Funded by the: Jisc e-Learning programme.

Lead Institution: Royal Holloway, University of London.

Learner Provider Type: Higher Education

Project Duration: April 2012 - March 2013

Key Words: Course Data

Case study tags: course data, process improvement, kis, enterprise architecture (ea), course information, royal holloway - university of london

Note: This is an abridged version of this project's final report.  The full version is available here.

 

Project Summary

At Royal Holloway there are many systems that store and use course information. These systems do excellent work in silos, preparing and using course data for their particular functions. During the Autumn Term 2011, Royal Holloway participated in the Stage 1 Jisc Course Data programme. Shortly after, there was the development of the Course Finder functionality as part of the migration of our web content to a new CMS tool. These two projects revealed the extent of the manual effort required to maintain course data in various repositories, how little automated data reuse there is across systems and how difficult it is to bring all relevant information together for a college wide advertising service.

 

With this project we have used enterprise architecture (EA) techniques to further improve cross-functional course data storage, management and publishing (Jisc 2009). The project has given us the opportunity to develop a holistic course data ecosystem for Royal Holloway that will provide a foundation for strategic future organisational transformation and compliance around course advertising, course data management and syllabus management. This has been achieved using an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) which enables proper communication between web services of our course data legacy applications, data warehouse and application servers in a Service Oriented Architecture. This approach also provides a good platform for automating data feeds such as XCRI-CAP feed for consumption by external aggregators, and a course taxonomy for our new paperless admissions service.

 

What did we learn?

The project revealed how manual activities in maintaining course data across our legacy applications has resulted in a significant  waste of meaningful time and the cause of irregularities with data stored in the systems. It also clarified the need for the college to ensure data quality within the students’ record system and other legacy applications to promote reuse of course data across the entire student lifecycle. The project has benefited from the understanding and use of Enterprise Architecture to inform a holistic course data ecosystem for Royal Holloway. This has enabled us to strategically view course data management process in a broader sense and consider the benefits of a college wide transformation other than trying to improve individual systems in silos.

 

The use of Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) as a middle ware has been an interesting development that was not anticipated at the start of the project. Although there was a consideration to introduce a more Service Oriented Architecture into the application and interface design, the implementation of the ESB primarily for our Finance Project has now brought this to fruition. The course data project is now being used as a candidate early adopter use case to try out the ESB. The ESB provides the appropriate interface for integration of web services of our legacy applications, new data warehouse and application servers to generate and publish data feeds.

 

The project initiation and resourcing was badly affected and delayed by internal restructuring and procedures, some expected and others unexpected. It took longer than initially anticipated in the original project plan to get the project fully up and running. The project also had difficulties in pulling together the broader project team.  The analyst named in the original project plan was not available to work on the project as expected due to other projects the analyst had to work on. This slowed the start of the analysis work package which was not progressed until later when I was appointed to work on the project.

 

Also, the Project Manager/Enterprise Architect, initially managing the project left the college mid-way through the project. This left me with a steep learning curve of understanding the project and familiarizing with Jisc’s processes and the college’s internal processes for running research projects which are more geared towards academic departments than professional services.

 

Furthermore, the college’s effort was initially focused more on the Key Information Sets (KIS) however we have been able to build on the work done in this area to accelerate the course data project. 

 

Finally, the task to clean up data within the students’ record system (Banner) was a major challenge. It was difficult to identify and reconcile which courses were being offered by the college, when they are available, and specified attributes about the courses. There was much dependency on the ADS, IT and Data Management teams to carry out this task as a matter of priority even though this was not part of their day to day activities at this time.

 

In the midst of these challenges we are glad that the project was still able to meet its outcomes. This was only possible because of the commitment of the project team members who saw the anticipated benefits of project and worked together to achieve them.

 

Immediate Impact

Data Quality:

The project has enabled the college to take the quality of course data more seriously. This led to the need to clean-up and develop data in Banner, so that it can be the authoritative source of course data for other system and requirements. A snapshot of the course data in Banner now gives a true representation of the courses we offer and the correct attributes of those courses. This is quite useful for other systems and processes which rely on Banner for course information.

 

Process Efficiency:

The implementation of the new data ware house and the ESB now makes it possible to have a single authoritative view of course information. Therefore data requirements from any system can now be easily fulfilled through a web service connection to this view. This makes our course data reusable and eliminates the need for manual intervention in fulfilling data requirements.

 

Accessibility of data:

Again course data is now easily accessible from the data warehouse through web services for both internal and external use.

 

EA /SOA:

This project has enabled the college to embrace enterprise architecture as a useful tool for ensuring organisational and IT project alignment.

 

XCRI-CAP:

Our XCRI-CAP feed is now available for consumption by external aggregators on data.rhul.ac.uk. This increases visibility of course data for comparison across institutions by aggregating and reusing open data.

 

Future Impact

Course Finder:

One significant impact of the project will be in its use for course finder improvement. The implementation of course finder functionality in 2012 was a very onerous task due to the amount of manual intervention required to migrate data to the CMS. However, we are very optimistic that this project will make the enhancement of course data a lot easier. This will involve using master course data and published data feeds to automate and improve the flow of data into the web based course finder directory for course advertising and promotion. Courses advertised on external websites will then have essential information to enable students make informed decisions about the course.

 

Societal Benefits:

Through the published data feed, the project will help learners discover courses more easily, particularly harder to find courses. It will open up more learning opportunities and better comparison tools to enable learners to make better choices.

 

Course Lifecycle:

Processes and Master Data Improvement: The project provides a great platform to enable the college improve the processes across the course lifecycle with a particular focus on the validation process and workflow, document management for course related documents, and master data management of course catalogue information.

 

Conclusions

Royal Holloway has successfully delivered a course data architecture that has transformed our cross-functional course data storage, management and publishing. This has provided a springboard for the production of automated course data feeds for consumption by external aggregators and for internal efficiency improvements. This has been demonstrated by the production of a proof of concept course data service: an XCRI-CAP feed for external purposes. The production of course taxonomy for our new paperless admissions service is also ongoing as a demonstration of the outcome of the project. The developed architecture further provides the means for easy generation and reuse of course data for the fulfilment of any other data requirements both for internal and external uses. Course information within the data warehouse can easily be accessed through web services connected to the ESB.

 

 

Further details: email and contact names etc

Project Director     Laura Gibbs

Project Manager    Godswill Arum

Contact email        Godswill.Arum@rhul.ac.uk

Project Web URL   http://spaces.rhul.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=34 and http://www.rhul.ac.uk/iquad/projects/coursedata/home.aspx