Abstract

Higher education institutions of Lithuania are seeking for reconstruction and improvement of academic studies and university management structures to be able to join new European Union programs in education and training like SOCRATES and LEONARDO. The process goes intensively on through redevelopment of university Information System using IT as strategic tool for improvements in information and management services. The paper will focus on approach taken by Kaunas University of Technology (KUT) to make an open and flexible study system by implementing principles of transparency, accessibility, study data sharing and distribution in a networked environment. The work is supported by the TEMPUS project "A Shared Architecture for Academics and Administrators (SAAA)" during the period of 1998-1999.
 
 

Introduction

Over past years there has been introduced a modular curriculum at KUT, and the well-timed TEMPUS JEPs also considerably supported this process. Having done this, the annual cycle of study process planning, management and administration is considered as a process consisting of several major stages:

General revision of curriculum, which is made up from a set of degree programs;

The first renewal of course modules, introduction of new ones and presentation of all of them to academics and administrators;

Revision and renewal of degree programs, which are to be made up from sets of modules;

The second revision and renewal of course modules;

Certification of course modules and degree programs;

Initial or continuous building up of individual study plans by all students;

Correction and adoption of students’ individual study plans.

The entire process must take into consideration different and continual changing requirements of degree programs and students wishes, i.e. individual study plans must include various core modules and some choices from offered alternatives resulting in a certain amount of credits during each semester.

According to our approach all those stages of study management and administration can be realized through a unified Web-based interface with corresponding amount of applications.

In this presentation a web-based system to deal with course modules and degree programs will be presented in details, including an operational, organizational as well as design issues. There will be also discussed the requirements for a reasonably unified access to diverse information sources.

The database of course modules is already in use and is offered to academics to fill it up through web access from individual desktops. Our aim is to present the experience of using course module database along with networked applications built on this database to date of the conference.
 
 

Objectives

In the end of 1997, KUT took the decision to develop a new IS for the studies process management. Significant stimulation to modernize our old IS has been given from TEMPUS SAAA project with the overall objectives of (i) improving services offered for the academic community; (ii) modernizing the University organization; (iii) clarifying the degree programs offer; etc.

The foundation of the Studies Planning, Management, and Administration system is a new database of degree programs and course modules, i.e. database contains the details related to all awards together with their constituent parts.

The key elements of the project objectives are

to implement an active-Working/Informing environment both in the academics and student assistance provided/managed by an Office of academic affairs,

to deliver actual information to academic community and get the primary data feedback from them round the year,

via Web-based user interfaces.

What makes the difference between old-new IS?

‘The course module program’ specification was introduced instead of ‘a course module description’ in old IS what concluded in a primary data increase up to 10 times at least.

‘The degree program’ specification was introduced instead of ‘a some set of course modules currently (previously) being (been) in use’.

Now the primary data collecting goes from a desktop directly to the central database with an information feedback. This reflects in a significant increase of on-line data suppliers in general.
 
 

System in outline

KUT is located over two sites throughout Kaunas city with one branch in Panevezys, north Lithuania, 150km from Kaunas.

Administrative function is distributed likewise; although distributed users use one central database in Kaunas for their direct access.

All new developed applications are accessed via Web. So, KUT extended the use of its studies IS throughout all sites and departments, and to all staff and students.

The system architecture is built in three layers. The first layer defines computation and communication primitives, initially based on existing Web standards (HTML, CGI, and Java) to provide a publication model of computation. It is nothing more than an extension of a computing environment for heterogeneous and distributed computing by Web technology.
 
 

Services in module program preparation

The goals of these services have been to show all the university staff members the advantages of new IT and involve them into the process they are very familiar with over many past years.

All services are split and can be viewed in sense of different responsibility from users like author (data supplier), head of department (data supplier/manager), academic (evaluation/certification), administrator (maintenance of classificatory and user passwords, process scheduling and so on), others (browsing), etc.

We have achieved these goals by means of the highly interactive and well managed Web-based applications.

For instance, the lecturers do all of their work on-line in this environment and don’t submit any work on paper for preview or later recording. For better understanding of what does it mean we could say that our module program is somewhat much more than regular syllabus, i.e. lecturer can specify several module delivery forms etc.

We provided two sessions of practical teaching in how to renew old course modules and develop new ones for all the representatives of university departments. About 250 attendees were taught by academics and application developers together at the same time.

After the whole process there was accepted to use the only paper form as a certificate to be signed by three representatives: author of a course module, head of his/her department (to prove the content and submission), chairman of relevant university academic committee (to prove an acceptance, duration for delivery or motivated rejection).

All certificates were collected to keep them in an office of academic affairs.
 
 

Services for degree programs

A degree program is treated as a combination of course modules that have been approved by the university. Most probably it is just a framework for students registration to follow study programs i.e. the students are required to enroll annually according to the procedures laid down by the university.

Annual enrolment for a program of study and its constituent modules include the registration for the relevant examination etc.

The majority of KUT undergraduate degree programs is a modular organized under what is known as the ‘semester’ system. Semesters making up a degree program are thought and examined during a single academic year.

On the other hand a study program and its associated modules and regulations must be approved by both the relevant university Committee and the Academic Board before the program can be offered.

Keeping in mind all the previous thoughts we are going to offer the Web-based services by addressing needs of both degree program developers and the wide distributed end users, administrators incl.

In these circumstances the specification of degree program and its database have been developed. It was first time the degree program specification as an object with relevant set of attributes was introduced to university practice. We have an intention to provide you with an ‘entity-relationship diagram’ of degree program for discussion.

