Slideshow Transcript

1. Slide 1: IWMW, York, 17 July 2007 XCRI - syndicating the online prospectus Scott Wilson, Institute of Educational Cybernetics, Bolton Ben Ryan, KaiNao Ltd. Mark Stubbs, MMU Business School This work is licensed under a Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence
2. Slide 2: Why… • Does every agency need your course information re-typing into yet another web form? • Does every new initiative, e.g. 14-19, mean re-designing the course information data? • Can’t we learn from the success of simple syndication techniques like RSS and stop this expensive nonsense? • Enter XCRI!
3. Slide 3: xcri | what • XCRI Course Advertising Profile: – A candidate XML specification for enabling course descriptions to be aggregated by brokers – Derived from the XCRI reference model, which describes the components of curriculum documents used in the curriculum development workflow
4. Slide 4: xcri | why • National agenda of ‘informed choice’ about learning opportunities. • Standards exist for exchanging information about people, groups and membership but • no standard way to exchange information about courses. • Institutions developing ways to populate their prospectus from definitive data but • resorting to primitive data entry to populate aggregator sites, regional portals, ... etc. • Genuine interest from the community in a standard for exchanging course information.
5. Slide 5: Admission E-Admission Learner Pathways Stats Trails Advice Applicant Feedback Course Course Details Search Entry Requirements Course Learner Goals E-Application Advertising Entry Personal Profiles Statements References Evidence of Achievement Portfolio Acquired/Required Competence Curriculum Management Transcripts Personal Course Development Approval Course Student Planning Assessment Modification Results Records
6. Slide 6: xcri | history Q1 2005 XCRI project devised by CETIS Enterprise SIG spin-off + UCAS Q2 2005 Existing standards reviewed (Norway’s CDM closest) Q3 2005 UK prospectus websites reviewed (161!) Case studies of existing practice produced from site visits Q4 2005 R1.0 XML schema developed through prototyping & critique Q1 2006 R1.0 XML schema tested with Plymouth-UCAS, Oxford Uni CPD, Reid Kerr Prospectus & Liverpool Learning Matrix Regional Portal. Searchable curriculum repository demonstrated Q2 2006 XML used at Adam Smith College to generate PDF course brochures Report produced on competence modelling and XCRI Q3 2006 Existing XCRI deployments & authoring options reviewed Optimised Course Advertising Profile XML schema released Q4 2006 JISC fund trials of the XCRI CAP + demonstration aggregator + support project Q1 2007 XCRI-CAP 1.0 released, as is demonstration aggregator Q2 2007 First feeds start to trickle in from Oxford and the OU…
7. Slide 7: xcri | specification Full spec at http://www.xcri.org/wiki XML schema at http://www.xcri.org/svn/trunk/bindings/cap.xsd Principles: • practical • based on today’s data and systems • real implementations • open community process driving spec development • as simple as we can make it Structure: Catalog -> Provider -> Course -> Presentation (aka offering, instance…) ~36 total data elements, including vCard/DC/Atom “borrowings” Inheritance heuristics used to reduce repetition (& file size)
8. Slide 8: xcri | specification
9. Slide 9: xcri | specification
10. Slide 10: xcri | cap implementation patterns • Pure aggregation, RSS/Atom style - “course info feeds” using XCRI-CAP • OAI-PMH protocol carrying XCRI-CAP metadata • Microformat http://www.xcri.org/wiki
11. Slide 11: xcri | example implementation
12. Slide 12: xcri | example implementation Institutions Publish Get the code via http://www.xcri.org/wiki XCRI XML Learners Search the Aggregator
13. Slide 13: xcri | more mashups?
14. Slide 14: xcri | current projects • GMSA • Learning Matrix Liverpool • SURF (not the Dutch one) • UCAS • JISC E-Admissions process improvement programme • Mini-grants round 1
15. Slide 15: xcri | future work • Continue to develop the spec based on community feedback • Provide online validator for XCRI-CAP feeds • Submit CAP to a recognized standardization process by the end of current project (Feb 2009) • Explore some of the terra incognita
16. Slide 16: xcri | find out more • http://www.xcri.org • http://www.xcri.org/blog • http://www.xcri.org/forum • http://www.xcri.org/wiki • http://www.xcri.org/aggregator
17. Slide 17: xcri | get involved • JISC mini-projects (10k grants) • Contribute on forum and wiki • Add your XML to the aggregator and see how it looks • Build some interesting stuff and tell us about it