I. Announcements
Jim Roberts, Provost:
If not aware, Kathy Bader, director of the SISS Office, has joined Huron Consulting’s cloud computing student systems focus group. Her last day at Duke will be July 15. The job is now posted; a search committee has been formed including John Board, Chris Meyer, Caroline Nesbitt from Student Affairs, and others.
We’ve arranged that we will have Kathy’s services for DKU planning in August and September.
A year or so ago we appointed Frank Blalark as University Registrar. Frank has been here a couple of times. Frank will be involved in a review of the undergraduate registration processes.
Sally Kornbluth has approved a committee Frank will lead including students from DSG and ITAC, faculty members from ITAC, undergrad deans from various schools, and others from SISS Office and OIT, about 13 persons, to gather input and best practices between now and the end of the fall semester.
II. Agenda Items
4:05 – 4:30 – SISS Portal Redesign Update, John Campbell (15 minute presentation, 10 minute discussion)
What it is: ACES/Storm portal redesign: A new web interface for the common student and faculty views of our student information system has been redesigned based on feedback from faculty and student users of the current system. John will display the faculty and advisor pages in the new design, along with the go-live timeline and future enhancements.
Why it’s relevant: New features in the base program have afforded Duke the opportunity to develop a new front-end to the most commonly used aspects of the student information system to improve user experience. ITAC feedback has been a very useful component of the redesign process.
7-8 months ago we presented info on changes for students.
We’re getting close to being done. This is a quick preview to show you where we are.
We’re going to have a central location for all our systems. Today we have several views but all goes into PeopleSoft.
The name for our new view: DukeHub.
We’re talking mostly about student, faculty, and advisors; other pieces will be added as we go.
The front page can display general announcements, including system maintenance, registration due dates, and so on. There are links to the Duke course catalog and class schedule, as well as links to sign on to the various systems.
Demo of faculty section.
On the faculty view of classes, we’ve exposed permission numbers so they’re easier to get to and easier to use.
The exam schedule for your classes will be generated earlier than in the past, and is displayed here. There’s also an easy link to notify the Registrar’s Office if no exam will be held, to avoid student confusion; they’ll see the exam schedule too.
For administrative tasks, Staff Center and Admissions Center links will connect to those functions from the main faculty view.
Advisors can see lists of their students, including pictures, and can search and filter by graduate term and other values.
Important dates:
August 6: Official rollout to faculty, advisors, and students. At that point you won’t be able to access the current PeopleSoft through current channels; you’ll come to this view.
August 20: Last date for changes before students arrive and classes start.
September 15: Updates to financial aid look and feel.
Students have been testing this over the summer.
A small group of advisors (about 25) have been giving us feedback about changes.
Summer 2 faculty will be in this new portal as well.
Communication to students via social media and other posts is coming.
Starting next week we’ll notify faculty and advisors by email.
At the bottom of each page, there’s a link for feedback and FAQs
Potential issues:
We’re confident that we have 90-95% for the content for each group.
Some pages load slowly at the moment.
Staff who have to go through the old way and one of the new pages: about 83 users will have to use multiple browsers. (These users have both a faculty/advisor and a staff role.)
We’ll demo this in three upcoming town hall meetings, and this will cover the issue with split roles. As we move more functions into the new system, this issue will go away.
Questions and Discussion
Question: What about loading grades into systems automatically?
Answer: There may be opportunities for future development here.
Question: What about the multiple appearance of grad student advisees?
Answer: The new system displays these in tabs (Prelim Committee, Dissertation Committee).
4:30- 4:50 – Sakai 11 Upgrade, Michael Greene, Jolie Tingen (10 minute presentation, 10 minute discussion)
What it is: Sakai is a flexible, open-source collaboration and learning environment that provides Duke Faculty and instructors with tools to support teaching and learning activities. An upgrade from version 2.9 to 2.11 is planned for August 16th. Michael and Jolie will discuss the upcoming upgrade and what Duke has done to prepare for it.
