Office of the University Registrar

A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education illustrates that the open-source approach to developing software to help manage universities is gaining legitimacy. Released earlier this week on its website, The Chronicle’s article “Business Software, Built by Colleges for Colleges, Challenges Commercial Giants” outlines how the Kuali Foundation’s grassroots efforts are beginning to challenge “Big Software.” (That term is a reference to traditional, fee-based software and consultation companies.)

The article focuses on Kuali Coeus, the grant-management component of the Kuali software suite, but also mentions Kuali Student (KS). The UW contributes to the development of KS and will consider using it in the future. That this open-source initiative is being discussed in The Chronicle as a legitimate contender to expensive, proprietary systems is an important part of Kuali’s evolution.

See other posts about Kuali on this blog.

The November edition of Highlights, the newsletter published by the Office of Information Management (OIM), recaps many important projects. Though they all originate with OIM, some of these projects are joint efforts with other UW departments, including the Office of the University Registrar (OUR), UW Technology, and UW Marketing.

The one-page newsletter is available at OIM’s website and additional information about projects the OUR played a part in are linked to below. Each post is grouped by the section of Highlights in which the project is mentioned.

Information for Decision Making

• “New UW iPhone application allows students and faculty to view and search course information online.” – Carry the UW in your hand.
• “Partnering with the UW community to prioritize Web Services” – Course Catalog Search, at your (web) service and 

Replace the Base

• “Kuali projects make major move forward” – Kuali Rice Officially Released

The term “web services” has been used frequently on this blog when discussing new tools for the University community. Some examples include m.UW, the UW’s iPhone app; an improved course catalog search; and Kuali, the next-generation student software initiative. With the fourth version of the Student Web Services (SWS) open and available for use, it’s time that the Office of the University Registrar officially invite interested developers (and their managers!) to dive and start creating new, useful tools.

Okay, but how do I start?

That’s a good question. Here are the ingredients necessary to get a SWS project off the ground:

1. Join the community – The UW’s web services community is strong, and if you’re going to develop something using SWS you should get to know it. Read On the ROA, the UW’s web services blog; review ideas from other developers at UserVoice; and stop by at a Web Services Discussion Group meeting. Sign up on the “appdev@u” mailing list to be notified of meeting dates and locations.
2. Identify a need – Have you wished there was a site that did X? Are your students asking for Y? Want to find a better way to display Z? Once you’ve identified something to build, fix, or improve upon, you can plan a web site, iPhone application—or something else—to accomplish it using the data available to you (see number 3).
3. Research the services at your disposal – The Web Services Registry is a maintained list of UW web services, including a description and links to documentation and a contact person. You can also submit your own UW-centric web service to the registry. But don’t limit your idea to UW-specific data; maybe there’s another dataset that you could mash up it up with?
4. Build it – Web services really shine when it comes to accessing data. If you’re using public information you can simply access the service you want and start using the data returned. And it’s easy to do so regardless of your preferred language: PHP, Python, .NET, Ruby on Rails, etc. There’s a PHP class already available to simplify things even further; a .NET version is in the works.

What about an example?

Part of the reason for inviting the community to built tools with SWS is the “serendipity” factor. With pubicly-available data and a whole community of smart people, the sky’s the limit on what sort of useful tools might emerge.

An example is the recent improvements to the University’s course catalog search. A developer in the Office of the University Registrar saw the data available, knew of the issues with the current Google-based search, and built a prototype replacement in just a few days. A presentation of this tool’s development was recently given at the Office of Information Management’s Community Forum (the developer’s slides are available for download).

So go ahead: wow your students and the University as a whole with your creation. Show us the tool we didn’t know we couldn’t live without.

This post is an update to a previous entry, available here: Carry the UW in your hand.

Last week the UW released a version of its mobile application, m.UW, for the Blackberry smartphone platform. m.UW has been available on the iPhone since Sept. The application was introduced at Educause, a major conference focusing on information technology in education, to a fair bit of fanfare. Because the UW is the first university to release a mobile application on the Blackberry platform, the release has garnered attention from local media, including KOMO news and the Seattle PI.

Blackberry users can download the m.UW for their devices at the UW’s mobile website.

This post is an update to a previous entry, available here: Carry the UW in your hand.

The University’s iPhone application, m.UW, has been downloaded and used many hundreds of students. But what about those on campus without Apple’s high-tech phone or its cousin, the iPod Touch?

A version of m.UW is being developed now for another popular smartphone platform, RIM’s Blackberry. (Specific information regarding its release will be posted when available.) More importantly, the content in m.UW can be accessed by any mobile device simply by viewing this web address: m.uw.edu from a mobile web browser.

