Oncourse, OneStart show improvements

With Oncourse CL fully operating and a new OneStart in the works for the end of September, IU is already seeing a broader focus on technology under President Michael McRobbie’s administration.\nChanges in both programs marks University Information Technology Services move this fall toward more personalized, advanced technology for students and professors.\n“The largest challenge for us is insuring that everything works well for everyone as we are moving through these generations of technology,” said Brad Wheeler, IU’s vice president of Internet technology. “We are pioneering new ways of doing things.” \nWheeler said the major goal of his department is to “establish IT leadership in absolute terms,” not just at a collegiate level.\nWhen he accepted the vice presidency, Wheeler said he knew there was “lot of work ahead of (IT) and it was time to get that work done.”\nProblems with Oncourse CL being down the first week of the semester were due to an overload of volume that would have been impossible to simulate in low-testing, but the program has since been relatively stable, said Barry Walsh, Associate Vice President of Enterprise Software.\nTroubles with adapting to new software are not coming from the students, but the faculty, Walsh said. The reason might be that the faculty depends more heavily on Oncourse CL as a teaching aide in class, where a 10-to-15-minute waiting period would be more critical than for students in the dorms trying to check their assignments, Walsh said.\nWheeler said IU developers will focus system changes on making technologies simpler for users and expanding the “extended IT team,” which has added the University of Michigan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University to its roster.\nWhereas changes in the original Oncourse depended on IU developers, Oncourse CL can be improved by any of these affiliates. This means more tools, features and options for students and faculty, said Associate Dean for Learning Technologies Anastasia Morrone.\nThese tools already include instant course-mail notification, a master calendar for assignments and the ability to store up to a gigabyte of information in the resources section, Morrone said.\nMorrone credited Wheeler as being one of the key players involved from the beginning with the Oncourse CL project.\n“(The) continued enhancement, improvement and innovation” that Oncourse CL is capable of will mean that there should not be a change in its major architecture again for quite some time, Walsh said.\nAs for simplification, the new OneStart will have only five color-coded tabs with links for services down the left-hand side, much like Oncourse, Wheeler said.\nLinks and notifications on the site will be related to the student’s school or major.\nThis student-specific interface will make OneStart more navigable since the current OneStart has what users consider to be too many options, Wheeler said.\nStudents who have specific questions about the changes in Oncourse CL and OneStart should first go to the Information Commons located in the Wells Library or visit the Knowledge Base Web site at http://kb.iu.edu/. For students who aren’t technologically savvy, there are not-for-credit workshops and Internet courses provided through UITS’s IT Training and Education. A list of these classes is available at http://uits.iu.edu/scripts/ose.cgi?amec.ose.help.\n“(IU is) not interested in staying (a technological) forerunner to be number one,” Walsh said. “It’s about service.”