to try the CP_API. Cleveland State has also not been successful with the CP_API option yet. U of M has been using the CP_API perl script. The problem with both of these (using perl script or course migration school) need access to the directory structure of the server. The download feature of the course migration tool is not really useful. It downloads the course migration framework, not the individual IMS packages. Still need access to the server structure on the backend. ETSU has tried the single course export with BlackBoard and it works, have not tried the bulk export yet. 423-439-3607 (Lee Frakes, frakesl@etsu.edu) APSU has not been successful with a BlackBoard conversion yet. Tom Wallace has successfully exported from WebCT up to a certain file size. No problems under 22-23 mb seem to work okay moving into D2L. Question- how will the CE export tool work with files that are in organizer pages as single pages instead of content modules. Tom Wallace, NSTCC, reports that a new unit will be placed in the content module for each page and then inserts the file under it. This will be a huge undertaking to “clean up”. Might want to zip up the files and then import into D2L and use the “Bulk Add Topic” feature instead. Remember, quizzes, discussions, drop-box also need to come over. Organizational Set-up Is anyone implementing the other org unit type for colleges or divisions? The purpose for doing this is to allow some separate branding for a particular section of an institution or specific permissions associated to a set of courses. Will Continuing Education on the campus need it’s own brand? What about committees and other non-course related uses for D2L? Templates Has anyone figured out the real purpose of templates vs course offerings? Templates- a container that holds the courses not a template in the true sense of the definition. One way to approach this might be what level will the faculty be using D2L. - Faculty just using D2L to manage Class
- Faculty using D2L to enhance class (basic- syllabus, email, dropbox, quiz)
- Faculty using D2L for hybrid class (syllabus, email, dropbox, quiz, content)
- Faculty using D2L for full featured online class (syllabus, email, dropbox, quiz, content, extra tools)
How does all of this work with the integration piece? Server Issues TBR training org site can be used for a while (tbrtraining.desire2learn.com) can get some access to this site. It is the same server we are on right now. We will not have any development boxes at all. This is not in the contract. Any development that is done must be done on the production server. Can development be done in a sandbox department and then moved to a real department? It can be done but it is complicated. The site we trained on was (elearn.tbronline.org) that is an org that was contracted for and will stay there. It is okay for everyone to keep an account there. This site has an actual purpose. The (tbrtraining.desire2learn.com site) is an actual site however, D2L will leave it open for training. John will set us up with whatever access is needed to create training accounts. Not sure if this is a good idea or if we should just set up training on our own box. Would like to set up classes where faculty can log on to a training site. Can we start using the tbrtraining.desire2learn.com for that? Who would we work with?
Send John and email and he will set up an administrative account that will allow us to set up courses and users. This will stay through the transition period (through the end of 2007), this is not permanent. If we use this site for training, will there be a way to differentiate the different schools? Will probably need to create another org called college and then create orgs under it for each school. Not sure if this is a good idea or not. Probably need to think this through a little further. There is one test server. We need to form a committee to check off on upgrades and patches. D2L will be installing upgrades and patches on the test server and we will need to do some quality assurance to make sure it is ready for production. In conversation with Minnesota and Wisconsin, comments have been made that problems are frequently found and need to be addressed before moving it to the production environment. All schools will need to agree that a patch or upgrade is ready for primetime. When that patch is installed, it will impact all of us. Will trainers/faculty be part of this process? Yes There is not a link set up to the test server yet. It will be discussed on the Chairs conference call this afternoon that will be discussing how to set up the test server. Will admins have admin access to the test server? Could be a challenge if 23 admins have access to this site. Another issue, how can it be really tested if one school has 15 different roles and another school only has 4 different roles and different DOME settings. D2L is going to have some temporary test servers as part of the integration process. There will be 4 additional test servers that will go away immediately after we have our SIS integration working. Seeing Users from Other Orgs In the error log, you can see information about other users. You can see every error there is on the server, who did it, where they are at, and what role that they have. This is