Rice Sakai Deployment: Rice Sakai Deployment: Integration, Implementation, and Integration, Implementation, and

Lessons LearnedLessons Learned Angela Rabuck, Dean Lane and

Omer PiperdiRice University

Agenda• Implementation

– Rollout Timetable– Architecture– Getting data from Banner to Sakai– CAS & Kerberos Integration

• Issues/Assumptions• User Data

– Usage Stats– Customer Feedback– Survey Results– Training/Support

Rice University

• Undergraduate student–to–faculty ratio of 5:1

• Median class size of 15

~3,000 undergraduates~2,000 graduate

students

Why Sakai?

• WebCT Campus Edition 4.1.3.8 previously used• Very low adoption - <10% faculty• Max - 75 courses/semester using it• Reasons for switch:

– Licensing concerns– Blackboard uncertainty– Modifiable code– Project sites– Ability to interact with other instructional tools

People

Java programmer

Full time:Instructional Technologist

Oracle DB admin

Web Developer

System admin

Part time:

Our Setup

• All Rice members receive Sakai userid and password

• Guest accounts – Created by Admin– On-line guest account process available in future

• Project sites– Faculty and grad students

• By request• Not self serve

– Undergrads • Can request with faculty sponsor• Ex: club site, study group, etc

• 2 levels of Teaching Assistant and Member roles

Assumptions

• Group multiple sections with same instructor– SPAN 101 001/003 F06– Multiple sections with no instructor not grouped

• No accounts removed from Sakai– CAS/kerberos authentication will control Sakai login ability

• Each course is term bound – CHEM 121 F06– CHEM 121 F07– Previous semester’s courses available

• Reuse old materials in new course site

Assumptions continued

• Default 1 GB file resource limit for every site• Hardware or software load balancer

– “sticky session” capability

• Sakai DB Account same as CAS NetID or Kerberos principle• All Banner course data will contain either

– a valid instructor – dummy instructor NO_INSTRUCTOR

• No Banner data record will be available once that record is no longer valid

• Students/etc added by professor unmanaged by scripts

Summer ‘05Summer ‘05 Fall ‘05Fall ‘05

Rollout Timetable

Spring ‘06Spring ‘06 Summer ‘06Summer ‘06 Fall ‘06Fall ‘06 Spring ‘07Spring ‘07

PilotSakai 2.04 courses

PilotSakai 2.06 courses

PilotSakai 2.116 courses30 project sites

ProductionSakai 2.1.130 courses50 project sites

FullProductionSakai 2.1.2350 courses130 project sites•3 WebCT courses

FullProductionSakai 2.2.2? courses? project sites

For comparison: WebCT server - ~75 max courses a semester

Architecture

• VM Servers– Load balancing

• Netscaler• 2 servers currently• Add additional VM

servers easily

• Oracle Database• NAS

– BlueArc Titan– NFS mount

Sakai Hardware

Architecture

Data Load Programs• sakai_load_users - creates the main sakai account for

each user. Does not assign the user to any sites. • sakai_load_courses - creates all of the new course

sites in Sakai. This is the process that assigns the Sakai site ID for the course.

• sakai_load_students - adds/removes the students from each of the courses that they are assigned to.

Data Flow

Sakai_load_users

• Creates the main sakai account for each user • Does not assign the user to any sites • Creates random extremely long passwords, which no

one ever knows – Since we use CAS and kerberos, local password hidden from

user

Sakai_load_courses• Create every course for next semester• Assigns the Sakai site ID for the course• It gathers all related courses based on cross listing or

section and instructor• Load all defined instructors in course sites• Load any dept admins into Dept course sites• Add a standard set of basic tools to every course site

– Home, Announcements, Syllabus, Schedule, Resources, Discussion, Assignments, Site Info

• Mark course sites as “unpublished”

Sakai_load_students

• Adds/removes students to/from their course sites• Twice daily update of course rosters in Sakai• Verifies that student didn’t just change sections before

deleting students

Web Services Used

• addMemberToSiteWithRole()

• addNewRoleToAuthzGroup()

• allowFunctionForRole()

• checkForSite()

• checkForUser()

• checkForMemberInAuthzGroupWithRole()

• removeAllRolesFromAuthzGroup()

• removeMemberFromAuthzGroup()

