Next Generation Student Information Services

The goal of the Next Generation Student Information Services Program (NGSIS) is to create and deploy technological solutions that help students fully engage in rewarding learning experiences and achieve academic and personal success, and that help faculty and staff provide a rich and supportive educational environment.

Through targeted investment in information technology, over the past eight years, NGSIS has introduced a wide variety of new services for students and staff, providing real-time information about all aspects of the student experience. As a result, NGSIS is now actively supporting over 25 individual student and administrative applications in addition to the current core Student Information System (SIS)/ROSI system. Included in this list are some of the most successful NGSIS services for students, faculty, and staff, such as ACORN, Degree Explorer, and more recently, Award Explorer, the Course Information System and Accommodated Testing Services (ATS).

As with many operational teams at U of T, the NGSIS development team had to pivot quickly in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Enhancements and adjustments to SIS for credit/no credit, student attendance and online course delivery options diverted, and continue to divert, resources from previously planned projects. In addition, the need for a new student advising platform (CRM) to help manage student information as a result of the new remote work and classroom settings has become a top priority for U of T.

Despite these pressures, the NGSIS team was able to make significant progress on a number of fronts over the past 12 months. In order to help U of T chart a new course forward in replacing and/or renewing our core SIS, the team was able to complete two investigative exercises, an environmental scan of potential student information systems in the marketplace, and a prototype of a new ROSI administrative user experience.

Through this work, we have established that currently there are no vendor or cloud-based solutions that will easily accommodate U of T’s requirements. As mature cloud solutions are likely years away, U of T should continue to keep an eye on the marketplace but also invest in current solutions such as ACORN, Degree Explorer, Course Information System and Award Explorer. In addition, consideration should be given to improving the ROSI user experience using in-house resources over the next several years.

For a more detailed explanation of these strategic recommendations and specific projects for the coming year, please explore the remaining sections of this report.

The Student Advising Service initiative will complete an enterprise implementation of the Salesforce Student Success Hub for Higher Education platform with the goal of enabling consistent, best practice advising within and between divisions through effective and efficient access to, interaction with, and management of a comprehensive student advising record.

Advising provides the opportunity for students to seek – and for the institution to initiate and provide – support and advice about academic, administrative, financial, and personal well-being issues to help students achieve their personal and academic goals. It also supports institutional goals of ensuring student success, providing quality service, achieving recruiting, retention, and graduation.

Building on the work done in 2020-21, the team selected Huron Consulting Group as the University’s partner for the initial discovery phase of the project. The discovery phase aims at establishing the scope and pace of initial implementation in the Faculty of Arts & Science and the Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education and a framework for future onboarding of additional divisions. The target date for Phase 1 Foundational Release is Fall 2022. Further rollout will occur throughout Spring and Fall of 2023 with a second round of divisions to be onboarded identified in Summer and Fall 2022.

Some of the potential benefits from the Phase 1 Foundational Release include:

• Foundational Data and Security Model
• Central source of truth for student interactions
• Staff Referrals – Case Management
• Student Requests – A&S OFR and Colleges Manual Case Creation from Email
• Internal Knowledge Base
• Staff Appointment Scheduling

And the Key Integrations proposed for Phase 1 include:

• ROSI Integration
• SharePoint Integration
• TCard Photo Integration
• Logging/Auditing
• Outlook Integration (Plug In)
• Staff SSO

U of T has contracted with some of the leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms in the past few years and the demand for integration with our core Systems of Record has increased significantly.

Over the past decade, a standard method for integrating systems has emerged, including a standard to secure such methods. EASI has established resources in the Microsoft Azure Cloud that support these standards and facilitate the exchange of data between the core systems and the SaaS platforms.

ROSI itself continues to be a legacy application, albeit a web-based one, and questions remain regarding the future of our core student system. Should U of T replace ROSI with a modern cloud-based vendor product; should we redevelop this system using the latest in Java development tools; or should our future direction include a combination of both vendor and homegrown solutions? Should U of T consider using an API-centric approach to enable composite applications that use functionality from multiple applications, including Salesforce, ROSI and SharePoint?

In 2021, the implementation of a Salesforce Student Success Hub solution for academic advising was begun. An implementation partner was engaged to conduct a Discovery Phase and refine the requirements as they pertain to a Salesforce-based solution.

