Stellar Development Takes Off

The Educational Media Creation Center is eager to share with the MIT community information about the development of its web-based knowledge management environment, Stellar. Stellar is being designed from the ground up to provide the richest set of features possible, while integrating tightly with MIT’s existing information systems infrastructure and services. The Stellar initiative, sponsored by Provost Bob Brown, is being developed by the EMCC in cooperation with IS and many other parts of MIT. The design and development of Stellar also includes coordinated, collaborative effort among peer institutions, including Stanford University and North Carolina State University.

What is StellarStellar?

The StellarStellar initiative is a web-based environment for supporting MIT’s technology enhanced educationalteaching and learning activities. StellarIt will provide MIT with a framework for usingsupport a wide range of web-basedmultimedia content and communication mechanisms including text, multimediagraphics, streaming media and various forms of both synchronous and asynchronous communicationdiscussion. And, and it will be integrated tightly intowith importantMIT’s solid information MITinfrastructure and core administrative systems that support education. web based multimedia materials in support of educational initiatives. This initiative, sponsored by the Provost Bob Brown, is being developed by the Educational Media Creation Center in cooperation with IS and many other parts of MIT, including you! And as you start looking forward to using Stellar, this list of features, functions, and benefits may help you decide what is the best way that Stellar can help you.

What Features and Functions Does will Stellar Provide?

A rich set of features is planned to be available in the Summer 2001 release of the Stellar package. Stellar’s modular design is intended to allow faculty a great deal of flexibility to pick and choose among which components to include in a course’s web environment. its suite of pedagogical tools, including support for collaboration, quizzes, tests, surveys, assignment management, grade book management, and multimedia content handling, will form a versatile system for delivering courses and educational programs. Among the features planned for inclusion in the initial release of Stellar:

• Course management, including course membership lists, group management and similar administrative tools, and data synchronization with MIT’s Student Information Systems.
• A powerful integrated grade book designed to work with MS-Excel formats and allowing both automatic grade management, say from a web based multiple choice quiz, and management by hand. and integrated with the rest of Stellar
• Flexible content creation, management, and presentation tools, including both basic file upload and viewing and more advanced methods of uploading content around whichand developing structured documents around itcan be developed. ( should we say something about Word, PP, etc?)

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• A simple but powerful approach to setting up and organizing course schedules and material that will allows faculty to easyily faculty -development-generate of onea singlecourse description "document" called the course outline, . This course outlinewhich iscan then be presented to students in multiple ways including, including a syllabus or weekly outline, (syllabus), course calendar,, topic map, and other formatsetc.
• A suite of collaboration tools, including the functionality of threaded discussions, synchronous messaging (e.g. chat), asynchronous messaging (e.g. email), and shared whiteboards.
• Support for quizzes, testing, surveys, and similotherar assessment toolsmechanisms, integrated with the course outline and grade book features.
• A toolSupport for for assignments, turn-in, collection, review, return and pickup of assignments (homework support) also integrated with the grade book and other Stellar components.

· A suite of tools for handling the semester roll-over of courses, allowing such aids as makingfor course content to be the permanent content easily repeatedtransferred from one session of a course to in the next, session of a course and secure, persistent saving individualarchival of student contributions for later access.

· Integration with the MIT Student Information System and other MIT systems, building on the existing subjects catalog and other materials.

Integration with the MIT Student Information System and other MIT systems, building on the existing course subjects catalog and other materials

A suite of pedagogical tools including collaboration tools, quiz/test/survey tools, assignment tools, gradebook, and course subject- multimedia content handling tools that form a powerful pedagogically versatile courseware system for delivering courses and educational programs.

· Integration with MIT authentication systems, so that your Athena account is also your secure StellarStellar account.

· Ability to integrate other applications and external systems, both institutional and commercial, via standardized software gateways (APIs), so that the Stellar functionality can continue to grow and improve.

· A powerful, flexible approach to providing appropriate, secure access to information while providing strong support for privacy, and protection of intellectual property.

Ability to integrate other applications and external systems via APIsstandardized software gateways (APIs), so that Stellar will continue to grow and improve as we use it

A powerful, flexible approach to providing appropriate access to the information contained in Stellar while still providing strong support for privacy

What Functions Does Stellar Provide?

·Course management, including course membership lists and similar administrative tools

·A powerful gradebook designed to work with Excel formats and integrated with the rest of Stellar

·Flexible content creation, management, and presentation tools, including both basic file upload and viewing and more advanced methods of uploading content and developing structured documents around it

·A powerful approach to setting up course schedules that allows easy faculty development of one "document" called the course outline, which is then presented to students in multiple ways, including a syllabus or weekly outline, calendar, and other formats.

·A suite of collaboration tools, including the functionality of threaded discussions, synchronous messaging (e.g. chat), asynchronous messaging (e.g. email), and shared whiteboards.

·Support for quizzes, testing, surveys, and similar assessment tools

·A tool for assignments, turn-in, collection, review, return and pickup (homework support)

· A suite of tools for handling the semester roll-over of courses, allowing such aids as making the permanent content easily repeated in the next session of a course and saving individual contributions for later access.

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What Benefits Does Will Stellar Provide?

The integrated modules of StellarStellar will allow automatic coordination of materials elements such as the course outline, syllabus, calendar, quizzes, and tests, assignments, and the grade book. For example, when you set up a basic quiz and add a quizadd it to the syllabuscourse outline, you can may also automatically add the quizreference that quiz to in the calendar, set up the basic quiz, and add or create an entry for it to in the grade book. Stellar is being designed to allow faculty to pick and choose features, starting off with as little as needed and then adding functionality as desired. For example, one might start out using only Stellar’s class list and basic content management feature, and later decide to add assignment management and collaboration tools as the needs arise.

The open framework approach that which is core to the StellarStellar uses design makes additions and enhancements easy, and will allow the Stellar environment to be a great starting point for other, more pedagogically specialized or advanced system development. For example, someone who wants to develop a simulation environment can will be able to use StellarStellar as a base so that their development can focus on just doing the simulation components, not and take advantage of doing athe course list, grade book, quizzesassessment, collaboration tools, etcand other elements that already exist within the Stellar environment. Furthermore, wAnd when a new tool is added developed within the StellarStellar framework, it is may also be made available to all theother users of StellarStellar users.

Stellar has been designed to allow faculty to use as little as needed to start, and then add functionality as desired. For example, someone might start out just using the class list and basic content management, then later decide to add the collaboration tools.

Stellar provides a basis forThis sharing and reuse of information, will extend to both at the content and and structural elements as welle levels. For example, someone who has developed a good set of files documents about FFT statistical regression might make that available for use in other courses, and StellarStellar will makes simplify that this kind of reuse easy. Also, if someone develops a course outline is developed that that may be of use tois useful for other faculty or to other courses, it is will be easy to "borrow"make that structure available and for reuse it with different content.

StellarStellar will be available to some parts of MIT in the summer of 2001. If you would like to know more about StellarStellar, or become one of the early participants in this program, or learn more about how the Stellar framework might enhance your own courseware development efforts, please contact the EMCC by phone at 3-1999 2836 or by email at stellar@mit.edu.