only the admins who have access to it. What is the consequence of that? None that can be seen- just shows log in info but no passwords. Clarence will post on wiki. The distribution list should work to get in contact with everyone. (D2L_sys_admins@tbr.edu or D2L_trainers@tbr.edu) if someone is not on the list, contact John and he will add you to the list. There is usually a 2-3 day turnaround for adding people to the distribution list since it must be done by someone at the board. If anyone wants to send John a generic email address please do so. Question: has anyone considered re-looking at the timeline and implementation date? Is anyone considering moving to the Spring? MTSU has not planned on being completely in D2L by the fall semester. Memphis plans to have D2L as the active server and WebCT only for those whose courses got left behind. APSU is reconsidering stretching out its timeline. TSU is considering going live in spring 2008. LOR One of the main concerns, when looking at the metadata administration and metadata views there were several different standards. One issue that Gary was concerned about is the TBR elearning strategic plan requires our participation in the SREB SCORE repository. Will there be a separate repository hosted by another institution? Florida has offered to host this. Another option, will the State of TN create our own repository separate from SREB that would cover TBR, UT and K-12. There are some federation issues that D2L must address before this can happen. The D2L repositories are there along with 5-6 options on how to put the metadata together. We must fall under the SCORE metadata standards in order for this to work. Do we want to hide all the other standards? Gary will talk with D2L to find out what needs to be done to offer the view to all campuses. Recommendation: hold off on doing a lot with Learning Object Repositories for now. There needs to be some discussion about this, librarians should also be involved in the process as they are the experts in metadata and tagging. Question: should we arrange for our MERLOT license key so we can use the MERLOT LOR? The MERLOT license doesn’t really apply to items we are adding to our repository. When we first turn the repository on, there will be nothing in it. Yes, it is a definite. Has anyone read the MERLOT license agreement? Most haven’t read it yet. Go to the DOME, click Learning Object Repository (don’t expand it) get the key here. Recommended that everyone start this now.
Roles and Security The University of Arizona page (http://help.d2l.arizona.edu/InstructorTools/Roles/roles.htm) has some nice definitions of roles and security. Can we post what we are doing at our campuses on the wiki? It would also be nice to see what Wisconsin, Oklahoma and Minnesota are doing. Has anyone else developed a relationship with a sys admin at another site? Follow Up Items - Search out information on ePacks- relative to access codes
- Search out information about other 3rd party tools
- What about Wimba- audio only or video too? Working with D2L now
- Other vendors that need to be pursued right now?
- Impatica (note: Impatica doesn’t always work on the Mac yet- problems with Safari and Firefox)
- Some issues with authentication with mozilla based browsers and the Mac. Must authenticate 3 times
- Smart Thinking
- Turnit in
- Micrograde
- Testing software used by the TTC’s
- Agilx Backpack (allows you to download your course and work with it off line)
- Learningobjects.com (another Blackboard item- will it work)
- Elluminate (rep said they had been told by D2L that they would have an integration set up within 60 days)
- Respondus
- 3rd party software for students to use for creating doc’s etc.
- System error logs-
Locker size (will be on Worksheet #4) Chairs will be asking for your recommendation: How much space should we give students? Any real good reasons for personal locker space? Will students actually use this locker space? Is it needed? Upload amount needs to be larger than 10k. 1.75 terrabytes is the total storage space for the state. Comment: it can be frustrating as a student not to have access to the files when they work on them from different locations. Student will use this, especially the students who are very mobile. At the very least, students should have 2-3 mb to work on their stuff. Suggestion: How much of our total storage do we want to commit to student storage? Once that is determined, we can look at how much space to allocate. Can we table this discussion for the future when we have had a chance to look at all the issues? Also, is this a number that will increase each semester as we add courses, etc.? John will follow up on the progression and expansion of disk space. Issue for chairs meeting- no permission set on the community site for faculty. Do we really want faculty to have access to all the different documentation, etc.? Southwest, MTSU and other schools are creating an elearn portal – pulling down information and creating access to the material that we want to share with everyone. Next Call Recommendation- keep doing these conference calls on a regular basis. How does every 2 weeks work. Monday mornings at 9 a.m central (10 eastern) We have an exceptional group involved in this. Thank you all for participating! | 
