Rowan's reply to my message to him (CC to Tom S and Wes):

Off the cuff, I'd probably say that we want to have it hosted
remotely, at least next fall. My thoughts for this are:

1) The summer's project plans are fast filling up. With what's
already on the plate, I'm not sure I have time to learn how to
set up a server for CHEF and then do so before mid August. A
better time frame for that might be fall to have ready by second
semester.
2) I'm not sure we have the funds to purchase a server before July,
and by the time we did, we'd be back to the first point.

Given the number of faculty interested at this point, I think we
wouldn't be much hampered by an off-site host. Certainly if/when
more faculty (and students) are using it, we'd want to bring it in
locally so that it could tie in with everything else and be more
responsive. I also think that some planning of web services is in
order before we take that step, though.

--rowan

Original message:

Lo, Mark Pearson and the coffee pot sang in unison:

> Chaps,
>
> I got this from Tom Kirk today. I plan to set up a meeting between our Chef
> 'team' and U.M. Are you both willing / desiring to be on the 'team'?
>
> Unfortunately we have missed a Chef workshop for developers
> (http://chefproject.org/chef_activities.htm#recentMeeting). What are your
> thoughts on implementation Rowan? Would you rather host the system here
> (http://chefproject.org/chef_technologies.htm) or have us use it remotely
> in the first instance. I have had two faculty express interest - Monteze
> Snyder and Randall Shrock - my guess is that the total number of students
> involved would not exceed 50 in the autumn semester. Then we could move to
> more classes in the Spring of 2004 perhaps. Any thoughts?
>
> I am going to follow up with folks who came to the Course Management
> meetings and suss out interest.
>
> Cheers
>
> Mark

At the bottom of the CourseTools NG page:

CourseTools.NG Winter Pilot Criteria:

Features Include:
• Home,
• Schedule,
• Announcements,
• Resources,
• Assignments,
• Discussion,
• Chat,
• News and
• User Presence.

Features Do Not Include:
• Student Profiles,
• Email Archiving nor
• Private Discussion.

Other points:

• CTNG websites should not be used simultaneously by all students during class.
  

  {so, how are we to tutor the classes that are using this? Should we prefer CHEF on a EC server?}

• Faculty should have experience with the existing UM.CourseTools or equivalent course management systems.
  

  We'll have to do our own training for faculty - after having been to the U.M training

• Faculty and students must be willing to provide feedback on their experience using CTNG.

  We can easily create an online form / questionairre to complete

Note also

CHEFng currently does not include U.M Lessons which is designed to help instructors create web-based quizzes, tutorials, and surveys.

From their blurb:

With U.M Lessons you can:
• create review lessons to allow students to practice what they have learned.

  Great pedagogy, this

• develop quizzes and tests to assess what students know

  standard stuff - but how easy are these to set up & can a quiz be autograded?

• assign grades using partial credit

  could be useful ....

• provide extensive feedback for each right or wrong answer

  again, excellent pedagogy

• create surveys to collect data - student feedback need not be just at the end of the course

  useful to get feedback for different course sections

Hopefully this stuff will be added to CHEFng at some point soon ...

Email from Tom kirk today:

Mark,

Please proceed to talk with UM about Earlham's use of Chef on a trial basis next year. I think your game plan is reasonable and workable. It is important that you get as much detail as possible about the need fro support at this end. I would prefer if we could start the year with by using Chef off their servers but if it is to be on our server(s) then we need to know details about what is needed: operating system, size, ideas about amount of time to support and any other operational details. Once you have that information then we can quickly proceed to hold the meeting you request with Wes, Tom K, Tom S, Bryan, Rowan and yourself.

Thanks Mark for keeping this on the front burner.

Tom Kirk

Email sent to Tom Kirk, Wes Miller and Tom Steffes today:

Chaps,
I've just been talking to Wes about Course Management.
Basically, I'm concerned that unless we make a move soon with regard to talking to the University of Michigan we'll drop the ball, and lose momentum and time in evaluating Course Management Systems. Two faculty, Randall Shrock and Monteze Snyder have expressed an interest in using Chef or similar in a course in the Fall term. I do think that we need to have expereince of using a CMS locally before we can implement it for a Ploughshares joint course.

Here's what I'd like to do:
1) Have a meeting with Wes, Tom K, Tom S, Bryan, Rowan and myself where we can decide a short term program for getting our feet wet with CMS - either Chef or something else.
2) Email with Michigan and set up a video conference date sometime in May where we can all talk about specifics.
3) Figure out whether we want to conduct the pilot courses from a server at Earlham or on the U.M system
4) Send some folks to U.M training (myself, Lucy) to learn how to administer / configure the system for each course and what to teach to faculty users. Over the course of the summer.
5) Support two EC courses to use CHEF in the Fall - Monteze & Randall ??
6) Get PAGS, humanities faculty interested in using it for Spring semester.