Clients
Education
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Program: Minority University-Space Interdisciplinary Network (MU-SPIN)
Summary
MU-SPIN was started in 1990 by the Office of Equal Opportunity Programs and has remained a highly effective tool as it has continually grown and evolved over the past decade. The program serves America's Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) and Tribal Colleges. The first step for the MU-SPIN program was to help provide campuses and schools with network infrastructure. MU-SPIN recognized the need to provide access to the Internet, the world of electronic information exchange and the sharing of educational resources. MU-SPIN helped minority schools buy and even build their own computers for the classroom.
We were thrilled to have Telophase take on this engagement! They came in with a very structured plan and initiated the drive to make MU-SPIN’s goals realized. — James Harrington Jr., Technical Project Manger/COTR, NASA GSFC
The Work Performed
Project Management
Telophase Project Manager worked with the customer to develop a project schedule that meets customer’s needs and with the assigned resources. We were responsible for providing important deliverables such as monthly status report, QASP, and WBS according to the project schedule. We provided periodic updates to the customer about our timelines and budgetary constraints as it pertain to the engagement.
Web Portal Development
Telophase developed and deployed a custom content management system for organizing and facilitating collaborative creation of documents and other content for the MU-SPIN framework. This web-based CMS tool will manage MU-SPIN websites and web content. Myriad of tools were used in the development phase- CSS, JavaScript, AJAX, PHP, HTML and XML.
Requirements Analysis
Telophase worked with MU-SPIN users to create strong, integrated web-based authoring tools and the data management capabilities for instructional materials. We gathered all the required information from the customer that was pertinent to the design and development of MU-SPIN. Collectively, we wanted to design a tool that required minimal effort to set up, flexible, and scalable. Our end goal was to provide a system for managing web content and web users that is ideal for MU-SPIN project groups, communities and intranets.
Training
Created an online education model with web-based training as a primary method for instructing MU-SPIN users. Under the distance education model, we applied proven business methodologies, instructional design, project management, and multimedia development techniques to create web or computer-based training. Also, our solution allowed users to search for learning materials and content from multiple collections, instead of having to search each one separately.
The Results
- Simplify the administration of MU-SPIN’s disparate websites.
- Ability to create and manage courses, assessment and assignment, enrollment, and syllabus.
- Individual training sessions for students, instructors and administration.
- Customized reporting section for students, instructors and administration.