• setRoleForAuthzGroupMaintenance()

• addNewSite()• addNewPageToSite()• addNewToolToPage()• addNewAuthzGroup()• addNewUser()

CAS and Kerberos

• LOG-IN using NetID– All Rice members have

NetID/password– Single Sign on

• CAS (Central Authentication Service by JA-SIG)

– Passwords already created

• Non-Rice LOG-IN– Sakai DB

• Admin, Test and Guest Accounts

– Kerberos• Necessary for WebDAV

authentication

Database• sakai session expiration via cron job

– Expires session if active over 24 hours– Remove session from SAKAI PRESENCE table

• DB Backups– DB files stored on BlueARC NAS– Backing up files every 4 hours– Shutdown and take cold backup of oracle DB once a

week • Cron job 3AM Saturday mornings

Content Hosting• Binary uploads are stored on BlueARC - NAS

– Two sakai servers mount to same storage for load balancing

• Also for Melete and JForum uploads – Necessary for load balancing

• File storage growth:– 350 courses and ~130 project sites

• 2-4 GB/week

Server Outage Notification• Nagios monitoring• pages sent to personnel if:

– Sakai server down– DB down– storage down– Sakai http not responding– SSL Certificate expiration

Load Balancing

• Netscaler– Quickly add/remove servers– Automatic failover– Redirection to outage notification page– Can wean people off of one server for

maintenance• No service outage

Benefits• All user accounts automatically created• Self serve courses (unpublished) ready for instructor use

– Faculty don’t need to contact IT to get course site– Faculty don’t need to create a site– Students added/removed automatically– Instructor can add anyone they wish to their course sites– Basic tool set added to every course

• Home, Announcements, Syllabus, Schedule, Resources, Discussion, Assignments, Site Info

• Ability to add departmental admin automatically to all dept courses

Unresolved Issues

• Handling manual creation of sites before Banner feed presents the data

• Deleting accounts and all data associated with it

• Removal/archival of old course material

Gotchas• Email tool issues every upgrade

– If you are changing host name after the upgrade• Db redo logs when creating courses (oracle)

– creation rate of 50MB/min– Lot of CLOBs

• Takes a long time to create each course over web services– 1-2 minutes to create a course site

• Admin account getting added to all courses slowed down system– Took a long time for the admin account to display the top menu bar that contains

all of the course names– May be an issue for departmental coordinators at later date when a few

semester’s worth of courses are showing up• Banner data started getting courses listed without the cross listing data. Caused a

number of courses to be created that needed to be merged/deleted. Need to make sure that all data in Banner is “good” before running scripts!

• CAS client caches CAS server host IP

Number of Accounts & Courses

• Instructors– 1191

• Students– 6138

• Guests– 401

• Courses created F06– 1709

• Courses created Sp07– 1940

Usage Stats• Fall 2006 Published Courses

– 350/1700 = 20% courses• Max users at one time

– 425• Max number of unique logins in a day

– 1848• Max number of total sessions in a day

– 3854• Total number of unique logins (June 2005 - 11/23/06)

– 4846

Usage Stats

Web Trends Stats• Avg page views/day

– 30,458

• Most active day of week– Wednesday

• Least active day of week– Saturday

• Most active hour of day– 3:00pm - 4:00pm

• Least active hour of day– 5:00am - 6:00am

Faculty Survey Results60 faculty responses

Are you planning to use OWL-Space in the future?

41

1

2

2

4 1 Yes

Only with better support

Only if the softwareimproves

2-and-3

No, I have no furtherneed for OWL-Space

No, I do not feelcomfortable using OWL-Space

I would recommend OWL-Space to a colleague.

Disagree5%

Neutral20%

Agree39%

Strongly Agree27%

N / A5%

Strongly Disagree4%

Faculty Survey ResultsLearning to use OWL-Space is

Difficult8%

Not easy/not difficult

23%

Easy43%

Very easy13%

N / A11%

Very difficult2%

Time to learn OWL-Space

Very slow2%

Slow6%

Ok36%

Fast31%

Very Fast13%

N / A12%

Faculty Survey Results

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

Post a syllabus

online

Publish an

online calendarPost an audioand/or videorecording of

lecture

Post lectureoutline or

notes beforethe lecturePost lecture

outline or

notes after the

lectureSend

announcementto my students

Post onlinereadings and

other

supplementary

Post sampleexams andquizzes forlearning

Give examsand quizzesonline for

grading

Have not used

Not valuable

Valuable

Very Valuable

Student Survey Results

•526 student responses

Academic Classification

27%

17%

17%

14%

25%

Freshman Sophomore Junior Senior Graduate student

Student Survey Results

Learning to use OWL-Space has been:

