4:00 – 4:05 p.m. – Announcements (5 minutes)
Rachel Richesson will be leaving Duke. David MacAlpine will be the new chair.
Laura Webb will be replaced by John Shaw as the new coordinator. Thanks to Laura.
Rachel Richesson commenced the meeting and David MacAlpine introduced the first topic.
4:05 – 4:35 p.m. – Return to Campus Update: Data, Richard Biever, Charley Kneifel (5 minutes of presentation; 25 minutes of discussion)
What it is: Undergraduate classes began this week bringing a limited number of students, staff, and faculty together in person on campus for the Fall semester. To do so safely, several new data management processes have been enacted.
Why it is relevant: Many new and existing services and applications are coming together to form complex data configurations and management processes. From symptom monitoring to contact tracing, several points of data are newly available about individuals and need to be securely maintained. This presentation will give a brief update on the plans so far and then discuss as a group the implications and practicality of such a structure – what data? for what use? for how long? how is it protected?
Data and Testing perspective
Data – number of sources of data:
1. wifi, door access
2. Student Affairs financial transactions, class rosters, housing assignments,
3. symptom reporting (Redcap and SymMon),
4. testing/case management from EOHS and Student Health
Data flows into repositories including Splunk and Data Transfer Warehouse (used for business processes)
Data is used for analytics and reporting (e.g. Tableau, Azure)
Security with a view of protecting this data is paramount
Data will be kept until the end of the academic year; may also strip out identifiers and keep some data longer.
Student Testing
1. Move-in
• Undergrads were tested for COVID 19 as part of move-in; then, they had to quarantine until results were determined
• 1900 students were tested, and a very small number tested positive
• students are notified by Code+ Notify software
2. At present
• 11 sites on East and West Campus are available for testing
• Students can go to any location
• Students pull a test kit, scan barcode with SymMon app, swab, place into a tube and into biohazard specimen bag which goes to Duke Human Vaccine Institute
• 5 samples are run together because few positives are expected (turn-around time for 1st testing round is 8 hours); if positive found, then each of the 5 samples is run (turn-around time for 2nd round is 12 hours)
• Negatives are not communicated; positives go into Epic, to Student Health and My Chart
3. Going forward
• The plan is to test 3,000 students next week
• Ramping up for capability to test 10,000 individuals per week; details to be worked out
4. Results – 99% of students had the app and could scan; 2 students had a problem with the app; 2 students did not have cell phone nor app, so they received help from Duke staff
Questions:
Q. MacAlpine – Are all 5 students warned of a positive?
No, they are not notified as these are asymptomatic students. For symptomatic students, Student Health has a normal process for testing.
Tracy – Data is updated every Monday; the numbers look low so far but seeing what is happening with other universities, Duke needs to make sure this testing rigor holds up.
Q. Does pool testing include front line staff such as The Link Service desk and TEC employees?
Yes, to the extent that this is algorithmically determined.
A detailed conversation ensued about the use of data to support manual contract tracing efforts, guide pooled testing samples, and enable building density monitoring. The discussion included consideration of appropriate access to the data, and methods to ensure rigorous protections for the data.
The question of research uses of the data was raised. Although there was broad acknowledgement such uses could be quite valuable from a research and societal perspective, currently there is no authorization to use the data beyond the approved (operational) uses. Any future research uses of the individual, identifiable data would require standard IRB approval and user consent. Members of the committee encouraged future consideration of research use of aggregated and unidentified data.
Throughout the discussion there was reinforcement of the need for retention of the data to be limited, consistent with what has been authorized under the “Acceptable Use Policy Statement of Expanded Use of Data during COVID-19” (see: https://returnto.duke.edu/community-responsibility/data-usage-during-covid-19/). A member of the committee raised the question of what if data being collected turn out not to be useful. Should certain data prove irrelevant as the modeling efforts progress, collection of those data into the repository will be discontinued.
Q. Is there a way to ensure students have performed the COVID test correctly?
Yes, the staff is present at every site to oversee.
Q. Is Duke collaborating with other universities?
Charley responds Yes. Tracy responds Yes: John Board is hosting a call with other CSG universities interested in what Duke is doing; yes, collaboration is alive and well.
4:35 – 5:00 p.m. – Fall Registration Update, Chris Derickson, Frank Blalark (15 minutes of presentation; 10 minutes of discussion)
What it is: Registration for Fall 2020 classes took place in August and successfully registered students for a very different semester than was originally planned. The Student Information Services and Systems and Registrar’s office changed course this Summer with extraordinary collaboration.
Why it is relevant: This presentation will share the numbers that make up our Fall 2020 semester. Frank and Chris will elaborate on specifics, like the number of students in class and the types of classes.
Frank Blalark and Chris Derickson started by giving an overview of the Registration for Fall 2020 classes.
Frank then took a step back and talked about Spring 2020 and the impact that COVID-19 had. Major changes happened during this time, some of those include,
• Mass changes to instruction modes
• Changed all class instructions modes online.
