XCRI Blog

The main objective was the implementation of the XCRI CAP 1.1 against the university catalogue comprising undergraduate, postgraduate, FE and CPD components. The university has many disconnected databases, created and maintained by different business functions that contain course Information. The course catalogue was driven from the ASIS student record system and an xml course repository was created and accessed through web services and aggregators. Through this project, the University:

• was able to output all the course advertising data in an efficient manner to the internal and external collectors like the Hot courses ltd and UCAS.
• Reviewed the current processes, minimised the workload for the schools by providing high quality data sets.
• Reduced the duplication of data around the course by process re-engineering. Created a comprehensive course catalogue integrating the institutional MIS system, including SITS.

The project influenced the partner institutions through the WYLLN (West Yorkshire Life Long Learning network) and has worked with the non-partners to investigate different ways the XCRI –CAP can benefit in regards to the 14-19 area prospectus.

Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), a diverse institution has a large number of complex catalogue of courses that are paper based ones and are advertised online. In collaboration with the Greater Manchester Strategic Alliance (GMSA), it supplies course data to the major aggregators like the UCAS and the UFI Learning Directory to build a regional lifelong learning network.

The approval of new courses was paper based which were proposed to the Centre for Academic Standards & Quality Enhancement. External Relations Department was then alerted by this approval .The validation panel then scrutinises it and was then manually entered in to the student record system which was used for enrolment purposes.

The project found it hard to match the databases of courses that were used for advertising purposes and the student record system where the students were enrolled. The challenging situation was not the same for undergraduate, postgraduate and short courses. The UCAS codes helped in matching the marketing and enrolment details. The problem with the postgraduate and short courses was with the aggregators such as Greater Manchester Strategic Alliance. This developed a need for the Academic Database project for aggregating the gathered data for different purposes.

This project was major success and paved the way to many other institutions to adopt XCRI. XCRI @MMU finished in 2007 and produced an XCRI-CAP compliant XML prospectus for the university with the small team involving colleagues from the MMU’s management Information Division, UCAS and so on.

Considering the scale and complexity of the data flow, MMU student records was gathered in an Oracle Database which then used to produce an XCRI-CAP-compliant XML feed that was validated and consumed by tools available through the XCRI support project . XCRI@MMU made a major contribution to the national trials of the XCRI course advertising profile and with the close communication with UCAS, it identified the issues at each step and explored them with UK Higher Education’s premier course information aggregator. With regards to the outputs of the project, the organisational structures underwent major change like the responsibility of producing the paper based and online prospectus was divided between two departments within MMU’s External Relations Division. Validation of new courses was handled by the Centre for Academic Standards & Quality Enhancement and the student records by the Planning and Management Unit.

West Cheshire College is a vocational college, with a range of courses with three main campuses located in Chester, Ellesmere Port and Capenhurst. It comprises about 2000 full time students and 20,000 part time students. The aim of the project was the generation of XCRI within the FE sector and to export the course information to an appropriate web service within the FE sector. The project employed the software company Phosphorix to publish the information from the college database and the Unit e-course information system in to a single XCRI catalogue. The student information was administered within the College Information System (CIS) and the course advertising was managed by the Marketing department. The Content Management System (CMS) was in charge of advertising the leaflet information to the external people. The Learning Aims Database (LAD, oracle Database), collected the necessary data such as the level of course and the awarding body. A single view of this data was then created by liaising with other stakeholders and bringing together the data from three different data sources. Course Exchange was used to generate the XCRI-CAP xml file combining the brochure information and the course presentation details was then shared with the SOLVS project.

The project faced some organisational and technical issues like

• Absence of awarding body information in college database
• Compliance issues with the creation of leaflet information and linking course presentation to the leaflet.

It has been proved that XCRI has raised awareness and through this project the institution is now in a position to act as an advisor on XCRI and the flexibility of the XCRI schemas to the colleges and schools in Cheshire and Warrington. The project considers that XCRI has paved way to wider access to further FE programmes within Cheshire and Warrington Lifelong Learning Network.

For more info please visit,David’s blog

Thanks to my collegue David Sherlock for sorting it out.

The XCRI project in the University of Worcester developed a course catalogue for exporting data in the XCRI-CAP (eXchange of Course-Related Information – Course Advertising Profile) specification format. HWLLN (Herefordshire and Worcestershire Lifelong Learning Network) launched in 2006 consists of one University (Worcester) and eight FE (Further Education) Colleges. This project initially planned to combine the course advertising information from a partner college (Kidderminster College) with the catalogue of the University of Worcester. Unfortunately, due to the time constraints and the results not being up to the mark when data was extracted from the Content Management System, the XCRI-CAP readiness report could not be completed at Kidderminster College.

So, the university followed the steps suggested in the XCRI developer’s guide. The project was tested for the ‘’XCRI Readiness ‘’ at the first step. The report available to the public definitely gives a good overview to other institutions that might choose XCRI in the near future. The new course catalogue is based on the data extracted from two different existing databases: Red Dot Content Management System and SITS ( the Student Record System) which is exported as an XML file and mapped to the XCRI schema. The next step is to develop a course search tool using PURL (Persistent Uniform Resource Locator) and publicly publish the XCRI-CAP file as a URL (Uniform Resource Locator). As a result of this implementation, the university found that the XCRI-CAP feed added value to the student because it provided easy navigation of courses and related details. As a part of the evaluation process, the university presented this XCRI project at the EUNIS (European University Information Systems) conference in June 2009.

Overall it was discovered that XCRI-CAP is not difficult to implement and that having a common standard like XCRI across different institutions can benefit the other agencies such as UCAS (Universities and Colleges Admissions Service). The XCRI Readiness report and the XCRI-CAP file is now available to the public in the Wider Horizons website .

