Is there interest in a cohort model for DoOO campus-wide implementation?

Domain of One's Own
#1

We at Muhlenberg College are in the processes of implementing DoOO. Several of us here have been in contact with great folks at other institutions much further along, trying to chart our course. If you are one of those folks, thanks! Truly. But I’d also like to interact with folks at the same stage of this process as ourselves.

I recently worked to implement an integrated library system whose developers rely on a cohort model. The project spanned nearly two years, and involved migration as well as implementation. Basically, newly committed institutions were grouped into cohorts of 5-8 libraries of similar sizes and with similar technology profiles. The various library project managers then worked through an implementation schedule along a common timeline, meeting challenges and sharing whatever shortcuts and tips they picked up along the way with one another. The ILS company also provided a project liaison to call the meetings (we used WebEx), track implementation milestones, get folks unstuck (usually 1 on 1), and put out big fires.

I’m sure not all of this fits within the Reclaim or DoOO contexts. But I am curious about a few things:

  1. Are there other campuses about as far along as mine in their implementation of DoOO?

  2. Have enough institutions traveled this path to reveal something akin to sound practices?

  3. Can some number of institutions benefit from sharing their efforts through periodic online hangout-type collaboration?

  4. Are there milestones that could be established? Is that idea even practical? If ‘yes’ how might working together along a timeline make things easier, better, more fun?

As you might guess, I’d be willing to try. I’d love to see what others in this community think.

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#2

Hi Tim,

Let me start by saying this is a brilliant idea, and I really love the thinking you have been doing around Muhlenberg’s domain package out the gate. There are a number of schools who will be following a similar, discovery path with Domains this year, and I’ll be inviting them to this thread to see if they are at the stage where this makes sense. I really hope some folks will take up your call because I believe doing this as a cohort would have exponential benefits for all involved, including Reclaim Hosting—and we are more than willing to support your efforts in any way we can.

Thanks for your continued awesome in this department.

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#3

Hi Tim,

I really like this idea! Just in the last week, we have started rolling out DoOO at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, beginning with a pilot project to work with students in some specific Digital Humanities and Journalism/Visual Communication classes. Students have started claiming their subdomains this week, and I worked with a class last night that will be creating DH projects. I would say that our take on things this semester is that we’re conducting an experiment, so while we know we have willing and eager participants and teachers (in the disciplines as well as info and digital literacy contexts), we’re largely shaping things based on need and interest rather than pre-planning a lot of what the DoOO will look like here. I think it would be helpful to talk with others about the approaches they’re taking at their institutions, along with the questions you raise.

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#4

Hi Liz,
I’m one of Tim’s colleagues at Muhlenberg, and I teach in Media and Communication so it makes a lot of sense to me that those courses/students are a launching pad for DoOO. We’re starting here with a Faculty Learning Community this fall–kicked off with a visit from @jimgroom in October. Faculty who participate in the FLC will then roll out DoOO with students in courses in the spring and next fall. I think one of my major questions is scale and how big or small we start with and really if that’s something we can control very much once folks know what’s available. It’s not that I would want to limit it, only want to be sure that we are ready on the support side of things.

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#5

Hey Tim - I am at the University of Texas at Arlington, and we are in the midst of implementing DoOO. I work at a research lab that implemented the idea, but we are currently in the middle of growing the user base, as well as finding a permanent home for the project. So far, two classes are using DoOO, about 10-15 instructors, and a few other random projects and staff members. I would love to help and share any thing that we have learned on this (as well as what we still need to learn).

We recently created an advisory council that will guide the implementation of DoOO at UTA. This was something that I started so that we can give a voice to every group on campus that will use DoOO. That way, no one group will take control and only represent their own interests. We plan on expanding this council and getting some students on board soon. They are by far our largest group of users.

Right now, the council is working on a proposal for our Provost to suggest how to implement and support DoOO. We are looking at some ownership and funding options. These are kind of in flux as our university is re-organizing several key units that would effect this options. If our campus instructional designers can get moved out of their current structure and get placed in a new Division of Teaching and Learning, we will have a huge piece of the puzzle solved, as that would be a great resource for our instructors (I used to be an ID in that group, so I know they will be able to implement the right mindsets for teaching with DoOO).

Additionally, we have several people in the library on the council that are very enthusiastic about DoOO and ready to help support students and others as we roll it out. It’s a small council, and campus-wide interest is still minimal, but both are growing faster than I can handle :slight_smile: I presented to several hundred honors college students last week about DoOO at UTA. Its growing so fast that I have to ask some groups to wait while I get through batches of registrations (we are still navigating tricky political waters to get single sign-on implemented).

