IT Services Takes UC San Diego “Online” to a Global Audience
New platform extends academic reach far and wide.
By Douglas Bonilla, Communication Specialist
“For matriculated UC San Diego students, instructors currently use the Canvas learning management system to provide lecture and class content, but we needed a solution for our non-matriculated students,” Systems Integration Engineer Paul Jamason explained. “The university has been seeking to broaden and strengthen its portfolio of fully-online courses and programs available to non-matriculated students, such as a Master’s in Data Science for example. Coursera and edX were previously used for these offerings, but thanks to our own Open edX underpinning this effort, all new courses are now being offered on the new UC San Diego Online platform.”The biggest change in teaching and learning at UC San Diego this year is the well documented shift to remote instruction due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But there’s been another major development in how our University offers content and scholarship that extends out to a much broader global audience of learners. This new venture is called the UC San Diego Online platform and it promises to open our academic reach for all of our non-matriculating students.
Multiple IT Services teams were involved in getting UC San Diego Online, well, online! The EdTech Ecosystem Services team in Education Technology Services (ETS) worked with edX’s official technology partner Arbisoft to customize, test and deploy the application architecture into Amazon Web Services. The ETS EdTech team wrote the Online Help Center with assistance from the Web Content Management System team in Workplace Technology Services (WTS). The WTS Business Intelligence and Analytics team enabled real-time event streaming into the Student Activity Hub. And the Application Platforms and Network Integration & Monitoring Services teams in IT Enterprise Architecture & Infrastructure helped with several configuration and monitoring tasks.
Having our own Open edX platform benefits UC San Diego in several ways: it allows greater control over the customization and marketing of the site; enables detailed Student Activity Hub learner analytics to improve student outcomes; and increases the University’s share of enrollment revenue.
Instructional designers at the Teaching + Learning Commons help faculty create well-designed training, enrichment and professional development courses for the platform. Some of these courses and programs include Professor Ram Ramanathan’s Bending the Curve program on climate change, a course series for K-12 teachers on teaching Computer Science, and Professor Ravi Ramamoorthi’s Computer Graphics Rendering II course. The current goal is to create a dozen fully-online courses for repeated enrollment offerings over the next year.
“UC San Diego Online is an incredible example of what IT Services can accomplish for campus stakeholders when multiple teams work together,” said Director of Education Technology Services Dan Suchy. “We’re proud to offer this platform to broaden the reach of our world-class University.”