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Dozens of employees on the IUB campus were involved in the development of the Expanded Context Transcript that won a prestigious award from EDUCAUSE, a higher education technology association that serves 1,400 campuses. Representing major-player units that helped develop the innovative instrument are (left to right) Chris Reising, UITS; Catherine Olmer, physics, a member of the College of Arts and Science's Policy Committee and the Bloomington Faculty Council (BFC) Education Policies Committee; R. Gerald Pugh, registrar at IUB; and Lloyd Orr, economics, and Richard Carr, French and Italian, both members of the BFC Educational Policies Committee.
A team from Indiana University Bloomington has taken top honors in the 1998 CAUSE Awards for Best Practices in Higher Education Information Resources for its innovative and objective approach to grade reporting. The Best Practices awards program was designed to recognize programs that have solved campus information resource-related problems in a particularly innovative and exemplary manner.
Since the beginning of academic record keeping, readers of transcripts have had difficulty understanding the significance of grading schemes from one class to another, in order to evaluate the academic performance of individual students. The philosophy behind the new system at IU Bloomington is to display sufficient information that the reader can see the academic context in which the grade was given.
| Since the beginning of academic record keeping, readers of transcripts have had difficulty understanding grading schemes. Enter IUB's Expanded Context Transcript. It's a winner. |
The Expanded Grade Context Record Program won the Best Practices award in the category for Applications. The project was led by R. Gerald Pugh, IUB registrar, who worked with individuals serving in five teams: project management, application development, client development, grade distribution reporting and implementation.
The IUB Office of the Registrar worked closely with the Bloomington Faculty Council to define system requirements, and with University Information Technology Services (UITS) to code and deploy the application. Registrar personnel developed the user interface components while UITS staff developed the core modules. The use of object-oriented design principles reduced future maintenance and provided for extensibility. The application architecture followed the guiding principles for IU systems development to minimize data redundancy, create standard interface parameters and encourage customization at the point of service.
The other winner in this year's competition, in the Professional Development category, was a team from the University of Virginia which was honored for its Computing Survival Skills Certification Program, an effective approach to building computing skills in a support staff that is distributed across the campus.
The Best Practices Awards were presented in December at a general session of the association's conference in Seattle. Nearly 3,500 attended.
EDUCAUSE was formed in July 1998 by the consolidation of two leading higher education technology associations, CAUSE and Educom. The focus of the new organization encompasses the management and use of instructional, research, administrative and library computing, networking and administration of the higher education enterprise. It places a high emphasis on helping individuals develop as professionals in information technology management. With offices in Washington, D.C., and Boulder, Colo., the association serves more than 1,400 campuses and 4,000 individual representatives. The Awards for Best Practices in Higher Education Information Resources are sponsored by PeopleSoft Inc.
Full descriptions of the IUB team and its product are at the EDUCAUSE Web site. Entry deadline for 1999 awards is March 1 and application information is on line, too.
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