Funded by the: Jisc e-Learning programme.

Lead Institution: University of Bedfordshire.

Learner Provider Type: Higher Education

Project Duration: January 2012 - March 2013

Key Words: Course Data

Case study tags: course data, process improvement, hear, kis, course information, university of bedfordshire

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

 

Executive Summary

The project was started in 2011 as part of the University’s “four strand” programme of work to ensure delivery of comprehensive and accurate institutional information to the University’s internal and external stakeholders.

The XCRI-CAP project developed the important work delivered by our previous project implementing the Tribal IPP module of SITS (our student records system) which managed the transfer of course data from paper format to electronic format.

The aim of the XCRI-CAP project was to make further significant developments to manage the flow of course and associated data and improve course material, external expectations and course data flows within the institution.

The initial project team unfortunately left the University at various points during the project leaving the project with poor continuity. 

The XCRI project, however, succeeded in identifying areas for development arising from the IPP project and succeeded in overhauling the data collection process, improving the internal and external information provision within the University and creating better communication with our stakeholders via creation of our feed. 

We now have most of our courses stored via IPP.  Of those remaining most are short courses.  This information populates our website (www.beds.ac.uk) and is refreshed nightly.  Our XCRI feed populates the same information via its COOL URI for aggregators to collect.

There is still further ancillary work to be done to fully achieve comprehensive online institutional information.  This work includes inclusion of short courses into IPP and the XCRI feed, implement a way of archiving data and deliver a web-front end.  These objectives are to be included within the next stage of work.

Issues raised in methodology/implementation:

• Lack of defined owner of feed meant that resolving data warnings went around the houses across various departments of the University. 
• Issue of relationship management with Jisc.  No single relationship manager within university.
• Emergent issue in realising that there was no allocation of ownership of feed in business as usual. 

Achievement of Aims, Objectives and Outcomes

• XCRI-CAP is the fourth strand in a University-wide programme of work that also includes KIS, HEAR and the Tribal IPP module with a unified objective to offer comprehensive and accurate information to the University’s internal and external stakeholders. 
• Original objectives listed in our project plan (and status - achieved/partially achieved/not achieved):

• Achieved
  

• To improve course material and external expectations, improve course data flows and processes within institution. Achieved…
• To refine the work already started in publishing consistent, accurate information to students.  Plan is to offer a single source of data that will populate a different number of mediums to ensure version control of course-related data is viable for foreseeable future. Achieved…
• Project will extend the current dataset to encompass all university awards and respond to HEAR and KIS requirements.  XCRI-CAP is part of the “four strand” group of KIS, HEAR, IPP in programme of work: its programme objective is to offer comprehensive and accurate information to internal and external stakeholders.Achieved…
• Communicate better and more consistently to our fee paying students to make sure they have the right information to make right choices.  Achieved…
• Establish an XCRI-CAP feed with COOL URI for certain types of course and proposed other work.  Achieved... 
• Ensure that material is Jisc compliant and able to be placed in public domain.  Achieved…
• Produce XCRI-CAP feed for external agencies: “aggregator”.  Achieved: Feed created, tested, exception free and published.
• Ensure sound communication channels with Tribal and Squiz: Achieved: We did not experience any problems communicating with Tribal and Squiz.

•  Partially achieved

• To establish further significant developments to manage the flow of course and associated data within an external XCRI format. - Partially achieved…  
• Increase confidence that course development and marketing processes are fit for purpose and external scrutiny.  Partially achieved…
  Provide a validated XCRI XML feed supplying course content to the website.   The feed does not supply to the website.  Our existing IPP feed continues to supply course content to the website but both draw course information from the centralised repository.
  
• We will have completion of current IPP records and web visibility in relation to a range of part-time and postgraduate course data and explored issues for aspects of CPD materials including testing the full import of data to IPP for Professional and Statutory Regulatory Bodies (PSRB), CPD, short course and Research provision.  Partially achieved…

• Not achieved
  

• Agree a policy for electronic access to University course information externally with other agencies including agreement on charges to third parties.  Not achieved: No such policy has been agreed.  We agreed mid-project that the notion of charging third parties to advertise our course information was inconsistent with the open source nature of the project.  
  
• Review success of initial stages of data transfer and quality already done within IPP project.  Not achieved: End of Stage review completed post IPP implementation and a series of recommendations were made.
  

Recommendations

• Ensure that business analysis is undertaken to ensure best fit of application for our business requirements.
• Need to consider how aggregators are going to ensure that data they share is accurate as it will inevitably change from the day that they collected it from us.
• Ensure that project work stream owners have dedicated time available to work on project work and are not “one deep” to ensure that alternative colleagues are available to support the work if there is staff absence or departure.
• Need to identify ownership in business as usual of the XCRI feed.
• Ensure correct assignment of project management role within organisation in order to get time/inputs required in work streams from those who had knowledge/resource to deliver the work packages.
• Ensure project scope is clear and the work packages have sufficient resource in terms of time and availability of SMEs to deliver the products.

Further details: email and contact names etc

Project Director: Deputy Registrar Martina Rohr

Project Manager: Mrs Julia Shearing, Project Manager, Project Management Office, Julia.shearing@beds.ac.uk

Partner institutions: Associate and FE partner colleges of the University software suppliers

http://blogs.beds.ac.uk/jisc