XCRI eXchange 2011: eXchanging Course Related Information was a National Showcase held on Monday 27 June 2011 at the University of Nottingham.
Alan Paull provided an overview of day. The event had been organised jointly by the SAMSON and MUSKET projects and the XCRI support team. All presentations were recorded and the material will be available on the XCRI knowledge base http://www.xcri.co.uk.
The workshop consisted of a series of short presentations that are summarised below followed by group discussions.
Prof Mark Stubbs, Manchester Metropolitan University provided some back on the origins of the XCRI work he has been leading across the UK since 2005. The original project developed a reference model for course information and through the CETIS Enterprise SIG identified a simple need to stop re-typing course information for different course sites. In 2006 a high intensity role out phase was started to further develop the specification. This was developed into a standard for course information (XCRI-CAP) and they looked at EU for related standards and worked towards EU harmonization, leading towards MLO standard being agreed and adopted in the UK.
It has been very important to do tests and trials to understand the issues, which is why it has taken 6 years to get to where we are today with XCRI. The challenge is now to develop the business processes within institutions as XCRI 1.2 is ready. The time is right as well with the Browne Report in Oct 10 saying students do not get adequate information which has led to the development of the Key Information Sets technical standard to be rolled out next year.
Ruth Drysdale (JISC) gave an overview of the future development opportunities around XCRI-CAP. A new JISC call coming out 29th June (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities.aspx). This will be a two year programme with a focus on XCRI-CAP 1.2, and including important roles for UCAS and HESA. The XCRI work is right level of maturity to create critical mass through large scale role out. The first stage will require institutions to review their current situation and plan out what they will do to address issues (3 months), they may wish to make use of the XCRI self assessment framework (http://xcrisaf.igsl.co.uk/). Funding of £10k will be available to ant eligible institution conditional on having senior management, marketing and academic registrar/admissions commitment. The final output will be an implementation plan that will go forward for selection to start in Jan 2012.
There are several drivers for implementation that institutions will need to consider. Fee paying students want to know more about academic experience and how courses will compare. They want a clearer understanding of what they will be paying for. There will be an increased scrutiny by QAA (through the KIS) and requirements for transparency on what institutions are spending money on. Students need to be able to compare courses between institutions in meaningful way. The implication is that better informed students improves retention and motivation. Other standards work especially the Higher Education Achievement Report (HEAR) will also need to be considered.
A main challenge is to articulate the differences and connections between the HEAR, KIS, CAP, etc. HESA are leading a study to look at how the course information changes across the different stages.
- CAP – provides information on what students are about to do i.e. the course
- KIS – provides information on what they likely to do if they take a course
- HEAR – describes what they have done at the end of a course
Some important areas to look at are the non-standard courses (i.e. not core UCAS) such as online, distance and part time, post graduate and CPD courses. There is also a need to with other agencies such UCAS, NLD, 14-19 prospectus, careers services, IAG staff.
Scott Wilson (CETIS and XCRI Support Project) explained what has changed from XCRI-CAP: 1.1 to 1.2. XCRI-CAP 1.2 has been harmonised with the EU standard MLO and made simpler. It includes new requirements such age range from schools, better information on venues and provider types, abbreviations for qualification name, all of these trying seeking consistency. It has simplified the modes of student engagement, distinguishing between text that will be displayed and a label that is for machine use. A similar implementation has been made for course start date and duration.
Full details are available at http://www.xcri.org/ and a single page for the 1.2 specification will be provided and this will not change for the next few years.
There are some bits that have not been include but the XCRI community will continue to explore and further develop them.
George Dafoulas, Middlesex University provided an overview of how they have been demonstrating the potential uses of XCRI for transforming and comparing course documentation. They wanted to help students and institutions (and potentially employers) to compare courses. They found it difficult to access course information in their own institution, so they had to go direct to academics and converted course documents into XCRI-CAP format. This allowed then to look at how to map and compare courses. They have developed a set of tools to compare courses (see http://www.musket.mdx.ac.uk/). The challenge is to try to match the needs of learners, employers, AP(E)L claims from learners, etc. There are several applications that can be utilised and what this demonstrates is the potential of having course information in an XCRI format.
