Welcome to Instructional Continuity
Instructional Continuity
Overview
The Instructional Continuity Project is to provide online course collaboration (remote classrooms) for NC State Students and faculty during a socially distancing event. The project will use the Elluminate collaboration tool and NC State's VCL service. Elluminate is already in general use for collaboration at NC State. The VCL service will be used to dynamically provision server resources for a clustered Elluminate service to support hundreds of remote classrooms. This project is being developed by DELTA and OIT - Advanced Computing staff.
Goals, Objectives & Scope
In the case of an event necessitating closing or limiting access to campus, provide a mechanism to allow course lecture sessions to continue to be delivered. A cluster of Elluminate servers will be provisioned and an Elluminate session created for each course lecture sessions. Students and instructor would receive Email with session information and will also be able to locate sessions based on the normally scheduled class location. Sessions would occur at the normally scheduled class time.
A web based user interface will allow the designated University official (to be determined) to initiate the Instructional Continuity process for all or a portion of campus. When the process is initiated the following actions will occur:
- VCL service will dynamically build a Elluminate cluster.
- Collect data on classrooms designated for this event (all campus, an area of campus, a building, ...).
- Collect data on classes scheduled in the affected classrooms.
- Collect data on students and instructors in affected classes.
- Communication
- At start of event - notify affected students and instructors that instructional continuity plan has been invoked for the specified classes
- Daily - provide students and instructors link(s) to Elluminate session(s) for their affected classes scheduled for that day
- At end of event - notify affected students and instructors to resume attending class in physical location
- Monitor loads on Elluminate service and add or remove capacity of the Elluminate cluster
- Retain or archive the classroom Elluminate recordings for the remainder of semester.
Timeline
Spring 2010 - Develop capability to provision Elluminate cluster using VCL, to obtain necessary course data, to create Elluminate sessions, and to send Email notifications to participants. Test capability with a few lecture sessions - DELTA collecting volunteers.
Summer 2010 - Test ability for VCL to deploy an Elluminate cluster (expected to be) capable of serving all classrooms.
Fall 2010 - Capability exists to provide Elluminate sessions to support instructional continuity using VCL resources. Additional steps necessary to ensure that the capability can be successfully used if needed:
- Instructors consider impact of potential use of Elluminate session in place of physical classroom
- Encourage each instructor to test use of Elluminate with each class by holding one actual class session per semester using Elluminate - or scheduling a special, extra Elluminate session for their classes each semester
- Test deployment of full scale Elluminate cluster annually