The University of Bolton brands itself as a professional university with heavy emphasis on Continuous Professional Development (CPD). Therefore, new and existing courses must be marketed accurately.

Prior to the commencement of the XCRI project, the existing course database was simply an unsophisticated collection of 60 HTML (Hyper Text Mark up Language) files across a number of disconnected databases, so cross verification of the dataflow between them was difficult. As the content needs to be updated when modules change, the need to redevelop the existing course database became essential. The need arouse to build a new course database from scratch and it was at this point that BoXCRIp (Bolton eXchanging Course Related Information Project) was started on 1st February 2007.

The BoXCRIp project faced a number of challenges from different perspectives such as technological side, human side and many other practical sides. Whilst the technological challenges were relatively easy to address, issues covering aspects from both technological and human sides such as people preferences and identification of the course representation (i.e. structure of courses) were more problematic. The other practical problems were in data entry, administration (the process between the data entry and exit in different perceptions), checking the Active Server Pages (ASP) web pages and so on. There was some resistance by the university to using the student record system (SITS) which was used for many other purposes like timetabling and so on. After modifications to the technical approach and design process, the University of Bolton launched its new Course Catalogue database which can export XCRI data in the CAP (Course Advertising Profile) specification format. Many of the Project’s other objectives were also met including:

• Establishing an easily searchable and comprehensive, web-based, University catalogue for the purposes of marketing courses to potential students.

• The ability to test and use the XCRI schema to present the course catalogue in a way that can be consumed by external services including Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS), mash-ups and aggregators.

• Eliminating the need to duplicate data entry relating to course advertising information

• Identification of opportunities to improve the automated collection of information by describing the existing processes through which course promotional information is built up.

• Creation of a single repository of information relating to the advertising and promotion of courses, including undergraduate, postgraduate, CPD modules, and short courses.

Further information on BoXCRIp is available from the BoXCRIp Project Report: Case Study and an interview with Bolton’s Head of Information Systems and Technology, Patrick O’Reilly. A slideshow is also available.

If you follow XCRI you may also be aware of our work on harmonizing with other initiatives across Europe through the CEN MLO work. Here’s an important update I posted from my other blog.

Upshot: If you’ve already implemented XCRI 1.1, then you’re already 90% of the way towards complying with a future EU standard. In a future revision of XCRI we’ll need to add a couple of properties to the model for full 100% compliance, but they aren’t mandatory for providers anyway, so chances are you won’t need to change anything if you produce an XCRI feed, and aggregators will need a very minor update.

Its been very gratifying to see so many XCRI mentions cropping up - at the JISC Innovation Forum there should have been bingo cards for keynote mentions as we’d have won top prize!

However especially good to see this slide from a presentation at IWMW by Alison Wildish - formerly of Edge Hill and now at the University of Bath:

XCRI becomes just one of the things you do to make a sensible e-Prospectus, along with tagging and sorting out the database.

Well done, Alison! Hopefully we’ll see a Bath XCRI feed soon! 

Link

Seems like a long time now since the CEN workshop on learning technologies met in Athens last October, but I thought it might be interesting to publish the “Athens Declaration” made at that meeting:

There is a considerable interest in many countries in Europe in creating specifications for the exchange of information about courses and other learning and training opportunities.

There is a clear scope for greater harmonization of these efforts within a European context.

All existing national initiatives will benefit from contributing towards harmonization at a European level.

There are sufficient clear commonalities across existing national initiatives for future European standards to be developed.

Harmonization should balance the benefits of common standardization with the necessity for meeting local contextual needs and infrastructure.

Harmonization efforts should focus on small, simple models based upon existing commonalities that can be expanded upon at national or regional level, rather than all-inclusive monolithic standards.

CEN WS-LT signatories: XCRI, CDM, CDM-FR, EMIL, PAS1068, Italy & Greece

Since Athens we’ve made a lot of progress on developing the Metadata For Learning Opportunities (MLO) standard, with a draft nearly ready for submission to CEN. The MLO standard harmonizes the core models of the various european specifications, including XCRI, into a single core standard that would become a “european norm” (de jure standard) for advertising courses. The MLO working group has also actively engaged with the R3SG vendor community to make sure there is good buy-in from suppliers, and coordination with other key areas such as Europass.

These things take a lot of time, as text needs to be ratified in each EU language, but potentially this could be on the books by 2010. Along with all the other existing EU specs, XCRI is going to have to change slightly in that time in order to become MLO-compliant; however I think its fair to say that if you implement XCRI 1.1 now, you are already 90% there.

The next step is an open workshop at the EUNIS conference in Denmark on the 24th of June to open out the consultation to more suppliers, then a meeting of the CEN workshop in Lyons on the 27th of June.

For us at the XCRI project this really helps take us forward in our objectives for an open standard, and all the input the community has made to developing XCRI has given us some very important input into the development of MLO.

Look out for the reports from Denmark and Lyons later this month!

Sebastian Rahtz did us proud last year by winning the Innovation Competition at IWMW 2007. Can you make it two in a row for XCRI?

Brian Kelly writes:

This year we will be repeating the Innovation Competition. This time, rather than relying on a commercial sponsor, the Universities of Aberdeen and Bath and Edge Hill University are the sponsors. These three institutions have recognised the potential benefits of opening up their data and APIs to the community, and invite members of the community to demonstrate what can be done with their RSS and Atom feeds, their XCRI data, their microformats, their OpenSearch APIs and other data on their Web site.

More details are available on the IWMW website.