Brandon Muramatsu

CaPRéT JISC CETIS Comments and Responses

Here are the comments on CaPRéT from JISC CETIS (in italics) along with our responses.

Deliverables

  • Has the tabular display and .csv export facility been completed? CETIS and JISc have considerable interest in seeing the tracking information that has been gathered for the sites that we have “capret-enabled”. Yes, we’ve completed the tabular display and csv download. You can see them at: http://capret.mitoeit.org/tabular.html
  • Did the project test the implementation with 1-3 UKOER projects as stated in the project plan? We did not make as much progress as we would have hoped in this regard. I had a discussion last week with Patrick McAndrew at the Open University about use of CaPRéT–so we’re still working on testing it.
  • We would have appreciated more communication and engagement with the oer-discuss mailing list. This goes for both Mini-Projects. Discussion on the list as a whole seems to have trailed off rather dramatically from the engagement over early-/mid-last year. We did try to post as regularly as we were making progress with examples and status updates.

Technical feedback

  • A very useful demonstrator to illustrate how attribution and tracking can be addressed.
  • Also demonstrates the “kind of magic” that can be done with javascript, but also highlights some of the pit falls of this approach.
  • Some systems pick up the tracking gif as a security risk.
  • The CaPReT server was down when viewed on the 29th November so we were unable to see the tracking stats.

    We had a technical “glitch” that took us a bit to recover from. We’re hosting the site from a “free” AWS micro instance. The AWS virtual server crashed and was taken out of service earlier than announced by Amazon. As a demo, we didn’t put in fully redundant systems, so it took us a bit to recover from the downtime. We’ve restructured the server setup to make it less likely to have the same issues (we’re storing the data separate from the app now). The rebuild was exacerbated by the limited compute resources on the micro instance. We think we’ve addressed that in the current setup.

  • The system was tested again on the 1st December and while the stats pages were visible they contained no data.

    We’ve been recording the data since we announced the demo to the oer-discuss list. Unfortunately the Amazon failure wiped out the old data so we had to restart it from scratch. When we brought things back online in December it was with a new database/log. That info we’ve collected since early December is visible online now.

In the spirit of openness that the Mini-Projects Programme has attempted to foster would you object to us sending a copy of these comments to oer-discuss?

Absolutely.

We’d also like to thank you for participating in the experimental OER Mini-Projects Programme. We’ve learned a lot from the experience and hope to share some feedback and reflections with both JISC and the oer-discuss mailing list.

Thanks again

/by