Technical Considerations
Collaboration with Business and Community Engagement partners across institutional boundaries raises a wide range of technical considerations at institutional, service, project and individual level. The trial projects encountered and overcame many technical issues, including those relating to security, network access, support, network stability, network bandwidth, mobility and hosting.
Security
Security of systems infrastructure is of utmost importance for both education institutions and external partners. Numerous questions relating to security arise when considering online collaborative tools:
- How can an open, collaborative environment be fostered that does not jeopardise the business critical infrastructure of the institution?
- How can commercially sensitive data and ideas be held securely within a collaborative endeavour with industry partners?
- If third party online tools are used, how can security of information be ensured?
The University of the Arts and University of Leeds trial projects took a very open approach, as required to build an online network/community. Username and password security credentials were required for each community member able to gain access regardless of location or institution affiliation.
In developing the new version of their bespoke tool, Knowledge House implemented an Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) data model, which allows finer grained security and access to data. A strict design rule of the system is that the application layer should never access the database directly.
The Northumbria University trial project sought to use open source software, hosted by the institution, to brings together industry partners and students from across the globe, including students from the School of Design at Northumbria University into the 'Design Studio'.
From the industry partners perspective, security is paramount due to the sensitivity and potential commercial value of ideas created and contributed to the collaboration. Thus, third-party hosting was not an option. Security was also a major concern for the host institution, Northumbria University where a solution needed to be found that did not jeopardise the business critical infrastructure of the institution. To this end the University of Northumbria's IT Services department provided the Open ICT Tool project with a test server (a virtual machine) which was used by the project team to host a variety of open source potential solutions during this project. This machine was partially isolated from the main University network located within the network's DMZ (Demilitarized Zone). Routes through the University's firewalls were built to allow common access to existing mail servers (for e-mail traffic) and Active Directory servers (to allow Northumbria students and staff access using their existing university usernames).
The trial projects were ultimately successful, enabling the implementation of the dedicated and secure online collaborative tool hosted by the university. Business partners contributed with confidence with regard to security of commercially sensitive project related material. Additionally, the collaborative online tool was only available to community members, ensuring the provision of a safe learning environment for students.
The ability of the Northumbria University trial project to overcome institution-internal security issues is largely due to the excellent relationships that were built. The team spoke to the Director of IT Services at the outset of the project, and from this meeting momentum snowballed. The trial project has brought together Academics and IT Services with lasting benefits for all, the collaborative server and its hosted online tools are likely to be re-institutionalised and provided institution-wide.
Focus on: Skype
Skype provides an example to highlight the management of security concerns within Northumbria University. Until recently Skype was maintained on a separate network to nullify the implications of a peer-to-peer system within the software. Once the security concerns were fully tested and understood and the impractical nature of using Skype alongside other systems on separate networks was recognised, the software was rolled out across the institution.
Taken from: Vimeo
'The main issue that we have in Northumbria is we have an incredibly locked down set of systems. Whether it's wireless, the actual main backbone network or any of the other systems, they are really very heavily monitored. A lot of the things that we've started to use, things like Skype, were already allowed, but they're not allowed in an open way. So you would have to get our students to use a particular wireless network, but that wireless network is not allowed to talk to Outlook Web Access, it's not allowed to talk to Desktop Anywhere, so you don't get any interoperability between the different communication systems we've got.'
Quote from Ben Lovatt - LTech Northumbria University
Access to/from the network
For the user, the ability to gain access to a collaborative environment is clearly vital. For the institution, questions will arise around Access and Identity Management.
Issues relating to access were most pressing for the trial projects when the collaborative activity was synchronous, i.e. in real time, when there is an immediacy of need not matched by instant availability of support.
The University of Huddersfield, who trialled the use of Elluminate for online meetings, note that "By far the biggest problem encountered was that some participants were failing to connect to the session. There was seemingly no pattern to this - some users could connect whereas others would fail." However, after closer inspection, they identified that firewalls were preventing access for partners from across the West Yorkshire Lifelong Learning Network.
Birmingham Metropolitan College also trialled Elluminate, but found that many NHS partners experienced technical problems regarding network access from laptops and the use of webcams.
Who is privileged enough to have admin rights?
Elluminate is downloaded to the participant when they request to join a meeting. It runs within a web browser and no previous installation should be required. However, Elluminate requires a Java application which is temporarily installed and runs in the browser. Java is hence required on the host machine and local administrative rights are required to install and configure it correctly.
Support
Engaging in collaborative activity with Business and Community partners raises issues relating to the provision of support when a technical problem is encountered:
- Who provides support for the system or tool?
- Does an individual seek support from their local institution or the institution providing the platform?
Online collaborative tools could be considered to be 'disruptive', challenging existing systems or tools provided by an institution. Working across institutions boundaries, trial projects encountered varied responses to requests for assistance from IT support services, who in some cases understandably took an initial stance to protect their network and enterprise systems.
Knowledge House took a user focused approach to the development of support documentation, encouraging users to write the guidance, not the technical developers.
Network stability and bandwidth
Online tools, in particular those that are used in real-time, require network stability and make high demands on bandwidth. In particular, online communication tools such as Wimba or Elluminate that transmit video and/or audio data can become intermittent and unreliable if sufficient network stability or bandwidth is not available.
The University of Huddersfield trial took measures to ensure stability of the Elluminate service:
- Meetings were scheduled to occur during periods of 'light' network activity. This meant either first thing in the morning, Wednesday afternoons when no courses were taking place, or late Friday afternoons
- Web cameras were not used for meetings with more than 2 participants
- Users were encouraged not to run other applications in the background
- Users were encouraged to test their connection and audio equipment prior to the meeting
The University of the Arts London trial project, which used Wimba for online webinars, identified the particular technical problems presented by audio:
'Audio was a significant problem although participants recognised that it was normal to have audio difficulties at this stage of technology development. However several pointed out that it interfered with their engagement with the webinar, and the quality of the audio was particularly important when participants include non-native speakers of English. The specific audio problems were the audio breaking up, feedback from multiple microphones, background noise and speakers not aware when audio goes down.'
University of the Arts
A resilient community
They also note the resilience of participants within their online community to overcome system crashes. 'There were a number of system crashes ... However, as a mark of the resilience of the participants, most managed to move to another room that we had available and continue the webinar after a group email was sent out.'
'The system was only as good as local internet connections, and many participants experienced frequent dropping out and having to log in again.'
University of the Arts London
Mobility
Access to collaborative online environments from different locations via mobile devices, whether laptop or smartphone, is an important technical consideration.
The Birmingham Metropolitan College trial project provided all partners with a project laptop, so that they could 'attend' virtual meetings wherever they happened to be. This was an important consideration for academic staff who are part of the project team and who are responsible for recruiting from countries such as India or China and spend a lot of time travelling. The software chosen was Elluminate for video conferencing and a Moodle site for sharing files, forums and discussions.
Hosting
Technical considerations regarding hosting need to be considered when using online collaborative tools:
- Which institution should host the tool?
- Or should a cloud solution be considered?
- What are the cost, maintenance and reliability implications?
- Is the chosen service more 'secure' if it's hosted internally or externally?
The University of Huddersfield trial project changed the hosting plan for Elluminate part way through the project. After experiencing performance issues with self-hosting, they switched to a hosted solution.
'We discussed the matter with our Elluminate Account Manager who indicated that ... the only other institution who was doing something similar (self-hosting) was the Open University. Rather than continue trying to resolve the issues, it was decided to switch our licences over to a hosted solution, using Elluminate servers to hold meetings.'
University of Huddersfield
