Open Learning Initiative Torus Community, 8 Mar 2023

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From YouTube: Torus Community Meeting February 2023

Description

Monthly meeting to discuss Open Learning Initiative's next generation platform. This month, we presented the development roadmap, demonstrated the new course section scheduling features, and discussed homework systems functionality.

A

Hello: everyone, hey Aaron, hi, Mark how's, everyone doing today: What's Going Quiet, but good. It's nice and rainy here in Pittsburgh.

B

I guess I haven't looked out the window yet I.

A

Can hear it I can hear it tapping on my basement window next to me. uh So as usual, uh we'll get started as we uh in about five minutes as we get people joining, and uh today uh we have discussion about our release process and our schedule in the next couple releases, so that will be very Timely.

A

So just hang on a few minutes and we'll get started.

A

A

A

Again welcome everyone thanks for joining we'll get started about three minutes at 12, 35, Eastern, Time,.

A

Sorry about that.

C

How are the members of our community on this lovely gray, Friday.

C

Oh hanging in there Hal.

A

D

You an arm sorry.

C

Kyle Norman, whatever you.

B

C

Mark I can give you a long list of things that I've been told that are less polite than either of those. It's.

E

The beard that that actually happens all the time.

C

The people call you things less polite than how.

E

That that happens even more.

E

F

We have like a lot of Normans and a lot of on the screen depending on you know, and so it confusing confuses everybody.

E

That does happen. You're right. It.

A

Does happen, I love when I come into a meeting and there's like five norms. It's fun.

C

Anything better than one Norm.

A

Ally a couple more minutes.

A

It's like it'll, be a full house today.

A

Sebastian I love your response, fantastic, it's a great way to answer that question.

F

And complain: it's Friday. You know we have meetings, so we cannot even we're not even tempted to go outside where it's raining. It's.

A

F

It's almost a break, so we can pretend that we're gonna, you know not work.

A

Love, it love it. So it looks like we still have people coming in another minute.

A

A

So I say: let's get started um special guest today, Norm I'm gonna give a give us a great presentation so um make sure that sharing is on and yeah welcome. Everybody thanks for coming to the tourist community meeting today and uh I'll turn it over to Norm.

C

Thanks Aaron and uh thanks to everybody for joining um I'm, really excited to be starting to talk you through uh the current approach to how we plan for releases for Taurus and what our current product roadmap is. I. Think that um having a presentation of this to the larger Community is overdue.

C

um Part of the reason that it's taken a little bit of time is that we've, uh you know. As always, we are always uh working at about 110 Russian to keep up, and um it's good to be reminded that telling everyone about the great work is uh equally as important as doing the work, if we're not talking about it, you're not hearing about it. So what I'm, hoping that you will get out of this presentation? First I'm going to be talking about a more formal release, process and more formal release, scheduling and I.

C

Want you to understand why we're moving to this more formal schedule?

C

um When we think about our release schedule, we have uh some things that we're doing in the short term to try to make some accommodations some things we're doing longer term that we hope will be a little more consistent talk about what those are. Then dive into the 2023 road maps you can understand when releases are coming in this current calendar year. What's on deck for our next two releases, I see those features and get a glimpse of the things that we're thinking about for the remaining 2023 releases.

C

Finally, I'm hoping we can have a conversation about how we get this information out to you. A bunches would be lovely to continue to have a presentation. Every Friday talking to you about the cool stuff, that's happening and that's coming in tourists probably need some more effective mechanisms for communicating on this, um and so you know that that leads us to this question of just just be warned.

C

We are still working through some consistent approaches for the community engagement and we're trying to put in place some crispr, both processes and tools to help with soliciting strategic and tactical input about tourists from our community.

C

um Getting more formal there as we grow, is going to be important, pulling in those requests and processing them for features for enhancements for improvements and making sure everyone knows who they should be talking to and Publishing the roadmap in a way. That is easily and regularly accessible, but also understandable, not having it hit away uh under under a couple layers of GitHub or Worse needing to wait until I show up on a Friday to say, hey, let's take a look at my balance point so key takeaway.

C

As always, this is a work in progress, uh work that we're all doing together and- um and hopefully this is going to be exciting to you. So you know um you know. The first thing we want to talk about is the fact that we're what we're moving towards is a system with much more structure and much more formality uh than we've engaged with with Taurus up until now.

C

Why do we need this? Because really, since Taurus has launched over the past uh 24 months, we've really been able to maintain an awful lot of flexibility and that that gave us lots of options we can decide when we're going to push things out. We can decide um to make changes, but that kind of flexibility it turns out. It's like. Oh, this is really great. We want to be as flexible as possible, um ended up really being a little bit ephemeral and despairing on us.

C

It turns out that flexibility isn't all that it's cracked up to be, and what we found is we've tried to engage flexibly is a lot of reasons for increased structure and increased formality. One of the first Taurus is intended to be a larger, open source, community-based effort. um Taurus is the Oli platforms, the future of Oli, but when we talk about Oli in this case, we're not talking narrowly about Oli. Is it lives at CMU?

