Funded by the: Jisc e-Learning programme.
Lead Institution: University of Leicester.
Learner Provider Type: Higher Education
Project Duration: January 2012 - March 2013
Key Words: Course Data
Case study tags: course data, process improvement, course information, stakeholder engagement, university of leicester
Note: This is an abridged version of this project's final report. The full version is available here.
Project Summary
XCRI-CAP provides a standard for the storing and dissemination of course advertising information. We were keen to explore the utility of XCRI-CAP as a means for opening up our course information and making our courses more visible to prospective students. The University of Leicester is one of the largest providers of distance learning in the UK therefore we thought that it would be beneficial to be part of any programme that aimed to increase the availability of high-quality, accurate information about part-time, online and distance learning opportunities offered by UK institutions teaching HE.
As part of the project we produced a XCRI-CAP feed covering our centrally marketed Distance-Learning programmes. This is available at:http://www.le.ac.uk/coursedata/uolXCRI.xml
Within the timescale of the project we have not been able to put in place a direct internal use for the XCRI-CAP feed that we have created and at the time of writing this report it is too early to tell how the XCRI-CAP feed will be used externally.
“There's been a chicken-and-egg situation for a while. Aggregating organisations won't readily invest in facilities to consume XCRI-CAP feeds until a large number of feeds exist, while HEIs don't see the need for a feed if no-one is ready to consume them. The Course Data Programme takes the second one of these (I guess that's the egg??) problems - if we have 63 XCRI-CAP feeds, then we should have a critical mass to provoke aggregating organisations to consume them.” Alan Paul, Consuming XCRI-CAP I
It is therefore currently difficult to determine either the utility of XCRI-CAP or whether the content of the feed will be appropriate when viewed alongside other providers’ course data. However, should a major player such as UCAS start consuming XCRI-CAP the University is well positioned to take advantage and streamline our course data processes.
In many ways this project, has not delivered specific benefits to the University of Leicester but it has been an important part of our on-going journey in the management of course data.
What did we learn?
Simon Edwards, the project manager, has undertaken the Middlesex University PG Certificate Professional Practice in Educational Technologies and has personally learned about:
- .NET, Visual Basic and XML in order to create the database in Access / SQL and to generate the XCRI-CAP feed
- Full Economic Costing in order to process the budget
- Licencing in order to publish the feed
- In addition the project has helped foster a basic understanding of how to work more effectively with XML across a number of key staff in the Planning Office. This undoubtedly helped the University make its first KIS submission and work with the KIS data when it was released.
We also found learning from other projects incredibly useful. Finding others who were wrestling with similar problems to ourselves (e.g. how do we improve our course design processes, how do we read the KIS data, can we or should we get SITS to do X or should we use something else) acted both as a comfort and a source of inspiration.
Finally, being part of a standardisation process has been a huge learning experience although the chicken and egg nature of the development process has been infuriating at times. Validators, aggregators and search tools need valid feeds before they can mature and people creating these feeds need to know how the tools work and how their data will be presented in order to develop useful XCRI-CAP course data with conviction.
At this stage there is still a lack of clarity about aggregators and how XCRI-CAP data feeds will be used. Currently there is no evidence that aggregators will be clambering for feeds; there are no clues to how a prospect would find and choose an aggregator or a suitable ‘app’; there is uncertainty whether people will just carry on finding courses more easily on Google or through existing course database services. In addition it is emerging that existing course database services like Graduate Prospects may be very specific in their feed requirements, which raises the question of whether XCRI-CAP will realise the efficiencies it promises.
All of this is deeply frustrating as at the moment it is difficult to know whether the XCRI-CAP feed that we have created will actually be of any practical use to others. However, we recognise that this is one of the consequences of working within a standardisation process.
Immediate Impact
It has been useful to work collaboratively with others across the institution and the project has prompted a number of University of Leicester staff to think about using XML technologies and the data structures that they are putting in place to solve particular course data challenges that they may be facing. Examples include the Marketing & Communications/Web-team re-implementing our online PG prospectus, and the Registry/IT Services looking at how students should sign up for modules when they are on exchange or study abroad programmes. Although for many of these internal data challenges the data can often be accessed natively so more efficient, less time consuming, and therefore maybe less expensive solutions can often be found. In our opinion, XML/XCRI-CAP is more suited for sharing data outside of the organisation.
That said, we do think it is worth exploring the Advanced XCRI-CAP Search Widget (AX-S Widget) with our technical teams. On first glance this might provide an improvement both on the way we currently manage the course search facility on our website and to the user experience of the prospective student using our site.
When speaking to another Course Data project (a member of The Creative Assembly) we heard that when you start to see your data in context with other providers’ data and that it is being used for a particular purpose you question both the data and the data structure that you have provided.
We had already experienced this ourselves with the XCRI-CAP Course Discovery Service. The standard vocabulary that we have used to describe our qualification types is different from the discover options chosen by knowledge integration. This means that our courses do not show if a user chooses a qualification or attendance type from the drop down lists when trying to search for or discover a course. In this case it would appear that knowledge integration have not used the XCRI-CAP 1.2 recommended values within their drop down lists.
Given that we haven’t seen our data in context with many other distance learning courses we haven’t yet gone through the process of revising the feed. We also still need to solve the issue of true sustainability but this will only be possible once we have a stable feed structure. We do not want to cause additional workload for some of our stakeholders, by revising the feed or introducing process changes, until we are sure about the benefits that XCRI-CAP brings.
