Stellar Development Takes Off
The Educational Media Creation Center is eager to share with the MIT community information
about the development of its web-based knowledge management environment, Stellar. Stellar is
being designed from the ground up to provide the richest set of features possible, while integrating
tightly with MIT’s existing information systems infrastructure and services. The Stellar initiative,
sponsored by Provost Bob Brown, is being developed by the EMCC in cooperation with IS and
many other parts of MIT. The design and development of Stellar also includes coordinated,
collaborative effort among peer institutions, including Stanford University and North Carolina State
University.
What is Stellar?
Stellar is a web-based environment for supporting MIT’s technology enhanced teaching and learning
activities. It will support a wide range of multimedia content and communication mechanisms
including text, graphics, streaming media and various forms of synchronous and asynchronous
discussion, and it will be integrated tightly with MIT’s solid information infrastructure and core
administrative systems that support education.
What Features and Functions will Stellar Provide?
A rich set of features is planned to be available in the Summer 2001 release of the Stellar package.
Stellar’s modular design is intended to allow faculty a great deal of flexibility to pick and choose
among which components to include in a course’s web environment. its suite of pedagogical tools,
including support for collaboration, quizzes, tests, surveys, assignment management, grade book
management, and multimedia content handling, will form a versatile system for delivering courses
and educational programs. Among the features planned for inclusion in the initial release of Stellar:
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Course management, including course membership lists, group management and similar
administrative tools, and data synchronization with MIT’s Student Information Systems.
A powerful integrated grade book designed to work with MS-Excel formats and allowing
both automatic grade management, say from a web based multiple choice quiz, and
management by hand.
Flexible content creation, management, and presentation tools, including basic file upload
and viewing and more advanced methods of uploading content around which structured
documents can be developed.
A simple but powerful approach to setting up and organizing course schedules and material
that will allow faculty to easily generate a course description "document" called the course
outline. This course outline can be presented to students in multiple ways including weekly
outline (syllabus), course calendar, topic map, etc.
A suite of collaboration tools, including threaded discussions, synchronous messaging (e.g.
chat), asynchronous messaging (e.g. email), and shared whiteboards.
Support for quizzes, testing, surveys, and other assessment mechanisms, integrated with the
course outline and grade book features.
Support for, turn-in, collection, review, return and pickup of assignments (homework) also
integrated with the grade book and other Stellar components.
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A suite of tools for handling the semester roll-over of courses, allowing for course content to
be easily transferred from one session of a course to the next, and secure, persistent archival
of student contributions for later access.
Integration with the MIT Student Information System and other MIT systems, building on
the existing subjects catalog and other materials.
Integration with MIT authentication systems, so that your Athena account is also your secure
Stellar account.
Ability to integrate other applications and external systems, both institutional and
commercial, via standardized software gateways (APIs), so that the Stellar functionality can
continue to grow and improve.
A powerful, flexible approach to providing appropriate, secure access to information while
providing strong support for privacy, and protection of intellectual property.
What Benefits Will Stellar Provide?
The integrated modules of Stellar will allow automatic coordination of elements such as the course
outline, syllabus, calendar, quizzes, tests, assignments, and the grade book. For example, when you
set up a basic quiz and add it to the course outline, you may also automatically reference that quiz in
the calendar or create an entry for it in the grade book. Stellar is being designed to allow faculty to
pick and choose features, starting off with as little as needed and then adding functionality as
desired. For example, one might start out using only Stellar’s class list and basic content
management feature, and later decide to add assignment management and collaboration tools as the
needs arise.
The open framework approach which is core to the Stellar design makes additions and enhancements
easy, and will allow the Stellar environment to be a great starting point for other, more
pedagogically specialized or advanced system development. For example, someone who wants to
develop a simulation environment will be able to use Stellar as a base so that their development can
focus on just the simulation components, and take advantage of the course list, grade book,
assessment, collaboration tools, and other elements that already exist within the Stellar environment.
Furthermore, when a new tool is developed within the Stellar framework, it may also be made
available to other users of Stellar. This sharing and reuse of information will extend to content and
structural elements as well. For example, someone who has developed a good set of documents
about statistical regression might make that available for use in other courses, and Stellar will
simplify this kind of reuse. Also, if a course outline is developed that may be of use to other faculty
or to other courses, it will be easy to make that structure available for reuse with different content.
Stellar will be available to some parts of MIT in the summer of 2001. If you would like to know
more about Stellar, become one of the early participants in this program, or learn more about how
the Stellar framework might enhance your own courseware development efforts, please contact the
EMCC by phone at 3-2836 or by email at stellar@mit.edu.
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