C

We're talking about this larger community-based research effort that we're all a part of Taurus right now is already in production at three different sites. We have an ASU production server, kth production, server production server here at CMU and Beyond those folks who are using our production server. There are now eight different contributing organizations uh to Taurus.

C

We have a combination of universities and for-profit companies making contributions, and it turns out that that larger Community needs to have a crisper sense of when we're going to make changes when they can expect things rolling out the door and how they're going to contribute Beyond, simply saying. Well, you know when, when does Norm think we should do it? um You know Norm says so. It turns out it's not a very effective mechanism for scaling, and so our larger Community needs. This increased structure.

C

We've also been really fortunate in the past two years and in the coming years, to have an awful lot of funded projects and an awful lot of folks who are excited to be using and contributing to Taurus those different projects and the resources that are funding them are creating some competing demands.

C

We don't want to end up in a place where it's simply the first person to make a request, gets that request completed, and so we need some way to get better visibility into the different demands that our projects have and what kind of funding and resource we have to deliver those pieces. We don't want just want the loudest voices. We need some way to try to prioritize things thoughtfully.

C

We also need to recognize a real need for robust releases. We've been fortunate in our early years to have our um leading a doctor, our early adopter faculty, taking advantage of Taurus uh and in ways that you know allowed them to maybe be a little more forgiving of um of hiccups and challenges they might run into now that we are hitting scale.

C

We absolutely must be releasing strong, robust products that are going to be seamless for our faculty and, more importantly, for our Learners I think we all know from years of experience that nothing will burn Bridges faster than having these kinds of courseware products break and so process and formality are going to get us the kind of robustness that we need aligned with that. You know.

C

We also need to recognize the reality that most of our user base currently is moving off of a large use in Fall, a large use in Spring, and if we can be thoughtful in aligning our releases uh to that calendar, we're going to be better serving the needs of our of the of the broadest parts of our community, and we wanted to think about how we can do that in a way that doesn't limit us to just two releases a year.

C

um Finally, you all as a community need to know when things are coming right. um You know really having a clearer vision of when features are expected to be developed when you can expect them to be tested and released is going to give all of you the ability to engage a little more predictably with our work uh and allow you to plan.

C

So all of this, then we start to wrap these pieces together is going to uh really make sure that we as a development team and we as a larger Community, can be accountable for the commitments that we're making. So how are we going to get there?

C

Well, what um what we've moved towards decided upon towards the end of the year and started to put in action this year is an annual release cycle where we want to start off by establishing and Publishing a larger strategy for the year, not an 18-page document, though any of you that have been subjected to my writing know that I tend to go on at length, but something crisp to Define.

C

What are the big picture things we want to accomplish in this year and then we're going to start to manage that strategy and achieve it through a series of four releases: we're going to be having two larger, what we refer to as semester releases that are intended to line up and be used for spring and fall, and then two midterm releases um that we imagine some of our users will not deploy right.

C

So we don't want to make folks wait uh six months for changes, but we recognize that not everyone wants to be deploying in the middle of a semester with those releases we want to be really crisp and predictable. When are our release dates? When are we engaging in a code freeze and how are we going about testing when we think about our product roadmap of those four releases?

C

We want you to be able to look out at the next two releases to have a pretty crisp sense of what features are in development or plan for the six months for the six months. Beyond that, we have two more releases that are going to be less in focused, you say yeah. These are the kind of things we're hoping to accomplish, but as we get closer to the release, dates we'll be able to firm up and cement our plans.

C

So this ends up, meaning that our semester releases are likely to be having larger changes. We can afford to have greater impact on students and Educators um recognizing the rollout at the start of spring at the start of fall.

C

We also recognize that they are higher Stakes releases, and so we plan for a slightly larger testing period when we make our midterm releases, there's a sense that these May well be optional, and uh and that we want to be attentive to the fact that the majority of our classes will be in progress during these points and we're going to be attentive to any impact that pushing this release might have on these live classes. We know that some of our users won't grab these optional releases.

C

They may only choose to uh to push the semester releases and we have a slightly shorter testing window. So we're looking at a two-week testing cycle for our midterms three-week testing cycle for our semester releases at the bottom. You can see my fine skills with clipart and our annual release timeline.

C

um You know at the end of the year we want to look ahead and establish a strategy, and this is a place where we want to really invite larger Community comment and engagement as we move into our midterm uh development cycle out Midway through. We want to start to look ahead to uh sort of planning for the next release, get two weeks out from the end of March, and we want to hit a code freeze test for two weeks release and then move on to developing our semester release.

C

So we continue with this process over the year. So this is our ideal State um and we're eventually going to get to a point where we can say very specifically on the third Thursday of every March. We will have a code freeze and two weeks later, we will have a release- we're not quite there yet for 2023, we're still feeling our way into this space um and we're we're trying to make sure that, as we try to hit our strategic goals, we're making the best use of the time we have available.

