Externally Developed Projects

Projects Currently in Development

CICERO - the Center for Institutional Cooperation Educational Resource Repository project

The CIC (Center for Institutional Cooperation) Educational Resource Repository (CICERO) project has created a repository of information describing digital educational materials designed to give computer users the ability to store information about, identify and search for resources. The repository stores metadata, which is esentially "data that describes data," and provides a way to search the metadata which yields highly specific and accurate search results. Metadata has many practical uses, libraries use metadata to help people find books, programmers use metadata to store information, and scientists use metadata to catalog research. To read more about CICERO and VIUS please see http://css.its.psu.edu/news/metadata.html.

VIUS - The Penn State Visual Image User Study
http://www.libraries.psu.edu/vius/

The Penn State Visual Image User Study (VIUS), which is a Penn State project funded by the Mellon Foundation, shares CICERO's goal of helping scholars more efficiently identify, store, and locate learning resources. VIUS (pronounced "views"), however, focuses specifically on the use, storage, and retrieval of digital images. VIUS users will be able to access digital images using metadata searches. Once the search is narrowed, users will be able to view "thumbnail" images which can then be selected to build collections for various academic and research purposes. To read more about CICERO and VIUS please see http://css.its.psu.edu/news/metadata.html.

Project MELD - Multicultural Enhanced Learning for Diversity

Project MELD offers a digital library of information, materials and resources on diversity that can be used by faculty on all Penn State campuses. This initiative augments the University's drive for diversity awareness, particularly among new undergraduate students, and helps meet a Faculty Senate mandate for a greater focus on international and multicultural understanding on campus.

In phase one, implemented in 2002, Project MELD created a pool of online resources, including curricular models; exemplary syllabi, activities, assignments and assessments; course bibliographies, problem sets and simulations; information about experiential learning and active learning elements; international exchanges and multicultural experiences; scholarship on gender/ethnicity and academic disciplines; and classroom climate and culture.

Teaching and Learning with Technology staff will assist faculty in accessing and integrating the resources into coursework. To more quickly infuse diversity materials into the curriculum, the Center will work with clusters of courses and teams of faculty, rather than individual courses.

In spring 2005, Penn State hosted a conference on diversity-enhanced curricula for universities belonging to the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), the academic consortium of the Big Ten universities and the University of Chicago.

Projects in Use

SAP/Enterprise Integration Initiative
http://www.ie.psu.edu/eic/

SAP is an enterprise-wide software solution that links an entire organization together with one comprehensive system. That means that SAP can handle a wide range of tasks, from keeping track of manufacturing levels to balancing the books in accounting, and then tie it all together effectively streamlining the data flow between different parts of a business.

Allied Signal was the first to indicate to Penn State the need for students to have some exposure to SAP. As a result, the Office of Corporate and Foundation Relations contacted SAP and expressed interest in joining the University Alliance Program.

Phase One of this program involved the introduction of SAP R/3 in select courses as it related to Enterprise Resource Planning in Engineering and Business. Although only 100 students were expected to have access to the software, response was so great that professors decided to teach additional classes to benefit the students. By the end of the spring session, over 600 students were participating in the pilot program.

With the help of an Industry Advisory Board that looks like a Who's Who of corporate America, a three-year Phase II budget has been approved and adopted that will allow the program to expand to many more students.

Plans are being formalized to possibly offer both a graduate and undergraduate minor in Enterprise Integration. An SAP Student Interest Group has been started and has grown rapidly. Over 300 students have attended numerous meetings and been given access to the software system.