Office of Information Technology ITLC Summaries – January
2007
FY 2006-07 Portfolio of Information Technology Projects
Student Integration
Educational Technology Vision and Plan
Common Collaboration and Learning Environment (CCLE)
http://www.oit.ucla.edu/ccle
Since 2005, the Faculty Committee on Educational Technology has been
guiding a campus-wide initiative to converge on a Common Collaboration
and Learning Environment (CCLE). At its November 2006 meeting,
UCLA’s IT Planning Board endorsed the work plan proposed by the
FCET to specify requirements, evaluate possible open source solutions,
and select a shared platform. In June 2006, the FCET endorsed the
recommendations of the CCLE Functional and Technical Sponsor Groups’ Joint
Report.
An Assessment Taskforce was created to evaluate open source solutions
and bring a recommendation to the FCET. At its November 2006 meeting,
the FCET made two decisions: 1) It selected Moodle as the platform on
which UCLA will base its CCLE and 2) It decided that UCLA should stay
engaged with the higher education community and, in particular, with
the work of the Sakai Foundation in order to develop interoperability
between Moodle and Sakai.
While funding strategies are under review for this new campus-wide service,
a Project Oversight Group is developing governance structures and implementation
plans for the CCLE. Campus-wide subgroups are focusing on system
operations, integration with campus data systems and authentication,
functionality, migration, information, training and support. The
Office of Information Technology will be hosting the CCLE system.
Discussions have begun with Sakai and UC colleagues to explore approaches
for advancing the goals of CCLE platform interoperability. Two
initial steps are to discuss goals for inter-campus interoperability
with the UC-wide LMS (Learning Management System) group and to explore
interoperability strategies with the IMS Global Learning Consortium,
the Sakai Foundation and the Moodle Community.
Faculty Committee on Educational Technology (FCET)
The FCET has been appointed for 2006-07, replacing outgoing members and
adding two additional faculty representatives, one each from the School
of Medicine and the Anderson School of Management. Expanding representation
from the professional schools was seen to be critical to expanding faculty
involvement with key campus-wide projects in the coming year: CCLE,
Open CourseWare and other digital library initiatives, IT Literacy, UCOP-ITGC
strategic planning, and the definition and implementation of the WASC
Educational Technology theme.
The FCET annual report for 2005-2006 is available on the committee website
at http://www.college.ucla.edu/edtech/fcet.htm.
Copenhaver Award for Innovation in Teaching with Technology
In 2002, the Faculty Committee created an award to honor UCLA instructors
who effectively and innovatively use technology in support of undergraduate
learning. Over the past four years, 15 instructors have received awards.
Multimedia interviews with recipients are available at
http://www.college.ucla.edu/edtech/bpcaward.htm
Over this period of time, 128 instructors (from 47 departments) were
nominated. Many nominees have participated in a project focused on disseminating
information about experiences teaching with technology. Interviews are
available on the Award website:
http://www.college.ucla.edu/edtech/interviews
The 2007 call for nominations has now closed, with 28 instructors nominated
for consideration. The FCET will be selecting recipients during
winter quarter. A celebration event to honor all nominees and award recipients
is scheduled for May 2007.
Computation-Based Research Leadership
UCLA Grid
UCLA is working to help build out a UC Grid to make a vast array of
high-performance computational resources available to researchers. The
project will render existing computing clusters throughout the UC system
more accessible and better utilized regardless of location. Looking
beyond UC and into the future, the dream is that the UC Grid technology
will enable grid-to-grid connectivity, which would someday connect UCLA
and the UC grid to other universities, research labs, and supercomputing
centers around the country. The project sets the course for jointly
aggregating and building resources to achieve greater capabilities for
individual researchers. The ultimate vision is an overlay to computing,
data and presentation and visualization resources world-wide.
A UCLA team is creating both technical enhancements and organizational
partnerships to help make this happen. The UCLA Grid Architecture
is based on the UCLA Grid Portal (UGP) hardware, software, and the Grid
Appliances that attach to individual clusters. The key element is the
UCLA Grid Portal which is a web interface to UCLA's computational clusters. The
UGP enables secure, unified, "anytime-anywhere" access to resources
formerly available only to researchers who had highly technical IT skills
and access to a terminal window.
The UCLA Grid began with a number of UCLA computing clusters and then
went on to incorporate a UC Santa Barbara 128-node Dell Cluster onto
the UCLA Grid. The result is access to resources at UCLA and UCSB for
researchers working in the California Nanosystems Institute, which spans
both campuses.
