Start date: 1 February 2008
End date: 31 August 2008
Funding programme: e-Learning Capital programme
JISC theme(s): e-Learning, e-Administration
Committees: JISC Learning and Teaching committee
Overview
The Greater Manchester Strategic Alliance (GMSA) is a partnership of universities, colleges, work based learning providers and other stakeholders that delivers a Lifelong Learning Network (LLN) and promotes the progression of vocational learners into Higher Education. In support of this delivery, the GMSA runs two overarching projects that depend critically on course information; ModCAT providing modular learning options that can be combined into higher awards and the Vocational Course Catalogue (VCC), a larger collection of part-time vocational Higher Education courses in Greater Manchester.
In order to create catalogues of courses the GMSA wants to adopt a course description standard - to enable interoperability across the partnership and within its own systems. The GMSA needs to investigate and evaluate the technical implications of delivering such a standard to further the ModCAT and VCC projects, and also present an environment to practically demonstrate the value added from standardising, sharing and aggregating course information. As well as benefiting the GMSA partnership, outcomes from the project are also intended to be fed back into the XCRI project and community as a whole. By using technology to collect, transform, aggregate and display course information, the project will demonstrate how the administrative processes associated with learning and teaching can be supported and improved, and what new opportunities may be exploited as a result.
Aims and Objectives
To examine the technical and procedural factors of utilising a course description specification in support of the GMSA overarching projects, ModCAT and Vocational Course Catalogue.
- Investigation of existing course storage methods by consultant visit;
- Raising CourseExchange software to XCRI-CAP 1.1 compliance;
- Development of process model for course information submission for each institution;
- Deployment of CourseExchange software;
- As many course descriptions as possible from each institution mapped to the XCRI-CAP 1.1 standard, using CourseExchange software;
- Aggregation of course descriptions from each institution;
- Publication of combined course descriptions at a public URL;
- Identifying and drawing conclusions from events and issues at each stage;
- Using knowledge learned to successfully deliver ModCAT and VCC and refine XCRI-CAP 1.1.
Anticipated outputs and outcomes
- Capacity for utilisation of XCRI at the GMSA and in partnership institutions;
- An increased awareness of the potential benefits of sharing course information, from the point of view of marketing, quality assurance, administration and enrolment;
- Realisation of the benefits provided by implementing XCRI-CAP 1.1;
- Wider participation and involvement with the XCRI project;
- Return on investment with knowledge gained for JISC and specifically the XCRI project;
- Positive proof that openness, standards and collaboration are a good thing and serve to benefit the individual (institution) as well as the community.
Standards Used
| Name of standard or specification |
Version |
| XCRI-CAP |
1.1 |
| XHMTL |
1.1 |
| CSS |
2.1 |
| XSLT |
2.0 |
Project Partners