Funded by the: Jisc e-Learning programme.
Lead Institution: University of Nottingham.
Learner Provider Type: Higher Education
Project Duration: January 2012 - March 2013
Key Words: Course Data
Case study tags: course data, process improvement, enterprise architecture (ea), course information, university of nottingham
Note: This is an abridged version of this project's final report. The full version is available here.
Project Summary
The original objective of this project was to improve the University of Nottingham’s management and flow of course related information, making course marketing information available in XCRI-CAP standard format for its full international range of courses.
It was acknowledged within the original project plan that the full range of benefits in respect of course data management would not be available within the timescales for the Course Data Stage 2 project and would be obtained over a longer period of time with the implementation of the broader Curriculum Management project. However, acknowledging the revised scope for the project, it is believed that this project has laid substantial foundations for the delivery of these benefits in future projects. The Course Data Stage 2 project has delivered the following benefits:
Drawing together a wide range of stakeholders, whose roles encompass the development and delivery of course advertising information for prospective students.
Production of the as-is processes for course advertising data management and a proposed to be process.
Producing an XCRI-CAP feed for the full range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses published on the UoN UK prospectus web sites.
Embedded deliverables and project learning into the internal curriculum management Workspace (intranet).
What did we learn?
The project was delivered at a time of significant changes across the University in respect of project work, therefore one of the key lessons within the project was to work in an agile manner to deliver the XCRI-CAP feeds, whilst keeping in contact with the other projects and ensuring the work was aligned with these projects. This has ensured that the deliverables are available and useable to, for example, the Student Lifecycle Project.
The Jisc Project, Cumulus, delivered through the Flexible Service Delivery programme, in which UoN was partner had provided the opportunity for some stakeholders to gain prior knowledge of XCRI-CAP. However, for many stakeholders this programme provided the opportunity to discover more regarding XCRI-CAP and the benefits it can potentially offer.
In order to ensure the continuity of the project, pages within the UoN intranet have been set up for stakeholders containing links to the key Jisc and XCRI-CAP to keep people informed…
The core team delivering the project at UoN consisted of only two roles – a Project Manager | Business Analyst and an Analyst Programmer, with support from APS. Therefore, within the team, the project management governance, whilst required, could be fairly light. However, over the course of the project the team worked with around four or five separate departments at UoN and in the region of thirty different people to ensure a full understanding of requirements and deliverables in the context of the UoN project. Given the timescales for the project, it was vital to ensure people were on board quickly with the project and understood their role within it.
This project has also demonstrated that it is possible to deliver requirements, such as the XCRI-CAP feed and supporting deliverable in a short space of time. An important consideration for universities is the ability to select items from lists of potential projects and requirements and deliver quick wins. In respect of this project it was beneficial that stakeholders could see the longer term benefits that XCRI-CAP can offer, when the aggregators are in place to take the feeds.
The project also offered the opportunity to explore the course data agenda, in for example, the Stakeholder Update meeting with other interested parties, but not necessarily the same parties that would be in same Student Lifecycle workshops at the same time.
Whilst UoN publishes much work through its Learning Technologies Department and uses Creative Commons licences, it was a different group of stakeholders involved in the project and the concept of publication of data using XCRI-CAP type functionality is new in this area as was use of the Open Government Licence.
As the interoperability, Government Transparency and Open Data agendas continue to grow, there are potential knowledge exchange opportunities for the sector to explore this area further. Particularly where data exchange is concerned in new areas, such as XCRI-CAP.
The project also offered a perhaps slightly different focus on end user testing. Whilst the users updated and published new or revised web content or removed old courses, they also sent details of these changes through to the project team to check the feed. This hopefully provided confidence in the solution, whilst prospectus changes being made were part of their business as usual workload.
Technical Development
Initial guidance from internal teams was geared towards ‘screen scraping’ the course information; however this was felt that a more technical and ‘clean’ solution could be put in place that would offer a more sustainable solution.
Most of the data accessed in the Contensis database offered ‘clean’ blocks of data as published on the web site; however one field is wrapped with HTML Existing PHP libraries have been used to remove the HTML from this field to provide data in the required format for the XCRI-CAP feed.
UoN has campuses in the UK, China and Malaysia. At the time of this development, the prospectus data for each campus is published on its own part of a UoN web site:
UK – Undergraduate: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/ugstudy/undergraduateprospectus.aspx
UK – Postgraduate: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/pgstudy/index.aspx
China: http://www.nottingham.edu.cn/en/admissions/studywithus.aspx
Malaysia – Undergraduate:
http://www.nottingham.edu.my/Study/Undergraduate-courses/Undergraduate-courses.aspx
Malaysia – Postgraduate:
http://www.nottingham.edu.my/Study/Postgraduate-courses/Postgraduate-courses.aspx
The data relating to a specific course is structured within a template in the content management system. All schools and faculties are required to publish their data within the prospectus. There are some noted exceptions, for example, Initial Teacher Training courses (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/education/prospective/teacher-training/introduction.aspx).
Whilst not as a direct result of the project, the requirement by Marketing, Communications and Recruitment to Faculties, Schools and Institutes for all courses to be structured within a template design, made the data manipulation to produce the feeds straight forward. However, there is significant complexity in the database design to identify the databases / tables and fields required for the feed. The design of the solution has taken into consideration the use of the template; however it does not reference specific identifiers and is therefore future proofed if different identifiers are used.
