Unified information environment in the university. Past and present
In our university (MIEM) about 7-8 years ago a group of enterprising people formed who decided to create a unified information environment on the basis of the department. Gathered in the summer, they thought, they figured that yes, they decided to implement a project at that time, the goal of which was to translate various processes of the classical full-time educational process onto information technology. The process went on for a long time, many times the approaches to the implementation of various processes changed, as a result, about 4 years ago, we arrived at the final version of our ENI.
The system included:
a single LDAP-based authorization directory where all users were loaded and through which the authorization process took place for all services
your mail server (it is clear what it is for)
group of social services (forum, photo gallery, video hosting, file storage)
group of educational services (Wiki, Learning Management System, Library)
group of auxiliary entertainment services (notification of the birthdays of students and teachers, their quotation, analytical services, etc.)
The system allowed to solve a fairly wide range of tasks, one way or another connected with the learning process. The Wiki conducted joint projects, LMS collected reports on students (thanks to her, she managed to avoid the huge amount of paperwork associated with students' homework and laboratory work, as well as to make the educational process more transparent) and all the courses were stored in it. Well, the library, as you understand, kept in itself a rather large volume of digitized materials from different years.
')
Integration of various kinds of web services was based on a single requirement - remove all restrictions. In those days, many web services seriously limited users by the size / quality of the content they uploaded. For example, in many free photo hosting sites, the quality of photos has been significantly reduced, the volume of file storage is still seriously limited for most users. In the created environment it was not.
A year or two, while the system was going piece by piece, the majority of its enthusiasm was really small. But here it should be borne in mind that the default educational environment is very inertial. Those. The processes initiated yesterday can bear fruit in a couple of years. It took only a little patience - and now the created environment has become an integral part of the educational process at the department. This led to a really serious increase in the cohesion of teams within the university unit, the creation of initiative groups, multidiscipline course projects. Thanks to the same environment, within our department, a serious connection was born between the courses. Projects initiated by 5th year students were supported at various levels by students of all other courses. It became interesting to many, and for some years now we have no standard projects on most specialized subjects. Each course project is, in one way or another, a development starting from the 3rd course. The package of these developments is growing every year and it never ceases to please.
Of course, the built environment also revealed its minuses. The main disadvantage was the need to maintain all available resources. To support all resources, it is necessary to constantly create a pool of qualified personnel. This minus, in its time, was reborn as a plus - students, starting from the 1st course, had the opportunity to try their hand at administering and supporting these services. Which, however, led to the fact that by the 3rd year most of the students had already left to work in technical support for various large and not very firms.
As a result, about a year ago, we came to the conclusion that it is necessary to look for a suitable way to remove the process of technical support from students and transfer the entire ENI to an external platform. Of course, there is a huge pool of paid platforms, but since we are doing everything in spite of rather than thanks, it was necessary to choose the most convenient platform for this. And we decided to try for this Google services, which we have been using for a long time personally, but we haven’t let them go yet.
To do this, we registered an academic Google account for 5,000+ users on our domain (miem.edu.ru) in 1 day. After work has already begun on the formation of subdomains for the delimitation of working areas. Even during the creation of the first version of the ENI, our team came to the following type of accounts and, accordingly, domain zones: name.surname@year_ issuance.katfera.osnovnoy_domen. We decided to apply the same structure when integrating into Google. Naturally, Google-domains have their own ideas about user groups, which we used to differentiate user policies (students, graduate students, head groups, etc.)
Actually, we got a fairly large number of advantages from switching to Google. In addition to classic mail and docks, we received group calendars (with schedules for each group), university event calendars that automatically synchronized with student accounts, access to Youtube, Picassa, etc.
At the moment, we are developing an application for Android (by the way, as far as I considered this market in Russia a couple of months ago - we didn’t have a single university application for any mobile operating system) that would allow students to receive various information through their phone. According to soc. survey, more than 30% of students now use Android as the OS for their mobile devices. The share of Simba is still large (about the same 30%), but they are gradually moving to the same android. But I will write more about this application at the end of the year, when the beta version will be launched.
Why all this post? Moreover, the introduction of information technology in the modern educational process does not require investments in technology or the purchase of software. In humans, yes, definitely. But is it not pleasant to receive specialists who are prepared for work in the real world at graduation? Which already after the 4th year (bachelor) will be competitive specialists in various fields. IT does not replace the full-time educational process. This is not a remote control. This is an extension of the full-time educational process. This association of students is not only within the departments, but also, more globally, by the university. The openness of the laboratories and the availability of facilities of the university leads to the fact that, in addition to the educational function, the university strengthens the training of specialists with a broad knowledge of cross-disciplinary areas.
