academica: a 21st-century enterprise social portal for education communities (287317044)

8/20/2019 Academica: A 21st-Century Enterprise Social Portal for Education Communities (287317044)

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Academica-ESP: A 21st Century Enterprise Social Por

for Education Communities

Daren Hubbard, Interim CIO, Wayne State University ● Joseph Sawasky, President and CEO, Me



Topics for Today

Introduction of partner organizations

Legacy portals in higher education

Reimagining the campus portal

What is Academica?

Rollout of Academica at Wayne State and early experiences

Technology framework

Academica and a nascent digital community

The future and distribution models

Demonstration



Wayne State University

• Located in Detroit, Michigan

• Largest single-campus medical school in U.S.

• ~28,000 students



Merit Network

• Michigan’s research & education network,since 1966

• Located in Ann Arbor, Michigan• Stand-alone non-profit 501(c)(3)

• Connects all of Michigan’s publicuniversities and >300 other organizationsserving society in the state

•High-performance networking, cybersecurity services, digital communitybuilding, above-the-net services

• Recent completion of 2 federally-fundedfiber expansion projects



Why Wayne State and Merit?

Strong partnership that has existed since 1966

Wayne State - great at technology innovation and serving complex campus needs

Merit - great at connecting organizations and building community

Merit as above-the-net service provider

Shared desire to enhance individual organizations’ portal experience

Shared desire to position willing organizations to participate in a larger digital community



Legacy portals in higher education

Most heavily-accessed enterprise application

Mostly used for single sign-on to other systems

Used to push one-way communications to campus constituents without re

personalization and content relevance

Not typically used to improve student engagement and retention

Not typically used to help sustain alumni relationships

Challenges scaling to meet demand spikes

Not always mobile-friendly



Reimagining the campus portal with Academica-ESP

Serve as your campus community’s secure internal

social network, using Facebook and Twitter-like

features – but more private and secure!

Work on mobile devices and tablets, as well as

traditional web browsers

Increase student, faculty and staff collaboration by

being the digital forum people want to use…a place

where everyone has a voice

Automatically personalize the user interface forevery individual, remembering how they prefer to

work

Automatically organize course collaboration groups

for faculty and students

Improve: incoming student interactio

retention and alumni engagement

Cut through email spam clutter and pmessages that are relevant to each in

Provide Google-like search features

Scale in the cloud in real-time to mee

spikes and simultaneously lower annu

expenses



Enterprise single sign-on portal

Social network, private and secu

Cloud infrastructure

= Academica-ESP

What is Academica-ESP?



A new place for conversation on campus

WSU envisioned a new way to foster internal

communication, using a new tool that leveraged familiar

concepts

Created streams for distinct cohorts

Course-based (faculty and student)

Student Orientation

Work Groups



A new place for conversation

Immediate increase in student colla

Student-to-student conversations

dynamic

Interactions that are unique to Ac

taking place with great frequency



A new place for conversation on campus

Departmental campus communicators have

embraced the tool

Interactive real-time feedback

Greater opportunities for dialog



Adoption during voluntary phase



Technology framework

Running in the Amazon AWS cloud

Application auto-scales resources

– pay for what you use

Security features

• All users authenticated

• All messages encrypted



Academica-ESP and a nascent digital community

Replaced their enterprise portal with it

Very active and growing private social community – students, faculty and s

Creating new communications paradigm on campus

Rolling it out for its statewide member portal

Institutional liaisons

Preparing to make it available to all state member institutions’ IT profes

Planning to use it as a basis for a new Merit Michigan Digital Commons

Prepared to help institutions implement it locally as a service

35 public school districts, public school academies and non-public schools

Launching service as a pilot for targeted communities of interest



The future and distribution models

• Exploring software distribution models with Wayne State’s Technology

Commercialization group

• Strongly desire open source model for the software itself, but still worki

• Imagining eventual federation for ecosystems – K-12, community colleg

universities

• What can you do? >> Learn more and help us urge open source software



Thank you!



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academica: a 21st-century enterprise social portal for education communities (287317044)

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