Introduction
When CalCentral, a campus wide portal and dashboard service, was launched in
January 2014, it solved two critical problems for UC Berkeley. CalCentral

Helps orchestrate the student experience by unifying the myriad academic and
administrative web sites, systems, and applications key to negotiating campus
life

Provides an underlying technology, code-named Junction, which serves as a
lightweight, rapid development and integration platform to support the campus’s
enterprise educational technology systems.
The development of CalCentral was sponsored by the Vice Chancellors for
Undergraduate Education (originally, Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, Academic
Planning, and Facilities), Student Affairs, and Administration and Finance, and the Office
of the CIO. The project required an unprecedented level of cooperation and collaboration
among teams in different units across Berkeley’s federated central IT structure, including
Student Affairs IT (SAIT), Information Systems and Technology (IST), and Educational
Technology Services (ETS).
Background
Not unlike many other large research universities, Berkeley’s key online services have
long been distributed across a wide range of providers and web sites, resulting in a
fragmented experience that doesn’t serve students as well as it might. A few years ago,
the division of Student Affairs conducted a series of workshops and focus groups with
students that highlighted the opportunities to improve the usability, design, and overall
coherence of offered services. Just as importantly, these sessions painted a broader
picture of the student journey, from the post-admission onboarding process through
graduation, and aligned with a high level commitment within Student Affairs to providing
greater levels of support to UCB students. The crucial process of replacing the campus’s
decades old Student Information System (SIS) also gained new momentum at this time.
While the issue of the overall student experience was receiving ever increasing
attention, the campus also started the transition from a locally hosted open source
Learning Management System (LMS), which had been highly customized to meet
Berkeley’s business requirements, to a new cloud based and vendor-controlled system,
Instructure’s Canvas. Although Canvas represents a significant leap forward for
Berkeley’s online learning environment, bringing with it a superior student experience,
major campus-specific enhancements to the base product were still required in order to
replace the legacy LMS.
The User Experience
The CalCentral project started in summer 2012 with the design and development of a
personal dashboard that leverages the intersection among academic technologies,
student information system data, and general-purpose collaboration tools. Specifically,
the dashboard integrates the campus’s enterprise Google Apps for Education (GAE)
suite (calendar, task list, email, and document management) with data from the SIS, and
the Canvas LMS to answer four interrelated (if not overlapping) questions that guided
the design process:




Where do I need to be? [Single sign on to personal calendar w/ official class
schedule]
What classes and groups am I member of (or who am I working with)?
[Single sign on links to Canvas course and other group collaboration sites
student belongs to]
What do I need to do? [Personal task manager integrated with Canvas LMS
class assignments]
What do I need to know? [Message stream with LMS class announcements,
SIS updates etc.]
Figure A
Additional development work yielded the “My Academics” section (Figure B below),
which includes an interactive transcript with links to semester and summary pages for
each class a student has taken. These feature a GPA calculator, and integrations with
the library catalog, campus bookstore, and the lecture capture system. The “My
Finances” tab provides an overview and detailed ledger of a student’s billing history,
financial aid messaging, campus debit card balances, and links to financial resources.
Finally, “My Campus” is a curated set of links to other campus resources.
Figure B
A very brief video is available at https://calcentral.berkeley.edu/
The Platform and Other Integrations
The platform that delivers the entire CalCentral UI has been separately “branded” as
Junction. It has been designed precisely to meet the requirements of the applications it
supports. Junction comprises modern open source technologies that have been
assembled to consume data from a wide array of sources, transform and merge that
data, and then present it in a variety of contexts. The presentation technology enables
the rapid development of well designed, secure, accessible, scalable, and responsive
(i.e., the UI adjusts or responds appropriately to the device) web applications. It has
allowed a small team to build out not only the CalCentral service, but to develop multiple
additional tools that are embedded in external systems, all within a single technology
stack.
This strategy has been critical to the success of the campus’s LMS Replacement
Project. Essential workflows and tools unique to the Berkeley environment have been
developed and integrated seamlessly within Canvas, the cloud-based LMS the campus
has moved to. Junction also serves as an integration point for other educational
technology applications, which work in concert with each other and CalCentral. For
example, a single webcast application fed by the Lecture Capture system is embedded
within both the LMS and CalCentral.
Figure C
Core Team and Collaborations
The core design and development team behind CalCentral is a part of Educational
Technology Services, but the success of the project was predicated on broad
collaboration and cooperation from across the campus, including many students who
contributed designs, code, and guidance. Other key partners



Contributed expertise in user experience research, design, and business analysis
(SAIT)
Conducted intensive security reviews (SAIT)
Conducted thorough web accessibility reviews (IST – API)



Provided functional requirements (VCAF)
Provided access to essential data (SAIT, IST-API)
Developed an API and ESB infrastructure while working with the CalCentral team
as clients (IST – API, EDW)
The Future
UC Berkeley is in the midst of implementing Campus Solutions as its new SIS. After due
consideration, the SIS Replacement Project’s Executive Steering Committee made the
decision to use CalCentral instead of the delivered Campus Solutions portal for the new
student and faculty facing functionality. This validation of the approach CalCentral has
taken, which places a premium on user centered design and closely tailoring solutions to
the specific needs of the campus, opens up a wide range of possibilities.
The mash up of SIS, LMS and other campus data is helping to drive the conversation
around “learning analytics,” the application of campus data to understand and improve
teaching and learning. Combined with the richer functionality Berkeley’s implementation
of Campus Solutions will provide, CalCentral is poised to leverage data from multiple
sources to deliver a user experience that increasingly communicates the “What do I
Need to Know and Do” in a way that empowers both students and faculty.
Submitted by:
Oliver Heyer
Associate Director, Projects and Development Group
Educational Technology Services
Project Stakeholders:
Jenn Stringer, Assoc. CIO Academic Engagement
Angela Blackstone, Assoc. CIO SIS Replacement
Team Members:
Chris Tweney
Bernadette Geuy
Ray Davis
Christian Vuerings
Eli Cochran
Rachel Hollowgrass