Internet2 MACE-courseID Working Group: The Simple Co-taught Course Use Case

The Simple Co-taught Course Use Case

a. Two instructors from different campuses co-teach their respective courses (e.g. a UCLA course on the History of Philosophy and a Berkeley course on the Philosophy of History).

b. They consider this to be an "informal" arrangement since Berkeley professor will assign grades to the Berkeley students, and the UCLA professor will assign grades to the UCLA students (i.e. the registrar at Berkeley doesn't have to worry about whether a UCLA professor is qualified to assign grades to Berkeley students and visa versa). They also figure they can merge their students into one coursesite since neither instructor makes us of on-line journal articles that would be available to student at his school, but not available to the remote students.

c. They want their students to have access to a common body of on-line course materials, and they want to their Philosophy and History students to pair up to work on group projects, which will involve the use of various collaborative tools (e.g. chat rooms, asynch discussion groups, argument visualization tools, etc.) and collaborative work spaces.

d. Students, faculty, and staff on both campuses are authenticated via a central campus authentication system (Note: at Berkeley the authentication piece of our CalNetID system is based on Kerberos5).

e. Both instructors have coursesites that are managed by IMS compliant course management systems (IMS-CMS), but one has far more material posted to his/her coursesite, and a pool of quiz questions to generate online pop quizes. So, they've decided to make this site (the Berkeley site, of course) the "dominant" coursesite for the semester.

f. The two instructors have co-taught their courses before, but in the past the Berkeley instructor has generated temporary coursesite ids for the UCLA students, which aren't associated with their UCLA ids or the authentication system back at UCLA (so, its hard to coordinate the Berkeley site's collaboration tools with email systems etc. on the UCLA campus).

g. The UCLA instructor has also been given a temporary instructor's account on the Berkeley system so s/he can post materials, particpate in discussion groups etc.

h. Also in the past, the UCLA students take the pop quizes on the Berkeley site, but there's no easy way to get the quiz results back to the UCLA site's gradebook (i.e. the Berkeley instructor has to dump the gradebook to a spread sheet, delete the Berkeley students from the spread sheet, and email the spread to the UCLA instructor).

i. And, the UCLA professor wants an archive of the Berkeley site so s/he has a record of the discussion group logs, the student projects, etc. So, in the past the Berkeley professor has made an archive of her coursesite and emailed a rather large attachment to the UCLA professor at the end of the semester. Luckily, the coursesite archive is packaged according to the IMS content packaging specification, and both campuses are using the same version of the same CMS, so the UCLA instructor can upload the coursesite into his local CMS.

j. Both Professors have expressed their concerns to their respective support staffs regarding the complexity of creating temporary student ids, reporting quiz grades to the non-dominant coursesite, and emailing huge coursesite archive attachments..

k. So, the UCLA and Berkeley support staffs are looking for an authentication/authorization mechanism : - to automatically roster (provision?) the UCLA students and instructor into the Berkeley coursesite (and visa-versa if need be), - to send the quiz grades from the Berkeley site to the UCLA site, - to send an archive of the Berkeley site to the UCLA site.