Why it’s relevant: Version 2.11 contains many improvements and new features including a modern responsive mobile interface, site navigation with breadcrumbs, page layout options in lessons, spreadsheet-style entry gradebook, and streamlined settings in tests & quizzes
Sakai 11 has been development for a while; we’re focusing on the past six months.
We originally were shooting for a May upgrade date. We worked alongside Notre Dame, whose use of Sakai is similar to ours. We’ve been hard at work this summer, and Sakai 11 is due out next week. This is later than we had hoped. This may be Sakai’s biggest release since its inception.
Now that the community platform is stable, we’re now focusing on our Duke customizations. Duke has done a great job of not customizing Sakai when we didn’t need to; our two major customizations are Toolkits and Warpwire.
At the end of July, we’ll be upgrading our test environment, including all of our customizations.
Early August: communications overload.
August 16: We’ll upgrade sakai.duke.edu at midnight.
Longsite, our development partners, expect a 5-hour downtime, though we’re advertising a longer window.
August 16-September 14: We’ll be holding training workshops.
We performed 2 hours of QA testing every Friday.
Professor Robert Duvall taught COMPSCI 290 on Open Source Development this spring, and used Sakai as his example. Some of his students were actively involved in development of Sakai 11.
Duke and Notre Dame contributed 250+ hours of development over 170 cases in the JIRA development-tracking system.
The whole product is now mobile-friendly, responsive.
The new gradebook is much easier to use, and we believe faculty will be happy with it.
Lessons has new page layout functions.
Testing has been streamlined.
Syllabus now has greater flexibility.
Questions and Discussion
Question: Will all of the old courses be updated with the new interface?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Is there a good way of submitting feedback from within Sakai?
Answer: There’s a new Contact Us tool that we’ll customize for Duke. If you submit an issue to the Duke team and they determine it’s a bug in Sakai, they’ll submit it to the Sakai community.
Question: How do our students learn how to use Sakai?
Answer: CIT doesn’t handle student training. OIT in the past has done student training. There’s a student guide that provides an overview.
There’s also a culture of exploration and self-support, and less of a demand for formalized training than there used to be. When there’s a need for formal support, the OIT Service Desk provides first-line support.
Infrastructure changes at Longsight, our provider, mean that our Sakai 11 instance is moving to Amazon Web Services.
4:50- 5:30 – MEDx and 3D printing: Another collaboration between medicine and technology at Duke, Dr. Piers Barker, Chip Bobbert (25 minute presentation/15 minute discussion)
What it is: MEDx (Medicine + Engineering at Duke) was forged in summer 2015 to enhance existing ties and foster new interdisciplinary collaborations between the School of Medicine and Pratt School of Engineering. The purpose of MEDx is to better achieve the two schools’ many shared goals: developing new therapies, diagnostics and devices, accelerating basic science and its translation into clinical practice, creating innovative educational opportunities for students, and improving the quality and effectiveness of patient care. Dr. Morgan and Chip will discuss how 3D printing is being used to enhance teaching, patient care and research.
Why it’s relevant: MEDx fosters the exchange of ideas and creates research opportunities between physicians, engineers, computer scientists, researchers and innovators. It promotes the training of the next generation of researchers and clinicians to work symbiotically on new solutions to complex clinical problems and will be used to develop strategic commercialization opportunities to translate research advances into effective devices, therapeutics and care delivery systems.
3D printing labs have led to some interesting collaborations with academic areas such as anthropology: for example, we have printed primate skulls and are now printing other bones; a researcher 3D-printed dosing control for infectious disease testing to reduce costs. Another researcher is printing materials that simulate the sinking of a Civil War ship.
Faculty members have purchased expensive equipment which is now co-located (shared) for others to use.
One faculty member has printed devices to improve the sterility of culture testing.
An undergraduate student produced a working prosthetic hand.
