Kuali Student Service System

KUALI STUDENT SERVICE SYSTEM (Start Date:  September 2006)

The Kuali Student Service System program (Kuali Student, for short) is a community source effort to deliver a new generation student system based on service-oriented methodologies and technologies, and sustained by an international community of higher education institutions and private sector firms.

URL:  http://www.kuali.org/communities/ks/

PROJECT GOALS:

The vision of Kuali Student, more so than the underlying technology, illustrates why we refer to it as a next-generation student system.  Current generation systems are almost universally designed around rigid processes that were based on assumptions of student engagement that are increasingly inaccurate and at times irrelevant.   Kuali Student needed to solve the challenge not solely through building a system based on new technologies, but rather by rethinking the paper process design paradigm that are the basis of today’s less than satisfactory student experience.

With Kuali Student, we envision a technology environment that supports students and other users by anticipating their needs; helps them to make choices, set goals and track their progress; and reduces the time it takes them to complete administrative tasks. Kuali Student will support a wide range of learners and learning activities, in a wide range of institutions, and make it as simple as possible to provide support for new types of learners, activities and programs.  We will support a wide range of academic and related administrative and academic processes, including those that cross departments & systems, in ways that work best for each institution, while making it easier, faster and less expensive to change existing processes and introduce new ones.  We will build a system that complements human interactions, releases staff from repetitive clerical and administrative tasks, and allows them to provide higher value support and services to students, faculty, and other people who need them.

The specific objectives of the Kuali Student Program can be stated as follows:

•          To develop a next generation Student Service System architecture that follows the principles of Service-Orientation, implemented using Web Services.

•          To develop the Service Contract specifications for the services required to implement the Student Service System.  This will enable development work to be completed by a large community, not just the originating Founders.

•          To develop, and release for implementation, a software product consisting of a set of Services that have been defined to be the core functions of a next generation Student Service System - Kuali Student.

•          To define and publish standards for development that, when combined with the published service contracts,  can be used by other members of the broader community, including peer community source development efforts,  to create Services that are not within the scope of the core product.

•          To ensure the core Services of Kuali Student are successfully implemented by the Founding Institutions.

•          To promote the adoption and implementation of Kuali Student by a wide variety of educational institutions – within North America and internationally.

•          To build a community of interest that will sustain future maintenance, enhancement and development of the product.

•          To define product development and support processes that will be used to assist the community to implement the software and to provide operational support for the product.

•          To continue to evolve the technology and architecture of Kuali Student over time to keep up with new industry standards, tool releases and trends. 

LEADING INSTITUTIONS:

PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS

With the KS Board approval of the Program Charter at the end of June 2007, Kuali Student officially launched its technical and application architecture phase in July 2008. 

The project gained insights on development methodologies from peer community source projects including Sakai and Kuali finance efforts, and created three core teams: functional, technical, and steering committees.  The Functional sub-team focused on defining the functional requirements, identifying services candidates, and portioning these service candidates into application domains that will allow a modular approach to the application development and software release.  The high level functional requirements were determined through a broad consultative process involving several facilitated workshops.  These workshops, which brought together many representatives from the Founder and Partner institutions, presented opportunities for unique and innovative solutions. 

For example: The concept of the abstract Learning Unit presented new ways of thinking about learning experiences and how they can be used to support diverse goals throughout an institution.  Similarly, the scope of the Degree Audit domain has been expanded to encompass a broader range of institutional activities related to student learning experiences and outcomes.  We have further developed the concept of the Learning Plan, an application designed to help learners attain goals, objectives, and competencies. 

Our experience in the Application Architecture Phase confirmed the view that existing business processes of many schools could be mapped into the design of a service oriented system, while allowing for new and more student-centric capabilities that are part of the Kuali Student vision. By recomposing those business processes into services we were able to identify multiple common services - a point of efficiency in SOA.

The Technical sub-team focused on researching, investigating and testing of the Web Service technologies that are available in the open source arena.  Their objective was to prepare recommendations for the technology stack that Kuali Student would use for development.  The Technical Architecture Recommendations report was completed on schedule by December 2007.  This report is available for download from the Kuali Student website.

