Hi folks,

The CETIS OER Mini Projects wrapped up towards the end of last year at which point John, Phil and I reviewed the outputs of the projects, forwarded some feedback to the project teams and invited them to respond.  In the spirit of the openness of the call we also asked if we could circulate the feedback and responses to the this list.

Here are our comments on the CaPReT project, many thanks to Brandon for responding to the issues we raised and for allowing us to share this.

Cheers
Lorna

Begin forwarded message:

From: Brandon Muramatsu <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
Date: 18 January 2012 15:17:48 GMT
To: Lorna Campbell <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
Cc: "[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> Barker" <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>, Justin Ball <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
Subject: Re: CaPReT Project - comments and feedback

On 18 Jan 2012, at 04:15, Brandon Muramatsu wrote:

Comments inline below.

__Deliverables__

* Has the tabular display and .csv export facility been completed?  CETIS and JISc have considerable interest in seeing the tracking information that has been gathered for the sites that we have “capret-enabled”.

Yes, we've completed the tabular display and csv download. You can see them at: http://capret.mitoeit.org/tabular.html

* Did the project test the implementation with 1-3  UKOER projects as stated in the project plan?

We did not make as much progress as we would have hoped in this regard. I had a discussion last week with Patrick McAndrew at the Open University about use of CaPRéT--so we're still working on testing it.

* We would have appreciated more communication and engagement with the oer-discuss mailing list. This goes for both Mini-Projects.

Discussion on the list as a whole seems to have trailed off rather dramatically from the engagement over early-/mid-last year. We did try to post as regularly as we were making progress with examples and status updates.

__Technical feedback__

* A very useful demonstrator to illustrate how attribution and tracking can be addressed.
* Also demonstrates the “kind of magic” that can be done with javascript, but also highlights some of the pit falls of this approach.
* Some systems pick up the tracking gif as a security risk.
* The CaPReT server was down when viewed on the 29th November so we were unable to see the tracking stats.

We had a technical "glitch" that took us a bit to recover from. We're hosting the site from a "free" AWS micro instance. The AWS virtual server crashed and was taken out of service earlier than announced by Amazon. As a demo, we didn't put in fully redundant systems, so it took us a bit to recover from the downtime. We've restructured the server setup to make it less likely to have the same issues (we're storing the data separate from the app now). The rebuild was exacerbated by the limited compute resources on the micro instance. We think we've addressed that in the current setup.


* The system was tested again on the 1st December and while the stats pages were visible they contained no data.

We've been recording the data since we announced the demo to the oer-discuss list. Unfortunately the Amazon failure wiped out the old data so we had to restart it from scratch. When we brought things back online in December it was with a new database/log. That info we've collected since early December is visible online now.

In the spirit of openness that the Mini-Projects Programme has attempted to foster would you object to us sending a copy of these comments to oer-discuss?

Absolutely.

We’d also like to thank you for participating in the experimental OER Mini-Projects Programme.  We’ve learned a lot from the experience and hope to share some feedback and reflections with both JISC and the oer-discuss mailing list.

Thanks again
Lorna


--
Lorna M. Campbell
JISC CETIS Assistant Director
University of Strathclyde
Glasgow
Email: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Phone: +44141 548 3072
Skype: lorna120768

The University of Strathclyde is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, number SC015263.