Funded by the: Jisc e-Learning programme.
Lead Institution: Loughborough University.
Learner Provider Type: Higher Education
Project Duration: January 2012 - March 2013
Key Words: Course Data
Case study tags:course data, process improvement,course information, loughborough university
Note: This is an abridged version of this project's final report. The full version is available here.
Project Summary
...This project implemented the system, service, process and policy changes at Loughborough University that were needed in order to produce an XCRI-CAP feed of course marketing information. It also identified a number of benefits to the institution, many of which will also be of interest to the larger community and perhaps also relevant to related initiatives such as the HEFCE Key Information Sets and the wider Open Data agenda.
The project documented the process of stakeholder engagement and technical development via periodic blog posts. Project outputs were released under appropriate licenses, i.e. Creative Commons version attribution license (CC-BY 2.0) for reports and documentation, GNU General Public License (GPL v3) for code (Site Manager CMS formatter script), and Open Government License (OGL) for the course data feed itself.
The project engaged with Jisc and the wider community through the project blog and face-to-face/online programme events. Loughborough is an active participant in a number of relevant communities, e.g. AUA, UCISA and CASE, and is actively exploring opportunities to promote this work.
What did we learn?
The project has brought together a team including domain experts from Academic Registry, Marketing and Communications and IT Services, with stakeholder engagement from the Academic Registrar, Head of Marketing and the Head of Student Information Systems. We have also been delighted by the support for transformational change provided by Jisc, and the opportunity to share our experiences with other members of the community...
Immediate Impact
We feel that the new process for prospectus management is a huge improvement on our old approach. This is specifically because it:
- creates a single canonical source of course information that can be re-used and even embedded in School and Department websites,
- replaces labour intensive and often paper based processes (freeing up staff time for more worthwhile activities),
- gives us the opportunity to make time sensitive changes to the prospectus content which will be reflected immediately, and
- through doing so, reduces the likelihood of incorrect or out-of-date information being presented to prospective students
Future Impact
We are actively monitoring efficiency savings through a “Value for Money” programme of projects, which includes the Open Course Data initiative.
We will conduct a post-project review after the new process and system have been in day-to-day use for a period of time, to assess the success of the new approach.
We have already started to look at whether a similar approach can be useful in other areas, and moved to a CMS based strategy for managing University committee papers. A related project is looking into the feasibility of using the CMS to manage the programme review and approval process.
Conclusions
By moving course data and associated workflow into the central Content Management System database, we were able to make significant improvements in terms of reduction of duplication of course information, and also improve the efficiency of its management. Content held within the CMS may be re-used elsewhere on the Loughborough website. This is highly desirable as a means of preventing errors from creeping in as content is updated centrally but not in Schools and Departments, or vice versa.
Recommendations
Our project identified the following key areas:
Structured Data
The marketing information held in the Site Manager CMS prior to the start of the project was not sufficiently structured to facilitate the production of the XCRI-CAP feed, e.g. through use of composite free text fields such as describing a course as “BSc (Hons) DPS 4 yrs full-time sandwich” and “UCAS code: NN34 BSc/FinMg4”.
We had anticipated that the project would explore two approaches: enhancing the CMS templates to break out the various XCRI-CAP elements where these had been present in composite fields; and using a “widget” approach to embed data from Loughborough’s in-house student information system (LUSI) within the web pages generated by the CMS. After we started to trial the CMS based approach, it quickly became clear that this was the preferred option, and we did not pursue the widget based approach. We were also discouraged on this front by the “clunky” Key Information Set (KIS) widgets.
In our phase 1 project we had noted that some of the data we wished to represent via XCRI-CAP had complexity beyond the free text fields provided in the XCRI-CAP schema, e.g. entry requirements and fees, and we have provided feedback to Jisc on this aspect which we hope will be helpful with the future development of the XCRI-CAP standard.
Module and Programme approvals
There are only loose links between the course information held within LUSI (such as module objectives) and within the CMS, but there are clear reasons to improve this situation - particularly around extending the project’s approach to also cover the process for module and programme approvals. A separate project is currently being chartered to devise a way forward on this front.
Variant fields
We would prefer to present a view of the overall programme (such as “Accounting and Management”), with the option to drill down to individual course variants – such as four year sandwich course option, foundation year option and so on. The XCRI-CAP standard is not conducive to such an approach, and each programme variant is a “first class” object rather than facets of a common course. We have provided feedback to Jisc and the XCRI-CAP developers on this issue, which we know from programme discussions is also a problem for other institutions.
Further details: email and contact names etc
Project Director Dr Jennifer Nutkins, Academic Registrar
Project Manager Martin Hamilton, Head of Internet Services
Contact email m.t.hamilton@lboro.ac.uk
Project Web URL http://open.lboro.ac.uk
Project Video available on YouTube