C

So our current release plan. When we look at our 2023 strategy, we've got three big things guiding our work. One is really trying to prioritize features that we're going to need for our gates, Court courseware project. Luckily, the vast majority of these features are things that will end up making Taurus more broadly usable. More broadly, appealing, we've tried to develop these features and line them up in ways that, uh in many cases, they're addressing long-standing requests, long-standing needs of the Legacy platform.

C

We also know that if folks are going to migrate from Legacy onto the tourist platform, we need to have feature parity. Your instructors need to have access to similar types of gradebooks and dashboards and uh assessment options, and so we're working to get parity and, in some cases better than parity uh additional capabilities compared to the Legacy system. Finally, migration of courses- um you know a few of you were in the meeting uh back at the end of 2019 early 2020, where we first talked about launching tourists and I made you a promise.

C

At that point, uh no orphans. We were going to have no orphan courses. We are well on the way to being able to meet that promise, and so, of course, migrations are really in full swing. We have been doing test ingestions and have a series of Faculty uh and subject matter: expert teams reviewing the results of that uh with each time that we do an ingestion we're getting things a little cleaner. So that's our big picture for 2023 when we look at how this plays out in Civic schedules for our releases .23 through 0.26.

C

Our midterm release is coming up, we're about two weeks out from our code freeze and we're going to be making that release available on March 30th. When we look at our fall semester, um we're going to be doing a code freeze at the end of June taking three weeks and releasing on July 20th, that's going to make that available for us both in learn lab summer school, but also well enough in advance of Faculty beginning to use materials that they can test. This out, try any new capabilities. Before we get into the mid-august lunch schedule.

C

We have not nailed down specific days for our midterm and spring semester releases, but we know that's going to be at the start of October for the midterm likely at the end of December for spring semester, but hopefully with enough time that we can be confident before we disappear for winter break.

C

So that's our larger release plan um and again you'll note that this is not the ideal strategy. uh You know, eventually we're going to be a little crisper on what those dates look like. What's our road map, though, what are we actually developing across these different releases?

C

Well, for the end of the month for our midterm release, an awful lot of our work around the gates project has been in building out better entry points for students and for faculty into the courses moving beyond what we think of as the syllabus model, and instead providing a syllabus where we can guide students to content better call out areas where they're struggling, better call out areas where scheduling is going to encourage them to work on certain types of things. That, in turn leads to this notion of soft scheduling, which Aaron's going to be demoing.

C

um Pretty excited about this feature. We have always had hard deadlines inside of Oli. You need to complete this quiz by Timex, or you have this module, which needs to be done between these two dates. Soft scheduling is setting some dates where you should expect to be working on a module. We know that if we've got a class meeting coming up next Monday and that we're working on a module in stoichiometry I should be able to encourage students on that. Even if there aren't hard deadlines there.

C

Soft scheduling is going to make it easier for our faculty to do that work. We have this notion of an exploration activity inside of the new courseware, but really this is one instantiation of, what's always been a key element of oli's success, larger, more synthetic activities that that move Beyond. Some of our basic embedded activities designating these as Explorations is going to allow us to try to call them out a little more and not just have them show up at one place. In the course we've been developing what we're calling collaborative spaces.

C

This is the underlying technology that supports discussion, forums and chat as learning activities and will also support what we're calling social annotation work. It's emerging from our gates work putting in the pieces, we need to drive larger analytics and, finally, um we are finally going to be able to turn on CMU payment capabilities uh with our new release and I'm super excited about being able to release true a b testing capabilities.

C

We are integrating, with the upgrade platform, to manage a b testing that, in turn, is going to connect out to more thoughtful adaptive, experimentation capabilities- that's happening this month when we look ahead to what's coming out in July, we've got a lot of stuff on Deck um any of you that have taken a look at the Adaptive authoring tools made up and struck by uh their complexity.

C

We've got some new tools that are going to make authoring some adaptive, Pages, simpler, better opportunities for diving into details about courses for details about students, expanding some of the things that we can do with the scheduling capabilities that will be rolling out and finishing our uh key pieces of analytics infrastructure.

C

We've got a new kind of activity that will allow us to connect to LTI activities so easily, integrating with activities outside the system. Those of you at CMU have heard about the emerald Cloud lab.

C

uh We've got some new Cloud lab activities to support their use of tourists for training, better creation and onboarding materials, a little more attention to support, which I know that our support team will be excited to see in here and a few pieces required for Gates, better instructor alerts being able to require surveys of students enter the course and some better access to assignments.

C

Looking to the second half of the year, we do not have our features locked in some of the things that we're hoping to look at and consider. We know that you've been asking for certificates we're going to get there. I promise. We've also been asked for years about better homework system capabilities, we're exploring what we might be able to do in the short and long term.

C

There expanding our dashboards and analytic capabilities, providing access to Adaptive experiments and not just a b experiment capabilities, improving our user experience thinking about performance, and we also have an emerging need for being able to evaluate embedded questions, not just across one dimension but being able to evaluate across multiple Dimensions we're still working out what that looks like and what it means. But this is what the second half of the year looks like.

