IUSM Educational Technology

On Thursday, July 2nd, Angel was upgraded to the newest version and migrated to new hardware. To prepare for the upgrade, I used VMWare to configure a server that replicated our 7.3 installation, and ran the upgrade on that server 3 times to become aware of any problems that might crop up. The upgrade was complicated by the fact that I was not only upgrading the system, but migrating to new hardware and changing the DNS name of the server. The old address was daly.medicine.iu.edu, which people had trouble remembering. It is now angel.medicine.iu.edu which is probably what people would guess it to be if they did not know for sure. Additionally, Angel has been configured since the beginning her to use a virtual directory (/med), which I did not replicate since it complicates administration of the system and is sometimes unsupported by Angel Learning. ePortfolio was upgraded as well, but I did not run this upgrade until the following Monday. The URL for ePort changed as well, becoming eportfolio.medicine.iu.edu. ePort’s URL change is not as dramatic, since you get to ePortfolio through Angel. There are some historical portfolios on the system which will not be available from their previous public url, but all of these are dormant. ePortfolio is not heavily used here at IUSM, although the concept of a portfolio system is attractive to a number of faculty.

On July 2, I came in around 4:30am to begin the process of migrating to a new server and upgrading Angel. The process went well and was completed at around 6:20am. I spent the remainder of the day cleaning up broken URLs and testing functionality of high profile courses. I also brought up a virtual server which could capture anyone coming to daly.medicine.iu.edu, and present a page with the new URL.

The change that impacts our Angel course editors the most is the deprecation of quizzes. All the quizzes in our Angel system have now been converted to Assessments, which have more features but a different interface for creating and editing. A close second for the biggest change is the way that support for IE 6 has pretty much fallen off the cliff. Angel 7.3 did not support IE 6, but it worked most of the time. Angel 7.4 has definitely left IE 6 behind. For some IUSM faculty, installing IE 7 is not an option because they don’t have administrator rights on their computer, and if they did, the Clarian apps have to use IE 6. The option for these faculty is Firefox which works fine with Angel, but they have to find their LSP and get Firefox installed. Sometimes they do not know who supports their PC and don’t want to mess with opening a support ticket to get a new browser, so this issue is tough in this environment.

The change for Angel admins is the move towards role-based access rights. After a day or so of reviewing the way that rights are granted now, this will not a problem for us to support. In the past, faculty and staff were bulk loaded into Angel with the default role of “student”. Due to the new way of granting rights based on roles, this has prompted some support calls but the fix is easy. We just have to change the user’s role from student to faculty or staff. Also different is the way that rights are granted to the historical “system editor”, but I created roles which duplicate the functionality that these people had in 7.3.

After a couple weeks, I discovered that we had been bitten by a bug which caused migrated assessements to lose the answers that were input into the original quiz. You can still see who took the test, and what their grade was but this didn’t help much for survey type responses where the answer was critical. However, my upgrade plan mitigated the risk of this type of problem by retaining the last-moment instance of the 7.3 install. For people that need the historical data, I have an instance of 7.3 as it existed on July 2nd, and I grant people a logon to use that version of Angel to retrieve survey or quiz results. Any assessments taken after 7/2 on the new system are available normally.

Angel 7.4 has been running for 2.5 weeks as of this post, and although not without problems, the upgrade has had less impact on day to day operations than has previous upgrades.

Each of these devices will work with CERTTS for the most part, but there is an issue with the signature box used to get experience signed off. You actually have to sign the box above where the box appears to get the signature to work.

The best thing to do if you want to use one of these devices is to test this for yourself so you will see how it works. Sign a couple of encounters for yourself, and look at the results in Angel. You can delete them once you are done testing from the “view all of my encounters” link in the clerkship reports. It’s not hard to work around, but unfortunately you will have to let the person who is signing know about the quirk each time you get an encounter signed.

I am working with Joseph Salfity, an MS 3, to keep informed about the prospect of using the Palm Pre with CERTTS. We were able to test this today for the first time. The short answer is no, it doesn’t work with CERTTS - at least for now. The problem seems to be that the emulator (Classic from MotionApps) does not recognize the network that the Pre is connected to. This means that the clerkship forms cannot be downloaded, and if they were downloaded there would be no way to sync them with Angel. The “Forms” program used for recording skills actually runs, but it is useless with no way to connect to the server to get the actual clerkship forms.

Since the Palm Pre is a new device, and the “Classic” program is in version 1.0, it’s very likely that this problem will be solved in the future. Thanks to Mr. Salfity, I’ll be testing this with each new release or update of the Classic emulator.

For those that want to purchase a Palm Pre, I am suggesting that they get a cheap or used PDA that will support the clerkship forms to get them through the time period where CERTTS does not work with the Pre. Please note, the possibility exists that the Pre might never work correctly with CERTTS but I remain optimistic and will keep checking.

