Start date: 1 April 2005
End date: 1 October 2005
Funding programme: e-Learning Frameworks and Tools programme
Project website:
http://www.brock.ac.uk/bert
JISC theme(s): e-Learning
Brockenhurst College has been using its own in-house developed registration
and attendance system (“Emily”) for all Sixth Form classes since September
2003. The system carries details of 2,700 students and typically registers
around 1.2 million unique attendances in an academic year. The system also
provides individual attendance reports to students and parents via a
personalised web portal. The system has had a significant impact on the
management and effective support of learners and is popular with staff,
learners and parents. Emily has attracted interest from other institutions
who see the advantages of implementing their own attendance systems rather
than undertaking large-scale, vendor-led MIS transformation projects which
are both disruptive and costly. We believe that distilling our success into
an open source software toolkit would be of real value to institutions and
the wider e-learning community as well.
Aims and Objectives
The overall aim of the project is to provide a working, high quality
software toolkit which will allow institutions to begin using electronic
registration and attendance tracking without the risk of either purchasing
an expensive commercial system or building their own from scratch. The
toolkit also aims, through the development of service definitions, to
contribute to the development of the E-Learning Framework (ELF) conceptual
model.
The specific objectives are to:
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Develop data and behavioural models for registration & attendance
tracking
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Produce XSD and WSDL implementations of those models
-
To develop an open source, useable, robust e-registers system which can
be easily deployed or developed further
-
To contribute to the ongoing evolution of the ELF and promote discussion
-
To share our success with other institutions
Project Methodology
The software team work in short iterative cycles and have adopted current
software development best practices. Documentation will be produced as part
of the development process. Users of Brockenhurst’s existing e-registers
system (academics and MIS staff) are involved in writing the functional
specification, as are staff at the other colleges in the region who have
already expressed an interest in the system. These same users will
participate in a final evaluation and acceptance test.
Implications/ Deliverables/ Stakeholders
At present, no e-learning standards exist which can adequately model the
data structures, operations and messages needed for the processes typically
involved in recording student registration and attendance. There appears to
be a gap in standards initiatives such as IMS and the Schools
Interoperability Framework, neither of which make much of an incursion into
this problem space. Development and dissemination of our work in this area
through design, implementation and open-source publication of service
interface definitions and working applications would contribute to
discussion and future development in this area, as well as provide a solid
basis for implementers of registration systems today.
The toolkit will define and implement a data model, operations, messages
and corresponding web service definitions which enable the production of
attendance registers, their completion, storage, editing and retrieval;
they will also enable the retrieval of attendance data on a per-student or
per-group basis.
In addition to the “back end” web services, the toolkit will include an
open sourced, robust functional web registration application (based on the
College’s own system) suitable for use in most scenarios. Our
implementation will be directly “pluggable” into MIS systems which provide
data using IMS Enterprise Services, or systems which have been retrofitted
to do so (for instance using the SWEET.Net toolkit).
Final Report
This project completed in Oct 05 and their final report is available
at the bottom of this page.