Opening Up Academic Planning Information

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• Information distributed across websites– Out of date– Question validity– Trapped in HTML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


Public Data Flow


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


Academic Calendar

• Automated Academic Calendar– SOAP calls from Curricunet– Data stored in CMS


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


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


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


Thank You

Thank You

[email protected]


Opening Up Academic Planning Information

Technology

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