The applications we serve the degree programs with at this time are very simple, e.g. you can put the data describing degree program into database or browse the database throughout.

As we can imagine now, really suitable applications to deal with a degree program design/development should be somewhat like a Developers Kit & Navigator, when the usage is as much complicated as a complex underlying the database model.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Additional Services

The advanced networking infrastructure increases user requirements regarding other Web-Infoservices.

Special attention was given to allow users to have interactive access to different classificatory, regulations, schedulers, another descriptions etc. putting them on desktop in different windows upon user request.

Therefore, unified Web-based user interface for data entry is good enough to get user familiar with it quickly. The interface is also easy to implement (generate) but it is quite complicated in sense to observe of what user is doing or has done in general.

To meet such user requirements we introduced a Web publishing facilities i.e. a user maintaining data in database always can easy reproduce data in a form, which looks like a primary document or somewhat like a viewable report. So, user can always keep his/her activity in control and easy get a print copy as well.
 
 

Security, reliability, etc.

Intranet/Internet services management always might cause a particular risk in the university computer network security context. There may be natural issues and there may also be deliberate attacks against the information system.

The Authentication of access we initially introduced is based on a user ID/password scheme. Of course, as well there were used additional countermeasures by setting up an inactivity period (allowed duration between two database transactions for 20 minutes initially, for 30 minutes later; after that authentication fails).

Every university staff member already had his/her personal ID widely used for their accounting needs in old IS and now it is just a time to remember this. Initial passwords were generated (in pronounceable form), announced personally, encrypted and kept in database for further control and management. Even if such system worked quite well we tend to focus on being reasonably resistant to attacks and able to ensure totally non-interruptible working or to be totally impregnable against hacking.

Our main attempt to have SSL based sessions with Oracle Application server lead to success only with its new release 4.0.7. Now we are using our own Certificate Authority server, which well serves both Internet Explorer 4.x and Netscape Communicator 4.5 Web clients and WebServer as well.
 
 

Some figures

This part reports on an experiment investigating the functionality and usability of novel data input facility, different Web browsers, on a different computers, used by novice users for data entry tasks.

KUT is one of the largest universities in Lithuania with about 12 thousand students. About 60 organizational departments are permanently involved into the studies planning process by supporting degree programs and/or delivering of course modules. About 12 000 students and about 1000 of staffs are the main internal University potential to get a benefit from a new university IS in the nearest future.

Typical campus network (Ethernet 10 to 100 Mbs, ATM), Server Enterprise 450 (4x400MHz CPU’s, 1GB RAM, 40GB Raid 5). Information technology background: Oracle8 Enterprise Edition 8.0.4, Oracle Application Server 4.0.7 Enterprise Edition, Oracle Designer 2.1, and Oracle Discoverer 3.0.

In the autumn semester, 1998, we tried to involve all the KUT pedagogical potential into the process of course modules preparation and its further certification using new technology. To accomplish this set of new applications there was developed ‘on-the-fly’ and integrated into the university web site services. What was quite important to start that every lecturer could find and see all the course modules being in his/her responsibility already moved from the old IS into the new environment i.e. a start took place from the modifying of old module description. In this new IS every KUT staff member enrolled in either the modules submitting or in its assessment or review has the ability to present information and receives all the messages on ongoing process regulations.

As a first step in the ongoing evaluation process of the effectiveness of new services offered to the community unfamiliar with a new technology, the Distribution of User-sessions has been taken into account.

The following deadlines have been announced in this process: (i) for submission of course module programs (CMPs) 09 Nov; (ii) for assessment and certification of core CMPs 16 Nov; (iii) for assessment and certification of all the remaining CMPs 30 Nov; (iv) for the final revision and review of CMPs database 14 Dec.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

As you can see in the picture above, all the activity performed by university staff over a log time tells to us in terms of applications quality, reliability and satisfaction to group and intensive usage. As the outcome achieved almost in time from more than 1000 lecturers was result of 2722 certificated CMPs.
 
 

Summary and the Future Plans

This paper describes how we modified our old IS to provide a consistent, contiguous, and progressive applications development with a focus throughout the new technologies.

Another aspect, which should be considered in the nearest future, is to support an adequate management of access rights of the big variety of new users putting data to and accessing information from database round the year. At the same time the public access rights via Internet/Intranet should differ in depth and width.

The information held on curriculum should additionally facilitate the University marketing operations, provide information for the Prospectus, support the introduction of the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) and cater for the information requirements of students on courses.

Three other Lithuania institutions for higher education (Klaipeda University, University of Agriculture and Lithuanian Academy of Music) already expressed their interest in such Web-based Information Services for Studies Planning, Management and Administration and we are ready to share our experience as well.
 
 

Conclusion

At this moment, the environmental conditions are becoming suitable to put on the foundations, with a certain warranty of success (e.g. course modules & degree programs), a new model of primary data collection and its further transference to centralized databases.

This trend produced a shift from the only paper-based once-per-year (during 2-3 months) performed revision/review of the degree programs and CMPs, devoted mainly to administrators, to personal productivity tools and applications; from reduced technological environments to a widespread community of users, etc.
 
 
 
 

References

Targamadze A., Anusauskas L., Pocius K., Nauja studijø programø ir studijø moduliø programø specifikacija KTU informacijos sistemoje, Konferencijos "Auk?
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Kaunas University of Technology

Donelaicio 73, 3000 Kaunas, Lithuania

E-mail: Kestas.Pocius@pit.ktu.lt, A.Targamadze@cr.ktu.lt, anusau@pit.ktu.lt, vytas@pit.ktu.lt