CHEF Pilot trial - Fall 2003

In late February 2003 MITC sponsored an event called Instructional Technologists: Exploring our Dynamic Roles at the University of Michigan Media Union. During the course of this event I talked with some of the staff at the Learning Technology Lab about Earlham's interest in open source course management systems. One of the staff, Hanna Reeves, promptly arranged for accounts to be created on University of Michigan's Course Tools Next Generation system as it was then called (I.T blog entry for Feb 2003). In mid March 03 we recieved an offer via Hanna Reeves to host a pilot trial at U.M and by the end of March MITC hosted a meeting where they proposed hosting Chef on a pilot basis. We debated whether to install CHEF at Earlham and the consensus was that it would be better to use a remote host initially. By early August MITC had firmed up their offer to host CHEF and Janet Russell and I traveled up to Ann Arbor to for a planning meeting to discuss how the pilot project would work.

Courses involved in the pilot trial:

URL for the CHEF system on the MITC server : http://www.midwest-itc.org/chef/portal

Initially (early September) there were a fair few teething troubles (Monteze : 'horrible exception errors' , Wes : saving issues ) but these were addressed when Manuel (system manager at MITC) applied a bug-fix update from the U.M. to the CHEF system.

• Students in the Cell Physiology course were asked to complete a survey of their experiences with the CHEF system (full compliance was assured because they had to hand in the completed survey before they could do the final exam). Results were processed by the kind folks at MITC and a spreadsheet of data was produced. Results and comments.
• The faculty who participated in the pilot also completed a survey form, the results were compiled into a spreadsheet and are presented together with comments here.
• Manuel Rendon wrote an overview of managing the CHEF system from the system manager's viewpoint.