NORDUnet 2016 tender for Learning Management System - Q&A

Please describe what steps have been taken or plans
that are in place to address environmental concerns on i.e. Power consumption and the use of green energy.

What is NORDUnets expectations that we provide? E.g. company environmental strategy, actions etc.

Please describe in detail how the system supports open courses, with and/or without registration. Is it possible to have part of a course as open and other parts of the course

We expect that a participant can self-register for a course, creating an account in the system without needing help from an administrator. A student may browse open courses to select a course to participate in. Open courses should have the same functionality as a closed course, assignments, discussion, quizzes, etc. Successful course completion results in automatic acknowledgment (badges, points or certificates). In a closed course students are added via a system like LADOK or manually by an administrator.

Please describe the workflow and teacher overview during an examination using a group

Please elaborate and be more specific

A teacher creates a discussion forum which will be available during a certain period of time. The discussion forum can be opened and closed automatically. Students may be connected to the forum. If the teacher wants to use groups, either several discussion forums are created or one discussion forum may contain several (project) groups.

Students are supposed to upload an assignment which others students have to comment. This can be dealt with by two students (one student uploads an assignment and one other student comments it) or by a larger group of students. A teacher may change the groups during the examination so that other students may comment the assignments, as well.

Another scenario is the following: a group of students are assigned to work on one group assignment in a discussion forum before uploading it in a final version. This version may be corrected by a teacher or another group.

There is no logic other than to secure a costing of all mandatory additional features as part of the TCO. In addition, If a third party solution is used to supply a mandatory feature, it typically comes with additional cost, which is also what we are trying to get covered by this approach.

In regards NORDUnet LMS TCO reply form and Scenario 4:

Scenario 4 is the bulk purchase of licences for 100.000 FTE’s split over 10 institutions. (no additional features)

The organisation numbers 1-10 is simply to allow for adding a support overhead per organisation, as supporting 10 institutions is more expensive than supporting 1.

If you choose to include the support cost for 10 organisations in to the bulk FTE number, this is also perfectly fine, only the total cost for the scenarios will be evaluated.

It is correct that the second paragraph should read Optional rather than Mandatory, as below

"LMS Optional Additional Services, Features and Functions"

A new version of the template has been uploaded to the box folder.

In regards to the evaluation structure of the service catalogue ("NORDUnet LMS Service Catalogue reply form") there are 6 items under the first "LMS Mandatory Additional Services, Features and Functions" section.

Mandatory implies that if a bidder can not supply a requested mandatory feature, the bidder could potentially be disqualified.

Delivery

Our system evolves with several new releases and updates on a frequently basis.

How does NORDUnet define the readymade solution?

The readymade solution is as defined through the requirements and questions in the ITSOP and ITSFB. We are aware that as all cloud services this is an iterative process. For the functionality that are included in the proposed solution, it must be available according to R2 in the ITSOP “The proposed services and features shall be ready for service by end Q1 2017”

Delivery

Our system evolves with several new releases and updates on a frequently basis.

What date is the solution delivery deadline?

As above

Dialogue

In stage 1 all suppliers had one day dialogue.

Will there be a dialogue session between the ITSFB response deadline and the Contract Award?

There might be a web conference session to clear up any unclear points in the ITSFB response.

Commercial

In the dialogue session, we discussed the potential number of users and universities. You mentioned that NORDUnet would define a minimum number in order to proceed with the framework.

What number of schools and users do you expect will sign up for the framework agreement?

NORDUnet will award the framework contracts regardless. It is SUNET representative that has mentioned that they would want a minimum commitment from their community to do a call off. The whole setup is based on opt-in and therefore it is impossible to make any expected or guaranteed assumptions on the uptake.

Generic

Our assumption is that all suppliers has sent questions during the process.

Are all questions and answers available for us?

Q&A’a from the ITSOP stage is available in an anonymized format here… http://tender.nordu.net/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=58954465

Questions relating to the ITSFB stage will be added on an ongoing basis.

Could you define “on premises equipment”?

Please note that R1 reads: The proposed LMS services shall be delivered either without dependencies on on-premises equipment as a cloud service hosted within the EU region, or alternativelyas a multi-tenant managed on-premises solution, hosted by NORDUnet or any of the listed NREN’s.

Can you please explain what you mean and want to achieve with this? Are there any specific things you want to avoid putting this requirement in the reply form?

This is aimed at any design, architecture or implementation choices relating to i.e. entitlement that will limit the access to the data. Or it could be i.e. capacity between front and backend servers or storage IO etc.

What is the difference between Service Support and Bidder Helpdesk availability?

Can you please specify what you mean by automated archiving? Do you have any specific requirements related to the functionality?

Specific requirements could mean the ability to archive users and courses by a simple point and click interface. It could also mean an API function to support the same type functionality.

Elaborate what data and format.

Planned work request shall be communicated no less than 5 business days before planned work starts

An incident is an unplanned interruption to, or a reduction in the quality of the Service.

We want you to describe the processes that are in place to secure restoration of normal service operation. We are not interested in employee profiles or capabilities in this case.

It relates to both user, admin and in the case of on-premise ie. system requirements etc..

The how relates to, will it be available directly from a web site, must it downloaded, or is it distributed in an other way?

Depending on the answer to the above, describe how you will ensure that the documentation available is up to date.

Please propose your approach to benchmarking during the life of the Framework Agreement

What is meant is benchmarking against comparable products in the market.

The tender is run on behalf of NORDUnet and the NRENs in Denmark (DeIC) and Sweden (SUNET), with the intention to provide the service as an opt in service to their respective constituencies of connected institutions. There are no guarantees on the actual uptake of the service.

With the above reservations the maximum potential userbase of university students and employees exceed 360.000.

At cost, both NORDUnet and the respective NREN’s are capable of providing equipment hosting and if so desired an IaaS and storage platform that the service can run on.

We are struggling with this ESPD form.

Can we write our comments and answers on the PDF version, scan the document and place it in Box ?

We are about finalize our response in ITSOP Volume 2 reply form and have a challenge when it comes to the limitation of 100  pages in total. We have used pictures, tables, graphs etc. that illustrates the system to make our response more tangible but with result that we used 134 pages plus one appendix of 10 pages describing our complete process adding new customers to the service.

All answers are under the limit of 1500 words except the appendix that has 2724 words.