Richard Staniforth, University of Wales Institute, Cardiff provided some stark indicators of why it has taken so long for XCRI to become adopted in Wales. The current message of the potential benefits of XCRI is very simple, but the issues of adoption are a challenge. XCRI been over-sold initially, but will only be taken up if it is adopted. HEFCW see it as the role of institutions to implement it. In Wales they need to be able to exchange information across the post-92 institutions, FE and skills council and training centres in Wales. A key question is who has ownership of XCRI , this is important in Wales as they are unable to access the capital funding in the JISC programme. There is a need to look at the real market being demonstrated by OU, MMU, East Midlands, OXCRI as examples of tangible value added deliverables. They hope to establish a pathfinder team to build XCRI use across Wales through the University of Wales Federation. The opportunity to partner with XCRI champions and look at collaboration outside of Wales will be essential to draw in the support of the HEFCW and Welsh Government. The fear is that is the sense of ownership is dispersed there will be no commercial imperative to implement XCRI, so partnership and collaboration are essential in taking this forward .
Kirstie Coolin, University of Nottingham. XCRI adoption & opportunities to build data ecosystems
The implementation of XCRI is already within many institution’s roadmap and funding may not be the issue, but their own commercial drivers to meet needs of future market should be what drives it forward. There are many potential uses of the XCRI data and opportunities to link it with open data.
Kirsty asked “shouldn’t all course information be available as open data anyway?. All institutions and providers could have XCRI feeds out of their course systems as well to allow others to use it. It could be linked with other information to help provide richer information for learners to make decisions, promote course information wider and engage wide markets. So there is a commercial model for XCRI implementation through providing the services and making use of the information.
Craig Hawker, Software Developer, SMART Ways Technology Ltd. has developed an XCRI-CAP Generation and Validation tool. The generator is a .NET library to produce XCRI xml, it is open source and free to use in education. This makes creating XCRI-CAP xml easier and more consistent. The XCRI validation tool was developed to check what was being delivered met the standard. It lets users know issues with your XCRI feed and also gives feedback on what might need to be done. A future development will be to look at also validating the specific needs of other aggregators of XCRI feeds. See http://www.craighawker.co.uk/xcri/
David Sowden, Hull University provided some examples of why they implemented XCRI. They started with a project working with the NHS and looking at competence frameworks and an existing electronic framework. The need was to link learners needs to course outcomes and find courses. They aimed to develop an integrated system linking outcomes in the framework with outcomes in modules. So XCRI looked like a possible way to do this, did a small successful pilot but they needed to scale it. Before this could be done the NHS competence framework was to be discontinued due to lack of funding.
So they are now looking at the Cogent Skills for Science based industries, Cogent Gold Standard has been created to meet needs of large engineering employers. They are using XCRI as part of the solution to link all the data and mapping skills (future and current needs) with CPD offerings of institutions.
Michael Nolan, Edge Hill University described how they had used XCRI to develop an online prospectus. They started with The Big Brief in 2007 to redevelop their web site and decided against using a CMS but used systems to manage data. They had no way at that time to manage course data Courses, so XCRI-CAP offered a basis to develop this. They implemented the XCRI-CAP specification and built systems based on XCRI. This allowed several new possibilities in presenting course information on the web site. As a manager he has found basing systems around data to be very powerful. They are still having difficulties with short courses as no real system for getting them into the database. They can generate XCRI feeds from any web page but have not found any real applications, but they are ready when the opportunities arise.
Neil Pearson, Hotcourses Ltd explained what a course aggregator needs from XCRI. The HE data they receive is mainly from UCAS but also from providers, large privates, small providers and international providers. They have been piloting bulk upload, after 3 years and adoption of the latest XCRI they are making it works and seeing more take-up. Don’t under-estimate the stick in getting institutions in board.
