Unfortunately, technical problems make it impossible for us to resume collecting Teaching Questionnaire responses via CTools for this term. We recognize this is an immense disappointment to our students who may not have had the opportunity to submit their feedback.

All evaluations that were submitted before Monday at 9:00 p.m. have been successfully received. This feedback will be included in the reports that your instructor receives after the term ends.

We apologize for this inconvenience.

This email follows a series (1, 2) of CTools outages caused by the Teaching Questionnaire, colloquially and ubiquitously known as the class evaluation. Today's outages were so severe that all CTools servers needed to be restarted.

That an added module can destabilize the entire CTools system highlights the twisted nature of the system. Instead of modules being based off a safe, tested API that can be controlled, there seems to be some mess of hackery going on in the background. And it's not clear that Sakai 3, coming long after I've left, will make any significant changes. (however, in typical open source fashion, developers have already added some half-baked web2.0 "features")

This is a serious academic problem, too. Student feedback from the Questionnaire is used to assess faculty performance in tenure and promotion decisions.

The Residential College has stuck with its carbon-copy paper form. At least they'll know what happened in their classes this year.

There is no cohesive design for the features it holds. One section may use links for navigation, another HTML input buttons. The back button might work in some places, not in others.

This is because there is no design document, like Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, that directs CTools design.

The back button does not work on most pages.

New sections of a workspace cannot be opened in tabs.

The design and hierarchy has not been changed in years. A huge portion of screen real estate is used by the CTools banner. Hello, we know we're using CTools. More space is used to list all the sites a user is subscribed to.

The profusion of irrelevant "news" and Microsoft clipart on the CTools homepage shows that no-one with a vision is in charge. I'm not an instructor; why do I see news intended for them? The "news" link in My Workspace has content from 2003.

CTools offers no guidelines on how to organize content or facilitate online discussion. There are specific strategies for posting documents that will maximize their findability; I doubt. My list, a 20 page report, is available for $899 a copy, postage paid.

Professors continue to mandate posting to a discussion forum at regular intervals, a task that has no educational value. Here's a tip: nearly no-one puts any effort into this. The only good use of forums I have seen is in EECS 280, where students must ask any programming question online, so others can benefit from their answers. This only works because (a) the audience is accustomed to the practice of asking questions in online forums, and (b) the information on the forums is vital to the completion of course projects.

The chat feature, which could be used to create as back-channel where GSIs can answer questions during large lectures or office hours, is nearly never used.

The calendar is an over-specified joke.

You can't get data out of CTools -- no RSS, no email notifications, no iCal.

Important changes that break features are rolled out at the beginning of the academic year, instead of during downtime.

The organization is as transparent as a brick wall. No-one knows when or why things will change.

In three years using it, there has been zero progress visible to me or announced on any of the lists I'm subscribed to.

The state of CTools depends people like me -- people who stop caring after four years. University Administrators -- LSA IT, ITCS, department managers, and everyone else, has have lived with the system so long that it's not worth the effort to ask for change. There is pressure from no-one because the system isn't working so horribly that no-one can use it. It can just sit there wasting money.

Grants for larger projects -- up to $15,000, and even higher are also available. Those larger requests require more discussion and documentation, of course.

Grants are not competitive. Committee members and LSA Instructional Support Staff are happy to work with faculty to produce a valuable proposal.

Please submit a proposal if you believe you have a valuable idea. Level 1 grants -- up to $5000 -- are awarded on a rolling basis.

Stuff that sounds good
Save the environment
Football
Yeah.

Screenshot:

Click the photo for the suspenseful reveal!

Found on the current LSA gateway

n.b. Responses from LSA administrators involved in the purchasing process were not considered.

With luck, us mere mortals will hear about the planning process before it's over, so we can give input into the tools we need to use.

Attention: Problem With Manually Adding Users to Sites

There is a minor bug introduced in the latest CTools upgrade that may prevent you from manually adding participants to your CTools site. The bug is apparently triggered when selecting the option to send an email notification to the participant being added.

Either that, or it's gotten so bloated that they can't even run tests against basic functionality.

Hint: avoid changes to important features at the beginning of the term.

This time last year, I wrote about spam blogs on MBlog:

As with every blogging service, your favorite pills store is represented. (more spam blogs here, here, here, here, here, and here).

And I filed a trouble ticket on 8/27/07. Scott Martin, Patrick Mcneal, Jennifer Nardine from the MBlog team were assigned to fix the problem. All the blogs still exist.

If the institution in question offers foreign-language services, the relevant staff could also proofread the automated translation services' output before it is posted. If the institution doesn't offer foreign-language services, the value of providing translated materials is questionable and may even be misleading. (unless the materials are broadcast-oriented or targeted to a specific audience, like health pamphlets, which should never be machine translated)

(crossposted from www-sig)

Notable: the design is staying in the 800x600 browser space. The designers are going for some pixel perfect alignment, which is sure to break in many browsers. Text size is tiny and often low-contrast. Visual hierarchy is a bit strange, but I love the new use of color.

I asked the devs whether any focus groups with students, faculty, staff, alumni (especially elderly alumni!) were held, but I haven't got a response yet.

I also wonder if there has been a styleguide written in parallel to this redesign (I know my college certainly doesn't have one yet).

We are working on an LDAP interface to MCommunity that will provide read (and, for certain attributes, write) access to this data. We are targeting release of this interface for the start of Winter Term 2009. At that time, we also plan to replace the current web interface to UMOD with a new web interface to MCommunity.

The team is asking developers to hold off on UMOD directory,

We encourage units that are planning any future services with dependencies on the directory to plan on data lookups either to MCommunity via the LDAP interface or to the HR PeopleSoft table

UMOD is to be phased out by Summer 2009.

Michigan Marketing and Design built the site, and it has some of the best code and design I've seen come out of that shop in a while:

The homepage opens with great art, clear navigation, and well-formed code. In fact, the whole page takes only 53 lines of XHTML-strict.

The most obvious problem is that the front page doesn't describe what Arts on Earth is. Even a few sentences could solve that and lead deeper into the site. However, with the well-designed navigation, this may not even be an issue.

To find out if visitors are indeed confused, the web developers could look at their analytics. If a large number of visitors only view the homepage and do not continue to sub-pages, adjustments to the design may be in order.

Sub-pages are also well-designed and well-coded. Take the news and events page:

Text is set consistently with Lucida Grande in fixed sizes: 10/11/12/18px (a fixed font size may still be problematic for some users). The face is cleverly varied -- uppercase, italicized, bolded, set in red and blue -- to create a great look. The variations are not random, though. It's clear they were thought through and reflect the structure of the page. Some headlines are set in Georgia, a nice contrast.

The web developers certainly knew their business; the XHTML is clean and semantic. I was pleasantly surprised to see they went the extra mile to add a print stylesheet. The CSS could be condensed a bit -- the same font property is repeated many times, when it could just be used once in the body selector.

Missing from the site are newer features such as an RSS feed for events and news. The Sign Up page offers a way to receive updates, but the "Join our e-mail list" link just opens a blank email to artsonearth@umich.edu. The maintainers could add clearer instructions on how to join the list -- or use a free third-party email newsletter management service that offers a simple signup form, like Campaign Monitor or FeedBurner.

All in all, an excellent new site that many developers (me included!) can learn from.