CACCRAO Conference

On Tuesday I spoke at the CACCRAO conference in San Diego and did two presentations. One was on MAP and Getting Things Done (GTD) and the second was my iPod Generation speech. I enjoyed the time with the group, and if you are reading this due to my numerous and shameful blog plugs, you can find the links in the right column of this page. Enjoy.

(And for everyone else, it stands for California Association of Community College Registrars and Admissions Officers).

My Academic Plan Update

I haven't posted anything recently about our My Academic Plan (MAP) project and there is a lot going on. First of all, a quick overview. MAP went online at the end of April 2007 and it has been used by over 17,000 students to create roughly 38,000 academic plans. It was the result of a concerted effort of our counselors, some students and a couple of very talented developers - Pratik Modi and Shaun Collett. I have never worked with a design team that was more dedicated to seeing a project succeed as this group. It really is a privilege to work with them.

MAP was awarded a 2007 Focus Award from our state chancellor's office and they also gave us a small grant to explore the feasibility of turning MAP into a system that could support other colleges. We are in the midst of that feasibility study right now and are having conversations with several software companies to find one that would be a good partner with us. We are presenting MAP at a number of conferences and we are in conversations with several colleges who are interested in purchasing it.

I love this project because from the very beginning the focus was on the students. We came up with a very student-centered design and all of this exciting work going on around it remains secondary to the fact that our students are being served. Very cool.

MAP Go-Live

I want to apologize to both of my faithful DigitalEdu readers for the rather sparse blogging of late. Both my professional and personal lives have been incredibly busy lately and it's been tough to to find any time.

Got a few minutes right now and I'm very pleased to announce here that we went live with our "My Academic Plan" project on April 26th. I am very pleased with how it turned out. Our design team did an amazing job on this project, and I can't say enough about them. It was one of the best experiences I have ever had on a project. Their dedication to creating a truly great academic planning tool for our students was amazing. It was a long road, but I believe our students are going to benefit from all the hard work.

MAP is now available for all students through our new MySite 2.0 portal, and available to any staff member by request. If you are not in our district, I created a MAP Information Page that gives you some information which includes a demo login you can use to check it out.

One question any developer always asks is "If we build it, will they come?". No one wants to put a lot of work into a system and then find out that nobody really wants it. That was answered for me when I checked our stats for the first week. We had 840 plans created in the first week of availability, and we have yet to do any promotion. When you count the over 400 plans that were created during the focus groups, it means we are already above 1,200 plans. That is the part I love about my job. When we first made the link live I was watching the stats, seeing students using MAP for the first time and realizing that we were truly helping them make better decisions about their course selection. Very cool!

Educause Day 1

I'm at the Educause conference and had a good day today. Here are the highlights:

Vinton Cerf gave the keynote speech and it was pretty interesting. His basic premise is that the term "computer science" is a misnomer because virtually none of the principles of science apply to software development. We can't predict how many bugs will be in software, how bad they will be, or how to effectively eliminate them from future code. He had a really good point, but didn't really offer a solution to it. He used the term "iPod Generation" which I have been using for a couple of years in various presentations. I thought about suing him for copyright infringement, but seeing that he invented the Internet, I thought I would cut him a little slack.

I went to a fascinating session on using gaming as an educational mechanism. The University of North Carolina at Greensboro created an economics course that is presented as a video game. The quality was amazing - it was exciting to see people in higher education doing something so innovative and responsive to this generation of students. This is something that Marc Prensky has been talking about for some time now.

I did a presentation on our new system - My Academic Plan (MAP). I had a good audience and had some very positive feedback. (And yes, I once again made a shameless plug for this blog, so if you are reading this as a result - welcome.)

The last session was a very thought provoking discussion of a growing movement in higher ed to create a next generation community source Student Services System (SSS). I loved their emphasis on service and the need to create a robust, extensible framework to offer high quality services to students. It gave me a lot to think about.

This was the best day I've had at a conference in a long time. Looking forward to tomorrow...