As part of the Government’s open data policy, key information set and drive for transparency, the pressure is on for education organisations to market their courses to learners, employers and course websites in a way which is simple and easy to access.

JISC is helping to solve this need by launching a new grant for 100 education organisations to review their existing course information and adopt an information standard called eXchanging Course Related Information, Course Advertising Profile (XCRI-CAP). Once applied to university and college systems, the XCRI-CAP information standard enables the creation of an RSS style feed sending course information over the internet to those individuals and organisations who want to know about it.

The UK standard XCRI-CAP, eXchanging Course Related Information, Course Advertising Profile, is already the UK standard for e-Prospectus information.

By adopting this information standard it makes it simpler for universities and colleges to maximise their online presence and market their resources to existing students as well as prospective learners.
Ruth Drysdale e-learning programme manager at JISC explains how, ‘XCRI-CAP has been around since 2006 and is currently used by The Open University and Hull University amongst others. By adopting this standard it makes it easier to move data about courses between organisations. It improves the way staff do things in their own organisation and in partnership with others.

‘It also fulfils the requests from learners looking for more consistent data so it is easier for them to compare between courses. The impact of happier learners who understand the courses they will be studying is that they are able to find the best ones that suit their needs leading to better retention and progression,’ adds Ruth.

The current situation for many education organisations is that they have course information spread across their systems for different purposes. By taking part in this programme they will be able to create an authoritative source for their course marketing information.

Alan Paull, one of the authors of XCRI explains that for some organisations the adoption will be straightforward whereas for others there may be some initial time to organise their course information first. ‘If the location of information is already known, particularly if it is centralised in a database, and its quality is high, then writing code to create an XCRI feed can take as little as a day for an experienced developer. However, as with all things sometimes there is an initial time investment up front to organise the information. Many universities and colleges are doing this so they can adopt the Government’s open data policy as well as for quality assurance purposes.’

One university already seeing the benefits is The Open University. Fiona Carey, assistant director, communications Student Services shares her experience of how XCRI has made a difference, ‘XCRI-CAP has had a significant impact on systems effectiveness and has saved us time and money in the production and distribution of our course marketing information.’

This is just one of a number of initiatives started by JISC to help colleges and universities to improve how they work.

To receive information on this up and coming programme join the jisc-announce JISCMail list by sending an email to jiscmail@jiscmail.ac.uk containing the line: join jisc-announce yourfirstname yourlastname.

Read background to the course data: making the most of your course information programme at bit.ly/coursedata.

Find out more about XCRI.

Follow news about the programme on Twitter tag #xcri, on Facebook at All About XCRI blog.

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