CourseWorks and CubMail may be dream resources for faculty members trying to curb the paper trail, but students are taking the initiative to reform and invent information technology available to the entire University.
Sunday night marked the start of the first Tech Week, which gives the floor to student technologists, allowing them to present their ideas on the state of computerized services at Columbia. Spearheaded by Columbia College Student Council, the installment represents a key interaction between Columbia University Internet Technology and student government.
“We want this to be a way for students to know how the University handles its technology initiatives,” said CCSC Vice President for Policy Adil Ahmed, CC ’09. This past summer, Ahmed opened the lines of communication with CUIT based on encouragement from a former student council senator. Upon doing so, Ahmed discovered that David Etherton, the executive director of academic and student technologies, was “very receptive.”
Ahmed hopes that Tech Week presentations could be “a way for students ... to know how CUIT directly affects them,” and have a better grasp on what changes are on the horizon for campus technology.
Etherton performed a presentation on Sakai, an open source framework on which the new CourseWorks—to be instituted over the next four semesters—will run. “Sakai is a learning management system,” he said, adding that it introduces “collaborative tools” such as wikis and blogs to the classroom. “It will make adding content much easier.”
Sakai is itself a collaborative entity, as it was developed by all the universities currently implementing it. As a result, unlike a course management system like Blackboard, which is habitually updated or changed by a third-party developer, Sakai will offer CUIT more freedom in catering to specific
Columbia needs.
Ahmed and Etherton spoke of plans to form an advisory committee of students, faculty, and administration once the new framework powered by Sakai falls into place.
This committee would point CUIT in the direction of needed improvements and modifications to the new CourseWorks.
Ryan Bubinski, CC ’11, presented his project, Columbia Classes, which he created with Zack Sheppard, CC ’11. Both Bubinski and Sheppard are members of Spectator’s online staff, and their project received some initial support from Spectator .
“The inspiration for the product was CULPA [the Columbia Underground Listing of Professor Ability] and the directory of classes,” said Bubinski, referring to the Web site that enables students to write and read reviews of their professors and teaching assistants. In the hope of merging the functionality of those two sites into one, he described the site as an “instructor-course evaluator system,” where students, after logging in via their UNI, may submit and look at reviews on courses they have taken or are to take, alongside information on current offerings.
Bubinski intends to eventually inject more features into the site, including a book swap and schedule creator. “We are working with the University to find a way to integrate that data into the project while maintaining the privacy of the data set,” Bubinski said.
Columbia Classes is to be set in motion officially on Nov. 15.
Ahmed spoke positively of what is to come of Tech Week. “There will definitely be Tech Weeks in the future on different technical initiatives,” he said.
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