MIDAS (Maricopa Instructional Delivery and Assessment System) is a fully featured system designed to enable institutions and faculty to easily develop, deliver, and manage web-based instruction, and to support instructor-led classrooms.

The following overview describes the features of the system. Please note that this product is now entering a pilot stage and additional functionality such as progress letters, institutional calendars, extensions etc. are still under development. The name of the final product is also likely to change before the system goes into production.

MIDAS can be used to structure comprehensive courses and enable a variety of course delivery protocols including but not limited to:

• Instructor-directed courses, where students meet in classrooms with the instructor present, work simultaneously on assignments, tests, etc. This is still the most common and universally accepted delivery protocol.
• Student-directed, open-ended courses where students start and finish at varying times, progressing at their own rates. This delivery protocol may or may not involve meeting in person.
• Distance education, where communication and delivery of course content takes place on-line and the students and instructors may or may not meet face-to-face.

This section describes the features that provide the flexibility and functionality to allow this variety of delivery protocols.

MIDAS has capabilities that make it easy to use and convenient for both instructors and students. These features are designed to support the delivery protocols listed above:

• Flexibility of access: Instructors can assign access rights for different areas to different people. Collaboration between instructors is facilitated and students can take greater responsibility for their own learning, for example, by being allowed to set up online discussions with peers or provide materials for other class members.

• Any document display – Previously the web was sufficient for displaying text-based information and images, but not if you wanted to display less common media or character sets, for example, mathematics, foreign languages or chemical equations. Students had to find and install plug-ins and in some situations, particularly computer labs, they were not able to do this. MIDAS makes it possible to display any document that can be printed, in WYSIWYG fashion (what you see is what you get), without plug-ins.
• Intuitive, customized interface – Anlon's goal in designing this application was to create an intuitive user interface so that first time instructors and students can concentrate on the tasks at hand rather than on how to use the program. We have incorporated a logical order of tasks and natural language.

• Easy-to-use navigation – On every screen in MIDAS, navigation is provided by:
• an expandable, tree-structured menu that allows deep access to course documents and student information and enables instructors to quickly switch to and from the student viewpoint
• context-sensitive menus that pop-out on mouseover to provide additional options such as copying, importing, grading, deleting.

Instructors and students have home pages from which they can easily access their messages, see coming events and access their courses.

Every course also has a home page that allows users to see course documents. MIDAS creates an index for the student or instructors can create the index themselves, determining when materials will be available to students. Students navigate through the course from this page and will be able to keep track of what they need to do and what they have already accomplished.

Instructors create syllabi within a prescribed format or import syllabi created in other programs. Instructors can create a template of sections to include in all their syllabi. Instructors can:

• keep the syllabus private until they are ready to make it available
• make the syllabus available only to students who are registered for the course, or
• make the syllabus available to anyone with an account so students thinking about taking a course can see it as well.

Syllabi can be copied and edited for additional sections of the same course or for new courses. Course Calendars are linked to the syllabus feature and images, sounds, videos, or slides can be incorporated.

MIDAS creates a class roster and gradebook when students are registered for an online course. If MIDAS is interfaced with the administrative system, rosters will be automatically created without any additional registration within MIDAS. However, if the institution wishes, instructors can be allowed to add and/or delete students from their class rosters.

Anlon Systems created independent, stand-alone communication features, making third-party e-mail software unnecessary. This eliminates the need to know e-mail addresses and enter them correctly. MIDAS's communication features include the following:

Message Centers allow asynchronous communication between individuals and/or groups of persons who have MIDAS accounts. MIDAS provides all users with personal message centers that look and work like e-mail, but do not require an address. Users can send and receive messages to and from other MIDAS users whether they are students or instructors. Users can enter other message centers through their personal message centers by clicking on the name in a list. Only the message centers a user has access to are listed.

Instructors create additional message centers and decide who will have access and whether messages will be anonymous or named. These message centers are used to make announcements to the whole class or to groups within a class, and to hold asynchronous discussions. Discussions are threaded which means grouped chronologically by topic so readers can easily bring themselves up-to-date.