There are misconceptions in the approach “beyond build it and they will come”, as they won’t. We need to look at services that use XCRI that can be consumed not only by aggregators and other organisations but also the “mash-up guy” who writes small apps.
Aggregators need to give users choice to help them chose courses like car or house search. XCRI needs to suggest more enumerations to try and bring UK data into a coherent whole. Users need fast sites and if XCRI manipulation needs to take place, this slows it down, so it needs to be optimised.
In the future, they are working with the XCRI logical model and taking more responsibility as an aggregator to take things forward, building an auto-categorisation tool based on course title and summary for example. They intend to also expose any course uploaded as feeds.
Richard Entwistle, InGenius Solutions Ltd presented the XCRI eXchange Platform (XXP), which has been developed as a platform to exchange data using XCRI-CAP, so institutions could use the service rather than having to create their own XCRI feeds. They provide a way to get data in and get it out as an XCRI feed. The ownership remains with the provider. They are also working with aggregators and providing services to support their needs.
Summary of the group discussion on upgrading to XCRI-CAP 1.2 Facilitated by Scott Wilson
There are some controlled vocabularies and there is a need to sort out ownership and make sure they are maintained. The course specification is only a container but it doesn’t specify how the data should be structured. The vocabularies provide one means but the community needs to agree hwo it will be used.
The XCRI community needs to agree what is good practice and produce a usage guide. This will be produced as a community document rather than part of the standard. This needs to be community owned rather as it will develop out of the implementation of the standard over the next few years. XCRI dummies – a usage guide. Current docs aimed at standards bodies, not even developers. Need a guide for next level. Why to use this field, how have others used this field etc.
A need arose to be able to identify courses delivered by a specific person (i.e. high profile academic). Learners want to know who teaches the course when choosing. However there is no person information in XCRI but it could be linked to the specification in other ways.
XCRI can be used to tie together SRS (finance information) and marketing information and web information.Commercial vendors not related to SRS, new curriculum management systems do relate to XCRI and may be more important.
Hot Courses should be eating their own XCRI feeds. Aggregators should be able to consume XCRI feeds and one way to demonstrate this is for them to develop applications that consume their own data through XCRI feeds
What is happening with 14-19 Prospectus? This is an important are that needs to be linked with the next stage of XCRO role out.
Qualifications frameworks across UK and EU .Skills Development Scotland, developed services in XCRI 1.1 and the biggest problem is qualification, they are using the SQF, but have different course descriptions and use different qualification frameworks than they are using. The Meta Data and Education Group did a qualifications mapping (last updated 2009) and this needs to be updated.
Cost was never standardized, as couldn’t be. Cost is one area that could be worked on for the next version. There could be an extension to XCRI to handle this if it was required. Users want to be able to search for a course say under £500.
Summary from other groups (from plenary)
XCRI-CAP enabled services: Tying it all together Facilitator: Kirstie Coolin
Curriculum mapping. A build your own course tool, aggregators, marketing of XCRI – gold standard of course information, crack the joining up stuff you can spin out a lot of services on this.
JISC XCRI Capital Programme Facilitator: Ruth Drysdale
(see http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities.aspx)
Policy issues: KIS, HEAR and XCRI Facilitator: Alan Paull
There is a need for change agents to lead institutional process review and to identify processes that are adhoc and inconsistent. The community of practice around XCRI use needs to be developed further and led someone such as responsible aggregators.
The implementation is a messy problem within institutions and XCRI-CAP is only a small part of the problem.
It is now or never, there will only be one injection of funding to role this out and this is the last opportunity to get some support with the XCRI programme to implement it within your institution.
Summary
The team will review the material to enhance what is already available in the XCRI Knowledge base. The workshop provided a useful baseline for the new JISC call and suggested how important it will be for institutions to work closely with agencies and aggregators (such as UCAS, HESA and Hot Courses). There are several tools and services that institutions could also be exploiting and assisting in the development. Perhaps most importantly is the need to consider the wider applications of course information data once it is in a standard format and available as a feed, how it links with the KIS, HEAR and other open data and how these can be used together to provide the necessary information and services to users.