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IT Architecture Team
Report:
Academic Computing Infrastructure
Aim and Scope
The University offers a wide variety of information technology (IT) tools and services in direct support of teaching and research. This document reviews those offerings, focusing on those that are most broadly available to the academic community. The tools and services will be collectively referred to as Academic IT (AIT).
AIT offerings
AIT offerings can be divided into three classes: Centrally Hosted Services, Public Computing Facilities, and Distributed Software Services.
Centrally Hosted Services
These include the University's principal course management system, as well as other services that are managed centrally and can be accessed remotely, usually via the web.
Public Computing Facilities
OIT manages a number of servers which are available for login by members of the Princeton community, and on which are housed a number of software packages suitable for use in academic computing.
Distributed Software Services
The University has purchased or acquired licenses for a number of software packages (generally math/engineering/science packages), and individual faculty, students or staff can purchase or access these packages for use on their own equipment. Some of these packages are also available on the public computing facilities, including cluster facilities (computer labs) distributed around campus.
In general, access to any AIT offering requires that the user have a valid Princeton netID (that is, be a registered faculty/student/staff member, and have obtained an ID card and a netID). In some cases, additional registration and/or equipment may be required ... these additional requirements are detailed in the individual descriptions below.
Centrally Hosted Services:
Blackboard is the University's web-based Course Management System (CMS, sometimes also referred to a Learning Management System, or LMS). OIT automatically generates a Blackboard web site for every course at Princeton, using data provided by the registrar's office. These sites come pre-loaded with:
- Up-to-date student registration (updated nightly).
- Student facebook.
- Instructor List.
- Course Description (from data in the University's Course Information system).
- Course Location (pointer to the campus map with detailed location).
- Pointer to course eReserves (if course is using this facility).
- Pointer to course film reserves (if course is using this facility).
- Folders for storing course materials (documents, etc.).
Site managers (instructors or other authorized users) can upload additional content to the site, either as HTML, plain text, or in binary format (including MicrosoftWord and Excel documents). In addition, Blackboard offers excellent groupware facilities, including support for threaded discussions, email, chat, and journaling, as well as a rich set of other tools, including an assignment system (drop-box), an editable calendar, and a gradebook. Interested faculty can receive an on-site tutorial from the Blackboard training team. In-house programmers are continually customizing BlackBoard in response to faculty needs and requests. Recently, a tool was added which allows faculty to do precept student assignment out of Blackboard. For more information about Blackboard, contact the Blackboard help line at 258-0737, or take a look at the online resources at www.princeton.edu/as/bb_main.shtml.
Almagest is the University’s web-based Media Management System and display tool. Managed by the Educational Technologies Center [ETC], Almagest permits users to upload and catalog their own collections of media, and then to display these media in class using a built-in slide show program that is designed to work with digital projectors. Media can be of various types, including image files, audio files, video files and XML documents, although images are most common. Catalog data can be simple or complex. Almagest supports the creation of encyclopedic hypertext as background context for media. To use Almagest, faculty request a project from ETC staff (usually for a course or a research project) and then add media via a forms-based upload tool. Users then catalog media using web forms and Almagest’s metadata system. Slide shows are created with LectureBuilder, which can be learned in an afternoon. The search utility supports project-specific customization of various features. Almagest also provides tools to add users to a project, either as editors or viewers, and to restrict access to a project’s contents by IP address and/or user authentication.
For further information about Almagest, consult the online resources at almagest.princeton.edu.
Public Computing Facilities
The University hosts a number of unix (currently Linux) servers on which students, faculty and staff can login. These servers have associated permanent disk storage space, and provide access to a number of site-licensed applications (see below). Recently, OIT acquired and installed two 64-bit unix computing servers.
OIT manages a number of computing clusters around campus. These are made up of various combinations of Windows, MAC and Unix machines. The clusters offer access to a number of licensed scientific/engineering applications.
Web Application Services
The University supports a number of servers which provide web application support, allowing the creation of web sites that use PHP, Oracle, MySQL and other dynamic web-page capabilities. For details, consult the Web Application Architecture write-up.
Distributing Software Services
As noted above, the University licenses a number of scientific/engineering applications which are available either in one of the OIT computing clusters or by logging in to a central compute server. Software can also be purchased from OIT. Details on the available software offerings and services can be found at the Princeton Software Repository site: psr.princeton.edu/index.jsp.
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IT questions: helpdesk@princeton.edu, Web page comments: webservices@princeton.edu