That is about where are at now. Let me know if you have any questions.

(FYI - I found out the hard way that you will get locked out of DoOO for 20 minutes if you use the wrong password five times in a row. Not a good thing when it happens right before a 15 minute presentation :slight_smile: )

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#6

Hi everyone,

What a great idea, and thanks, Tim, for reaching out. At UNC Asheville we are looking at implementing DoOO with a faculty pilot next academic year – student pilot the following academic year. So we look forward to seeing what you all are doing, and yes, if we still qualify as part of your cohort, we would love to be involved. I look forward to learning and sharing!

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#7

In my small-scale DoOO experiment at a college of education, I had education and instructional design masters students set up their own domains and install Wordpress, Scalar, and other apps. I designed a series of challenges that rather than providing step-by-step instructions (lots of people create those and it is impossible to keep them up to date), instead outlined activities to accomplish (e.g., install a Wordpress theme, a plugin, create an About page, create pages and posts).

I built my courses on Discourse (see a syllabus here), so students could share in each other’s accomplishments and frustrations.

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#8

We are just getting started on my campus - not even sure of the scope yet… program, school, university, ? We have just begun visioning and discussing resources/requirements. Nonetheless, the idea of an implementation cohort is very interesting - I think all parties would benefit.

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#9

Hi again. I’ve written something about what a DoOO cohort might look like. I’d love to continue this conversation here. Please check it out if you can: http://yep.bergbuilds.domains/blog/domain-of-ones-own-cohort

#10

This is wonderful, thank you Tim. I really would love to implement something similar at my institution in the next year. I’ve been working on my own projects very similar to DoOO locally to my classes as well as promoting the ideas in general. Thanks for documenting your journey for us.

#11

From @floatingtim’s post this bit stuck out to me as something that could be powerful:

I imagine it more as a set of resources than a project plan, more of an assignment bank than a Gannt chart.

We’ve had folks in the past thinking about DoOO ask us specifically what kinds of things are involved in a campus implementation. There are of course commonalities but also so much we miss as the provider where I would love something like a crowdsourced assignment bank of all things DoOO. How cool and useful would a resource like that be? Maybe that’s something Reclaim could host and have the community here contribute to as part of this cohort.

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#12

I’m glad that there are several folks expressing an interest in working together on their DoOO implementations! What should I be doing next to keep things moving?

Can we presume something akin to an task bank? I’ve started to scratch out a preliminary organization of tasks that might be associated with an institution’s DoOO work. Most of these have already come up here at Muhlenberg, and several have been completed. I am likely excluding some important and interesting stuff that falls outside my immediate experience, so apologies in advance if I’ve done that.

As for where it might reside, I think @timmmmyboy is totally right that Reclaim Hosting is the natural home for any repository. But I’m also willing to pull my weight if there could be some way to share the effort?

Here is my very rough pass for how things might be organized. I offer this mostly as a way to keep things moving, and I could easily be persuaded to organize differently.

###Administrative & Policy Related###

  • Proposal Development, Strategies for Administrative Approval (I saw that this was requested in another thread today)
  • Budget Development
  • Privacy & FERPA
  • Terms & Conditions; Related Legal Stuff
  • Branding, Publicity Plans, & Promotion

###Technical & Preservation###
####Technical/Systems####

  • Authentication / Sing Sign On
  • Security Configurations
  • Integration of DoOO into Existing Technical Support Structures

####Digital Preservation####

  • Legacy Systems Auditing
  • Digital Preservation of Existing (e.g., migrated)
  • Digital Preservation Planning

###Faculty/Staff Considerations###

  • Running a Faculty Pilot
  • Faculty Learning Communities
  • Digital Pedagogical Faculty Development
  • Support of Faculty Research through DoOO
  • Faculty-centric Documentation
  • Faculty Technical Support

###DoOO & the Student###

  • Developing Peer Support
  • Student-centric Documentation
  • Support of Student Research through DoOO
  • Student Technical Support
  • Student Offboarding

One real quick observation here: I deliberately grouped audits or inventories of existing stuff, migration of that stuff if necessary, and preservation of that stuff. For me, it makes sense to consider how to preserve/archive (from an institutional perspective) existing WordPress MultiSite blogs, for instance, while we’re also considering how to move them to new infrastructures. We’re going through this here at Muhlenberg, but I can imagine this is a recurring situation. It sounds like this was the case at OU, after speaking to @acroom, for example.