Update 6/17/2009 - I contacted Pendragon Forms today and received note that they have updated their S-Link program to work under Classic on the Palm Pre. S-link is the portion of the Forms 5.1 program that connects to the server. A small but significant problem in Classic is keeping Pendragon Software from releasing the update. Apparently, the Classic application does not save state when it is closed (when the Classic card is whisked away) and also does not allow Pendragon Forms to close. Because of this, the Forms database loses any updates. In a nutshell, when you close Classic you lose the data that has been entered on the Forms.

Pendragon Forms is in contact with MotionApps on this issue. I am fairly optimistic now that this will be fixed with an update to the Classic app and that CERTTS will work soon on the Pre.

ANGEL community at the House of Blues in Chicago

I was in Chicago on Thursday and Friday for the 6th and final AUC. It was interesting timing since the acquisition of ANGEL Learning by Blackboard had been finalized earlier that week. I have attended all of the ANGEL conferences, presented at one, maintained the web and registration pages for two of the conferences, and served on the planning committee for the second conference in Indianapolis.

I have a pretty good perspective on the establishment and growth of ANGEL, albeit somewhat of an outsiders view. IUSM was an early adopter of ANGEL, back in the days when Dave Mills, one of the founders, would visit our site in person to troubleshoot and market new features of ANGEL. These were also the days when a support call might end up being answered with a code snippet that could be used to modify an ASP file that had a bug or needed more functionality.

From that point, in the space of around 8 years, the company grew and was purchased for $95 million. ANGEL Learning had just been voted earlier in the month as one of the best companies to work for in Indiana, and it always showed in the attitude and motivation of ANGEL Learning employees. I don’t believe there was any shortage of people who wanted to join the organization. At the customer appreciation event at the House of Blues, I had a chance to talk to a few employees, as many of us did. Most of them were just coming to terms with the shock of learning their company had been purchased, and wondering if they would ever find such a wonderful environment in which to work in their continuing careers.

Beyond the personal stories, I went to the conference to learn about the future of the product and what would change in the coming year. IUSM’s contract with ANGEL lasts one more year, so in 6-9 months I will need to be very informed about alternatives in case a choice needs to be made. ANGEL 7.4 is out now, and I will be upgrading our system this summer. This version seems like it would provide for our needs for at least two years, and the CEO of Blackboard tried to assure the ANGEL community that pricing would remain consistent for the forseeable future.

Michael Chasen, CEO of Blackboard, made himself very available during the conference. He even posted his email and office phone and invited people to contact him. It felt to me that he was on a marketing mission the entire time. I don’t mean this in a negative way, he really had to try and assure the ANGEL community that important lessons had been learned from mistakes made in the past, especially in the area of user support. The feeling I went away with was that the community is optimistic and would like the ANGEL product to continue the established tradition of innovation and customer oriented development, but we don’t completely believe the hype coming from executives.

One of the toughest questions I saw the CEO face was on the subject of corporate culture. Someone expressed concern that the LMS they used was now owned by a company whose strategy of growth seems to be acquisition and litigation. The question was answered in a politely defensive manner, explaining why previous acquisitions had been made and admitting historical mistakes. Along with this explanation, I sensed that the CEO defended his actions by proclaiming that everything the company has done was with the best interests of the educational community in mind. Believing this was a stretch for me, knowing the corporate culture that seems to pervade today.

In all, my knowledge of the event is increased but my strategy has not changed. I am researching LMS offerings so that I can be an informed consultant for the choice that IUSM makes for the future, whatever that choice may be.

In the late afternoon of May 6th, I learned along with everyone else that Blackboard was planning to acquire ANGEL Learning. I immediately began to think about the future of the ANGEL LMS at IUSM. Others around the country were having the same thoughts, and the ANGEL-L listserv lit up with questions and concerns for the future. Most were not optimistic, especially in areas of pricing and support. Here at IUSM, we have 2 years left on our ANGEL license, so I don’t expect that changes in our system will be significant for some time. Still, any migration to a new system would be a big change for our faculty, so I need to be completely informed about competing products.

Sakai is a logical first step in the discovery process. It already powers Oncourse, which is used by the IUPUI campus. It doesn’t have the flexibility of ANGEL but I need to find out exactly what that means for our environment. I requested an Oncourse test account this week, and am working through recreating an IUSM course on Oncourse for demonstration. I don’t expect that IUSM would choose to use Oncourse, we would probably maintain our own installation of Sakai. Granted, a lot may change in the next two years that I will need to be ready for.

Another interesting product is Epsilen, and I am somewhat familiar with this product since I maintain an electronic portfolio using this tool. Epsilen is hosted, so this would offload all of the system administration and we would concentrate on course curriculum, development and support of faculty. Similar to Oncourse, I have created a test course in Epsilen so that we will have something that can be demonstrated real time.