C

So some questions that I anticipate from you. First, where can I learn more about this stuff? Norman I can't remember all the things we just rattled through.

C

um We are working to update the current Taurus webpage to try to expand it, provide better opportunities for tourist tracking, so we'll be sending out an email on that, but we'll also be doing more regular updates at these Community meetings.

C

I know that how we solicit and capture and track features and requests, isn't always clear, especially to our broader audience. We know that we need to do better at this. We're exploring how to better get that information out there right now, features that are in the pipe are being captured via GitHub, some additional pieces that are in our jira board.

C

Those are accessible to you, although they are not very user friendly, uh we've got to figure out how to do a better job of it and we're also going to continue to refine how we go out and solicit your input right now. Obviously, these meetings make for a great venue. I know that Aaron has been doing great work in talking with you and the larger Community. To try to capture and streamline processes, continue to have those conversations and um try to be a little more formal. As we ask for input.

C

Some questions for you, things that I'm interested in um should we be doing an academic or a calendar year cycle I introduced this as the 2023 cycle, but one could imagine moving to an academic cycle. Instead, um when I talk about a spring release and a fall release, I was trying to describe this to someone else who was like wait. Are you developing in the spring? Are you releasing in the spring and I said actually neither of those things we're releasing for the spring semester, which other people would refer to as beginning in the winter?

C

So do the name conventions that I just rattled out make sense.

C

um I just talked through a lot of new features, love to hear which ones you'd like to see some demos of and uh details on um over over the next couple of meetings and, finally, just generally, what are your thoughts? What feedback do you have on this release cycle? No, that's the big picture would love to have some time for discussion. I, don't I, don't know how much time I just chewed up, but uh thank you for listening and sorry that it was uh such a one-directional. uh You know me talking at you.

C

Questions comments, anything look especially exciting or terrifying. There seen one vote for an academic cycle rather than a calendar cycle. Yes, two.

B

Votes, no, that didn't mean twice no.

C

No, the chats you're getting support in the chat Don.

B

For me, yes, is there someone else? Yes,.

C

April and Natalie have signed on you're getting you're getting co-signer Sharon. Okay,.

F

B

F

With the academic, one too.

B

Yeah, because we're always trying to put out our new version like right at the beginning of the semester, so that people can use it- maybe even a little ahead of the semester like two weeks, because our instructors often want to let their students. You know wander around the course for a bit before they decide whether to take it or not and stuff like that. Yeah.

C

No, that that makes sense to me I think that we've sort of uh started off on a calendar year just because we got started uh and with a release in December, but um revisiting and essentially launching our strategy on the academic year cycle. You know is a thing that we can do in July. You.

B

Know: okay, cool.

C

um How do you feel about the release cycle generally? Is this uh anything in there that concerns you I know that um you know this does mean we were not going to be able to turn on a dime and push out new stuff uh overnight.

C

um You know we obviously will still be pushing out hot fixes to release problems and address defects, but um you are. You are trading flexibility for some predictability and I hope that you find that appealing.

B

um um Yeah things like for the lab, if we need to make an update for a bug, fix if that's possible, then if the system that launches stuff is fixed for a semester, I'm good, as long as we can fix our own things like update content, update activities that.

C

Yes- and this is this- is I mean you know, this is one of the big selling points for tourists that we've really updated the publishing capabilities um to make it easier to push those updates and to put greater control of that in your hands and not require as many uh or attract any go around with with our assistant admin team. So.

B

In other words, we get to stop pestering Raphael and Gene.

C

uh That that's the Hope, or at least if you need to continue pestering.

B

Them in the bathroom once in a while yeah.

C

um Aaron I wonder if, rather than having a discussion on what features are most interesting, would it make sense for us to mail out a poll that people are a survey? Do some quick votes on features they want to learn more about? We can use that to inform future meeting topics.

A

Well, I was actually just going to ask you to go back to uh what's going to be in the next release and show that off and and ask folks um which of those things they probably want to see in upcoming meetings. Sure I can do that. Give me one second and I think that's that's all.

A

We need this, this group's really communicative and we stay in touch pretty frequently so I don't know if you guys want to pull I'm quite happy to send one out, but I think I have a pretty good understanding of the things you're waiting for, um but anything here that you'd like to ask about specifically and maybe see in the future in the next coming meetings and Sebastian. You have your hand up.

A

You have a question comment.

F

uh Yeah sorry, as right as I was about to call the phone rang and I was.

F

um Before I uh I knewed it against um a couple thing, one is uh thank you for going back to these things, because what I was going to ask was, was um you know? Obviously there is a lot even though we've been following the development of tourists, you know when it all happens.

F

You know at this sort of uh um I guess status, report points and it all comes at once then, all of a sudden it becomes a lot to handle, and so I was going to ask you to you know to circulate those slides, at least so that we can get a sense of uh what these tools are and the timelines and so on and so forth, which, where we can have a little bit, maybe lonely, more cogent view, but also more coverage and feedback in terms of how the timelines interface with our our own workflow uh and also uh in what order it would make sense to uh to get more familiarized with those with those tools.