Radiation Dosimetry: a $100,000 machine may be replaced using a cast lens for under $1,000.
We 3D-printed liver anatomy for conjoined twins.
We now can print fully hollow models for pediatric cardiology.
We printed the full spinal column for a girl with severe scoliosis so doctors could lay out rod placement beforehand.
In parallel with this is the MEDx project.
MEDx is funded by School of Medicine and School of Engineering, with the Provost’s Office. MEDx promotes collaborations between these two schools, with an interest in novel devices in therapeutics and accelerating translation of ideas to clinical care. We also have an interest in education and see the 3D Printing lab as being important.
Dr. Piers Barker
Professor of Pediatrics and Obstetrics/gynecology
Section head of non-invasive pediatric cardiac imaging
Teaching – patient care – research
The goal of MEDx is bringing different groups together with these goals in mind.
If the goal of non-invasive imagery is to accurately represent anatomy, you’d like to get it in a holdable form.
Current status of 3D printing
Example case: Newborn with abnormal cardiogram; heart chambers are connected incorrectly in a “crisscross heart”. This was detected in utero and confirmed after birth. There are several surgical options, and 3D printing helped us decide on an optimal approach.
3D printing allows surgeons to familiarize themselves with individual patients’ anatomy before beginning their incisions. It’s time-intensive: the 3D heart models here took about 24 hours. After software modeling, the printed model must be refined by hand; it can then be rescanned for comparison with the original software model.
In adult cardiology, 3D printing can assist with fitting round valves into non-round heart structures.
With MEDx, we want to expand tools to analyze flow. At Duke we’re using massively parallel models to analyze the human coronary system, including the complexity of bloodflow involving millions of individual red blood cells. We can then connect those data with anatomical models and question our assumptions about the best places to make interventions. The goal is not just to restore normal anatomy, but to restore normal function.
3D printing can provide new tangible heart models for teaching tools, avoiding deterioration of actual human heart samples.
Current research activity
The Duke research symposium included teams from adult cardiology, engineering, and NYU. We investigated aortic dilation; tetrology flow (“blue baby syndrome”); and a condition where coronary arteries leave the aorta abnormally. We’re part of an international consortium which is investigating whether preoperative 3D printing reduces surgical and bypass times, decreasing complications. Dr. Reynolds and I submitted a Gerber grant to look at patients with one ventricle, missing half their heart, to see how coronary arteries grow.
The FDA and HIPAA have been largely silent so far. This is exciting but we need to build infrastructure. There are questions about identifying physical objects without disclosing personally identifiable health information in violation of HIPAA rules.
How can we better display and understand 3D geometry and function?
How can we understand the intersection of form and function?
How can we change the paradigm from restoring normal anatomy to restoring normal function?
We have to collaborate across disciplines, like we’re doing with OIT and the Co-Lab, and with Surgery, and Radiology, and Biomedical Engineering.
Lots of challenges remain, but this is a very promising technology. With appropriate support we can become one of the premiere 3D printing institutions in the country if not beyond.
Questions and Discussion
Question: What volume is needed to produce these models in a timely manner? We now have 48 that are busy all the time.
Answer: Generating the virtual model is one part, and the printing is another. Resources are needed for both. Segmentation, pre-printing, takes about 24 hours per heart. Printing can take 8 hours for a small heart, or 120 hours for a spinal column, plus lots of time for post-processing.
It’s necessary to optimize workflows as well as provide printers.
Question: Are you still printing in the Co-Lab?
Answer: We’ve outsourced a few times, but yes, we’re printing in the Co-Lab. You need people who can do post-processing; people who work on the printers; and people who troubleshoot the incoming models. This looks easy on the outside, but the process of getting there is very complicated.
Software recommendations: OnShape, Fusion 360. SolidWorks is another, but there are licensing and cost concerns.
MRIs give lower-quality imaging, but due to radiation concerns, CAT scans are not always a preferable option.