I have mentioned on another thread here that I can remember the tilde sites I created as a student. I’d wager that none of that work was ever preserved in the University archives. I think that’s a shame. I’d love to see this community begin to get its arms around how we might ensure that Domains work will be available to scholars of the future. Perhaps taking this on at the point of backup and migration from existing platforms to DoOO will provide a test bed for archival best practices going forward?

###To Meet Online or Not To Meet Online###

A second and perhaps less obvious aspect of a cohort can include some kind of regular or semi-regular online meeting. I seem to recall an ‘old’ thread (community discussion prior to discourse) that talks about office hours, and how they weren’t well attended. I totally understand how this might not be broadly appealing or particularly useful for those with the most history or experience.

I’d really like to try and see if online meetings could work. I care about this because, as I stated previously, I’d appreciate some manner by which folks can “think aloud” about the possibilities DoOO affords digital teaching and learning. The opportunity for the exchange of ideas seems quite powerful to me. I also recognize that there are other closely related online and face-to-face communities that intersect or perhaps closely parallel what may be an online cohort around DoOO implementation. An alternative might be to seek dedicated DoOO sessions during other related community online meetings? I’d appreciate learning others’ opinions. Once again, I’m happy to do my part. My institution has access to a couple different online conference tools that could work. Same with the scheduling – I volunteer to help with logistics and scheduling if that is useful.

Thanks!

#13

We’ve been working (and have worked) on a lot of these issues here at UMW. We are about to start piloting a kind of DoOO curriculum to help faculty incorporate DoOO not just pedagogically but also in a way that is empowering for students. We haven’t made a huge deal of them yet, but you can find them linked here:

Building Blocks for Domain of One’s Own: A series of adaptable modules
Digital Identity
What is a Domain?
Understanding the Web
Copyright, Fair Use, Creative Commons
Digital Citizenship
Data Ownership & Usage
Representation (gender, race, culture, orientation)

Last spring, we (and by “we” I mean DTLT, but the team that did this is not the team who are here now), ran a successful Faculty Initiative, http://fi.umwdomains.com/. You can find the curriculum there, as well.

And, we have a pretty robust documentation site that we completely revamped over the summer:
http://umwdtlt.com/documentation/

This is a great idea. There are so many different directions that DoOO is going, and it would be really beneficial to have a place where we all can share (that is a little more organized than a forum). In the Google sheet I shared before, if you scroll to the bottom, I shared the various support sites that schools have created for technical and/or pedagogical support for DoOO.

I’d link to the google docs, but it looks like I can’t, so here the blog post, where the google docs are linked:

I know this is an awful lot of materials to work through (as the person who has been trying to work through them all!), but hopefully, this can get you started! There are lots of active communities and initiatives.

I would love to see a lot of different examples, because the last thing I want to see happen to DoOO that it becomes a one-sized-fits-all approach to implementation (for lack of a better word).

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#14

That was definitely what came to my mind, maybe Reclaim hosts a copy of @cogdog’s DS106 Assignment Bank setup

You’ve got a great start there with topics and we could find ways to structure it so that it’s easy for folks to contribute what they’re doing in these spaces. That alone would be a huge resource to people considering DoOO in the future because all of that and more comes up during the planning phase and often schools are relying on us or a few select references to get insight into these projects. I’m all for more open sharing because in addition to growing interest and building community we’d also all benefit from the variety of approaches.

#15

Since I first started teaching in 2001, I’ve wanted to create a massive collection of assignments that could be contributed to, searched, copied, remixed, shared. I’ve tried a couple times, and I had a lot of difficulty getting contributions. I like @floatingtim’s idea, because it emphasizes community and not content – collaboration in the designing and remixing of approaches more than just gathering and disseminating examples.

Something related I’ve been thinking about: what’s the larger frame in which this all sits? What would be the boundaries of a repository or of a community? How is what we are talking about here different from the work I have done with Digital Pedagogy Lab, #digped, Hybrid Pedagogy, etc. I think it is, but there are also useful points of contact.

“Online cohort around DoOO implementation” suggests a place to think through the philosophies underlying DoOO, a way to connect folks working on varied DoOO-like projects at different kinds of institutions. Ideally, this kind of thing would include as many kinds of stakeholders as possible: teachers, students, technologists, administrators, and tech companies [waves at Reclaim].

Have some things planned (already have some stuff planned, both at UMW and for Digital Pedagogy Lab) that might be related. But mostly just thinking out loud.