F

So I guess that's done and then and then the other question I asked was. um How do you see this I? Don't know how you know my my view of um of oil.

F

I, of course, is heavily mediated by uh my own uh involvement in it and my own Department's involvement in it and how things have been done in the past and are being done now that that we've added Natalie and Etc um and so I'm I'm wondering if you could speak to how you envision, um maybe a redistribution of tasks in terms of a workflow I know in the past we've. You know we had the authors and then we would.

F

We would work with Mark to facilitate the uh you know some of the technology aspect and then it would go to you and then it would come back to us and then you know so. um It seems like we're sort of rearranging the furniture here a little bit and uh if the question makes sense at all I.

A

Think we were asking if the.

F

Departments were where it were like this too, like I mean we we've been fortunate enough to have uh to have company competent authors, and now that Natalie is here, she certainly does a lot of the work herself, both on the content development and on the uh tool. The the authoring tools um Mark, has been heavily involved in in troubleshooting, the the tech aspect and QA, and all that stuff, uh and so I'm just wondering how that's going to evolve. uh If uh how much of our assistance you need or what uh does that make sense?

F

A

So what you're asking is how how does your workflow change with Taurus right? um We are authoring and Publishing and delivering workflows, um and it's a great question and I think they'll change uh somewhat. Definitely, but I think what will happen is there'll, be a shift to being able to do some new and better things right.

A

So uh publishing and Taurus is really easy and and push button, and do it yourself and it can you can do it at any time and you know change typos change activities whatever you need to do uh and and push those out to sections that are running, and then the instructors of the exceptions have the option to either deploy those um deploy, those those new uh publication things, those new fixes or new content or whatever um immediately or they can wait until you know, depending on how their semester is going, how that changes, the workflow is authoring is still done now.

A

You know we still have an authoring tool and Natalie's been doing a great job, I. Think of of wrangling that workflow and, like you know, understanding uh getting the right people um trained on tourists. In fact, I have a training uh that we're scheduling for for mid-march, beginning of April for some folks to get in there and start using Taurus from the languages department. And then um you know, since I don't know how much uh technology handling there would need to be like in terms of what Mark does now.

A

But what that can change to is being that this is open source and, being that, there's going to be a lot of uh new things that we're going to want to want to add tourists.

A

I can imagine it's just going to get more exciting because we're going to be able to do more Integrations uh create new things, new activities, uh all of those things that um You probably haven't been able to do very easily in the past, and so I'm excited about uh the directions that that we can go with this platform and with the content and so um yeah Norm. Did you want to add some stuff there.

C

One one way to think about it is: how would you adapt your workflow to take better advantage of uh newly freed up time from experts?

C

I think that when we think about the traditional Oli workflow, we have brilliant learning, Engineers working with amazing Educators to help to design learning experiences, and then they spend a lot of time, Translating that into very picky XML documents and start pushing files around on a server that they push out into the world, and that then we've got really thoughtful technologists who have to troubleshoot whether the XML is missing a bracket.

C

What we're hoping is that Taurus takes those ridiculous tasks that we're wasting expert time on and instead can get them back to being more thoughtful and careful and Innovative in how we build out these learning experiences more thoughts on how we analyze and look ahead to the next things, and so um you know in as much as your learning engineers and course developers shouldn't now be nothing about with XML.

C

How can you, how can you make better use of their time, and you know in the notion that Mark doesn't need to go in and figure out who missed a bracket?

C

um How can how can he be spending his time to to help to create a more robust learning experience.

F

Yes, indeed, I like it.

C

Yeah excellent good because we've invested heavily in this Vision.

F

Let's start from ground one.

C

All right, I'm gonna we will, uh we will share out these slides and um and- and you know, we're committed to taking this information getting it up on the web and keeping it updated um just uh not quite there. Yet today.

A

Okay, I think you took the side away too fast, but uh was there anything there that looked interesting to folks or that you wanted to know more about.

A

And we had some folks join late as well, so maybe maybe I can get these show them up. I, don't know Norm if you're planning on staying or.

F

You know me if you know if nobody has an opinion. I always have a couple, but.

A

F

Deals with uh uh collaboration and multi-modality, so anything with AV.

F

You know how we can it's always something that is of interest to us, because we are, um you know um looking to, especially since you know nowadays arrived we've taken a new look at at um um you know about designing designing our courses differently for for certain in the French three, but also in the the earlier level, is, is to to um to implement more sort of multi literacies based approaches, which, of course, do involve being able to not only um have student play with a variety of inputs, but also potentially have them design or and upload the varieties of outputs and Productions right, so anything from sound video images, uh infographics, etc, etc.

F

So anything anything that we can look at uh that. um You know showcases these kinds of tools in terms of learning activities and uh what kind of documents we can put in there, what the students can do with them and what kind of documents they can produce then um I'm. All for that.