Messages remain until the owner of the message center deletes them. Instructors can access the message centers they have created and delete individual messages, groups of messages, or the message center itself. However, instructors cannot delete messages in a student's personal message center because the student is the owner.

Users have the option of forwarding messages in their message centers to their e-mail. However, an e-mail system will not send replies to a message center.

 Automated Messages – Anlon recognizes the educational value of appropriate and timely feedback. MIDAS has a unique communication feature that generates and sends messages automatically to students or instructors or defined groups of users according to:

• absolute and relative times, or
• specific actions or events.

Automated messages are part of the customized release of readings and assignments. This feature is described more fully in the following section, Course Materials.

IntraCom^TM – Anlon has created a unique synchronous communication feature called IntraCom. It is similar to a chatroom, but much more flexible. IntraCom supports group decision-making and role-playing without requiring the physical presence of participants. Instructors can:

• divide a class into from 1 to 10 groups, randomly or by assigning groups themselves,
• hold more than one on-line discussion at the same time, with or without being present,
• set a timer for the discussion that the students will see,
• join a discussion anytime and know which students are currently logged in,
• create visual discussion tools via a whiteboard,
• receive and send messages:
• to all groups or a single group,
• to students currently participating or those who are not on-line, or
• to individuals playing specific roles within discussions,
• allow students to be identified by number or name,
• end the discussion at any time, regardless of the timer.

Instructors create and edit course materials, and incorporate text, images, sounds, videos, HTML documents, and slide presentations without having knowledge of HTML. MIDAS separates materials into two kinds:

• readings which provide information for students but do not require a response, and
• assignments which provide information for students and require them to respond.

Instructors produce multi-media in other software programs and then MIDAS will import them into the instructor's public files. From there they can be incorporated into any text entry area. Embedded links (text rather than buttons) can be used to take students to sites on the World Wide Web. Materials can also be linked to other material files, so students can go from one to another by clicking a button.

Instructors can create an index with links to the material files within a course. This helps students see the course from a broad perspective and keep track what has been completed and what needs to be completed. The instructor can use the index to:

• control the timing and the order in which students will access them,
• set prerequisites for all or some items in the index, and
• add and remove materials throughout the term.

New materials are labeled as "new" and the label disappears when a student has accessed the file.

HTML Editor – Instructors are not required to know or learn HTML codes. In every text entry box in MIDAS there is a button that opens an HTML editor. In the HTML editor, instructors click on the right "Smart Tag" and it is automatically inserted in the specified location. No typing, no cut and paste, just a click of the mouse.

Importing Multiple Files - Instructors can import multiple HTML files in a single step, even files with relative references to other imported files. MIDAS will change those references so they will link to each other within the secure, password-protected environment of the MIDAS server. Chris Russell at the College of DuPage found this to be invaluable because she had literally hundreds of interconnected HTML files to import.

Assignments and Grading – Instructors have the option of using material files to assign and collect responses from students in three ways:

• Text responses – Students enter a response in a text box on their screens. MIDAS assists instructors in grading by highlighting keywords in students' answers, and providing instructor answers for comparison. Scores are automatically entered into the grade book and students receive feedback immediately or later, at the instructor's discretion.
• Attached files – Students "attach" a file to the materials. Instructors receive all the attached files in a zip file format and must unzip the file to read the individual responses. (Free software is available for unzipping files.) Instructors enter a score on the screen and MIDAS transfers it to the grade book.
• Worksheets – MIDAS allows instructors to create worksheets using multiple choice, true/false, short answer, matching, and short and long essay questions. MIDAS automatically grades and records scores for objective items. MIDAS assists instructors in when grading short and long essays by highlighting keywords in students' answers, and providing instructor answers for comparison. Students receive immediate feedback and can be allowed to complete the worksheet again for practice.

