2010 April | Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education

SGHE Summit 2010 – Conference Overview

conference, higher education, strategic planning 1 Response »

Apr 272010

I attended the SunGard Higher Education Executive Summit and Summit conferences in early April 2009. This was the first time I attended Executive Summit and I found it to be highly valuable. There were about 250 senior Higher Education leaders from around the world in attendance. We were presented with roadmaps and strategic directions by senior SunGard HE leadership.

It has been one year since Ron Lang started as CEO and the transformation and direction of the company has moved to be more proactive and value focused. This is great for us as SGHE clients. There are many more changes coming and I am confident we have a good partner in SGHE.

Below are links to my notes from the Summit presentations that I attended:

There were plenty of sessions and no one person can cover them all. I am fortunate to have met key people in SGHE and just as importantly, connecting and reconnecting with my higher education peers and colleagues.

SGHE Summit – Project Horizon Technical Overview

conference, enterprise architecture 1 Response »

Apr 272010

SGHE Summit – Project Horizon Technical Overview – Bob Rullo (@bobrullo)

* power in Moscone West went out just as Bob started his talk. He did a great job working through his presentation with no slides! Great job, Bob!

SGHE Summit – Project Horizon Technical Overview

- needs Oracle 11gR1 database, Oracle Weblogics App Server, Java 6, Grails 1.1
- moving from Banner INB forms to new Horizon (Aurora UI) architecture
- need to migrate CRUD and transaction validation, field level validation (UI centric validation)

Grails Architecture
- a controller handles requests and talks to services to provide a response (data back to the user)
- blocks and fields map to the domain model like a row in a relational table
- field level validation moves to the view as do the canvases and windows – AJAX based

- leveraging automation techniques – by gathering metadata in the Banner Db and create a domain object
- can generate 80 to 90% of the domain models with these tools

- services are also being generated as well as the UI – where are fields located and how do we navigate between them

- we will be allowed access to these automation tools for our custom code and modifications
- look at providing us preview releases to get familiar on how things work and provide feedback to SGHE

- test early and often approach – huge increase in unit tests 100 to over 1000 = better quality
- our people need to learn GRAILS, java, groovy skills as well as spring and hibernate, still using PL/SQL apis
** SGHE please provide us a VM spec for a sample sandbox application

Resource Oriented Architecture – RESTful architecture allows us to extend our Open Digital Campus

More sessions …IT Lounge on Tuesday at 4pm

SGHE Summit – Plenary The Global Campus – Higher Education goes International

higher education 1 Response »

Apr 272010

SGHE Summit – Plenary The Global Campus – Higher Education goes International

IAU - International Association of Universities

New: Internationalizations Strategies Advisory Service (ISAS)

Key Concepts

Diversity – national (regional) and institutional, contexts, resources, goals/rationales
Shared Definition of internationalizations prevails – a multidimentional and comprehensive process to introduce international and intercultural dimensions into learning, research, services and deliver of higher education
Multiplicity of implementation approaches

Principles

proactive effort
cooperation and partnerships among equals
ethical behaviour, mutual respect and shared benefits
priority to academic rationales and to models that safeguard or improve quality and accessibility
promotion of geographically balanced and contextually relevant approaches by identifying and minimizing risks

3rd IAU Global Survey

Methodology

an international task force
online questionnaire in 5 languages
continuity of questions from 2003 and 2005

n=745 – majority of responses from Europe 44%

Why Internationalize?

improve student preparedness for international studies
internationalize curriculum
enhance international profile
Africa and Middle East reason strengthen research and knowledge capacity
Europe reason increase profile

Increase in importance in 3 years of internationalization up by 80%

Only 67% of institutions had a policy for internationalization, 72% have a budget attached, but monitoring frameworks (QA) down to 48%

Bologna Process – Europe striving to be the most attractive higher education location for international students but Africa, Latin America and the Middle East see themselves as the most important source of international students

Barriers – External Obstacles

difficulties of recognition for credits and courses
language barrier
Visa restrictions also limit options
#1 obstacle – funding and cost to the student

Conclusions Read more...

primary focus is on student’s preparedness
congruence between rationales and expected benefits but regional differences
student mobility opportunities are important but the impact is different
international research collaboration is important
growth of importance of internationalization as a policy area with budgets being allocated
linkage between prestige and internationalization but has related risks by limiting collaboration
disaggregation of data and regional analysis shows divergence on many aspects
- Middle East and Africa are challenging areas because they are only focusing on their own region
- Europe is the most popular region
- funding is the most important obstacle
- problems of credit and course recognition persist
Key Challenges
- finding funds = main barrier to increased HEI internationalization (can the private sector step up as employers)
- overcoming visa restrictions and process bureaucracy for student and faculty
- pursing efforts to ease recognition of credits and credentials
- respecting different interest of partners