Easy53%

Somewhat Easy 40%

Somewhat Difficult

6%

Difficult1%

Please describe your overall experience

Very Positive16%

Positive72%

Negative10%

Very Negative2%

Student Survey Results

0%10%20%30%40%50%60%70%80%90%

100%

Calendar

Accesssing course

material in Resources

section

Viewing assignments

on line

Getting assignmentsback from instructors

with comments Keeping track of

grades onlineAccessing classannouncements

Taking online

assessments/surveys

Did not useNot valuableValuableVery valuable

Project Sites• Fellowship and awards

committee• Faculty search committee• curriculum review• student study groups• departmental sites

– faculty only– faculty and students

• student clubs• graduate student associations• orientation week coordination• grants

• IT groups• research groups• researchers collaborating on

books/articles• planning committees• student recruiting• departmental equipment

documentation and usage scheduling

• scheduling of psych experiment rooms

• multi dept site with grad student peer review of journal articles

Training Sessions• Training sessions specific for WebCT users spring ‘06• Training/demo sessions beginning of fall ‘06 semester

– 1 hour demo • here’s what it is and what it can do, with a few basics covered• ~50 users

– 2 Drop in days• help available at any time 9am-5pm• low turnout

– 3 hour in-depth training session• 10 users

• Student training/demo session– Only 4 students showed up– No specific questions

Training• 1-on-1 training sessions available with Instructional Technology Specialist

or IT Trainer• Professors like one hour demos that show them enough to get started• Much lower turnout for longer sessions• Prefer to call/email than read FAQ• Rice News article about OWL-Space• Demos at IT events• Offered faculty and grad students project sites during pilot phase• Technology Brown bag lunches• On-line demo course with training/demo modules and other training

materials available online to faculty/TAs

Support• IT Help Desk

– via phone, email or drop-in – 8am-8pm M-T, 8am-5pm F; 2pm-5pm Su

• Instructional Technology Specialist – via phone and email during working hours and beyond

• Online FAQ – most professors just contact instead of reading

User Feedback - The Good– “I really love Owlspace!!”– “This is really cool”– “Let me first send my congratulations to you and the group you represent. I found

the owlspace pages extremely easy and quick to use.” – “[OWL-Space] has become a wonderful resource for our students”– “Despite the complaints I like OwlSpace and will continue to use it. It’s certainly a

step in the right direction but is a work in progress” – “And OWL-Space provides an excellent vehicle for distributing non-copyright

protected material without wasting paper or forcing students to pay for a coursepack.” (Rice Thresher - 9/29/06) - 1 month after full rollout

– “I have really enjoyed working in OwlSpace”– “First, let me just say, I think OwlSpace has been a great addition this year, and

for the most part, my students are loving it!”– “Owlspace has become a well-integrated tool within our laboratory!”– “Overall we love using OwlSpace and the updates (such as the Message Center)

just make things easier and easier to use.”

User Feedback - The Bad– “I must admit that I’m really annoyed about the quiz/question

feature in OwlSpace. It is wasting a HUGE amount of time, both for me and my TAs.”

– “I am about ready to throw OwlSpace to the ether! I cannot manage groups, I want to make a TA group to email and an Instructor group to email and the strangest things keep happening:”

– “I’m really disliking OWL-Space. The work-around we talked about on Friday, for the fact that we aren’t allowed to have point values in assignments be greater than the max points, and the fact that there’s no way to add an assignment grade for a student who didn’t submit it on OWL-Space, is problematic.”

– “I hate the confusion this is causing, and the extra work I and the TA have to do to make up for the shortcomings of the system.”

User Feedback - The Colorful

Summary

• Full production– VM servers

• Banner course data– Custom scripts

• Usage Data & Customer Feedback– Overall good, some negative– Stronger usage than expected

• To be continued . . .