Immediate Impact
In the immediate impact, the project has brought together a number of areas from across the University to discuss Course Data advertising and the XCRI-CAP programme.
It has given the opportunity to discuss and potentially take forward in the future the idea that the data within the XCRI-CAP feed could be enriched with further data from the student management systems. The current solution hands off minimal data to the Contensis CMS system to start the process to write the course advertising information for publication on the UoN web site.
It has given stakeholders the opportunity, as the UoN international web sites are aligned in terms of course advertising data, if they wish to add this data to an XCRI-CAP feed.
Building Relationships
As part of dissemination activities, the UoN project team held meetings with Loughborough College to look at the different approaches to the development of the feed. The UoN Project Manager also held a telephone conference with the Course Data Stage 2 Project Manager at the University of Birmingham. This latter work was specifically chosen due to the framework for collaboration that is in place between the two Universities (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/pressreleases/2011/february/birmhamnottmcollab.aspx ).
These discussions provided useful information in terms of the development and also confirming from the higher education institute perspective, the complexity of the overall course data.
Internal relationships have also been built across various departments throughout the University, especially as part of the Stakeholder meeting and noting the follow up work towards implementing the XCRI-CAP feeds and handover into a sustainable supported application.
Future Impact
Medium to Long term
Student life cycle project
Vocabularies - It is noted that the Student Lifecycle Project action plan has a task regarding ensuring consistent terminology. A recommendation from this project should be to consider vocabularies already published within the sector.
Creation of a specific UoN vocabularies and data definitions document.
As shown in the future-state diagrams, one of the key objectives for UoN is to hold a single source of curriculum data. Whilst this objective falls within the remit of the Student Lifecycle project, it is noted that the XCRI-CAP feed developed as part of this project should be sustainable in this environment.
The project team have been made aware that work is on-going within the Recruitment Team to align the templates used for course information on the web site for the China and Malaysia campus courses. Therefore, with only a small amount of project work it should be possible to create feeds for these courses.
This project has left the University in a good position to deliver XCRI-CAP enabled interoperable course feeds.
Similarly, if the prospectus changes and the UK prospectus is updated to contain all courses, irrespective of campus, then again it should only be a small piece of project work to enhance the XCRI-CAP feed and associated documentation to make this data available.
As part of the dialogue with Recruitment, Communications and Marketing, it was interesting to note that there is still a significant market place for the print prospectus. One of the topics under discussion at the Discovering Futures event on the 26th March 2013, is to look at the paper prospectus (http://www.discoveringfutures.com/conference/future-prospectus-update/welcome )
At UoN paper prospectus are available via the Enquiry Centre, they are also distributed to Schools and Colleges and some libraries in the UK, available at UCAS Fairs across the UK and from the International Office, as part of their international visits programme.
Conclusions
Work done under the SAMS programme in respect of Curriculum Management has not been lost in respect of this project and some of the documentation initially produced as part of the Curriculum management project and Course Data Stage 2, is being used by departments within the University to feed into the Student Lifecycle Project.
Whilst not specifically undertaken as a task within the project, the University could re-access itself using the Stage 1 Self-Assessment Framework for project evaluation and should hopefully see progress in its readiness in respect of course data.
Investigation of the operational context of curriculum data to demonstrate the diverse use of curriculum data to stakeholders has proved a very useful exercise.
The draft high-level as-is and to-be conceptual diagrams have been used throughout the project. The open source Archi product has been used to create ArchiMate models of as is and proposed to be processes.
As part of the dialogue with the Student Lifecycle Project, it has been requested that the outputs and outcomes from the project are made available to this project for review and incorporation as appropriate.
There is a workable XCRI-CAP solution available, as part of the project closedown, work will be completed to ensure ownership of this can be taken forward as aggregators are identified who wish to take these feeds.
UoN has the opportunity to provide standardised course information to aggregators.
UoN currently works with a range of aggregators including:
- Graduate Prospects
- Studylink
- UCAS Media
- Findamasters/FindAPhD
- Masterscompare/Postgraduate Studentships
- Hotcourses/PostgraduateSearch
Therefore, whilst the manual update of sites has the potential to tailor the text specifically to the aggregator, the automation of this process via an XCRI-CAP feed could offer significant benefits. One of the key benefits being time management, in making a full range of course data available to the specific aggregator, whilst also for any specific data being updated as per the current processes.
Recommendations
- The sector needs aggregators on board to demonstrate the benefits of producing the feed. It is hoped that those aggregators who have already highlighted their overview plans, will continue to develop these. Also, that there will be communication across the sector regarding aggregator readiness to consume the XCRI-CAP data, alongside the aggregators communicating and working with institutions to develop this solution into the standard way to maintain data with aggregators.
- The sector needs to be reassured that aggregators refresh data on a ‘regular’ basis.
- The sector potentially needs a wider discussion regarding whether this data is pushed to or pulled by aggregators.
- From a sector point of view should there be an ‘SLA’ regarding how often the data should be refreshed by a given aggregator?
- The sector potentially needs a wider discussion around the understating of the use of this data and the Open Government Licence and other licences. In particular, advising institutional legal specialists in its use.
Further details: email and contact names etc
Project Manager: Helen Barrow. helen.barrow@nottingham.ac.uk
Project URL -
