Funded by the: Jisc e-Learning programme.
Lead Institution: University of Bolton.
Learner Provider Type: Higher Education
Project Duration: January 2012 - March 2013
Key Words: Course Data
Case study tags: course data, process improvement, kis, enterprise architecture (ea) , course information, university of bolton
Note: This is an abridged version of this project's final report. The full version is available here.
Course Data Intelligence
Project Summary
This project sought to improve the capability of the University of Bolton (UoB) to capture, store, and re-use course related data for marketing, efficiency, and intelligence purposes. As well as using established techniques, the project sought to explore the use of innovative approaches that are more flexible in allowing for the combining of data from different sources; this may be poorly structured data and/or from outside the institution. This is of particular relevance in the current HE context, where there is increased reporting and use of data for different purposes. The XCRI-CAP specification was used for standardising course related information so that is available for marketing and advertising purposes and, where appropriate, aggregation with other providers’ data.
Context
The University of Bolton is a relatively small HEI (302 FTE academic staff, 54 research staff, 251 support staff, and 5151 FTE students). The institution was involved in a previous Jisc XCRI-CAP demonstrator project in 2007, and through this work had a reasonable starting point in terms of its systems and processes to undertake work that involved course related information. However, little development or maintenance work had been undertaken since the end of the demonstrator project. At the start of this project course related information was located in the course marketing database, the student management system, an online module database (developed in 2003), and Programme Specifications documents in text document formats that were circulated using email.
What did we learn?
The University of Bolton experience over a number of years indicates that there is ongoing resource required to maintain the data structure and integrity. Administrators, academics and technical staff require ongoing education, training and development. Unless the XCRI-CAP feed is actively consumed externally, it would be difficult for institutions to maintain or invest in developing XCRI-CAP further.
From an institutional perspective, the experience working in a Model View Controller (MVC) environment has proved to be valuable in increasing the capability of the organisation to deliver on software projects as it makes the re-use and re-purposing of code and the addition of new data more straight forward.
Organisational data ownership is a difficult issue to navigate and is one that we have not yet solved. Who can do what with particular sources of data and who can decide what can be done can take a long time to work through. This applies at a business process level as well as a technical one. The establishing of the Management Information Working Group is probably a good step for any institution to consider, if they wish to better coordinate activities around institutional data. At Bolton, the group is comprised of heads of non-academic departments, individuals with relevant knowledge and expertise, and is chaired by the Executive Dean - Market and Corporate Intelligence who is located in the Vice Chancellor’s Office. Thus far, matters addressed have arisen from operational issues faced by departments. A good example of this are the issues as a result of structural reorganisation of the university which impacts across the organisation: on finance; human resources; teaching departments; course related marketing information; and timetabling, etc. Having a group to think about solving these current issues is important, but developing this group to take a proactive approach to issues such as data policy and governance and procedures will be essential.
Immediate Impact
Module and programme databases have informed the collection of the KIS information and are now being used as a part of the course validation process and are more readily available to potential applicants to base judgements on about programmes and courses.
XCRI-CAP capacity has been retained at a time of significant staff turnover. Without the project it is possible that much of this institutional knowledge would have been lost.
Although not an intentional output, and the writing up work was funded elsewhere, the project staff on this Course Data Intelligence project used their experience gained in writing two Jisc-CETIS publications that offer a starting point for learning analytics in institutions:
Institutional Readiness for Analytics
(http://publications.cetis.ac.uk/2012/527) - this briefing paper is written for managers and early adopters in further and higher education who are thinking about how they can build capability in their institution to make better use of data that is held on their IT systems about the organisation and provision of the student experience. It will be of interest to institutions developing plans, those charged with the provision of analytical data, and administrators or academics who wish to use data to inform their decision making. The document identifies the capabilities that individuals and institutions need to initiate, execute, and act upon analytical intelligence.
Infrastructure and Tools for Analytics
(http://publications.cetis.ac.uk/2013/535)– this briefing paper provides a map of the major categories of tools, and highlights some landmark tools that are available now for analytics work, grouped by tradition, or established approach.
Future Impact
The most significant medium term, future impact from this project is that around the use of linked data technologies described in output 2, the CETIS Analytics Series: Infrastructure and Tools for Analytics. We believe that this offers a potentially significant way forward for combining different data sets to enable learning analytics approaches to be developed. This is not just the case at our institution, but there are sector wide opportunities to move toward a better use of data for information to inform decision-making processes. Arguably, this is something that the sector doesn’t do well currently.
An illustration of the potential advantage of this approach is by way of contrast to the data warehouse also being constructed at our institution. This is being developed for reporting purposes to managers and to personal tutors to provide information about students at risk. An ongoing issue is the changing nature of the source databases making the data modelling for the warehouse problematic and time consuming. Potentially, the linked data approach removes this particular problem as data can be imported in an unstructured way. This is continuing work at the University of Bolton.
Conclusions
There are clear and tangible benefits from having data sources in order: more effective and efficient marketing, better data quality, and improved institutional systems and associated costs savings. XCRI-CAP has an important role to play in this alongside better institutional governance of data and the development of new tools and technology for handling and making the most of complex sets of ‘messy’ unstructured data.
Institutional support of XCRI-CAP feeds into the future will require some evidence of take-up and value to the institution. Hopefully, the environment has changed sufficiently since the early demonstrator projects (2007) to the extent that there will be sector wide take-up of feeds and they become an essential way of doing business. This may come from offerings from providers such as Graduate Prospects or HotCourses who use the data to provide services to prospective students.
Recommendations
Jisc needs to continue to lobby to get UCAS to adopt XCRI as the method for informing them about undergraduate degree programmes. If this happens, sustainability in institutions will become a non-issue and adoption will become widespread and instantaneous!
A programme that explores learning analytics would be a useful stimulus to supporting instructions in catching up with commercial sectors.
Reference: The demonstrator technical case study can be accessed here http://www.xcri.co.uk/bolton.html - journey
Further details: email and contact names etc
Project Manager Stephen Powell
Contact email s.j.powell@bolton.ac.uk
Project Web URL http://coursedataintelligence.wordpress.com/