This initiative is seen as the first of many virtual collaborations
for UCLA researchers within the UC system, and eventually among national
labs and supercomputing centers.
At this time the UCLA Grid encompasses ten clusters with 675 nodes including
128 nodes from UCSB, which represent almost 10 Teraflops of computing
power. Also available through the UCLA Grid are the IBM Data Star and
the 64-Itanium cluster via the national TeraGRID.
The latest version of UGP allows for pooled resources, enabling sharing
with the entire campus community while adhering to the research and management
needs of an individual research group.
The UCLA Grid positions researches for more effective grant proposals. Access
to computing power across numerous research initiatives reduces the amount
of grant funding needed for computing in connection with any single initiative.
The "pool computing" concept has promise beyond academic
research and for the community at large. The vision is that as
the Grid grows and discretionary processing cycles become easily available,
they can be shared with a broader group of users.
The UC Grid is currently in phase 2 of testing. The test infrastructure
includes the UC Grid with connections to the UCLA and UCSB Grids with
UCI to be added in the first quarter of 2007.
UC Research Computing Group
UC Grid
The UC Research Computing group has drafted a white paper recommending
strategies to create and sustain a secure grid of computing, storage
and network technology resources and services in support of research. The
proposal will address the following issues:
- Augmentation of UC’s research technology infrastructure in
an interoperable fashion to facilitate sharing of the resources
- Strategies to manage resource allocation within the Grid to optimize
performance and utilization
- Services and service delivery models that address researchers’ needs
while encouraging behavior that benefits the common good
- Funding models that sustain these services and technology while leveraging
short-term funding opportunities
- Extension of the UC Grid to interface in support of research and
education with other computing Grids within California, the nation
and the world
The group presented its work plan to the IT Guidance Committee on Sept.
18, 2006. The first draft is now out for review, and the final
draft will be submitted to the ITGC in April 2007.
Scholarly Interaction
Digital Research Collaborations
The Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and the Institute
for Digital Research and Education (IDRE) is hosting a May 2007 event
to highlight innovative digital research in the Humanities, Arts, and
Social Sciences. The event has three goals: 1) to recognize digital
innovation in research, 2) to promote UCLA’s contributions to digital
research, and 3) to facilitate faculty connections to potential donors.
To this end, partners from across the campus, along with the UCLA Alumni
Association will work together to produce a list of invitees with an
interest in supporting innovative digital research.
Letters of interest were accepted in January for this celebration
of innovative digital research in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Appropriate
projects included those that address in some form the theme keywords
of countries, cultures, and communication, use digital technology for
research, use new technology to augment or extend disciplinary standards
of research, or involve the development of digital tools to assist research. Projects
in all stages of development were welcomed. Approximately
25-30 projects will be selected for the event.
“Countries, Cultures, Communication: Digital Innovation at UCLA,” will
be held on Thursday, May 10, 2007 at UCLA’s Faculty Center.
Experiential Technologies Center
Moving into it’s third year of existence, the Experiential Technologies
Center (ETC), is promoting the use of new technologies for experiential
research in diverse disciplines including architecture, the performing
arts, classics, archaeology, foreign language studies, education, and
others. Projects at the center explore a wide range of phenomenological
issues, including movement, sequencing, sonification, and visualization. The
center is working on projects to accomplish the spatial modeling of comprehensive
environments from natural and artificial landscapes, urban environments
and other material culture. Comprehensive simulations of historical
environments allow scholars to study various reconstruction issues and
provide new spatial gateways into research and teaching about the broader
cultural, social, economic, and political aspects of civilizations – both
ancient and contemporary.
UCLA on iTunes U pilot
UCLA on iTunes U is underway as a broad campus collaborative effort. The
service agreement with Apple is being developed with the Office of the
President and UCLA intends to sign into this agreement. This agreement -
under discussion for the last six months - is still being negotiated. This
delay negatively impacts the project's ability to accomplish deployment
integration tasks as access to the iTunes U software depends upon a service
agreement being signed.
Phase I of the project will focus on an internal facing audience with
content for students and the UCLA community. Phase II of the project will tackle
an external facing audience with content for the public.