Academic Honesty (for course materials) – MIDAS is the only course management system that performs academic honesty checks on worksheets and text responses. If an instructor selects this option, answers are compared and a similarity rating is provided for every pair of students in the class. It is the instructor's responsibility to decide what percentage of similarity indicates the likelihood of dishonest collaboration and how to handle the situation.

Automated messages are part of the prerequisite tracking of course materials. MIDAS generates and sends messages to individuals (students or instructors) or groups, according to:

• absolute and relative times, or
• specific actions or events.

For example, instructors can have messages sent to students when they register for the course, when they access a particular material file, a day before the availability of a test ends, or when they've failed to meet a deadline. Feedback can be given to a larger number of students than would be humanly possible. Instructors can also have duplicates or related messages sent to their own message centers or e-mail, in order to track student progress.

Automated messages are sent to message centers (internal), but students can have them forwarded to their e-mail addresses (external). The instructor can have them printed if a high volume printer is available. Automated messages can be:

• customized, according to the occasion or the student's needs, and
• personalized, similar to mail merge features.

The ability to automate messages supports both:

• synchronous learning such as in a traditional in-class, and
• asynchronous learning as in individualized instruction or distance education.

Linking Materials to Test Questions – Instructors have the ability to link test questions to meta-data in material files. If a student answers a question incorrectly, MIDAS provides a link to the exact location of the text that generated the question.

Flexible Access – An instructor can allow students to access the area for creating material files. Students can use the HTML editor, provide information, and create presentations for the class.

Anlon Systems is the only company that offers all of the following flexible assessment features:

Test Creation and Test Banks – Instructors create questions, store them in a test bank, and organize them by learning objective and level of difficulty. Multi-media can be imported or embedded within a test question. MIDAS creates tests randomly as the instructor directs, by learning objective and level of difficulty. Instructors can have the order of questions scrambled so every student's test is different. Tests can be saved and reused exactly as they are or with modifications.

Detailed Post-Test Analysis - MIDAS will automatically grade tests with objective questions such as true/false, multiple choice, matching, and fill-in-the-blank. MIDAS will assist instructors in grading subjective tests, such as short or long essay, by highlighting keywords and providing an instructor answer for comparison. Instructors can receive reports in detailed formats or summarized, and in spreadsheet exportable format.

Test item analysis includes:

1. Performance on exam - Class performance is analyzed. Instructors receive a report providing minimum and maximum scores, the number of students who took the exam, the average score, median score, standard deviation (how scores are distributed around the average), KR-s 20 internal consistency (measures response consistency), and a histogram so the instructor can see general trends and identify trouble areas.
2. Individual question analysis - Individual test questions are scrutinized for effectiveness according to discriminative item analysis, a method used by California Test Assessment.

Timing – When planning a test, the instructor sets the dates and times of availability and can also enter a maximum duration. For example, the test may be available from 8:00 a.m. Monday, January 21 until 8:00 a.m. Tuesday, January 22. Students are able to take the test anytime within that time frame. However, if the instructor limits duration to 60 minutes, students only have an hour to submit their answers from the time they first access the test. If a student does not submit the test in time, it is submitted automatically and the instructor is notified. The instructor has the option of resetting the time for that student.

Test Security – MIDAS allows testing in secured and unsecured environments. Secured environments include classrooms or computer laboratories where everyone is present at the same time including an instructor or test monitor. In such situations special security can be implemented that prevents students from accessing any other screen. If students try to check their e-mail, look at a document on the hard drive or a disk, or access another web site, the test screen locks up and turns red (often referred to as the "red screen of death"). That student can only return to work by entering a password that the instructor or monitor provides. Special security also prevents students from copying a test for the purpose of saving it on a hard drive or floppy disk for printing. All students must copy and paste a test submission key, so their clipboards are cleared.

When students take tests in less structured situations, at home, for example, the tests are unsecured. Special security should not be implemented in these situations.