The technical investigation revealed that the current compliment of open source offerings are not as mature as anticipated.   This was particularly evident in the lack of an open source implementation of the web service standard: WS-Transaction.   In spite of this short coming, the investigating teams did not find anything that contradicted the original assumption: namely that web services are replacing J2EE as the dominant paradigm of enterprise computing.

The technical team made the following choices for Kuali Student development.  These choices will be reviewed and confirmed as we proceed through the next phases.

1. Portal:                              uPortal (v2.6.1)
2. Database:                         Derby (v10.3)
3. Rules engine:           Drools (v4.0)
4. Web service engine:           CXF (v2.0.2) or Metro (v1.0FCS)
5. Web Container:                  Tomcat (v6.x)
6. BPEL engine:                      Open BPEL (from Sun)
7. ESB:                                 Apache ServiceMix (v3.2.1)
8. Workflow:                          Kuali Enterprise Workflow

MILESTONES AND DELIVERABLES – Past 12 Months

• Final Program Charter signed off by KS Board – June 2007
• Proposal to the Mellon Foundation submitted – July 2007
• Project Kickoff Workshop – July 2007
• Mellon Foundation Award – October 2007
• Technical Architecture Recommendations Completed December 2007
• Technology Stack POC – December 2007
• Commercial Affiliates Strategy and Partners Strategy – December 2007
• Communication Strategy – January 2008
• Development Infrastructure Phase II Kickoff – January 2008
• Application Architecture Recommendations Completed February 2008
• Service Modeling and Contract Design Phase II Kickoff – February 2008

MILESTONES AND DELIVERABLES – Next 12 Months

• Development Infrastructure Phase II Completion – May 2008
• Phase II POC – May 2008
• Development of Configuration Application Complete – October 2008
• Phase III POC (fully integrated vertical slice of application software) – October 2008
• Service Modeling and Contract Design Release 1 Complete – October 2008
• Start of Release 1 Software Design & Development – November 2008
• Start Service Modeling & Contract Design Release 2 – November 2008
• Release 1 Beta – April 2009

COMMUNITY

During the period leading up to the approval of the Program Charter, the focus of the KS team was to establish a strong foundation for the program: commitment of founders, program governance, resource estimates, and planning. However, once the project was successfully initiated with team members from the Founding Institutions and Partners, the focus has turned to developing the larger community.

Communications and marketing activities continue to trigger considerable interest in Kuali Student.  Discussions are ongoing with several institutions in the United States and Canada who have expressed interest in the program and represent potential partners and adopters.  In addition substantial effort was expended to develop the international community in the UK and EU during the latter half of 2007.  These efforts have been expanded to Australasia during the first quarter of 2008.

Community interest in Kuali Student is strong as evidenced by the number of requests for information sessions that have been fielded by the Founding Institutions.

SUSTAINABILITY

The Kuali Student Program plans to achieve sustainability through three key mechanisms:

• A robust community of functional and technical leaders who are committed to making contributions to the Kuali Student product
• A strong group of Commercial Affiliates who will support the community by providing implementation and support services and possibly product contributions
•  A clearly define process for contributions which will ensure the quality of the product.

Over the last 12 months the following actions have been taken to firmly establish these mechanisms:

• A Partners strategy was created that defines how Kuali Student can effectively engage the potential community of contributors and adopters
• A Commercial Affiliates strategy was created that defines how Kuali Student will develop a strong vendor community
• A Communications and Marketing program was developed to support the objectives outlined in the Partners strategy and the Commercial Affiliates strategy.  Many communications and marketing activities have been conducted as part of this program.  (See below for a brief description of some of the activities.)
• As part of the Commercial Affiliates program, discussions have been initiated with existing Kuali Foundation Commercial Affiliates – IBM and Exeter – to determine how they can support the Kuali Student program.  In addition, discussions are on-going with 2 other large strategic vendors to determine if they may be come Kuali Commercial Affiliates.
• Kuali Student has been working closely with the Kuali Foundation to develop contributions guidelines that can be used to manage software releases and control the quality of the Kuali products.  These guidelines will continue to evolve as the products become more mature.