The system included:
a single LDAP-based authorization directory where all users were loaded and through which the authorization process took place for all services
your mail server (it is clear what it is for)
group of social services (forum, photo gallery, video hosting, file storage)
group of educational services (Wiki, Learning Management System, Library)
group of auxiliary entertainment services (notification of the birthdays of students and teachers, their quotation, analytical services, etc.)
The system allowed to solve a fairly wide range of tasks, one way or another connected with the learning process. The Wiki conducted joint projects, LMS collected reports on students (thanks to her, she managed to avoid the huge amount of paperwork associated with students' homework and laboratory work, as well as to make the educational process more transparent) and all the courses were stored in it. Well, the library, as you understand, kept in itself a rather large volume of digitized materials from different years.
')
Integration of various kinds of web services was based on a single requirement - remove all restrictions. In those days, many web services seriously limited users by the size / quality of the content they uploaded. For example, in many free photo hosting sites, the quality of photos has been significantly reduced, the volume of file storage is still seriously limited for most users. In the created environment it was not.
A year or two, while the system was going piece by piece, the majority of its enthusiasm was really small. But here it should be borne in mind that the default educational environment is very inertial. Those. The processes initiated yesterday can bear fruit in a couple of years. It took only a little patience - and now the created environment has become an integral part of the educational process at the department. This led to a really serious increase in the cohesion of teams within the university unit, the creation of initiative groups, multidiscipline course projects. Thanks to the same environment, within our department, a serious connection was born between the courses. Projects initiated by 5th year students were supported at various levels by students of all other courses. It became interesting to many, and for some years now we have no standard projects on most specialized subjects. Each course project is, in one way or another, a development starting from the 3rd course. The package of these developments is growing every year and it never ceases to please.
Of course, the built environment also revealed its minuses. The main disadvantage was the need to maintain all available resources. To support all resources, it is necessary to constantly create a pool of qualified personnel. This minus, in its time, was reborn as a plus - students, starting from the 1st course, had the opportunity to try their hand at administering and supporting these services. Which, however, led to the fact that by the 3rd year most of the students had already left to work in technical support for various large and not very firms.
As a result, about a year ago, we came to the conclusion that it is necessary to look for a suitable way to remove the process of technical support from students and transfer the entire ENI to an external platform. Of course, there is a huge pool of paid platforms, but since we are doing everything in spite of rather than thanks, it was necessary to choose the most convenient platform for this. And we decided to try for this Google services, which we have been using for a long time personally, but we haven’t let them go yet.
To do this, we registered an academic Google account for 5,000+ users on our domain (miem.edu.ru) in 1 day. After work has already begun on the formation of subdomains for the delimitation of working areas. Even during the creation of the first version of the ENI, our team came to the following type of accounts and, accordingly, domain zones: name.surname@year_ issuance.katfera.osnovnoy_domen. We decided to apply the same structure when integrating into Google. Naturally, Google-domains have their own ideas about user groups, which we used to differentiate user policies (students, graduate students, head groups, etc.)
Actually, we got a fairly large number of advantages from switching to Google. In addition to classic mail and docks, we received group calendars (with schedules for each group), university event calendars that automatically synchronized with student accounts, access to Youtube, Picassa, etc.
At the moment, we are developing an application for Android (by the way, as far as I considered this market in Russia a couple of months ago - we didn’t have a single university application for any mobile operating system) that would allow students to receive various information through their phone. According to soc. survey, more than 30% of students now use Android as the OS for their mobile devices. The share of Simba is still large (about the same 30%), but they are gradually moving to the same android. But I will write more about this application at the end of the year, when the beta version will be launched.
Why all this post? Moreover, the introduction of information technology in the modern educational process does not require investments in technology or the purchase of software. In humans, yes, definitely. But is it not pleasant to receive specialists who are prepared for work in the real world at graduation? Which already after the 4th year (bachelor) will be competitive specialists in various fields. IT does not replace the full-time educational process. This is not a remote control. This is an extension of the full-time educational process. This association of students is not only within the departments, but also, more globally, by the university. The openness of the laboratories and the availability of facilities of the university leads to the fact that, in addition to the educational function, the university strengthens the training of specialists with a broad knowledge of cross-disciplinary areas.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/132755/
All Articles