XCRI Blog

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.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 2:32 pm and is filed under case studies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.