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Michael Feldstein: Summary from WCET on State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement
For any online program in the US that enroll students from more than one state, the issue of the Department of Education’s State Authorization proposed regulations is a major issue. WCET has played a leading role in raising awareness on the issue as well as pushing for a solution. From their summary page (read the whole page for a summary of the timeline, pushback, state regulations, etc):
On October 29, 2010, the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE) released new “program integrity” regulations. One of the regulations focused on the need for institutions offering distance or correspondence education to acquire authorization from any state in which it “operates.” This authorization is required to maintain eligibility for students of that state to receive federal financial aid. Institutions have until July 1, 2014, to have obtained the appropriate approvals. Meanwhile, institutions are required to demonstrate a ‘good faith’ effort to comply in each state in which it serves students. While the regulation has been ‘vacated’ by court order, we believe it will be reinstated.
To give an idea of the issues, consider that Missouri charges institutions $5,000 – $25,000 fees to register in the state, and there is a burdensome process. While not all states are as expensive as Missouri, the costs and overhead add up quickly, and there are conflicting and inconsistent requirements from state to state. According to a survey from UPCEA, WCET and Sloan-C, one third of online programs have not applied to any states outside their home, despite the serving a median of 37 states. Furthermore State Authorization rules would stifle online education programs and is already causing many programs to reject students in certain states.
Despite losing in court (the ruling was vacated), the Department of Education still plans on pushing forward and planning to revive State Authorization.
The most promising approach to dealing with this situation is the State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement (SARA).
The backbone of the Commission’s recommendations is a system of interstate reciprocity based on the voluntary participation of states and institutions to govern the regulation of distance education programs. Participating states will agree on a uniform set of standards for state authorization that ensure that institutions can easily operate distance education programs in multiple states as long as they meet certain criteria relating to institutional quality, consumer protection, and institutional financial responsibility (further described below). Participating institutions must be authorized by their “home state” (which is, presumptively, the institution’s state of legal domicile).Once designated, the home state should have responsibility for authorizing the institution for purposes of interstate reciprocity and be the default forum for consumer complaints.
WCET has a summary post up by Russ Poulin that describes the latest report and commission meeting on SARA.
A national meeting on next steps in state reciprocity was held in Indianapolis on April 16 and 17. The purpose of the event was to serve as an initial introduction to representatives from each state about next steps in reciprocity.
The session focused on the report: Advancing Access through Regulatory Reform: Findings, Principles, and Recommendations for the State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement (SARA) that was recently released by the Commission on the Regulation on Postsecondary Distance Education. The Commission, which is a committee formed by APLU (the land-grant universities) and the State Higher Education Executive Officers, built upon the work of previous efforts of the Presidents’ Forum/Council of State Governments and the regional higher education compacts. You can see a short history of state authorization and the reciprocity efforts on our web page.
Russ goes on to describe support from ACE and even Hal Plotkin from the Department of Education:
While the Department of Education cannot formally endorse the work, he brought a two-word message from the Secretary Arne Duncan and Under Secretary Martha Kanter: “thank you.”
There is also a summary of the key questions being considered, including accreditation affects, fees for institutions participating in SARA, determination of Home State, and impact of the 25% rule (more on that one in a future post).
In short – this is an important issue to track, and WCET has some excellent resources to help online programs stay up-to-date.
The post Summary from WCET on State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement appeared first on e-Literate.
LAK 2013: Open academic analytics initiative - Initial research findings
Presented at the Third Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference proceedings at Leuven, Belgium. The presentation talks about an open learning ecosystem and Predictive analytics based Early alert system developed at Marist College. It also researches into how the portable the predictive model can be when deployed in a different academic contexts(community colleges) and gives the results about the model performace.more about OAAI at https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=75671025 Conference website: http://lakconference2013.wordpress.com/
Linking to External Tools from a VLE/LMS: IMS LTI, oAuth or Webauth (or any other web-based Single Sign-On)?
Adam Marshall: Linking to External Tools from a VLE/LMS: IMS LTI, oAuth or Webauth (or any other web-based Single Sign-On)?
WebLearn (Sakai) offers a number of technologies for people wanting to interoperate with external tools and services. This post attempts to explain each option and then make a suggestion as to which one should use.
Thanks to Matthew Buckett for proving the initial commentary.
IMS Basic LTIIn essence IMS LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) is a session migration mechanism It allows someone who is currently using WebLearn to click on a link to a remote website and for details about the current session to be securely sent to the remote website. The details that are sent can include:
- current user details (ID, email, name, status)
- current site details (ID, title)
- current user role in site
- source service information (service name, URL)
Chuck Severence's 'ring of LTI compliance' tattoo
This allows the remote learning tool (or website) to create a session locally for that user and then return a page appropriate to them.
Typically a tool that supports LTI will use the site ID to provide data specific to that site and will use the role to decide what actions the user can perform.
All LTI tools must be set up by the central WebLearn team, we cannot yet provide a preconfigured LTI tool on the Site Info > Edit Tools page.
Medical Sciences make extensive use of IMS LTI to provide access to their iCases tool. (iCases give students the opportunity to interact with experimental data in a realistic context.) Each instance of an LTI tool maps to a single iCase – the mapping between the tool and the iCase is held in the iCases database. This means that before an LTI link in WebLearn will work, somebody with the maintain role must first configure and store the connection.
Medical Sciences have also used LTI to connect to their own installation of the testing engine QuestionMark Perception.
OAuthOAuth allows extra credentials to be created to grant a 3rd-party application access to your account once the application has been authorised. These extra credentials will typically have restricted permissions on compared to regular access. Once set-up the 3rd party service can request data on behalf of the current user.