It is difficult to explain any additional business benefit of producing an XCRI-CAP feed mainly because it doesn’t feel like there aren’t any consumers/users of the feed. However, we do fully recognise that this may come later as either:
- The database and XCRI-CAP feed are demonstrated to interested parties.
- Aggregators start using XCRI-CAP to power external course directory websites such as UCAS, Hotcourses, FindaMasters, Propsects, The British Council’s Education UK site, Inspiring Futures Foundation for their Futurewise product, GTI for Targetcourses.com, Postgrad Solutions for postgrad.com, llmstudy.com, Gradschools.com, Learn4good, Studyportals, Studylink etc.
At the very least our project provides another XCRI-CAP feed to entice the aggregators and so should provide some benefit to the wider community.
Future Impact
The HE information landscape is likely to change substantially in the next few years. Whilst we doubt that XCRI-CAP will form a direct part of the regulatory information landscape we are sure that we will need to provide different types of data in different ways and this project has been useful preparation. Likewise XCRI-CAP could have a very real and immediate impact on how courses are promoted. We are concerned that the use of XCRI-CAP by aggregating organisations might like the Key Information Set reduce a prospective students’ decision to a poor version of the ‘comparethemarket.com’ experience and the view of the data that aggregators will provide will not provide the good subjective information we have spent years building up.
This project has helped us explore some of the issues that we are likely to face in the future and we have learnt a great deal from other institutions about some of the next steps that we need to take on our journey to better manage and share our course data. These next steps include investing in new SITS modules so that we can continue our work to better manage our fee information and standardising the way that we hold our course data, either within SITS or elsewhere.
Conclusions
General conclusions
It is difficult to say whether this project has been a success or not. In part this is probably because we started with a project plan that didn’t contain a clear enough set of internal benefits and unrealistic expectations. We wrongly assumed that the Jisc aggregator was going to be more than a proof of concept and that conversations with organisations like UCAS were at a much more advanced level than was the case.
We found that the project required substantial systems and course data knowledge, but that the practicalities of creating an XCRI-CAP feed were ruthlessly technical. We were lucky that we were able to call for help from an XCRI-CAP expert within our IT department. However now that the groundwork is done, we know that implementing a XCRI-CAP feed with a wider scope is relatively easy should this be necessary. Although we think that in order to create a useful and sustainable XCRI-CAP feed for distance learning courses that uses our SITS data as the source we would first need to unpick the data structures that we have in place.
Conclusions relevant to the wider community
It is important to ensure that there is adequate business need for XCRI-CAP. Other projects on the Course Data programme will provide more compelling business cases for investing in XCRI-CAP than this project does.
It is easy to underestimate the amount of work that needs to be done in order to create a sustainable and useful system-generated XCRI-CAP feed.
Conclusions relevant to Jisc
- The Jiscmail service relating to this project has been overly technical at times. We were hoping that the Postgraduate Certificate Professional Practice in Educational Technologies, XCRI-CAP training with Middlesex University would help with technical understanding but it has not, both due to its non-technical content and its lateness in delivery.
- When we repeated the XCRI-CAP Self-Assessment Framework exercise we found that we still had Red flags for many questions where the answers had not changed as a result of being fully prepared or even having successfully completed an XCRI-CAP project.
- Tools like the XCRI-CAP Course Discovery Service are needed in order to develop the feed. However the options they use for discovery need to marry to the current XCRI-CAP specification.
Recommendations
General recommendations
- The University needs to keep a watching brief on how XCRI-CAP fares in the near future. In particular we need to establish whether or not XCRI-CAP is going to be used by aggregators and whether those aggregators are in turn used by our prospective students.
- We should keep abreast of the demonstrator projects to determine which, if any, are relevant to the University. These should be demonstrated to relevant staff. Depending on the technical background of the member(s) of staff the course database and XCRI-CAP feed could also be demonstrated.
- We should ensure that we review the project reports from all SITS users. As part of this programme Tribal have been working with some institutions on software modules that support curriculum development/planning and process management. These functions may form part of the solution to the problems that we have in some of our existing paper driven course data processes. It is early days yet but it would be good to see how the other institutions rate these modules before embarking on bespoke systems of our own or purchasing these SITS modules.
Recommendations for the wider community
We would make the following recommendations to institutions considering investing in XCRI-CAP:
- Have a very strong internal case for making the investment in XCRI-CAP.
- Consider very carefully how the feed will actually be used. Gather as many different stakeholders as you can to get the internal view. Also think widely about how what external users will do with your feed.
- Don’t get trapped by a silo mentality. We think you need to collaborate across the institution to successfully implement an XCRI-CAP feed.
- Additionally, think about silos in your data. We found focussing on our distance learning courses made things very much harder for us and limited what we could do with existing data.
- Ensure that your current course data structures only describe attributes of the course and that they map to the course regulations and promotional material before you start work on mapping to the XCRI-CAP structure.
Recommendations for JISC
The Course Data programme has been a journey and different projects are at different stages of that journey. Many are like us not currently at a stage where there is much that they can sensibly disseminate however we will continue to look at dissemination activities both within (e.g. two members of staff are booked for the Oxford Brookes dissemination event) and outside of the project lifetime.
Further details: email and contact names etc
Project Director Brendan Fawcett
Project Manager Simon Edwards
Contact email we4@le.ac.uk
Project Webpage URL http://coursedata.le.ac.uk/xcricap