The project is made up of two teams, a Content Management Team and a
Deployment Team; both meet bi-weekly. The Content Management Team
has created language for a ‘click thru’ agreement and is
working with The Library, Legal and UCLA's office of Intellectual Property
to develop an IT policy stating the university's position on faculty
uploading of content. The deployment team - with resources donated
to the project from the Office of Instructional Development - has created
a working prototype of an “UCLA on iTunes U” site request
application.
Increased Productivity
Academic Personnel
The Dossier Action Tracking (DAT) system is a web-based database application
that tracks the progress and status of all academic personnel actions
through their complex academic review process. The DAT system
eliminates duplication of data entry and increases the transparency of
the academic personnel review process by utilizing a shared action tracking
database. DAT produces an official electronic "historical
record" that provides departments with ongoing eligibility business
rule automation. Additionally, DAT's functionality includes tracking
of: sabbaticals and leaves, faculty details, waivers and degrees as well
as new appointments and recruiting outcomes.
The DAT team is in the process of forming an advisory board to help
prioritize refinements and new requirements for the system. The
DAT team is currently in the process of working with the School of Medicine
to import their system’s data into DAT. Once this is completed,
a nightly data exchange between the SOM’s academic personnel system
and DAT will be put in place so that both systems are aware of all academic
personnel cases’ in progress along with their current status.
The DAT Rollout to Faculty will take place on a school by school basis
and begin in the spring of 2007 starting with The Engineering School.
Student Records Rationalization
This program collects various student record-related development activities,
including: an upgrade to the transaction system, a new degree audit system
and the addition of student data to the dimensional campus data warehouse. The
real-time online portion of the transaction system was completed in December
2006 as planned. The degree audit system is also making steady
progress after coping with some unanticipated staff changes. The
data warehouse portion of the task has not yet started in earnest.
Seamless Student Interactions/Integrated Web Experience
This program aims to consolidate various student-facing web pages and
applications into a student portal and to disaggregate and re-aggregate
middleware and functionality into a new architecture. The project
objectives, illustrated by a demonstration of UCSD’s TritonLink
were presented to the executive leadership in November 2006 and approval
of the planning phase is expected when this group meets again in January
2007.
Office for Protection of Research Subjects (OPRS)
The original vendor for a new system to support institutional review
boards (IRB) that was to be installed at UCLA and its partners RAND Corporation
and Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science was unable to
meet the system specification. A new RFP was issued and a new vendor
selected, but not yet announced. We are in the process of finalizing
the terms of the contract with the new vendor.
Repositioning IT Initiative/TIER
The Repositioning IT initiative began as a campus effort to reduce costs
and complexity in campus infrastructure services, consolidating a large
number of independent physical networks, email systems, server rooms
and data centers into fewer regions. As part of a response to the Chancellor’s
2003 request to reduce costs, the initiative emphasized the consolidation
of infrastructure services primarily (but not exclusively) in administrative
areas.
Efforts under the Repositioning Initiative aligned in three parallel
tracks to:
- Consolidate network and email infrastructure services within Business
and Administrative Services (largely completed) and Murphy Hall (in
planning with some consolidation).
- Bring a diverse and distributed IT and governance community together
to begin planning the next generation of infrastructure services. As
part of the planning enable “proof of concept” projects
that would help involve both design and campus standards.
- Organize expertise, both managerial and technical, to provide
support to individual unit’s that wanted to improve, upgrade,
or trouble-shoot problems under existing structures. Provide incentives
through support and funding to units to adopt evolving next generation
standards and designs.
A great deal has been accomplished under Repositioning that is foundational
to UCLA’s strategy for moving forward. While an emphasis
to create appropriate savings and efficiencies within administrative
areas is generally a desired outcome, the Repositioning IT initiative
(including its name) does not adequately define or reflect the efforts
involved in designing IT infrastructure services for current and future
educational and research requirements.
TIER (Technology Infrastructure for Education and Research) Program
The TIER program, focuses on the future as UCLA now moves to design
the next generation of infrastructure IT services that are core to UCLA’s
primary mission of education and research. While savings and consolidation
opportunities are important under TIER, they are not the driving forces.
As UCLA moves out to the greater academic campus to support its primary
mission, TIER will respond to the requirements for sustaining UCLA as
a leader in education and research. Some of the characteristics
of this response include:
- Balance University “openness” to facilitate scholarly
collaboration and security concerns.
- Optimize performance while maintaining secure systems.
- Reduce infrastructure equipment duplication by facilitating natural
partnerships and shared management models.
