Student and Academic Management System (SAMS): Project Update
The Student and Academic Management System (SAMS) Implementation Program is a major initiative for 2006-8 impacting QUT's staff, students, systems, and processes. QUT is working with the chosen vendor, TechnologyOne, to deliver a robust, student-centred student system that will enhance the university's online teaching and learning environment and improve the quality, accessibility and useability of academic and administrative services to QUT's student and staff community.
The SAMS program is sponsored by the Registrar, Carol Dickenson. The Program Director and system business owner is Kathy Grgic, Director of Student Business Services (SBS). SAMS is organised into four (4) projects, namely: Curriculum & Academic Policy, Student Administration, Technical Environment & User Interfaces, and Communication & Change Management. The program is strongly supported by three (3) governance committees to ensure alignment with operational as well as strategic QUT goals.
The SAMS program involves the replacement of the current student system (Callista) and associated business processes. Subsequently, SAMS will precipitate the replacement or modification of up to 38 interfaces with other QUT and external systems and processes. Given the interdependency of SAMS with other corporate systems, projects and activities within QUT, the SAMS program team have already started to establish close partnerships with key groups such as ITS, FRP, APPU, and SBS to address issues of system integration as well as business and policy review. The Registrar and DVC (TILS) have jointly initiated a systems integration forum to assess and manage the impact of SAMS across QUT’s corporate systems infrastructure. The forum will address issues relating to authoritative sources and budgetary impacts as well as the determining whether there is a need for re-prioritisation, re-scoping and the transfer of work between projects.
SAMS offers a high degree of curriculum functionality, particularly via student study plan capabilities. Given the interrelated nature of academic policy, QUT’s business processes, and system functionality, the Vice-Chancellor has given in principle approval for the review of relevant academic policy to enhance the University’s teaching and learning environment. To this end, a range of issues will be identified during the SAMS implementation in consultation with the academic community including fora convened by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) and Registrar. The impact of business and policy review on QUT’s corporate systems and projects will be assessed and managed accordingly.
SAMS is currently in the final stages of the Planning Phase. The Project Managers are working closely with the vendor to develop a Program Plan that will define the scope and the implementation schedule for 2007-8. It is anticipated that the SAMS Steering Committee will approve the Program Plan at its next meeting in May 2007.
Refer to the SAMS website www.sams.qut.edu.au for further program information.
The QUT Staff Email Project: Moving to Microsoft Outlook
The objectives of the QUT Staff Email Project are twofold: 1) the design and installation of a corporate Microsoft Exchange system and 2) the migration of staff email, mostly from Eudora, to Microsoft Outlook using the new Exchange system. Implementation of a transparent archiving system, Enterprise Vault, is being carried out with the implementation of Exchange. All University email will be held and backed up centrally, being transferred from local area responsibilities and gaining associated efficiencies.
Overall, the project:
- Introduces a robust and highly available infrastructure based on the MS Exchange application
- Supports a more integrated and unified messaging capability
- Supports the broader integrated collaborative environment at QUT for:
- People working collaboratively, for example, integrating voice, video, instant messaging, voice mail and calendar as a user experience
- Application interoperability at the desktop, for example, with TRIM digital records management and other applications
- Mobile access, interfacing with a range of mobile devices
- Is designed to satisfy growth in the University’s staff messaging requirements for the next three years as in Evaluation Criteria, Section 2 of Proposal Content and Structure
- Supports the University’s mission and goals, particularly the integration of technology into the business/support functions and infrastructure
- Reduces the number of separate systems required to deliver an integrated messaging environment.
After an extensive RFO process, Dimension Data was selected to put the Exchange and Enterprise Vault systems in place. QUT staff are now working with Dimension Data on Proof of Concept testing in a virtual environment. The production systems with the physical hardware will be in position in early May. After a pilot migration of 50 email users, the systems will go live at the end of May ready for the main staged migration. The migration is planned to be carried out in June, July and August, with follow up in September. Consultations with FAMs (or other senior administrative staff) and key technical staff are now under way to ascertain special considerations and arrive at custom schedules. Academic moves to Outlook will most likely be arranged to happen after the beginning of Semester 2.
More information about the project is available at: http://www.its.qut.edu.au/projects/staffemail/
A New Learning Management System: QUT Blackboard
On February 12th, QUT Blackboard was successfully launched for all units offered by the Faculties of Health and IT. This launch followed the migration of all unit sites for the two pilot faculties from OLT into QUT Blackboard.
With QUT Blackboard now operating as a production system, some of the benefits of the LMS Replacement Project are beginning to be realised. These include:
- Alignment of the LMS with administration and governance processes of other enterprise systems
- Automation of account creation and access to unit sites due to direct integration with authorities data sources
- Introduction of new functionality has been positively received by academic staff and has driven parallel discussions about improving teaching practice
Phase 2 of the project is now underway, which involves the adoption of QUT Blackboard for semester 2 by a further five faculties and the International College. This includes the migration of all required semester 2 unit sites from OLT, the majority of which have been migrated over the Easter break to allow academic staff sufficient time to familiarise themselves with the new system and to take advantage of the training programs on offer.
Project Working Parties, established in each faculty, continue to provide direction to the project and ensure that communication activities are localised at the faculty and school levels.
More Information
Please contact Wendy Harper, Project Leader (w.harper@qut.edu.au) or Kate Clarkson, Project Manager (k.clarkson@qut.edu.au).
Detailed information about the project timelines and background is available at www.tils.qut.edu.au/about/lmsproject/.
QUT's Research Capacity: State-of-the-Art
A new state-of-the-art high performance computing infrastructure will be available to QUT researchers in the second half of 2007. The new system will play an important role in advancing scientific and engineering discovery in Queensland and Australia by enhancing research outcomes in vital areas such as environmental and sustainability modelling, security and medical engineering.
The new multi-processor system will act as a tightly integrated high performance computing (HPC) resource that delivers high levels of performance and supports the latest programming paradigms and hardware accelerators for computational simulation in research. Leading-edge simulation is necessary for modern, multidisciplinary science and universities need supercomputing facilities to support the resulting high-end simulations. Computational simulation avoids in some cases the need for costly, controversial, dangerous, prohibitive or impossible experimentation. At QUT the increased demand for the use of computational modelling and simulation is evident in many disciplines as more researchers take up large-scale simulation to improve research outcomes and compete internationally. The fundamental objective is to obtain a state-of-the-art system which allows researchers to solve large modern day problems in order to compete at national and international research levels.
The new system replaces the out-dated infrastructure with a modern optimised computational cluster whose peak performance is rated at approximately 2 teraflops. This is more than ten times the computational capacity of the existing system and is scalable to meet future increased demand. The new installation includes two compute systems and a large data store. The first machine is an SGI Altix 4700 SMP supercomputer (96 64bit Itanium 2 cores and 198GB RAM), and the second machine is an SGI Altix XE Cluster (containing 14 compute nodes, with 112 64bit Intel Xeon cores). Both systems will share a hierarchical data storage system which will provide over 100 terabytes of disk storage to QUT researchers.
Purchase of the million dollar system was made possible through a successful bid for a Linkage Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) Grant in collaboration with CQU. The new computational system will be made available on a Queensland wide basis through the Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF) in an initiative supported by Queensland universities and the Queensland State Government. The new infrastructure is consistent with the national supercomputing framework and directly supports Australian Research Council (ARC) research that addresses national research priorities.
For more information about the new system, including installation progress, contact the HPC & Research Support Group:
web: www.its.qut.edu.au/hpc/: E-mail: qut.itshpc@qut.edu.au; Phone : (07) 3138 2730