F

E

Video annotate.

F

A

And yes to uh to Natalie's Point yeah, there is file upload and Taurus right now. So uh there is the ability for students to upload files of different types, and you can grade them as an instructor, um and that grade will pop the Gradebook.

F

Can they annotate videos, for example, or.

A

Candidate videos yet, but we're working on some annotation tools on testing some things out to see what would work and what what would make sense. And then we have the collaboration spaces that have already been um yeah pushed out, really cool, yeah yeah, and so you can assign a collaboration space on a page and have discussions on specific content.

A

So there's a lot in place. uh You know, we've heard we've heard you all as you've been uh as I've been collecting these uh preferences over the the few years or so that we've been developing and incorporating them in for sure.

A

What's most exciting to you guys, what's most exciting, uh share that excitement.

A

Excited about new workflows, you excited about new features. Are you excited about it being open source and the possibilities of uh development opportunities.

F

Yeah I mean I. Think increasingly, you know you know. I keep on now, I open every single class. For the past two years, I've opened with a you know, trying to to ingrain in students that learning is a team sports and that if they do it alone, they're doing it wrong.

F

um Despite all the. Despite all the statements on the academic, Integrity I'm like yeah, you need, if you, if you do it alone, you're really really doing it wrong or not. Not as well as you could be. You know, but uh increasingly also developing is going to be a team sport right.

D

F

We uh and so having the ability to work on a platform where you don't have to worry, who is on who's doing what and everybody can just you know, play at the same time potentially is particularly exciting. So that's.

A

F

um I think yeah I think I think that's anything to make it more open, collaborative and and uh seamless is good. In my book.

A

Great great to hear.

F

Again, a very selfish view.

A

Of things yeah, that's that's fine! That's what I want to hear I want to hear everybody's selfish view of things.

C

Do we have uh I think we had a demo of the soft scheduling scheduled for this meeting too many schedules in one sentence there.

A

I actually thought this conversation would take the hour, so I uh I didn't prepare the demo I apologize. uh You know if, if you guys came for the demo I'll schedule, another meeting um I.

D

Might have a I have a quick question. This is off topic, but I was just wondering if this is something that would be covered in an upcoming meeting right.

A

D

Been doing a lot of reading on a particular grant that we're working on and it's surprising, I I'm, seeing a lot about diagramming in stem, which is not the focus of our current Grant, but I've been doing a lot of exciting reading about it and I'm wondering a little bit about. I know that there's major issues with accessibility uh surrounding activities that are so visually based I know that that's an inherent problem.

D

But there is a lot of exciting research going on with the utility of student diagramming for understanding model, building and scientific understanding and I'm wondering about the capabilities for building visual diagramming students, building that within Taurus, including something as simple as filling out tables and how that will work. So that's my question tables and other diagramming capabilities.

C

um So one great question and I think I would put all of this work into a yeah into a slightly different context, right, a reminder that, when our work has been at its best, we've been doing the most interesting and uh most effective work.

C

It's when we start to cross departmental and domain boundaries and bring in colleagues from other areas and so um trying to more narrowly address these challenges of how do we build effective, engaging Graphics, intense learning, experiences that are nonetheless accessible feels like its own research project that we should be bringing in some hcii colleagues on um I think that in the medium term, I think right now we should be able to have create and have students populate tables in Taurus. Is that accurate, Aaron or my miss I know that we've got those capabilities in Echo?

C

We will eventually have them, but creating a table-based activity where each field in the table is a text box is something that we we can do now in the current system and I think we'll be already able to do in Taurus, I.

A

Believe so, yes, and we have we're more robust tables and tourists as well, so you can actually do a little more formatting than you have been able to in the past.

C

um One of the things that we're working on so when we talk about the larger tourist Community, um one of one of the uh contributors to the community are our colleagues at Arizona, State University in the etx education exploration, lab they've been our partners on the skates Grant through an earlier Department of Ed project.

C

They have built out some activities that are um intended to be more generic things: a style of activity like a diagrammer tool and like a writing tool that can be plugged into other courses, they're working right now to plug these activities in and make them available in Taurus and so I think in the short term, we will have some better diagramming tools available um over the next uh six to eight months, and it may make sense for us to arrange uh for a visit from our friends to give a demonstration of what those tools currently can do and where they're headed um I I can almost guarantee that it will do only a part of what you hope to do and what the research is inspiring you to do.

C

But that again is a good jumping off point. Let's see what the next step of capabilities are and then start thinking about what what do we want to do beyond that?

C

um I'll confess that we have been pretty heads down in trying to just make sure that Taurus can do what what we can already do in Legacy and take care of this Gates Grant um and I am I, am desperate to get to the place where we can take a breath and start daydreaming and being creative and figuring out like what's the next new stuff, but showing off uh some of the steps along that path might inspire you and start to give you a sense of where you, where you want to take this larger work.

