NUMBER:                               Administrative Policy

SUBJECT:                               e-Learning and Instructional Support Learning Management
Systems Policy

AUTHORIZING BODY:         Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost

RESPONSIBLE OFFICE:       e-Learning and Instructional Support

DATE ISSUED:                       January 19, 2007

LAST UPDATE:                     

RATIONALE:                         Moodle and other online learning management software, are available for faculty and students as a pedagogical aid in the teaching and learning process. Since Learning Management Systems serve as digital classroom space, policies for its use must take into consideration both university procedures and academic needs.

POLICY:                                 e-Learning and Instructional Support develops, administers, maintains, and provides support services for Learning Management Systems. e-LIS must respond to faculty requests for help and special services concerning Learning Management Systems and those services must be in accordance with university-approved procedures and policies, concerning users, assigned roles, additional requested courses and cross-listed courses, semester transitions of content, incompletes, course ownership and user support.

SCOPE AND APPLICABILITY:        This policy includes all faculty, students, courses at OU that are in Banner and imported into Learning Management Systems.
                                               
DEFINITIONS AND PROCEDURES:
A.        Users and Usage
All persons associated with Oakland University as students, faculty, or staff have access to Learning Management Systems through their OU email account.  Guest roles must be created by e-LIS and granted access on a temporary basis upon requests from faculty or staff in relation to a specified teaching and learning need. Only OU students will have access, unless other contractual arrangements are made. Faculty may use Learning Management Systems for teaching, research, and/or committee work. There are three types of university courses using Learning Management Systems: traditional classroom courses with supplementary Learning Management Systems' materials, web-enhanced courses with ' activities substituting for in-person classroom hours, and completely on-line courses.
 
B.         Assigned roles and courses in
Learning Management Systems are integrated with the student information system in Banner by means of software called Luminis Data Integration Suite for e-Learning. Academic units are responsible for input and accuracy of schedule information. If changes to any courses' students or instructor are desired, then those changes should initiate in the academic units. Then the correct information will be pulled through to Learning Management Systems. However, due to differences in Banner and Learning Management Systems software,  e-LIS recognizes that there will be necessary exceptions to this general principal.

Possible Learning Management Systems' roles attached to a Learning Management Systems account:
*Instructor role--the primary instructor of the course, who creates all course elements and has access to all course and student information in the Learning Management Systems' course. Instructors may login as any of the students in their course, send mail to their OU email, and access grades.
*Secondary instructors and TAs role--The primary instructor can add other instructors (if they have an LDAP and OU email account) and choose to give each editing or non-editing privileges. Guest instructors without OU email, from off-campus, will have to be manually added to the Learning Management Systems' server, before they can be added to courses.
*Student role--a student role doesn't allow one access to the course creation or management tools. Instructors may use this role to view and test the course from the student point of view.
*Administrator role--an administrator may change settings for the entire program and login as any instructor or student to trouble-shoot.

Exceptions to Banner.  Learning Management Systems import course information including classes, instructors, and students from Banner.  But since Learning Management Systems is a digital classroom environment rather than a registration system, there will be discrepancies between the two software systems, such as roles and accounts. Exceptions may be manually added to Learning Management Systems for the following reasons:
*Test students: Faculty may request a student role and account to practice online course features that they have created in Learning Management Systems.
*Additional guests in instructor roles: Faculty may request that additional guest speakers and instructors be added as co-instructors or student status to their Learning Management Systems course. The possible roles in Learning Management Systems do not always correspond to real roles.
*Students: Students who are registered in one Learning Management Systems course and need to access another may be added. This is possible as long as there are no tuition, fee or academic record implications as approved by the Office of the Registrar.
*Entire courses: Faculty and staff may request new courses to be created for advisement, tutoring, committee-work, pilot studies, research, and/or training purposes with a faculty-designer (s) and either guest student accounts or actual students.

C.        Additional Courses requested by Staff
Staff may request courses so that they might have contact with the student population they are trying to reach. A conflict may arise where students' course lists may become too lengthy so that academic courses become buried in the non-courses. For this reason, the responsible authority for any given population of students must approve student enrollments in non-academic  "courses".

D.        Cross-listed Courses
There are a number of possible types of cross-listed courses.
1. Courses cross-listed in Banner. These courses have two different rubrics but are approved through the traditional process as one course. Learning Management Systems import these cross-listed courses as one course, with the multiple CRNs listed, exactly the same as in Banner.
2. Faculty requests for combined courses that will be accommodated.
*Combined identical sections with the same course rubric for courses taught in the classroom at different times for the purpose of course resource materials.
*Combined identical sections for a special purpose like the library module put into combined sections of RHT 160.
3. Faculty requests for combined courses that will be accommodated only with the permission of the chair, dean, or provost's office as appropriate.
*Combined courses with different rubrics.
*Combined course sections with the same rubric for completely online courses.
4. Faculty requests to separate courses cross-listed in Banner into separate courses will not be accommodated.

E.       Semester Transitions

The transition or copying of course content between semesters should be as simple as possible in the Learning Management System environment. Faculty may request ongoing development courses to be created on the Learning Management System server by filling out a request form on the e-LIS and Learning Management System website. Content will then be moved for faculty if desired.

There are two basic types of courses on the LMS server - "term-based" courses and "persistent" courses.

TERM-BASED COURSES

A term-based course is an "official" course which belongs to a specific term and is recorded in the student information system.

