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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
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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
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Wayne State University
• Located in Detroit, Michigan
• Largest single-campus medical school in U.S.
• ~28,000 students
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Enterprise single sign-on portal
Social network, private and secu
Cloud infrastructure
= Academica-ESP
What is Academica-ESP?
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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
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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
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A new place for conversation on campus
Departmental campus communicators have
embraced the tool
Interactive real-time feedback
Greater opportunities for dialog
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Adoption during voluntary phase
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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
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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
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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
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Thank you!
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