A

Something else that I actually put in uh that I had scheduled for this meeting was to start to talk about what what we think of as a homework system and start to develop or start to get an idea of what kinds of things you all would want if we were developing something like that, so the first question is: is what do you think of when you think of homework system that might be different from what we can do in Oli now,.

G

Yeah I have something for that, so something that a lot of educators will the that are using our materials across the US and Canada. For language.

G

They'll complain to me that you know you can assign a due date for the test, but you can't assign a due date for any of the formative activities that the students are using throughout and they want to be able to do that because that's what they're doing and competing you know large textbook, publisher platforms that have ebooks and e-sams and basically online workbooks, um so being able to partition out instead of just telling students.

G

This Pages do this date and I'm going to take a look at it, then being able to actually have those dates on the student facing side is something that I think would be attractive to a lot of users.

E

Natalie, do you imagine that you would be um applying one date to many things simultaneously, because I think a lot of platforms don't have as many inline activities as we do and they're not as they're, not as disparate they're, not physically they're. You know they're not separated from each other and it I I can imagine that would be very tedious to apply dates to every every activity in an Oli course. Yeah.

G

And that's something that I don't know if y'all have have seen platforms that are um like super site from Vista Higher Learning um you're able to assign kind of a whole section at once. Like all the vocabulary, activities are part of the vocabulary activities to check off.

G

These are the date that you want students to do these formative assignments or whether they're formative or summative, or instructor graded or Auto graded um being able to check those off at once, so that with language classes, we often like our students to engage multiple times a week with the course rather than having one single due date, so that they're learning in in smaller increments and they'll be retaining language better.

G

That way um and so being able to assign multiple due dates within a module in instead of just saying everything's due this Friday at midnight is something that that seems attractive to folks.

C

Interesting I'll be interested to see how soft scheduling meets and doesn't meet that requirement, like part of what has been guiding our thinking around homework systems um has been some really aggressive feedback from uh from some colleagues in the stem domains as they look like I'm teaching, chemistry or I'm teaching calculus I need to be able to assign problem sets for people to practice. It's not the same as having your low stakes.

C

Activities I have to be able to give a score and I'd like to be able to have which problems are assigned be a little more flexible, whether that's being suggested by the system based on learning estimates or whether faculty member is really going in and making some selections.

C

um So this is on our longer term roadmap as part of the gates Grant, and we think that that might start to hit some of the things that you've just described, but not all of them. I think that that sort of notion of cycling through um I think we want to.

C

Think through how that plays out and I, think that, once once you know, you start to see what some of the specs are there. You can start to think about. How would I want to deploy this in the language courses and how does it? uh How? How is it not meet? My needs.

A

um Do any of those things resonate with others? Do do others think okay Don have an ability for instructors to inject their own problems into assignments.

A

Yeah! That's a that's an interesting.

B

Yeah like um or to pick which 10 out of a set of 20 they want to give to their students or something like that. It's something we've been thinking. Maybe we could do it ourselves in the lab, but if there was a more General solution, that would be fantastic too.

E

Great would would those questions need to be pre-existing so that they are skill, tagged mm-hmm right, I mean we.

B

Have a journal tagging stuff yet because that's a very complicated question in the lab that we've never had time to address, but we've had both ideas, both authoring by instructors of their own problems on the Fly, and you know having our own pools or Banks of questions that, were you know, pre-made, pre-tested and all that stuff for instructors to choose from or possibly even um to be able to like randomize what students get so that for for our problems. We can have it like exactly the same problem, but you change out what letters are used.

B

So it looks different and that might um help address inappropriate collaboration on assignments.

B

Answer sharing like because then students would have to think. Is this actually the same thing and that's teaching them something? So they'd still be able to cheat from other people's answers, but at least they'd have to think about it in the process. So yeah.

H

That's interesting, I think that that last use case I think could be addressed by the feature in the platform. It's a no! It's an author facing feature of uh Dynamic questions. So I can I can author a question that essentially contains in the question stem uh in the feedback and the correct choices variables that at runtime can be evaluated in and supplied by the system. So the idea is I can construct a single question that might ultimately show up to the student in 100 different forms.

H

uh So that's kind of giving additional practice, but also addressing that need I. Think that you were pointing out yeah.

B

That that sounds cool if something like that were available for the lab.

B

That would be really awesome like if we could specify like a matrix or something of problems like here's, the simple stuff once they get those you know without having to undo and redo and reset a lot of times once they're, showing Mastery on the simple problems, um progress to intermediate and once they get those progressed, but just by fetching them out in like I, don't know how to do that, but I want to be able to do that so and adding the layer of the lab. That's like not Noli system.

B

It just plays nicely with it most of the time um yeah, so something that any kind of activity could fetch stuff that make any sense.

C

I think we need to explore so I I think we should do two things. One is, um you know, maybe set up some time to show you what the current Dynamic question capability.

B

C

About because I don't know.

C

To make any notion of a homework system viable right, we need to be able to take one question and let it generate lots and lots of different questions just to give students additional opportunities for for Learning and for practice.

