XIM Blog
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[edit] May 2008
Final report for the XIM project is now with JISC. Find it here.
[edit] April 2008
XIM reporting was included in the XCRI presentation at the JISC Conference 15 April 2008.
I circulated draft implementation models (UML activity diagrams) and textual descriptions of scenarios to reviewers. I received several very valuable comments from the team, which led me to tweak a couple of the models; specifically I have added a variant of the Integrated Content Management System model, so that it covers a case in which an integrated MIS system is also used, linked by common course identifiers to the CMS.
[edit] March 2008
Have now had very positive feedback to the HEI readiness template from nearly all the validators. As a result of feedback, I have revised the visualisation of the characteristic scales to this:
Final XIM template for HEI XCRI readiness characteristics
[edit] February 2008
Drafted the first cut of the HEI readiness template. The characteristic scales look like this:
Had very useful meetings with Graduate Prospects, Tameside College and the University of Manchester. The last two were project initiations for the GMSA XCRI mini-project, but this work is likely to impact on XIM too. Working with Graduate Prospects and the University of Manchester may enable XIM to extend its data collecting organisation models and to capture almost all the courses data from a single HEI.
[edit] January 2008
Continued reviewing 2007 mini-projects via talking to participants and looking at documentation, including the (relatively sparse) JISC reports.
Found a small number of practitioners to validate the outputs of the project, in particular the XCRI readiness template and the scenarios that will act as business models.
Did some initial work on relevant attributes of HEIs in relation to readiness to implement XCRI, for example:
We have arranged to do a briefing at UCAS Admissions Conference on XCRI.
Visited Phosphorix at the end of the month. Went through the process of installing Selwyn's IONetwork software for courses. This includes an ionetworknode, course hub, course agent and optionally a portal. It all runs on Apache Tomcat and provides services for importing data, editing (fairly crude), and publishing. It's main strengths seem to be that it permits a range of deployments - for example, at an HEI, at an agency or at a data collecting organisation. It would save an HEI from having to mount its own web services for publishing data. It also permits sharing across nodes for searching and data exchange. Portals can pull the data by subscribing to hubs; publishing can push from agent to hub. All this means that there seem to be a range of possible implementation models.