Academic Honesty (for tests) – Anlon Systems is the only company to provide this feature. If an instructor chooses, MIDAS will perform academic honesty checks on tests that have been submitted in secured or unsecured environments. Answers are compared and a similarity rating is provided for every pair of students in the class. The instructor decides what percentage of similarity indicates the likelihood of dishonest collaboration and how to handle the situation.

One instructor with a class of 70 students was alerted by the high degree of similarity in the work submitted by 6 students. Upon further investigation the instructor found what he considered proof of cheating, that each of the six had misspelled the same word (iitself) in the same location. The students received failing grades for that test.

Students have also indicated that they appreciate having test security and academic honesty, because they know their peers will not have an unfair advantage and that everyone will be graded according to their true performance.

Question Formats – MIDAS allows objective questions such as true/false, multiple-choice, matching, and fill-in-the-blank, and automatically grades students' answers and records grades in the grade book. MIDAS also allows subjective questions including short and long essays. MIDAS assists instructors in grading them by highlighting keywords in students' answers, and providing instructor answers for comparison. (The instructor provides the keywords and the instructor answer.) Instructors enter a test score on the essay test screen and have MIDAS record it in the grade book.

Retakes and Practice Tests – Instructors can allow students to take a test more than once by indicating that it is for practice. If the questions are objective, MIDAS can report the students' scores to them immediately. They can try to improve their scores every time they take the test. Instructors can also let a student to retake a test when it was not a practice test.

Providing Feedback and Recording Grades – The instructor chooses to have grades recorded in the grade book immediately after each individual's test has been graded, or after a whole set of tests have been graded. Instructors can also provide feedback to students immediately or after all tests have been graded.

Student Portfolios – Student portfolios provide evidence of student accomplishments from year to year. A portfolio is basically a folder containing documents that may include any multi-media that MIDAS will import. Portfolios can be updated and stored for as long as needed.

MIDAS creates and administers anonymous or named surveys in the same manner as tests. Surveys are not graded, but extensive analysis of the results is available. Surveys can be given to any groups of students who are registered with MIDAS, regardless of whether they are currently taking an on-line course or not. The special security and academic honesty options are not available with surveys.

MIDAS provides extensive flexibility and functionality in the grade book, so instructors can benefit from the automatic grading yet retain complete control over the grades their students receive. MIDAS creates a grade book when instructors build a new course and enters students as they register.

Flexible Timing - When an assignment or test is graded on-line, MIDAS automatically creates a column and enters the scores. Instructors can choose to have:

• each student's score recorded immediately to provide quick feedback or
• scores for everyone in the class recorded at the same time to allow for possible adjustments after seeing everyone's work.

Flexible Viewing - MIDAS has a new spreadsheet-like interface allowing instructors to scroll through, view and update the grade book easily. Scoring items can be organized into categories.

Flexible Organization - Instructors can create columns, arrange them in any order, enter scores manually, change a score that was entered automatically, or delete an entire column. Scores can be imported from a spreadsheet and exported directly to Excel.

Instructors can combine columns or categories and have MIDAS:

• add all the scores,
• average the scores,
• select any number of scores (for example, the four highest, the five lowest scores, or the eight scores in the middle) and:
• keep them and discard the others
• discard them and keep the others
• raise or lower the percentage a column or category will be of the final or current grade by "weighting" the scores.

The grade book can be printed as displayed or after exporting it into a spreadsheet. The capabilities of an instructor's printer can affect the outcome.

Flexible Grading – MIDAS has a boolean-based, multi-stage grading scheme that supports the high percentage of instructors who want a relatively simple grading scheme and the small percentage who want a complex grading scheme. There is extensive flexibility when performing grade calculations, either within a particular category or across categories. MIDAS totals scores and determines each student's grade anytime during the term. Instructors can adjust grades by:

• changing the total points (increasing the total lowers students' grades and decreasing the total raises their grades),
• changing the minimum percentage for a grade, or
• changing the weight of a category or individual column of scores.