C

um How and that might engage with the lab or with other super activities, is I, think a bigger question, but um certainly one. We should talk about.

A

C

A

Have that meeting set up.

B

A

Weeks, where I'll make sure I demo, that specifically for you.

B

That would be great.

B

A

You you're welcome.

C

So Aaron I will confess I'm super excited about, saw, scheduling and I wonder if we could let Darren show it off just.

E

Because I have been talking, it.

C

Up so, if Darren feels like he's in a spot where you can show it off, that might be cool that'd.

D

Be great that would be awesome. I just wanted to like uh put out the question that I would like to look. I would like to learn more about the problem solving as well, because I'm interested in having worked examples be a problem type not just solving for the problems, especially because so much learning happens with worked examples. um So I would just put that out there as something I'm interested.

A

Great and you're, not the only one, so yeah. Let's talk more about that and see how that might work. um I would definitely love to talk to you more about that Lauren. So I'll reach out.

H

So I can give a very brief demo of this scheduling feature uh with the caveat that this is completely unrehearsed, uh so I have no idea which direction this will actually go. uh So let me uh share my screen here.

H

This is also being done on our development server, which could just go away at any moment as soon as we land code, the system automatically redeploys uh but I think we should be safe. So uh as an instructor right, I see this as the kind of the manage the course section overview. There's now a new option that used to say gating and scheduling, is now rebranded Advanced getting and scheduling and there's a new scheduling option. So I can go into that interface and this course section has a specific start and end date associated with it.

H

So I see on the top portion here that first row, The Columns of this table represent the individual weeks that are present in the over the duration of the course given the the start and the end date. So for this particular course section there are maybe a dozen or so top level units uh and I can click reset timeline to actually have the system lay out a soft schedule for all of the course material.

H

It's giving me the opportunity to select which dates I want to opt into scheduling against and I might want to align that with actually perhaps the days that I'm actually meeting in class. Right so say it's a Monday, Wednesday, Friday and so clicking OK lays out those units across that timeline. I can drill down then into one particular unit to see the modules below there so now, I, see right. Composition of substances and solutions. Has these various sub modules that are laid out accordingly, uh underneath that that unit now I can.

H

This is what the system laid out for me by default right, according to it's kind of uh scheduling, algorithm, but I can change that right if I, if I want to change the order of two two units, because that's just how I teach it right, I can just simply grab that and slide it over to the right and grab one and slide it over the left right and it moves everything kind of beneath it uh automatically you see when I did that it it put a little lock icon next to those two items that I manually adjusted right so now, they're kind of fixed in place uh until I would, until I would undo that.

H

So, if I uh I undid that one and now well, it's not a really great demo at the top level. But if I move that back and say, I move this one here that now has the lock icon and that's in place. I can continue to move the parent container the unit and reposition it, but since I manually adjusted that one module that stays fixed in place until I would unclick it.

H

And now it's going to move and reschedule uh with the rest of its uh its siblings, so I can drill down to the point where I'm seeing pages in the course right. That's what's indicated by this kind of block, page icon, and so it's laying out then those pages according to the days that I've specified are available to it. And so you can see the default schedule, and this was this is what gives its uh the it the term.

H

A soft schedule is that it is suggesting to the students that they should read this particular Page by this particular date. You have other choices where you can actually well. It's actually cutting off the drop down. uh I can say that this is actually something we're going to talk about in class right.

H

So it's gives perhaps a different level of importance for that student to see when they, uh because all this will feed into a student oriented view where, when they log into their course, section they're going to see essentially a calendar of what's up next for them.

H

So if they see uh in two days we're going to talk about this, uh the topics in this page on this day in class uh that may motivate them to read that page uh before uh that class, the final option is, do buy, and so that's actually where this now Bridges back into the existing feature of what we call a hard schedule. So I can actually say this page I'm, not just suggesting you do it by this certain date.

H

You have to do it by this certain date and now a time if you don't uh work on that page and submit an attempt, you will not be able to access it after that time, so that actually uh unifies kind of our previous scheduling, uh interface and feature into this single uh user interface. For laying out the soft schedule for all of the material in your course, but also then having the ability to specify probably right for your for your graded pages in the course when there is a hard schedule.

H

That's defined right when the student has to submit an attempt by because after that date and time, they won't be able to uh to access and submit additional attempts.

H

um So that's that's, I, think kind of the gist of it and it took us right up to 130.

A

I'm just gonna say it took us right to time thanks Darren, so much for showing that.

C

Yeah super cool and I think anybody that has tried to uh who not tried but has suffered through the Legacy scheduling environment. um There's there's a lot here that should make life easier super excited about it.

A

Thanks Sebastian well, that brings us to time thanks everybody for joining us. If you want to have more of a look of the soft scheduling, feature just reach out and ask me I'm happy to give a demo on this or anything else as you need it, and uh definitely happy that you all joined us and don't uh and look for joining us again next month.

C

Awesome thanks Natalie.

G

C

Have a great weekend have.

A

A great weekend, everyone thank you, take care, bye.