Spring 2013 UCosmic Stakeholder Meeting Notes

Attached are the to the Spring 2013 Virtual Stakeholder Meeting held on May 14, 2013: Spring 2013 Stakeholder Holder Meeting Notes.

We’d like to thank all of our members who attended the meeting and provided such great feedback. We hope that all of our members will review the notes and provide feedback on your development priorities for the coming months. With a new full-time developer on board, we expect that the development process will speed up and that UCosmic will have a lot of new functionality in the coming months.

Update on Stakeholder’s Meeting

The May 14th 2pm EDT Spring Stakeholder’s Meeting will continued as planned.

The May 23rd 6am – 8 am EDT meeting is cancelled.

UCosmic Consortium Conference

It is my pleasure to announce the first annual open UCosmic^@ Consortium Conference. The conference theme is: “Innovative Technology to Empower Global Strategy & Operations.”

This conference will take place at the SUNY Global Center in Manhattan on October 31^st.  Attached is the conference flyer, please distribute this flyer to relevant parties at your home institution as well as to others you think might be interested in attending the conference.  This conference is open to both UCosmic^@ Consortium members and non-members.  Following the conference, on November 1^st, we will hold a members only Stakeholder’s Meeting.  Click to view the UCosmic^@ Consortium conference flyer.

We are accepting session proposals under three conference tracks:

1. Best-Practice in Mapping Internationalization (non-UCosmic® Track)

2. Best Practices Emerging from the UCosmic® Consortium

3. Common Challenges Faced by Institutional Leaders and International Administrators

We hope that many of you will submit session proposals.

We would like to also encourage you to attend the 2013 SUNY Critical Issues in Higher Education Conference. This year’s theme: “Building a Smarter University Big Data, Innovation and Ingenuity.” This conference will also take place in New York City immediately before the UCosmic^@ Consortium Conference, on October 29–30^th.  The UCosmic^@ Consortium will be featured during one of the conference sessions at this Big Data conference. Click to view the Big Data conference flyer.

We hope you will consider attending both conferences and the Stakeholder meeting.  We can assure you that this will be 4-days well spent in New York City. But even if you cannot come for the entire period, please try to come for the UCosmic^@ Consortium Conference. We will be arranging for hotel rooms at a special discount rate for the duration of both conferences.  If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to be in touch.

UCosmic Consortium Spring Stakeholder Meeting

We are hosting two teleconferences for the Spring Stakeholder Meeting:

1. Western Hemisphere Call: May 14th 2pm – 4pm EDT

Eluminate Room: https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=2012301&password=M.3FFD4CA4F28963AFA8E10A85410532

Conference Call line: (518) 320-1200, passcode: 5566

2. Eastern Hemisphere Call: May 23rd 6am – 8 am EDT

Eluminate Room:: https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=2012301&password=M.82A216F69E8C0BE6870EDE5B4FDA69

Conference Call line: (518) 320-1200, passcode: 4455

Both conference calls will cover the same agenda:

1. Updates to the Agreements Module
2. Updates to the Faculty Module
3. Alumni Module Discussion
4. Development Timeline

Please RSVP to Rebecca.smolar@ucosmic.org and indicate which call you will attend. If there are any other pressing issues, please let us know and we can add them to the agenda.

May 3rd Stakeholder’s Meeting Postponed

The May 3^rd UCosmic® Consortium Stakeholder Meeting is being postponed. Instead, we will schedule two, 2-hour conference calls at times convenient for UCosmic® Consortium members in different time zones. UCosmic® Consortium Executive Director, Dr. Mitch Leventhal will be in touch shortly to provide more information about these upcoming Virtual Stakeholder Meetings and to give an update on the state of the Consortium as well as the upcoming UCosmic® Consortium Conference. The first  UCosmic® Consortium Conference will take place on Thursday October 31^st and the Fall UCosmic® Consortium Stakeholder Meeting  will take place on November 1^st.  Please save the date. If there are any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to be in touch.

