Sorry for the late post . . .
. . .I hope there is still time to ask a question.
I am very interested in the recent efforts on developing “Moodle Networks.” While at SUNY one of our challenges was to provide integration between the LMS and the 40 or so disparate Student Information Systems (I believe that's Student Management Systems in NZ?). Campuses where running Datatel,Sungard Banner, PeopleSoft and even home grown systems. The requirement to us was a single interface where any campus could push student and course information to the LMS to create and populate courses, then provide the SIS with course completion, grades, etc. on the way out. Added to this complexity was that each campus had its own unique ID's for students and faculty and course/section nomenclature. SUNY's legacy LMS evolved to include its own SIS, causing, for example, students who used the system to not only enroll in their own campus and course, but enroll again within the SUNY system's LMS - basically double registration. This obviously caused problems with data integrity between the two systems as students added/dropped, enrolled in the wrong course or sections, etc.
This requirement, a common integration interface across SUNY, was considered a must have, yet we could not find an example of any campus or system that had accomplished this in the U.S. Finally we came across a project out of the UK, SUNIWE (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_edistributed/suniwe.aspx39 ) , where crosscampus enrollment was being developed with uPortal. Based on the activity between uPortal and Sakai, we initially thought we may have found a solution. Unfortunately the uPortal/Sakai collaboration proved less than we had hoped.
In addition, SUNY's technology decisions where moved out from the LMS and technology groups and made by very senior administration. This group was very uncomfortable with any OSS (this will be the topic of my post) and a commercial provider, Angel, was chosen despite both the technical and university system architectural issues. Angel is now expected to provide (build) this single interface for disparate SIS' or, perhaps this requirement is no longer considered vital.
Can you please provide more information regarding the “Moodle Networks?” How similar are the campuses that will be contributing courses, sharing students, etc. Do they all share an SIS (SMS) - ether a single instance or at least the same application, student ID's, course/section ID's.
Thanks, Patrick
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