Generally speaking, at any one time there will three terms of term-based courses on the server - the current term, and the two previous terms. There will be short windows (of perhaps a month) during which there will be four terms of courses on the server. The specific technicalities are spelled out below.

Term-based courses follow this life cycle.

• A term-based course will be created on the LMS server (via an automated interface with the student information system) one month before before the start of the term to which it belongs. Example - if a course belongs to a winter term that starts on Jan 5, then the course will be created approximateley on Dec 5 (one month earlier).

• The course will persist on the server until one month AFTER the start of the next instance of the term to which it belongs. At that point it will be archived (backed up and taken offline). Example - a winter 2008 course will be archived one month after the start of winter 2009. ELIS staff can restore archived courses for faculty who request it.

• Teachers will have access to the course throughout its life cycle - in other words, from the moment it is created until the moment it is archived.

• Students will have access to the course starting one week before the official course start date. Example - If a course in Winter term starts on Jan 6, then the course will become available to students on Dec 31. If a course in Winter term starts on Feb 14 (i.e., a late start date), then the course will become available to students on Feb 7.

• Students will continue to have access to the course for one full term AFTER the term to which the course is bound ends. Example - a course in Winter 2009 will be available to students for both Winter 2009 and Summer 2009 terms. It will NOT be available to students in Fall 2009.

PERSISTENT COURSES

A persistent course is one which is not bound to a specific term. It is not archived at any specific point in time, but rather stays on the server until there is an explicit reason to remove it (like the request of the faculty who owns it). Persistent courses fall into the following general categories:

• Ongoing Development Courses. These course shells will be created at faculty request to store course data or develop courses. One development or practice course per live course is typical. No students from Banner are imported into the development semester courses. Faculty may use these courses for developing content for teaching, service, and research purposes. Courses may be created to support groups such as committees or advisory councils. At the end of every academic year (immediately after June 30 each year), all materials in the Development Courses that have remained untouched for a period of 2 prior years will be archived and accessible by e-LIS, who will search old courses at faculty request.

• Academic Groups. These courses are those such as the library modules, Academic Skills Center, and Professional Advisors. All staff seeking groups of students must have the approval of the department, school, or Office of Academic Affairs before students will be added.

• Faculty Organizations. Faculty may have courses created for a digital space that enhances committee work or academic work.

F.       Incompletes

Oakland University Undergraduate policy (see page 70 of 2004-5 undergraduate catalog) on "I" grades is that they must be cleared during the first 8 weeks of the "...next semester (Fall or Winter) for which the student registers..." According to this policy, if a student receives an "I" grade in Winter, Spring and Summer semester, it would not need to be made up until 8 weeks into Fall, if he/she registered for Fall. If the student had an incomplete in fall, and registered for winter, he/she would have 8 weeks into winter to complete the course. If the student had an incomplete in fall or winter and did not register for the following winter or fall, he/she would have 1 calendar year from the end of the semester to complete it. Also there are P grades that indicate "progress"- another type of incomplete that get 2 years from the end of the term of registration for completion.

The Learning Management System will always have the current term and the last two terms worth of courses available. This should accommodate all "I" type situations described above. This means that accommodating incomplete requests should not require a course to be restored from an archive. If, however, the course is from a term that is no longer on the server, the faculty can request that the course be restored from the archive. e-LIS will construct a shell for the archived course and import it so that the instructor and student can both access it.

Note that in some cases, it may be required for the faculty to "unhide" their course so that a student can see it. This is because a course is only available for student view for two terms (the term to which the course is bound and the term immediately following it). For instance, if a student needs to see a Winter 2009 course in the middle of Fall 2009, the course will have to be unhidden by the faculty.

If faculty want a student to complete his/her grade accessing the current semester's course, we will add the student to the new course.

G.        Course Ownership
Faculty shall individually own their courses in Learning Management Systems. No other faculty member, administrator,  or academic unit may copy an individual's Learning Management Systems' course without their written permission. However, if a particular unit and their faculty to share modules or courses among a certain group approve alternate written arrangements or contracts, e-LIS will follow those arrangements if they are consistent with all other policies in this document.

H.        User Support
Webpages at: http://www2.oakland.edu/elis/ contain links to four help request forms.
*Help Request General Form--any type of help involving Learning Management Systems may be requested here by instructors and students.
*Learning Management Systems' Development Courses--this form is to request additional practice courses on Learning Management Systems.
*Faculty Test Account--faculty may ask for a student identity to test how elements of their Learning Management Systems' course are working.
*Archives--faculty may request a copy of old Learning Management Systems' courses (older than one semester) from our archives. However, it would be best also for faculty to create their own backups of Learning Management Systems' courses and keep their own archives. e-Learning and Instructional Support will answer these emailed help requests within 48 hours.

I.          Audits
The registrar's office looks upon learning management systems as an extension of Banner because student records come in from Banner and students can see their grades in the learning management system.  If e-LIS puts unofficial audit students into the learning management system, there could be liability issues with offering grades and materials to non-students. So only officially registered audits will be added to Learning Management Systems' courses.

J.          Student Privacy
Learning Management Systems usually are password-protected, so that students meet in a private online classroom space. Although students generally should not see each other's registry information without consent, such as emails, the Participants Block in Moodle does allow students to see other emails within a particular course. The Participants Block may be hidden from students by an instructor closing the eye icon or students may hide their email in the Edit Profile area.

Reviewed  by:
E-LIS Faculty Advisory Committee  10/27/06
Senate Academic Computing Committee 10/27/06
Academic Council 1/17/07