Extra Details

• Extra Details about our architecture and scripts are attached

Contact Information

• Angela Rabuck– adehart@rice.edu

• Dean Lane– dlane@rice.edu

• Omer Piperdi– omer@rice.edu

• sakai@rice.edu

Hardware Specs• SunFire 4100

– 2 single core AMD Opteron Processors 2.8 GHz

– 8 Gigabytes of RAM

– Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4

– Oracle 10g

• HP DL385 (Middleware)

– 2 single core AMD Opteron Processors 2.6 GHz

– 8 Gigabytes of RAM

– Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4

– PostgreSQL 8.1

– Java 1.5/Perl 5.8.4

• HP DL385 (Sakai)

– 2 single core AMD Opteron Processors 2.6 GHz

– 8 Gigabytes of RAM

– Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4

– VMware GSX Server 3.2

Hardware Specs• VMware Guest

– Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4– 3 Gigabytes of RAM– 20 Gigabytes of local disk space

(containing Operating System + Sakai Installation)

– Sakai 2.1.2– Tomcat 5.5.12– Java 1.4.2

• BlueArc Titan NAS Storage System– used to store the Oracle

Databases (via NFS)– used to store external files for

Sakai (via NFS)

• Netscaler 7000– 6.1 Firmware– Sticky Sessions– Automatic load balancing– Automatic failover– Accepts access to ports 80 and

443 (Thawte signed certificate)– All traffic to the Sakai servers is

over port 443, using a self signed certificate

Sakai Load Users Graphic

•added - the record is newly added to the Banner view, add entry to Sakai•modified - the record has changed since the last time it was seen, change entry in Sakai•seen - the record was seen in the Banner view but unchanged•frozen - the record has not been present in the Banner view in the last day•locked - the record has been frozen for over 4 days, prepare for removal•deleted - the entry in Sakai has been removed

Load UsersField Original

Source Source Field Description

netId Middleware DB (Person Registry)

account_name The netId for the user

firstName Banner - PPAIDEN

SPRIDEN_FIRST_NAME The user’s first name

lastName Banner - PPAIDEN

SPRIDEN_LAST_NAME The user’s last name

emailAddress Middleware DB (Person Registry)

The user’s primary email address

type Banner Multiple fields Unknown, Student, Staff, Instructor

(continued) Banner - PEAEMPL

PEBEMPL_EMPL_STATUS active/inactive employee record

(continued) Banner - PEAEMPL

PEBEMPL_ECLS_CODE employee job code

(continued) Banner - PEAEMPL, PEAREVW, NBAJOBS

PEBEMPL_TERM_DATE, PERREVW_REVT_DATE, NBRBJOB_END_DATE

employee termination date

(continued) THRCSDB THRCSDB_STU_STATUS active/inactive student record

password load script randomly generated very long random value

Copy Table Flow

Sakai Load Courses

Column Name Description Attributes Example Data swvitsi_term_code character

varying(6) not null 200710

swvitsi_term_desc character varying(30)

Fall 06

swvitsi_crn character varying(5)

not null 21063

swvitsi_subj_code character varying(4)

BIOS

swvitsi_subj_desc character varying(30)

Biosciences

swvitsi_crse_numb character varying(5)

425

swvitsi_section character varying(3)

001

swvitsi_title character varying(30)

PLANT MOLECULAR GENETICS

swvitsi_long_title character varying(256)

PLANT MOLECULAR GENETICS AND DEVELOPMENT

swvitsi_sect_coll_code character varying(4)

NS

swvitsi_sect_coll_desc character varying(30)

School of Natural Sciences

swvitsi_sect_dept_code character varying(4)

BIOS

swvitsi_sect_dept_desc character varying(30)

Biosciences

swvitsi_sect_enrolled character varying(4)

5

swvitsi_xlst_group character varying(2)

L1

swvitsi_xlst_enrolled character varying(4)

5

swvitsi_instructor_pidm character varying(8)

not null 211

swvitsi_instructor_id character E06543210

Column Name Description Attributes

Example Data

swvitsi_primary_ind character varying(1)

Y

swvitsi_instructor_last_name character varying(60)

Bartel

swvitsi_instructor_first_name character varying(15)

Bonnie

swvitsi_instructor_middle_name character varying(15)

- null-

swvitsi_instructor_email character varying(90)

user@rice.edu

swvitsi_instructor_dept_code character varying(6)