- Facilitate and support infrastructure consolidation where overlap,
functional similarities, and other opportunities exist (as example,
a potential Medical School, Public Health, Dentistry, and Nursing network
integration).
- Create higher and more consistent standards of system and service
performance for faculty and students (i.e. researchers should expect
high performing networks independent of affiliation or location).
Security
UCLA has hired its first security director, who has taken the helm of
the Applied Security Task Force. The ASTF, which is comprised
of technologists from seven distributed IT units, is poised to become
the authoritative security resource to the campus. Toward that
end, the Task Force is:
- Developing a way to work in an applied way to triage security incidents.
- Becoming a resource for security-related issues, e.g., a task force
looking into encryption.
- Helping units with security, e.g., penetration testing or network
reviews.
- Sponsoring campus pilots of vulnerability scanning software
eEye Pilot
The ASTF has implemented a pilot of eEye scanning software and is making
it available to all campus units. Participating in the ASTF
Retina/Rem Pilot will provide departments with several important benefits,
including:
- Licensed access to eEye products at no charge.
- Training and technical support in the configuration and use of the
eEye Retina and REM products and the interpretation of reports for
effective vulnerability assessment and penetration testing.
- Access to additional reports for departments, particularly for the
purpose of time-based comparisons of system/network state.
- Secure access to departmental Retina scan results through SSL.
- Remote scheduling of Retina scans.
- Become part of a UCLA security user group to increase awareness and
develop best practices.
IT Policy
Lifetime Email Address
In October 2006, the campus implemented UCLA Lifetime Email. The
graduating class of 2003 seeded this idea with their class gift, which
corresponded with the campus vision of replacing paper communications
with email. The campus wanted to deliver Lifetime Email in a framework
that was effective and flexible so that as email practices and student
and campus needs changed, Lifetime Email could change as well. The campus
email policy is being revised to include the new student email features.
From the student perspective, UCLA Lifetime Email means that every student
gets an email address when they enter UCLA and, if they graduate, they
can keep this address for a lifetime. All students get an address
from Bruin Online and the Law School and Anderson Graduate School of
Management provide life email addresses for their students as well. After
graduation, the BOL and Anderson email accounts will be terminated (the
law account will remain active) and the email address transitioned to
the lifetime forwarding service. External Affairs and Bruin Online
are working with graduates to establish their Lifetime Email Address
and forwarding.
Students maintain their email information thru URSA. Beginning in October
2006, students have been using URSA to indicate an Official Email Address
to be used for campus administrative communications. It can be
one of their Lifetime Email Addresses or any other email address they
chose. Student email addresses are stored in the UCLA Enterprise Directory,
a part of the UCLA technical infrastructure which provides a central
repository for commonly and widely used information. The student also
controls, through URSA, the display of their email addresses in the campus
online directory.
The campus also implemented a consolidated logon – UCLA
Logon – last October, to enhance security replacing the UID and
PIN as an authentication method. Using the UCLA Logon, a student can
move from one UCLA web application to another without signing in again – as
long as the application uses the UCLA authentication infrastructure (ISIS).
Similar email resources for employees will be developed in 2007.
IT Licensing
Security Software
In order to assist campus departments in meeting the Minimum Security
Standards, UCLA negotiated, coordinated and implemented a new campus-wide
agreement for PatchLink patch management software. Based upon consensus
of the Common Systems Group, the Applied Security Task Forces, and campus-wide
survey results, UCLA negotiated renewal of the campus-wide agreement
for Sophos anti-virus software.
Open Source
UCLA is working toward a coordinated campus-wide approach to Open Source
software licensing issues to ensure effective participation in the Open
Source community while maintaining compliance with policy. Initial
test cases were Grid Portal distribution as an add-on component to the
Globus Toolkit and roll-out of Moodle as the campus-wide Common Collaboration
and Learning Environment software. UCLA is currently working toward
a standard set of information and approaches that can be applied to multiple
Open Source software licensing issues.
Microsoft Vista
UCLA is working on tools to provide guidance and leadership to the campus
in relation to Microsoft’s release of Vista, Office 2007 and the
new activation mechanism (MAK and KMS). The goal is to provide
a central source of information and issues to consider when a unit is
deciding whether or not to transition to Vista and/or Office. UCLA
is also investigating the potential value of establishing a campus-wide
KMS service that could provide significant economies of scale as opposed
to each unit setting up their own KMS.
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