Looking forward for 2008, Kuali Student will continue to work with the Kuali Foundation to execute the plans and activities defined in the Partner and Commercial Affiliates strategy.

MARKETING/EVANGELISM

Kuali Student is at the start of a 5 year program of software development so it is important that we deliver the right messages to the community at the right time. Raising expectations for delivery of the software when we are 2 years from releasing it might not be the optimal approach.

Kuali Student has developed a comprehensive communications strategy which includes a detailed stakeholder analysis and defines specific communications campaigns to move the potential community of adopters from awareness, to understanding, to commitment and finally to participation.  These communication campaigns are designed to deliver the right messages at the right time in order to achieve the communication objectives while making effective use of limited resources.

Over the last 12 months (April 2007 – February 2008) the following presentations and information sessions have been conducted to provide and awareness and understanding of the Kuali Student program:

• JA-SIG – presentation June 2007
• AACRAO Technical Conference – presentation July 2007
• Scandinavian CIO Forum – September 2007
• EDUCAUSE – October 2007:  information session and brochure
• Kuali Days 5 – November 2007
• Press Release and Announcement at Kuali Days
• UC System, Enrollment Services Technology Conference – October 2007
• JISC working group – November 2007
• Australian National University – visit February 2008
• Visited University of Southern California to present an overview of the KS program.
• Hosted University of Washington at UBC to provide information regarding the KS program.
• Development of public website

The following conference presentations are currently planned for the next 12 months.  Additional information sessions will be conducted if requests are received.

• University of Southern Australia – visit March 2008
• AACRAO Annual Meeting – presentation March 2008
• Oracle/PeopleSoft Higher Education User Group international conference – panel discussion, March 2008
• NACUBO conference – presentation, March 2008
• JA-SIG conference – presentation and meetings, April 2008
• Kuali Days 6 – full conference track, May 2008
• Association of Registrars of the Universities and Colleges of Canada (ARUCC) – presentation, June 2008
• AACRAO Tech conference – 4 presentations  – July 2008
• Educause conference – 3 presentations proposed – October 2008

SYNERGY WITH OTHER PROJECTS

We envision potential synergies with many other open source projects.  Indeed, the basic refining of many of the key data definitions that Kuali student will use (learner, learning unit, etc) will necessitate close partnerships with peer projects.  Facilitating these partnerships is critical to the technical and architectural strategy in selecting a web services approach. Proposed interactions include:

• Kuali Foundations Projects: Financials, KRA, RICE – there are many synergies including shared services, standards, procedures, infrastructure, architectural features of RICE, co-development of Kuali Identity Management (KIM), and more.
• FLUID – we are working closely with this project as we develop our user interface.  We benefit from their work on usability, design, and tools.  They benefit from our experience and real life application of the key concepts.
• JA-SIG (uPortal) – Since Kuali Student has chosen uPortal as the portal technology in the infrastructure stack, we intend to work closely with JA-SIG on uPortal product directions.  The uPortal team is also working closely with the FLUID project, so this 3-way collaboration should provide many synergies.
• Sakai – There are obvious integration points between a student information system and a course management system.  Kuali Student intends to work closely with the Sakai Foundation to ensure easy integration between the 2 products.  As we progress through the service modeling phases we anticipate that we will discover common services as we will be pursuing opportunities for joint development in these areas.
• Mellon ESB Research – Kuali Student participated in this research initiative by providing use cases for the analysis.  As part of the Kuali Student technical architecture research, we took this research a step further, download and testing all of the products.  Our findings corroborated the Mellon ESB findings that Apache Service Mix is currently the top rated open source ESB.
• Bamboo project & Duke Library System initiative – both of these initiatives are in the preliminary stages of setting up projects that will use service-oriented analysis and design (SOAD) to create their application architecture and software development framework.  These projects can possibly benefit by the work that Kuali Student has done on collaboration frameworks and SOAD methodology.  Kuali Student has already had preliminary discussions with these groups to share ideas and methodology deliverables.