Mobile Oxford uses oAuth to communicate with WebLearn.
The first time you try to use WebLearn via Mobile Oxford you supply your Webauth credentials to say that you authorise Mobile Oxford to (use oAuth to) communicate with WebLearn on your behalf. This authorisation lasts a very long time and means that it is not necessary to re-login each time WebLearn is accessed.
Mobile Oxford acts as a broker between the user’s phone and WebLearn. The user’s phone makes requests to Mobile Oxford, Mobile Oxford then decodes the request and asks WebLearn for relevant data using oAuth as the authentication mechanism, WebLearn checks the credentials and permissions and then returns data to Mobile Oxford which the constructs a web pages and sends it to the user’s phone.
The Blavatnik School of Government’s iPad App also uses oAuth to authenticate with WebLearn.
The WebLearn team will need to set up the 3rd party application as a client before oAuth can be used.
WebauthThese technologies are web-based authentication mechanisms generally implemented as an Apache module. Obviously we use Webauth at Oxford which is used for authentication by people with Oxford SSO accounts. After authenticated with WebAuth web applications can only retrieve the SSO username; the user must also dismiss the ‘green tick’ page.
The username can then be used in conjunction with the Oak LDAP or Core User Directory to retrieve further details such as affiliation or status.
The above description applies to similar technologies such as CAS (Central Authentication Service, an Apereo project), Pubcookie and many others.
Shibboleth is also similar but has the potential to allow logging in by users from external institutions.
Which Technology To Use?All the above sounds very good but how does one decide upon the most appropriate technology? It is this question that prompted me to post.
LTI is very useful when you have an external tool that you want to integrate into WebLearn, it allows the tool to be aware of the context (originating site) within WebLearn. If the tool is only accessible via LTI then it means that the user will always have to visit WebLearn first.
WebAuth is useful when you have an application that you want to make accessible to Oxford users but don’t require any integration with WebLearn.
OAuth is useful if you want to grant an application access to data in WebLearn but don’t want to have the user interact directly with the application. It is also useful if you want to perform operations against WebLearn from a 3rd party system on behalf of the user when the user isn’t actually logged in.
It is entirely possible and sometimes desirable, to use two or even all three approaches at the same time. As an illustrative example: you may have a quiz tool which you protect by Webauth. Once logged in, a student is faced with a list of tests and they are told to click on a particular link to take the test. The tool is also an LTI ‘end-point’, when students visit the tool via WebLearn, there is some logic that looks at the WebLearn site ID and automatically loads the correct test.
Links- IMS Basic LTI
- IMS Global LTI site
- IMS Basic LTI Outline
- Allowing access to iCases through LTI (Medical Sciences)
- Basic LTI for QuestionMark Perception (Medical Sciences)
- IMS Basic LTI Tutorial
- Example IMS Basic LTI PHP code
- Example IMS Basic LTI Java code
- Connecting IMS Learning Tools Interoperability and SAML (Shibboleth)
- Learning Tools Interoperability (Dr Chuck’s slides)
- oAuth
- Webauth
AppleScripting OmniFocus > Send completed task report to Evernote 2 | TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog
神様の壮大な計画 2013/04/21
2013年4月21日 シリーズ：God with Me~ヨセフの人生~ week3 「神様の壮大な計画」 メッセンジャー： 大窪秀幸牧師 / Pastor Hide メッセージノート： http://www.lighthousechurch.jp/message.html 日曜礼拝時間： １１：００〜１２：１５ １４：３０〜１５：３０ (J-on ※) ※ユースとヤングアダルト中心の礼拝。もちろん誰でも参加できます。 ライトハウスキリスト教会 大阪府堺市堺区砂道町3-6-19 http://www.lighthousechurch.jp
OxTALENT Awards 2013 – Call for entries – deadline 17 May
Adam Marshall: OxTALENT Awards 2013 – Call for entries – deadline 17 May
The annual OxTALENT Awards are presented each June. The deadline for entries is mid-day 17th May 2013.
We encourage your WebLearn users to consider entering the WebLearn category.
This year we are pleased to announce five open award categories, and we would encourage you and/or your colleagues to enter your examples of Oxford Teaching And Learning Enhanced by New Technology.
This year’s categories are:
- Use of WebLearn to support a course or programme of study
- Student IT Innovation
- Conference Poster
- Digital Images and Photography
- Data Visualisation and Research Infographic
Winners will be profiled on IT Services and other University websites, interviewed by the University podcasting team to produce a case study, and receive a prize at the red-carpet awards ceremony in June.
This is your opportunity to get your creativity recognised, so take a look at the details for each category and how to enter at http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/events/oxtalent2013/ .
Matthew Buckett: Generate some files in folders for testing using bash.
for dir in {1..100}; do
for dir2 in {a..f}; do
folder=dir-${dir}/dir-${dir2}; mkdir -p ${folder}
echo "A file with some text" > $folder/`pwgen -A10`.txt
done
done
Every time you run it you get more files, but the folders remain the same. It needs bash 3 or greater to run and creates folder like:
./dir-1/dir-a/euciphel.txt
./dir-1/dir-b/aineijof.txt
./dir-1/dir-c/naungeix.txt
./dir-1/dir-d/oopoolah.txt
./dir-1/dir-e/epahgome.txt
./dir-1/dir-f/ahshicia.txt
./dir-2/dir-a/busaenga.txt
./dir-2/dir-b/waepheep.txt
./dir-2/dir-c/jaeyahbi.txt
./dir-2/dir-d/biejoong.txt
Generate some files in folders for testing using bash.
, a Sakai Commercial Affiliate
