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About Tim Calhoon
Tim Calhoon is the Director of the California Community Colleges Technology Center at Butte College, which helps facilitate and coordinate the work of California Community Colleges (CCC) systemwide technology projects in coordination with the CCC Chancellor's Office Telecommunications & Technology Unit. Prior to this, Tim accrued more than 10 years experience in managing educational technology organizations for PLATO Learning (Nasdaq:TUTR) and CyberEd, Inc. This work, in conjunction with a talented development team, lead to more than 17 educational technology awards and a Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) CODIE nomination. Tim lives in Northern California near Chico with his wife, son and daughter. His children are both currently attending college.
Tech>ology: CCCNext Generation For Systemwide Applications
Last Updated on Tuesday, 02 March 2010 Written by Tim Calhoon Friday, 26 February 2010
There are a number of systemwide and intersegmental applications that provide services to our students and colleges in use across the state.
- CaliforniaColleges.edu Explore careers and find colleges that provide education in those areas.
- CCCApply Apply to college.
- eTranscript California Secure delivery of transcripts.
- California Virtual Campus Catalog Search for online courses across the state.
- ASSIST Find out how courses articulate between institutions.
- ePortfolio California Collect, evaluate and showcase your work.
Future applications may include a student academic planner and transfer counselor workbench.
There is an obvious need to begin to tie these applications together. Although there is some tread left on these apps, many are built with legacy technology that does not stand up to today’s Web 2.0 standards for speed, ease of use and functionality.
At the California Community Colleges (CCC) Technology Center, we are looking at a platform standard that will allow us to build new Web 2.0 applications that work together, provide sharable services to the colleges and can incorporate legacy functionality as we transition to the next generation.
The platform is composed of four technologies. I will address each in future blog posts, but here they are in brief:
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Service-Oriented Architecture: (SOA) Under this model, siloed applications are deconstructed into their component services and connected via secure internet communications. This enables these component services to be reused by college or vendor applications and combined into composite applications.
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Enterprise Portals: Most of the colleges are moving to some form of portal interface for their students. If we provide our systemwide applications as portlets to the colleges, they can be plugged in to provide additional services and functionality for students. In addition, a systemwide portal would tie together our applications with a common front end.
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Federated Identity: Both CSU and UC have Federated Identity initiatives base on the InCommon Federation. InCommon includes over 200 Higher Education Institutions, Government Agency's and Vendors. Federated Identity enables a common Log-In for the student/staff across applications and institutions while increasing security and privacy. The greatest potential benefit for CCC may be in transferring identity from CCC to CSU or UC.
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Elastic Cloud Infrastructure: The emergence of elastic cloud platforms, where the computing power behind deployed applications is monitored to scale up or down to service demand loads, has made it possible to efficiently handle the annual cyclic student demand on student services applications without having to build a large data center to handle peak loads.
As mentioned earlier, I will write more about each of these technologies and how they tie together in the next set of blogs. If this lights up an idea about what you'd like to see us provide in functionality or you have a concern, please reply.<>