Shohreh’s Blog

AP Review Pilot Launch

I am delighted to share our AP Review development team, in partnership with colleagues from UCSD, has successfully launched the AP Review Pilot application for UCI on September 20, 2010.

Background: UCI’s Academic Personnel (AP) development team has embarked on several key enterprise level projects for UCI. In 2008, UC Irvine and UC San Diego engaged in a cross-campus collaborative model of developing and operating the Academic Personnel Recruit and Review applications. Both campuses were excited about the opportunity to streamline processes and adopt unified standard practices in light of budgetary limits and legal/risk factors associated with these operations. The approach was designed to bring long-term cost saving benefits by eliminating redundant efforts across multiple campuses through a shared model of development – SaaS (Software as a Service) solution. UCI shares its Recruit application with UCSD, and UCSD hosts its Review system for UCI. AP Review is an online application that facilitates faculty’s merit and promotion reviews. This new application allows for normal merits, as well as CAP (Council on Academic Personnel) Review files, to be processed online. The Review application is a result of a highly successful collaborative effort with our partners at UC San Diego – hats off to their development team! With the launch of Review, we are now able to provide an enhanced, streamlined, faculty review process to the campus.

Other AP systems significant milestones include:

2005: ICS faculty recruitment system became campus-wide

2006: UCI’s AP Recruit 1.0 launched

2007: Faculty myData system (builds merit files and CV’s) purchased/launched

2008: Partnered with UCSD to develop a UCI-UCSD strategy for AP Recruit and Review systems deployments for both campuses; Last launched OEOD’s Faculty Academic System Tracking

2009: Recurit multi-campus launched for UCSD by UCI team

2010: Review multi-campus launched for UCI by UCSD team

This project demonstrates a strong partnership between four entities: UCI and UCSD’s IT teams as well as UCI and UCSD’s Academic Personnel business partners in order to advance faculty and staff experience with technology. The project team has taken an initiative to make collaboration a theme within OIT and between campuses.

This collaborative effort is an outstanding example of successful team work and communication. As Duke’s University’s amazingly successful basketball coach has said, “There are five fundamental qualities that make every team great: communication, trust, collective responsibility, caring and pride. I like to think of each as a separate finger on the fist. Any one individually is important. But all of them together are unbeatable.” The key point is that this is our team, with everyone playing his or her part.

Congratulations and thank you to the following UCI AP, OIT staff, UCSD IT staff, and UCSD AP members for their teamwork on completing this project.

UCI Core Team:

• Aldo Sarmiento – Developer (OIT)
• Henry Balanza – DBA (OIT)
• Jean Chin – DBA, Data Analyst (AP)
• Joan Tenma – Business Sponsor (AP)
• Kim Gerrard – QA Lead (OIT)
• Max Garrick – Project Manager, Technical Lead (OIT)
• Nancy Vongsawat – AP Business Requirements (AP)
• Phil Orwig – Enterprise Systems Architect (OIT)
• Ray Vadnais – Business Analysis (OIT)

UCSD Core Team:

• Chris De Rosa – Architect
• David Soleno – Developer
• Dawn Reser – Business Project Manager
• Emily Deere – Sponsor
• Gail Mikels – Developer
• Jennifer Kramer – Architect
• John Baker – Manager
• Lin Chen – Developer
• Lynn Underwood – Technical Project Manager
• Viet Truong – Technical Project Manager
• Kristi Larsen – AP Sponsor

UCI OIT Contributors:

• Briandy Walden – Manager
• Chris Peters – Shibboleth Administrator
• David Pritikin – QA
• Duncan Phillips – SSL Certificate
• Ilona Pak – QA
• Josh Drummond – SAMS Setup

UCSD Contributors:

• Alan Moxley – System Administration
• Crys Harris – System Administration
• Gabriel Lawrence – Security

Since 1996, the UCI’s Electronic Educational Environment (EEE –
eee.uci.edu) course management system has been an integral part of UCI’s
strong educational mission. With a high participation rate of 100% of
students and 98% of faculty, EEE has been the primary academic portal
driving instructional technology needs of the UCI campus.

EEE offers over 20 instructional and administrative applications to all
UCI instructors and students ranging from course Web sites, online
MessageBoard, Chat, GradeBook, teaching Evaluations, Quiz tool, and
rosters, to DropBox, Surveys, and many more. Services provided by EEE
facilitate and promote student and faculty communication and enhance the
teaching and learning experience at UCI.

For over a decade, EEE has become one of the most popular and highly
regarded technological systems across the campus. With 4.1 million hits
per day, EEE is the second most frequently visited Web site on campus.
EEE’s competitive advantage and its remarkable successful history stem
from 1) maintaining direct and productive partnerships with faculty and
key constituent units (OIT, Library, Registrar, and DUE); 2) creating a
faculty-driven custom-built system, shaped over the past many years with
direct faculty input and experience.

EEE is an effectively and efficiently run enterprise system which presents
enormous cost, time, and resource saving opportunities to faculty,
teaching assistants, and administrative support staff (e.g. teaching
evaluations, grading, online quizzes, and Rapid Return).

It is critical to continue to build on this success and adapt to the
drastically changing need of our students and faculty due to the
economical pressure. We must rethink instructional technology offerings,
develop and support more flexibility, allow for innovation and creativity,
and prepare to integrate with variety of teaching styles and formats (such
as hybrid and online). In order to maintain UCI’s highest standards for
teaching, we must continue to invest, support expansion of instructional
technology offerings, and follow through the University’s strategic plan
statement, as stated, “Goal: experiment with new forms of teaching and
learning in and outside of the classrooms. Integrate technological support
more thoroughly into traditional classes and explore more uses for
distance learning and Web-based instruction …” (Page 69).

Today seven team members from UCI’s IT and Academic Personnel organizations are going to UC San Diego to attend a workshop on their newly launched online Academic Personnel System (APOL). Since Novemember 2009, series of discussions and conversations between key players from each campus has resulted in a successful collaboration for sharing enterprise systems where both campus developers are fully engaged in creating a unified application that serves both campuses AP needs.

Currently, my team is in the mist of series of projects to develop academic applications for UCI campus. First, we will expand UCI’s online Recruit (http://recurit.ap.uci.edu) to be used by UC San Diego campus, then we will be developing along side UC San Diego IT team the UCI’s first online faculty promotion and review system.

The new movement toward integrating IT at UCI will present our IT professionals with opportunities to work more collaboratively, efficiently, and creatively. Its all about  how one perceives the “Change”!

UCI’s second Instructional Technology Faculty forum was a huge success! thanks to Kelsey Layos from NACS. It is such a delight and amazing experience to listen to faculty about how they incorporate technology into teaching. I was impressed to hear our EEE gradebook can be used to distribute information to class or quiz tool could be used to collect essays. Read more about this event at eee.uci.edu.

I will be posting information about projects, events, activities, and other interesting campus related updates. Please visit again.