 

UCosmic Consortium Spring Stakeholder’s Meeting

The UCosmic^® Consortium Spring Stakeholder Meeting will take place on May 3, 2013 at the SUNY Global Center in Manhattan. Please RSVP to Rebecca.smolar@ucosmic.org if you can attend.  If you cannot attend in person, but would like to call-in, please us know as well.  The agenda for the meeting is:

9:30 am – 9:45 am: Welcome and Update

9:45 am – 11:00 am: Agreements Module
Discussion of recent changes and future changes.  Recent changes include:

• Different lenses to view Agreements
• New interface to add partners.
• Configurable Agreement PDF  visibility
• Nickname field as  replacement for summary field
• Additional fields in  Agreements Contacts
• New functionality to  search and sort agreements
• Ability to upload and  download agreements data using an API.

11:00 am – 11:15 am: Break

11:15 am – 12:15 pm: Alumni Module
Discussion of alumni module functionality, including the degree of detail required in reports.

12:15 pm – 1:15 pm: Lunch

1:15 pm – 2:30 pm: Faculty Module
Discussion of changes to faculty module and pilot plans

2:30 pm – 2:45 pm: Break

2:45pm – 4:00 pm: Development Timeline
Review and discussion of the development timeline and stakeholder priorities

4:00  – 5:00 pm: UCosmic^® Conference
Discussion of the upcoming UCosmic^® Conference to be held on October 31, 2013

March 1 Update

Dear Team,

The UCosmic blog will now provide monthly updates.

Spring Stakeholder’s Meeting

Save the date! The next UCosmic Consortium Stakeholder’s Meeting will be on May 3rd, 2013 at the SUNY Global Center in New York, NY. If you have any items that you would like to be added to the agenda, please email rebecca.smolar@ucosmic.org.

New Feature

UCosmic has a new feature which is available to all members who have a Single-Sign-On (SSO) integration. Before this feature, all users were required to enter their email address in order to begin the sign in process. Today, clicking the site’s “Sign On” link will skip this email entry step and take users directly to their institution’s sign on page. Note that this feature will only work if users can see their institution’s logo in the page banner when they click the “Sign On” link. When the UCosmic Consortium logo is present in the banner, clicking the “Sign On” link will still prompt them for their email address.

It is also possible to create links to UCosmic which will automatically make sure your institution’s logo appears on the page instead of the Consortium’s SUNY logo (this feature has been in UCosmic for a while now). Here are the following URL’s for members which have customized UCosmic logo and site color scheme:

preview.ucosmic.com/as/www.lehigh.edu

preview.ucosmic.com/as/www.suny.edu

preview.ucosmic.com/as/www.uc.edu — also has SSO integration

preview.ucosmic.com/as/www.umn.edu

preview.ucosmic.com/as/www.usf.edu — also has SSO integration

preview.ucosmic.com/as/www.uwo.ca — also has SSO integration

We’ll explain more about this and how to deep link into UCosmic from other web sites and documents (like PDF’s for distribution) in a later post. In the meantime if you have any questions about how to do special linking into the UCosmic system, contact Dan Ludwig.

UCosmic site to be down for a short period

We are planning some system update downtime for the preview.ucosmic.com site on Saturday February 23^rd from about 12pm – 1pm Eastern Standard Time. During that time, the site will be inaccessible worldwide. If this conflicts with any scheduled demonstrations or other planned use of the system, please let us know by contacting Rebecca.Smolar@ucosmic.org.

Your feedback on Minor Change to Public Agreements

Dear UCosmic Consortium Members,

One of our members would like the Consortium to remove the message “to view more information about this agreement, sign in” for all public agreements. Please let us know how you feel about this change. We will be accepting feedback on this issue until January 25, 2013.

Sincerely,

Rebecca Smolar
Project Manager, UCosmic

Input on Proposed Changes to UCosmic

In conversations with the University of Western Ontario, the following changes were recommended:

1. Ability to turn off modules that the UCosmic Consortium is not implementing right away  (i.e. non-agreement tabs)

2. In the protected access mode for agreements, the ability to determine visibility of agreement PDF based on agreement type

3. If, we cannot implement #2, then ability to remove the message “to view more information about this agreement, sign in” for all public agreements

4. Tagging capacity for agreements, with the functionality to choose to limit available tags

5. Enhanced searching capacity for agreements: the ability to search by: Agreement type, Country, City, Institution, Tags

We would like your feedback on these requests.

Please comment  or vote in the UserVoice post: http://ucosmic.uservoice.com/forums/150533-general-feedback-support

Thank you.