Later this week is the ANGEL user conference, and Blackboard representatives will be there. A future roadmap for the ANGEL LMS will almost certainly be discussed, although at this point I would tend to believe that it will be rooted in marketing. I’m very curious to see how this will play out - many institutions that use ANGEL came from Blackboard and have no interest in returning. The mailing list is teaming with stories of how support from Blackboard fell off the cliff when WebCT was acquired by Blackboard, so Blackboard’s poor track record is on full display in that forum at least. As of now, this list has 1,172 subscribers.

I met with Megan Palmer and Jon Eynon today from the Dean’s office. They were interested in getting an overview of how ANGEL is used at IUSM and what can be done to get teaching faculty to increase their knowledge and use of technology in their courses. Megan is organizing an instructional technology expo for faculty to come and get some ideas about how to use technology as a learning tool. I will be there to demonstrate ANGEL and to cooperate on informal training.

Today I jumped around inside Angel courses a bit, showed them what students see when they use Angel and talked about how Angel has become a portal to most resources available for students. Jon was interested to know that HTML content can be developed and zipped up for easy importing into Angel. I showed them the Anesthesia cases, which are admittedly a bit dated now, but a good example of how HTML content that spans multiple pages can be brought into Angel.

Megan would like to come to a consensus about what workstation tools faculty will need to develop effective online courses, and pass that to ISTM as a standard “Angel build”. That way, faculty could request this and their PCs would then have what is needed, and could be supported in a standard way. We also discussed how Angel courses need to have some minimum standards, such as a syllabus and best practices for uploading and displaying course content.

At the IUSM, we do not have any faculty teaching and development staff, although in the past year some library faculty have become more proficient in ANGEL and are doing some of this. Because of this, Angel usage is across the board. Some faculty use Angel to post a course schedule only, some as a document repository, and still others use many more functions such as discussion forums and interactive content. The push to use Angel has not come from the School since MECA lost Dianne Wyman a number of years back. For myself, as the Angel administator and go-to Angel person, I certainly have the skills to do this but not the time within my current role. I indicated in the meeting today that I was glad to see an effort towards instructional technology from the school level, and would be glad to work together with others to raise the awareness of what faculty can do with technology that is available right now.

I’ve been fortunate to meet a couple of doctors from Kenya who are visiting through the Moi partnership with Indiana University. Dr. Okoth, whom I know as Biko, comes into our office quite frequently. He became friends with Wilfredo and is interested in PDAs because he believes that this technology would help improve patient care in Kenya. The Kenyan doctors want to test the effectiveness of UpToDate, a medical reference tool, at Moi hospital. This will cost around $300 per device to license. I met recently with Biko, Dr. Faiz Rehmani and Dr. Deb Litzelman to try and make this project work.

My role in the project is to identify affordable hardware and to preload the devices with a survey and data collection method that will help determine the usefulness of the PDAs for the registrars in Kenya. Registrars are somewhat like Residents here in the States if I understand correctly.

I contacted a vendor last week who sells refurbished Palm TX hardware, and I recommended we order 10 of these at a cost of $145 each. The budget for entire project is $5000, so it was good to get capable PDAs cheaply so that money will be available for software licensing. I hoped that the devices had new batteries installed, but the salesperson was not able to tell me this fact. She did assure me that the devices were in excellent condition, and came with a short warranty period. I told the group that if we needed to purchase new batteries it would only cost us around $20 each, and I can replace them. It’s worth the small risk in order to stay within the budget. In this particular case, UpToDate is the cost we’re working around.

This is actually pretty easy, but the information is so hard to find I though I would post it. One of our departments was complaining that a LaserJet 8150N printer they use would output gibberish when printing PDF files with more than a few images. Printer driver updates on the workstations did not help. All of the stations do IP printing directly to the printer. While looking into possibly more memory for the printer, I found that the printer was running firmware from 2001. The latest from the HP site was 2004, so I needed to try the update.

Of course, I’m a mac guy but the process seemed easier from Windows so I did all of this in a VMWare XP Pro session. Here were the steps:

1. grab the updated firmware from hp, mine was lj8150fw_MB7.119.rfu
2. Install the printer locally as a TCP/IP and make sure that works
3. create a share for the printer (right click, sharing, etc)
4. in a command prompt, capture the lpt1 port to the share which is: “net use lpt1 \\local-computer-name\share-name”
5. copy the firmware file to lpt1 “copy /b lj8150fw_MB7.119.rfu lpt1″

The file will copy quickly. Go to the printer, you should see messages on the display to the effect of “updating firmware”.

If you prefer, you can delete the lpt1 capture using “net use lpt1 /delete”