The Salesforce implementation is an example of the University adopting a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, hosted by an external party, to support the functionality the University needs. Other SaaS platforms are in use (e.g., Quercus, Office 365), and more will be adopted in the future (e.g. for experiential learning), so the next IT challenge is modifying these platforms to meet any unique needs the University has. One option is to modify the platforms themselves, but this has negative consequences when the platforms are upgraded by the vendors, requiring the University to regression test its own modifications and make any changes to comply with the updates made by the vendors.

To address the challenge described above and prepare the University for future SaaS integrations, an initiative to design and implement a new User Interface framework with a new API-centric architecture for administrative systems was instigated. These additional components constitute an additional layer of abstraction on top of the SaaS platforms.

Most SaaS platforms support a rich set of APIs that are used to support integration with other systems. These APIs change far less often than the other parts of the platforms. The NGSIS Digital Platform, described in more detail in this document, can call these APIs, thereby transferring data into or out of these platforms on behalf of users or other systems. Custom-built APIs can also be created to provide unique functionality when no other platform can provide it.

The new User Interface framework, named OASIS (Online Administrative Student Information Services), can be used to support academic or administrative processes that require interaction with one or more SaaS platforms. Using an in-house designed and developed framework provides the flexibility needed to interface across multiple platforms, using the platforms own APIs to access functionality and combining the functions to support the business processes needed. This approach avoids modifying the SaaS platforms and enables the integrated flow of data from one platform to another, supporting one or more processes in real-time.

The new integration capabilities, with the new User Interface framework, will enable the University to use a variety of different SaaS platforms, each suited for a particular purpose, and combine them to support unique business processes without major changes to the platforms themselves. ROSI data and business logic can be integrated using the same capabilities. Pertinent data from these systems are expected to be transferred to the Institutional Research and Data Governance (IRDG) Data Lake for institutional reporting purposes, and if necessary, archiving.

Apart from a few SaaS platforms designed specifically for Higher Education, most others are business applications with modifications to support some Higher Education specifics. Even fewer can deal with UofT’s unique processes and size. API-centric architecture introduces more complexity but provides the flexibility that the University needs to support its own processes without having to completely custom-build its own core applications, or having to heavily modify the user interfaces and functionality of other commercial platforms.

This hybrid approach appears to be worth further consideration as it can support the unique functionality the University needs and avoids the market-related costs associated with external implementation vendors.

Leveraging API Development

A number of APIs have integrated Rotman School of Management’s implementation of Salesforce with ROSI, and one of these APIs creates candidacy records for Rotman applicants in the production ROSI database. This is the first programmatic update of ROSI by an external system (in this case it is Salesforce).

A total of 22 other APIs are currently in production, including:

• Candidacy, Admissions and Confirmation APIs (for Rotman and SGS/Slate admissions applications)
• Degree Confirmation APIs
• Job Evaluation API
• Absence Declaration APIs
• Phonebook APIs
• SharePoint API
• Student Profile API
• Accommodated Testing Services APIs

Authentication / Authorization

• Authentication
  Since 2004, web applications at U of T have been integrated with Shibboleth Single Sign-On, also known as WebLogin, for user authentication. Once authenticated using Shibboleth, users can access other web applications without re-authenticating (except for high-assurance applications such as ROSI, which require authentication every time). UTORid is the credential used for Shibboleth. Modern applications now use a different method to authenticate users, called Open ID Connect (OIDC), which is compatible with a broader number of applications, including native mobile applications. U of T will support both types of authentication methods (Shibboleth and OIDC). Applications that integrate with Microsoft 365, e.g., to access SharePoint documents, will need to authenticate users using Azure AD.

• Authorization
  User authorizations (i.e., determining what a user is allowed to access/execute in an application) need to be finer-grained than in the past due to increased security risks. U of T has established a department, called Institutional Research and Data Governance (IRDG), to assist with determining and managing the levels of authorization needed by each type of role. Applications and systems (e.g., Degree Explorer) usually have their own authorization mechanisms, which makes it difficult to maintain the correct authorizations as people and devices/components, move or change status, since each application or system must be updated individually. The solution is to consolidate the authorization methods into a limited number of options.This approach improves the manageability of authorizations, and new technologies will enable finer-grained authorizations for student-related applications. A proof-of-concept project will start late in 2021 to determine the appropriate technologies to support Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) in addition to Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). The new solution will address both humans and devices/components that act on behalf of humans or in their own rights (e.g., robots), and is expected to integrate with the new Identity and Access Management platform to be deployed by Information Security. Once implemented, applications will be modified one by one to integrate and support the new ABAC capabilities. ABAC will enable U of T to improve compliance with the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, the General Data Protection Regulation, and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (where applicable), improve on-boarding and off-boarding efficiencies, and simplify operations.

