Picture This: Community Building with Data Snapshots Tony Harris, Eric Sakai and Megan Tucker Community College of Vermont Vermont State Colleges February 28, 2006

Educate: About the Vermont State Colleges Five colleges, 11,000 students –Community College of Vermont –Castleton State College –Johnson State College –Lyndon State College –Vermont Technical College

5,500 students No campus, no fulltime faculty 12 learning centers statewide 170+ online courses, 1,700 students Educate: About the Community College of Vermont

Innovate: Student Services Initiative Timeline fa 98Core Business Process Review sp 00Begin new SIS implementation sp 00Bb Learning System fa 02SIS live fa 03Bb v6 LS Enterprise sp 04Bb Community Portal & LDAP sp 05Web registration fa 05Content System pilot su 06Single authentication?

Innovate: VSC Blackboard Community Demonstration -

Everywhere: The Snapshot! Snapshot: What is it? –A way to import/merge data into Blackboard. Comes with Enterprise. Types of snapshots: –User (has Primary Role in it) –Secondary (Institution) Role –Course/Organization –Enrollment/Membership –Category (Course Catalog) & Category Link.

Everywhere: The Snapshot! How snapshot works: 1.Create a text file in the format for the type of data you’re snapshotting, with the fields you want imported/updated. 2.Get the file onto your Bb app server. 3.Run the snapshot utility, telling it what kind of snapshot, the file, and the data source key to match on (plus a few other bits of info). 4.The snapshot utility will add new records, modify data in existing records (if you let it), and delete missing (i.e. cancelled/unenrolled) records (if you let it).

Everywhere: The Snapshot! A note about the snapshot controller: –The controller handles the get-file and run-snapshot steps so you don’t have to. –BUT, it doesn’t come with the Bb app, it’s a separate purchase through Global Services. –If you’re handy, you can write your own. –Or you can do the whole thing manually (not ideal, obviously). A note about data source keys: –These just allow you to separate out your snapshots to make it easy to add/modify/delete records according to criteria. –Divide by semester, by type of course, etc. –Caveat - you cannot modify/delete a record unless the DSK of the snapshot file where you’re trying to do that matches the one the record came in on. –So plan carefully how you want to divide things!

Everywhere: Roles What we have to do to create that nifty portal environment: Users need to get the right Primary role, so we can assign branding, tabs, and modules to a primary role. –** A note about branding: it also works with virtual hosts, i.e. it’ll brand by the URL you come in on. But that’s not what we needed. Users need to be made members of the proper Organizations. Users need the right Secondary Roles to do special purpose tabs/modules, and enable access to specialized functions like the Content System.

Everywhere: Roles How do we figure their roles? YMMV (Your Mileage (or Methods) May Vary. A lot of complicated code on Datatel, looking at their employment contract (Staff vs. Faculty), what their active degree program is (students), and what their primary campus location is. And for secondary roles? These really vary widely! Example: Castleton nursing students stationed on the Lyndon campus. Or, Content System users (specific courses). In each case we have a Uniquery script that grabs data Colleague PersonIDs (i.e. the BatchUID in the snapshot. We made the users give us the query that gets the right people) Shell & Perl script combo that reads that data and produces the very simple snapshot file, and then runs the snapshot program itself to upload it. Watch those data source keys, though! You can get confusion if you’re not careful.

Everywhere: Summary To summarize doing portal roles: 1.Figure out what you want to do with them. Branding? Permissions? Propagating tabs/modules? 2.Have someone in your school who knows how to query your SIS, and who knows the criteria for getting each cohort of people, write the SIS end and above all get you some nice, unique student identifier. 3.Think about your data source keys, remembering you may want to be able to disable groups of people, and remembering to watch for overlap. 4.Use the query you were given, plus some massaging programming on your end, and produce snapshot file(s). 5.Find a nice way to automate running the snapshot process to import the files. The process will pretty much handle all the messy stuff from there.

Thank You! Tony Harris - Eric Sakai – Megan Tucker –