[APPLAUSE]
My name is Zac Wang.
I work in the Office of the Vice Provost
for advances in learning, also part of the HILT team.
Really excited today to introduce to you Harvard LINK.
So LINK is a personalized dashboard
for members of the Harvard community,
starting with faculty, and the idea
is to connect you to things around Harvard that
may be related to your work.
So I'm signed in as Dustin Tingly.
He's a professor in the government department, also
the leader of the group developing this app,
and his view is different from every other faculty's view.
This is just his view.
And so what we've done is we've taken his public facing
website, analyzed the text from that,
and we're matching that text to other things.
So you see on the top here there's
two panels, news and events.
We've taken over 100 different news
and events feeds-- so you can imagine, from centers,
initiatives-- combined all that data into one place,
and are now matching Dustin to those things.
So Dustin, despite being a political scientist,
has done a lot of work around climate change policy
and so, lo and behold, that's why that's showing up.
If you wanted to see what this "Comparative Politics Speaker
Series" was about, you could click on this,
get some information.
And then if you clicked here, he would go directly
to that listing.
We're doing something similar with other researchers.
So we have scraped over 95% of all Harvard faculty's websites,
and so now we can tell Dustin, "These
are other folks around Harvard who
may be doing something related to what you
do in teaching and research."
Moreover, you can go to the Researcher section
and, for the first time, you can search
across all Harvard researchers.
So if I want to say, "Who at Harvard
is doing work around war?"
I could do that.
And if I was Dustin, I could say, OK, people,
you know, in the government department,
I already know them.
I can filter this to just show me
people outside of the government department,
so reducing these frictions and discovering
new people around Harvard.
Now, down below we have other panels, one about syllabi.
Using Canvas, we've collected syllabi from across almost all
the Harvard schools, and when Dustin logs in,
we know what courses he teaches, so we have his syllabi.
We can compare the text of his syllabi
to text from syllabi across Harvard,
giving him other courses that may
be related to what he teaches.
He can go in here, see these courses, click on them.
And because we have data pipelines with the registrar's
system as well we can give him course information
and he can download the syllabus directly from here.
He could also click on the Instructor
and get instructor information, find that person's email
and website.
The other panel down here is on enrollment.
So this is to help faculty better understand
their students.
We can tell faculty what are the other courses your students are
taking while they take your class.
Also, what do they take before and after your course?
So if you go into Details here, this is the view.
Dustin's course is Government 40.
These are the classes his students take in the semester
immediately preceding and immediately after his course.
And again, you can click on any of these,
and you'll get course description and syllabus.
Nearest Courses-- so this actually came from an idea
from Andrew Ho in the ed school.
He had a project called Nearest Neighbors, where your nearest
neighbor are the instructors who are teaching the most
students that are co-enrolled in your course at the same time,
and so this is a visualization of other courses
that Dustin's students are taking at the same time.
So he could click on this, see that, OK, he shares
a lot of students with Joe Blitzstein He could see what
Joe's teaching, look at the syllabus,
try to make connections, you know,
in an cross-curriculum type of way.
Now, the other type of link that we talk about when we say LINK
is on the left-side here.
It's a bank of different resources.
Some of these are customized to Dustin because we know-- one,
he's a faculty member; and two, he's an FAS,
so we can give him specific links.
The big-term goal of this is to have a single point of access
in Harvard so that faculty can go here and easily find
all the resources they need.
There's also a staff and student view coming.