opening up academic planning information
DESCRIPTION
A presentation about how SFU is working with Student Services to open up access to student planning information.TRANSCRIPT
Opening up Academic Planning informationTo promote reusability
CANHEIT 2012 - SFU IT Services - Jeremy Rosenberg 2
Overview
• About SFU• Challenges• Public Data Flow
– Academic Calendar– Course Outlines
• Lessons Learned
About SFU
• One University - Three campuses– Burnaby– Surrey– Vancouver
• 32,000 students • 900 faculty• 1600 staff• 100,000 alumni
• Information distributed across websites– Out of date– Question validity– Trapped in HTML
• Varied web technologies– Difficult to update– Staff turnover leaves gaps– Information depends on technical skills
• Consistency Needed for Accreditation
Challenges
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Public Data Flow
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Data in Master Sources
Data in CMS or other
Distributed on Websites
• Current Academic Calendar– 500+ static web pages– All Program Requirements– All Course Descriptions
• Hosted Data Source– Curricunet– Auto generates HTML– HTML cut and paste in CMS
• Data is not reusable
Academic Calendar
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Academic Calendar
• Automated Academic Calendar– SOAP calls from Curricunet– Data stored in CMS
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www.sfu.ca/program-requirements/2012/fall/engl/major.xmlwww.sfu.ca/program-requirements/current/current/engl/major.xmlwww.sfu.ca/program-requirements/2012/fall/engl/major.xmlwww.sfu.ca/program-requirements/current/current/engl/major.xml
• CMS Integration– Reusable CMS Components– Exposed via REST– Dynamically updated
Course Outlines
• Current Course Outlines– Mandated by University policy– Represents a contract with the student– Generated by instructors– Wide variation in process
• MS Word documents• PDFs• Static departmental websites• Niche departmental applications• Dead trees
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Course Outlines
• Course Outlines Application– Consistent Schema– Form based input– Draws from Academic Calendar– Draws from SIS– Draws from Room Data– Reusable CMS Components– Accessible REST Interface
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www.sfu.ca/course-outlines/2012/fall/engl/201/d100.xmlwww.sfu.ca/course-outlines/current/current/engl/201/d100.xmlwww.sfu.ca/course-outlines/2012/fall/engl/201/d100.xmlwww.sfu.ca/course-outlines/current/current/engl/201/d100.xml
Lessons Learned
• Big Data is no longer Big– Entire Student DB is 250 Gigabytes– Walmart’s DB is 2,500,000 Gigabytes
• Friends don’t let Friends scrape screens– If data is published, it should be machine readable
• Set it free and it will return– No IT department can match the resources of a
million API developers
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