Last month saw two major Kuali milestones. First, the Kuali software project celebrated its fifth birthday August 30. Second, the first official version of Kuali Rice (KR) was introduced; the “community-source” software graduated from beta status with its 1.0 release.

According to its website (revamped for this new release), KR “provides an enterprise-class middleware suite of integrated products that allows for applications to be built in an agile fashion.” To describe it with a cooking metaphor, it’s the egg in cookie dough that helps bind everything together. KR includes modules for managing user identities and for transmitting messages among other components of the Kuali software suite, such as the financial package KFS and Kuali Student.

The UW is playing a significant role in the development of Kuali Student and Kuali Rice systems, with a member of the Office of the University Registrar serving on the team developing Kuali Student. We’ve detailed Kuali’s progress on this blog in order to keep the UW community abreast of a set of software tools that may power our own information systems some day.

This post is an update to a previous entry, available here: Carry the UW in your hand.

m.UW, the iPhone app created for the University community and named by student Shane Bunker, officially launched yesterday. It is available for free download at the iTunes store.

You can learn more about m.UW at the University’s mobile website, including a preview of its features if you don’t have an iPhone or iPod Touch.

Today the Office of the University Registrar (OUR) introduces an improved way to search the UW’s online course catalog. This improved search functionality, available from the Course Catalog website, leverages the recently-released version 4 of the UW’s Student Web Services (SWS).  We encourage the entire UW community to try it and offer their feedback so the OUR can improve upon it.

What’s the search like now

Currently, the course catalog search uses a Google custom search box to find and display pages that contain the entered keywords. While this is certainly effective, it’s not optimal when you’re looking for something specific. Suppose you’re looking for the description for Psychology 207, the Psychology of Peace. With the current Google-based search the top result takes you to the Psychology page, but you still must locate Psych 207 on that page.

How is the improved search better?

The improved search gets results directly from the SWS rather than a set of regular HTML pages. (The SWS will also power the forthcoming m.UW iPhone application). This brings a number of benefits, including:

• Course-specific results – easily see all the details of the matching courses, from description to credits.
• Optional search by term – find the perfect class for next spring by narrowing your search to a specific quarter, if desired.
• Instant updates – updates made to the course data are immediately available.

What does “beta” mean?

The label “beta” indicates the improved search is not ready to replace the existing course catalog search. Some features are not yet available, such as Instructor Course Descriptions. Nor does the improved search page yet meet full accessibility guidelines. As additional functionality is added to the SWS, the course catalog search will improve. And the OUR would like to know what you think, too! We strongly encourage your feedback so we know what additional features to work on first.

Finally, the OUR would like to acknowledge the incredible efforts put forth by the Office of Information Management, UW Technology, and members of this office to bring course information to the SWS. The improved search and other innovations to improve the UW experience wouldn’t be possible without their work.

UPDATE: After 10 days of use and more than 2200 unique visitors, version 1.1 has been posted. Thanks to insightful feedback from over 90 people, this update includes a few important bug fixes and clarifies some of the language on the page. Much of the feedback included feature requests (primarily, the ability to search course descriptions, not just titles). More improvements are on the way!

This post is an update to a previous entry, available here: Carry the UW in your hand.

In late July, a post appeared on this blog about the contest to name the upcoming UW iPhone application. Well, the choice has been made and the winning entry—provided by Shane Bunker, a senior in Informatics—is m.UW. Congratulations to Shane, and look for further updates when m.UW becomes available.

Last month, a useful and popular service (it’s the second most-visited page) on the Office of the University Registrar’s site, enrollment verification, got a little easier to use. The UW partners with the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) to allow students to view their enrollment information provided to student loan lenders, auto insurance, and other service providers who provide discounts for enrolled students. Viewing that information now requires only a single log-in.

Until mid-July, students were required to verify themselves to the NSC by entering their full name, date of birth, and social security number. That step seemed redundant because students had to first log in with their UW NetID to even be able to access the NSC log-in page. Thanks to the efforts of the Student Self Service team, the two processes now share authentication information. The time-saving measure is currently being rolled out and should be available for all students by autumn quarter.

On the surface, eliminating one redundant log-in procedure may not seem like a big victory. But in addition to saving a minute or two for each user (which can add up!), this improvement is a sign of bigger things to come. The term “federated identity management” describes the movement to simplify access to online services by sharing identity information. What does all that really mean? Potentially, it could render obsolete many of the accounts you must create on various online services. Instead, a trusted system would verify that you are who you say you are through a log-in process. Then you could access accounts at online services that work with the trusted system—without needing to log in again.

You’ll be hearing more about this topic in the months to come. The UW is one of over a hundred member organizations of the InCommon Federation, a group providing identity-management services.