008373

swvitsi_instructor_dept_desc character varying(35)

Biochemistry & Cell Biology

swvitsi_instructor_list character varying(512)

Bartel, Bonnie; Braam, Janet

swvitsi_time_location character varying(256)

01:00PM - 02:15PM TR TBA TBA

swvitsi_ptrm_code character varying(3)

1

swvitsi_ptrm_start timestamp without time zone

- null-

swvitsi_ptrm_end timestamp without time zone

- null-

swvitsi_credits character varying(4)

- null-

Table Custom/Banner Description GOREMAL Banner Person E- mail

repeating table. SCBCRSE Banner Course General

Information Base Table

SIRASGN Banner Faculty Member Instructional Assignment Repeating Table

SPBPERS Banner Basic Person Base Table

SPRIDEN Banner Person Identification/Name Repeating Table

SSBSECT Banner Section General Information Base Table

SSBXLST Banner Cross List Enrollment Information Base Table

SSRXLST Banner Cross List Section Repeating Table

STVCOLL Banner College Validation Table

STVDEPT Banner Department Validation Table

STVSUBJ Banner Subject Validation Table

STVTERM Banner Term Code Validation Table

THRCSDB Custom (RPTMGR) This table is used to build the feed to the campus services database and Rice web directory.

Banner Sources

Column Description Example owl_checksum character

varying(32) 68073a491ac7c6c40dff362f3f265604

owl_source_code character varying(12)

banner

owl_course_site_id character varying(100)

BIOS- 425- 525- 001- F06

owl_status character varying(12)

added, modified, seen, frozen, locked, deleted

owl_last_seen_date timestamp without time zone

2006- 10- 12 15:00:05.714

owl_modified_date timestamp without time zone

2006- 09- 06 04:00:11.758

owl_added_date timestamp without time zone

2006- 06- 16 15:33:14.08

owl_dropped_date timestamp without time zone

- note-

owl_created_date timestamp without time zone

2006- 06- 17 02:01:02.393

owl_deleted_date timestamp without time zone

- note-

Columns added to view

Sakai Load Students

Column Name Description Attributes Example swvitrg_term_code character

varying(6) not null 200710

swvitrg_term_desc character varying(30)

Fall 2006

swvitrg_stu_pidm character varying(8)

not null 03939482

swvitrg_stu_last_name character varying(60)

User

swvitrg_stu_first_name character varying(15)

Sally

swvitrg_stu_middle_name character varying(15)

Bogus

swvitrg_stu_rice_id character varying(9)

S01234567

swvitrg_crn character varying(5)

not null 39483

swvitrg_subj_code character varying(4)

BIOS

swvitrg_crse_numb character varying(5)

425

swvitrg_section character varying(3)

001

swvitrg_status_date timestamp without time zone

2006- 04- 21 17:42:06

Table Custom/Banner Description SFRSTCR Banner (SATURN) Student Course

Registration Repeating Table

SPRIDEN Banner (SATURN) Person Identification/Name Repeating Table

SSBSECT Banner (SATURN) Section General Information Base Table

STVRSTS Banner (SATURN) Course Registration Validation Status Table

STVTERM Banner (SATURN) Term Code Validation Table

Column Name Description

Example

owl_checksum character varying(32)

ce178c07286f57f804669ef091e973cd

owl_source_code character varying(12)

banner

owl_status character varying(12)

added, modified, seen, frozen, locked, deleted

owl_last_seen_date timestamp without time zone

2006- 10- 17 15:00:08.235

owl_modified_date timestamp without time zone

2006- 09- 21 04:07:10.337

owl_added_date timestamp without time zone

2006- 08- 31 15:22:45.495

owl_dropped_date timestamp without time zone

owl_created_date timestamp without time zone

2006- 09- 01 02:10:32.325

owl_deleted_date timestamp without time zone

CAS

CAS

Database Scriptbegin -- update sakai_session set session_end = current_timestamp where session_start = session_end and (current_timestamp - session_start) >= interval '1' day(1); -- delete from sakai_presence where session_id not in (select session_id from sakai_session where session_start = session_end); -- insert into sakai_event_bak select * from sakai_event where (current_timestamp - event_date) >= interval '1' day(1); -- delete from sakai_event where (current_timestamp - event_date) >= interval '1' day(1); -- commit; -- end;