• Grading basis changes
• Mass changes to S/U, P/F, CR/NC and back
• Registration 1.0
• February 17: Registration begins for Summer 2020
• April 1: Registration begins for Fall 2020
• Deletion of fall term data.
Next, Frank gave more details regarding the grading basis. Frank showed a chart of data detailing the main differences of grade basis for SPRING 2019 vs SPRING 2020. One thing here that Frank mentioned is that although the default for SPRING 2020 was S/U grade, because many students opted to receive a letter grade(A-F) instead of an S/U grade, there was a big effort to manually change these grades for students.
For the SUMMER semester, online classes continued, the number of class offerings increased, the recreation of all fall term course/class data. About 160 classes were added for undergraduates. 600 more students took classes. This is probably due to the addition of those 160 classes.
Next, Chris talked about FALL registration. When seniors enrolled in classes, about 1300 students enrolled in classes in less than a minute. Things here went as expected. One issue that Chris mentioned that happened during one of the days of sophomore enrollments, is that a bug in the system caused some delays in the number of class enrollments. However, after some time, enrollment numbers started to rise, and the day continued as normal.
Frank, also talked about a new instruction mode, asynchronous online classes for students.
There was also a student verification to ask the students a set of questions before the start of the semester to verify the information. 11263 students have completed the verification.
Frank then talked about Enrolled Students as of 9:00 a.m. on 8/20/20. Frank mentioned that almost all careers saw some decline in student enrollments. Frank noted that some schools have not started their semester yet, and that in the next month, these numbers will be different. This data was compared with that of the FALL 2019 term. Lastly, Frank talked about the different instruction modes. In-person vs online vs hybrid. The thing here is that compared to previous years and 2019 fall semesters, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, most classes have moved to online/hybrid classes.
Q: Do you have any sense of how many undergrads took a gap year?
A: last year 92, this year 232 students.
Q: Do you know how successful students were in recreating their class schedule?
A: The only way we can track this now is through students' complaints, but we have not received many.
Tracy mentioned here to look at the waitlist for classes and compare.
Q: Has it been considered to make it all S/U like how the spring semester was?
A: there has not been a conversation around that since about 75% of classes were switched to graded(A-F) classes.
5:00 – 5:30 p.m. – More Code+ Student presentations, Jen Vizas, and student project teams (20 minutes of presentation; 10 minutes of discussion)
What it is: The 2020 Code+ program ended last month. Over 10 weeks about 50 students participated in 11 project teams. In July we heard from two of the project teams. In this presentation, you’ll hear from two more of the project team student representatives.
Why it is relevant: In a year of great challenge for the program Code+ has found new and meaningful ways to connect students with both the technology and professional IT skills students need to expand their experience outside the classroom.
Jen Vizas -Code+ is a 10-week coding class with 49 students and 11 projects; the projects were amazing!
Course Permission Numbers App
Michael Faber’s team and Chris Derickson were the primary stakeholder who worked with the students on this project.
Duke has had no standard for granting permissions numbers for courses; this project’s goal was to standardize this registration process and to make the process easier and more efficient for faculty and students.
Process via software interface:
Faculty creates course.
Faculty uploads an Excel of permission #s.
Faculty has the option to save a template for a student questionnaire to help in determining which students to accept.
The faculty publishes the form so students can request class and can answer any questions.
Students request a permission number by finding the wanted class and filling out a form.
Students can view the home page for the status of the request.
Faculty will see requests and Accept or Deny by pushing a button: faculty can sort on responses, can hide columns, and can see answers to questions to make decisions; once an email is sent out, email is automatically sent to the student.
Q. Why has it been so painful to get this done? Why couldn’t we have had an integration with Duke Hub a long time ago? Why is this so difficult that students had to solve this problem? Must we keep this type of tension in the system so that students can come in and be the heroes?
A. Duke Hub 2.0 is including permissions.
Q/Comment: Shrey Majmudar noted that Duke Student Government would be interested in providing feedback.
Augmented reality for Lemur Center
Maria Gorlatova from Pratt was a sponsor of this project.
Goal: to improving the Duke Lemur Center Experience.
The students created an informational app for the Lemur Center to enhance the visitor experience
Using 3D models and virtual reality.
First, a storyboard was created, and the app was modeled to determine how to show information; then, ideas were combined and standardized before programming.
App includes:
Home page
Donate button
About us button
Visit button, to schedule tour and find hours
Directions to lemur center button
Users can see the profile of each Lemur species
Tour button – look for a checkpoint in lemur center and content is presented using augmented reality
Data is read in from the JSON file for maximum flexibility.
More content coming soon after COVID 19.
1. Face Filter – can see what you would look like as different types of lemurs; face tracking to determine how to overlay filters; save to camera roll to see saved photos
2. Lemus Quiz to test visitors’ knowledge; 5 randomly generated questions.
3. Madagascar map - uses augmented reality using Blender with sights and sounds of lemurs and views of Madagascar.
Q. Was this more of a coding or modeling project?
A: More modeling at the beginning; the grant was for augmented reality; once the modeling part was figured out, the project became more about programming and integrating into the app.