Replicating ROSI Data

One of the goals of the new platform was to enable real-time integration with other systems using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

In order to create this integration, the ROSI production data is copied to a real-time replica in the Azure Cloud and becomes part of the Operational Data Store (ODS). This replica supports read-only queries from APIs and reporting services such as Tableau.

Operational and Academic Reporting (2021)

Members of the SIS and Operations teams have been working to implement Microsoft Power BI and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) as the platform for the delivery of operational reports for administrative users across U of T. The system will provide more options for cross-database reporting, faster development time and a more user-friendly user interface than currently available for ROSI-based reports. Priority has been given to Curriculum Management reports currently based in iHub (formerly known as BIRT) and staff in governance offices have begun testing the new reports against those in iHub (April 2022). Other domains will be added soon, including CIS, ATS and a greater number of Absence Declaration reports. A new cross-functional technical and product team has been created for the purpose of prioritization and development of U of T’s ongoing reporting requirements.

Development of new functionality and extension of implementation to additional divisions remains a focus with the set of applications that support the administration of course and program development, review and approval, and publication and offering. While separate, these applications are being developed with points of integration with each other and with other NGSIS services.

Course information System (CIS):

The Course Information System supports the following undergraduate divisions:

• Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering (Exam Module)
• Faculty of Arts & Science
• Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education
• Faculty of Music
• John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design
• University of Toronto Scarborough

The Course Information System has been successfully rolled out to most of U of T’s first-entry undergraduate divisions. The CIS team is working with the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering to develop an end-to-end Syllabus Builder Module, which will be extended to include the Faculty of Arts & Science afterwards. This year, the team also collaborated closely with the University of Toronto Mississauga to complete our investigation to determine their best CIS onboarding strategy. The team is currently working with UTM to review resource requirements and finalize their onboarding timeline.

Looking ahead, CIS is planning for future releases that will include the following enhancements:

• A new end-to-end Syllabi Creation Module that would enable an instructor to create a syllabus for their course completely within CIS.
• Implementing existing functionality for undergraduate courses in the University of Toronto Mississauga.

The import of Course tagging from CM has been implemented to enable course instructors to identify and associate specific learning experiences as components expected to be completed by all enrolled students. This functionality will support clarity and transparency regarding student learning experiences within their programs and courses. In addition, additional functionality was delivered to allow instructors to provide additional session-specific information (subcategories) to course experience tags imported from Curriculum Management (see the entry for Curriculum Management).

Changes were delivered to support divisions on their requirements to address the COVID-19 situation. These far-reaching changes involved updates to the CIS system’s Syllabi, Exam Details and Final Exam modules to accommodate the collection of information for a hybrid course delivery approach.

Administrative controls are now available in CIS that allows divisional administrators the ability to configure when modules are available to their instructors. Administrators can also cross-list or group sections within a course or multiple courses, to allow for single submissions of details by instructors.

Administrators can also set deadlines for required submissions and have the system send automated reminders to instructors to submit information on time.

Administrators can now also access previous sessional data stored in CIS. This new functionality offers our administrators their data in a well-organized and easy-to-retrieve format while saving time for them, as there is no more need for storing and managing copies of information offline. In addition, it increases the overall security of the system as it ensures that only the right people can access the right files, which is of critical importance given the highly confidential nature of our documents.

The Exam Module in CIS has a complete, electronic end-to-end exam workflow. This process allows instructors to enter exam details, print options and upload their exams. Department administrators and chairs are then able to review and print exams, or electronically send them to an approved print location.

The Syllabus Module has implemented four areas of functionality:

• Basic Course Information: This information provides instructors with a high-level overview of important information regarding their courses such as sessional dates, requisite information, and lecture times and locations.
• Marking Scheme: This function allows instructors to complete the grading assessments for their course and receive immediate feedback regarding faculty and U of T policies and guidelines.
• Syllabi Policy and Procedure Statements: This section allows instructors to select from a list of required, recommended, and optional faculty and U of T policy statements. They also have the option to revise these statements or create their own and save them for later use.
• Syllabus upload and download

Accommodated Testing Services (ATS)

Started in March of 2019, and formerly known as Test and Exam Services, the Accommodated Testing Services (ATS) project leverages NGSIS products to introduce significant benefits to students registering for accommodated test writings; for instructors providing test details and documents; and for administrators tasked with keeping ATS processes working efficiently and in a timely manner. The system is being designed and implemented to support the administration of Accommodated Tests and Exams. Instructors, students and administrative staff will find the new process seamless, transparent and intuitive, providing easy online access to information through pre-existing U of T platforms. There will be multiple phases to this initiative. The ATS application is deployed in the new Azure Cloud, utilizing API calls residing also in the cloud.