MIDAS provides detailed reports, including:

• a breakdown of the grades and the percentage of students receiving each grade,
• a table listing students alphabetically, showing their total points, percentages, weighted totals and final or current grades,
• a table ranking students by percentage (highest to lowest), showing their total points, weighted totals, and final or current grades, and a graphic representation of the grading curve,
• a table ranking students by weighted total, showing their total points, percentages, and final or current grade, and a graphic representation of the grading curve of weighted scores,
• a summary of assigned letter grades, including how many students will receive each grade.

After viewing the report the instructor may assign the grades, or adjust them again to get different results. When the final decision has been made the instructor has the following options:

• inform some or all students via their personal message centers, and
• upload some or all of the grades to the SIS.

These final options support student-directed, asynchronous instruction as well as traditional synchronous instruction.

MIDAS tracks all student activity within the system and provides reports that include dates and times of entrance and exit. MIDAS summarizes class activities so instructors can compare a student with the rest of the class in terms of participation. Instructors can access logs for:

• all course-related message centers,
• material files,
• IntraCom discussions,
• tests, surveys, and so on.

Every MIDAS user, whether student or instructor, has an account that stores personal information. All accounts are protected by an industry-leading security system.

Student data includes names, passwords, user names, identification numbers, and other information. At any time students may change their passwords or other information. Instructors can see student information, but are not allowed to change it.

When students create an account they receive a personal message center through which they can communicate with anyone in the MIDAS system. Students can also create and maintain a personal calendar. Although personal calendars are not course-related, events from course calendars can be listed in a student's personal calendar.

Instructor data - Every instructor will have a personal folder in MIDAS where confidential information such as the instructor's password, user name, title, department, office location, telephone number and e-mail address are stored. Only the instructor and system administrator(s) can access this information. Instructors can change the information, including their passwords, anytime. Anlon recommends changing passwords periodically.

Instructors have the option of providing a teaching portfolio to be viewed by the public. It is an opportunity for the instructor to state his or her teaching philosophy and the standard policies and procedures adhered to in the instructor's courses. Portfolios can serve as a basis for documenting teaching effectiveness and continued self-evaluation and improvement.

In MIDAS the personal folder also includes the instructor's:

• test bank – where questions are filed according to learning objective and level of difficulty. The instructor can have MIDAS create tests and surveys from the test bank.
• public files – where documents imported from other sources are held. Links to these documents may be entered into any text entry box in MIDAS.
• personal message center – from which messages and sent and received. Instructors can choose to have these messages forwarded automatically to their e-mail addresses.
• personal calendar – in which private as well as course-related events can be listed.

+These items are not course-related and may be used in any course that the instructor teaches. Only the instructor can access them or allow others to access them.

Anlon Systems provides security that is unmatched within the industry. Instructional management systems are natural targets for attacks because students and instructors work in a shared computing environment, but security will be even more crucial when the course management system is interfaced with the SIS. MIDAS is secure in the following ways:

• Two distinct encryption algorithms are the foundation of the security system. Both are based on "Nondeterministic Polynomial Complete (NP-Complete)" problems, a superclass for which there are no known polynomial solution schemas. From a computational theory perspective, NP-Complete problems are the most difficult to solve. The key generation structure employed within one of the algorithms is highly chaotic, causing any polynomial time approximation attempt to fail. This results in a problem which grows exponentially more difficult to solve as its size increases. Breaking either of the encryption algorithms is computationally intractable, in layman's terms, as easy as moving a beach, one grain of sand at a time, twice!
• In addition to being NP-complete, these encryption algorithms are "time-loaded and dynamically-generated floating key schemes" that limit the relevant domain during which an encrypted element may be used. This domain is based on the perceived level of sensitivity for the area under consideration; hence, providing a heightened level of security to the most sensitive portions of the system.
• MIDAS maintains a log of all student activity. While providing a valuable pedagogical information to instructors, this feature also offers an additional level of security because instructors can track the time and location of every student's interaction with the system.