Phase 2 of the project will include the launch of a student request module on ACORN and the full roll-out of a new Accommodated Testing Services administrative application. Phase 2 expected completion is at the end of the calendar year 2022.

Following phase 2, phase 3 will focus on enhancing the various system components via rolling production releases, until all in-scope processes are completed and stabilized. There is also a plan to expand the work done within ATS to Accessibility Services. Requirements exploration will begin in the form of a discovery phase this year.

For phase 1, ATS completed two pilots (fall 2019 and winter 2020) that included participation from the Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education, the Faculty of Arts & Science (three departments), the Faculty of Law, and the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy. The Accommodated Testing module in CIS was rolled out to all University of Toronto St. George (UTSG) instructors in fall 2020. Based on feedback received from instructors, administrators and ATS staff in fall 2020, a series of enhancements were rolled out at key times of the year between the winter 2021 and winter 2022 sessions. Additionally, new administrative functionality was introduced for academic administrators to manage accommodated testing within their units and the first modules of the new ATS staff system were completed.

Curriculum Management (CM):

Curriculum Management was the first product to be delivered through our original partnership with Kuali Inc.

The application allows divisions to create, maintain and retire courses and programs using customized divisional governance processes, and in tandem, allows NGSIS to create a central repository of courses and programs for U of T which can be integrated with various NGSIS systems. The SIS team has also developed specialized governance committee reports as well as diagnostic reports and lists for the divisions. Curriculum Management (CM) data is also exported for inclusion in publications generated by Curriculum Publisher (CP).

Work for 2021-2022 includes the implementation of a new authorization framework. The remaining second-entry divisions will be approached to implement the application. We will also work with divisions currently using CM at the undergraduate level to import and manage their graduate courses. Analysis work will be undertaken to extend the configuration to cover the complexities of graduate program structures at U of T as well as data needs in the Office of the Vice-Provost Academic Programs and in the School of Graduate Studies with respect to tracking programs and academic change.

Course Experience Tagging

The Office of the Vice-Provost – Innovations in Undergraduate Education has been working with divisions to define data categories to identify courses designed to include work-integrated learning activities. These data points have been created in CM and are available to divisions to include in course proposals and revisions in the 2021-22 governance cycle. The data is available to the CIS and will be incorporated in CM data incorporated in Calendars and Timetable Builder.

From 2019 to 2020, CM was extended to six divisions bringing the total to 10. This means that CM now covers all first-entry programs at U of T, which represents 89 percent of undergraduate courses. That course information is available to other systems, including Course Finder, Timetable Builder, ACORN, and the Course Information System, and so is viewable by students and faculty. The divisions currently using CM are listed below.

In 2020, a new workflow tool developed by Kuali was implemented to allow for more flexible configurations of divisional governance pathways. It will also make it possible to manage multi-division graduate courses through parallel governance review.

Curriculum Publisher (CP):

Curriculum Publisher (CP) is a U of T developed content management website that optionally interfaces with Kuali Curriculum Management (CM), allowing divisions to publish a public-facing Calendar or Academic Handbook. CP has undergone a major technical upgrade to Drupal 8.

The University of Toronto Mississauga calendar was published in June 2021, which set a milestone for the project. CP sites are now in place for all the divisions using CM either for undergraduate calendars or graduate handbooks. The School of Graduate Studies calendar and the Faculty of Medicine MD program handbook are published in CP, although they do not yet make use of CM.

As divisions implement CM, CP will be made available, and we will work with the divisions to create new structures and templates for their calendars.

Technical upgrades were completed to move CP to cloud hosting in 2020. Each Calendar instance in CP was upgraded to Drupal 8 in 2020/21 and to Drupal 9 in the fall of 2021.

	Curriculum Management		Curriculum Publisher
Curriculum Management & Curriculum Publisher Usage	Undergraduate Courses & Programs	Graduate Courses	Calendar / Handbook
First Entry
Faculty of Arts & Science		X	Calendar
University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM)		X	Calendar
University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC)			Calendar
John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design			Calendar
Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering		X	Calendar
Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education		X	Calendar
Faculty of Music		X	Calendar
Second Entry & Graduate
Faculty of Information			Both
Faculty of Medicine	X	X	Handbook
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE)	X		Handbook
Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy		X	Calendar
School of Graduate Studies	X	X	Calendar

Last updated April 2022