Exchanging course-related information - Bolton University
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This project set out to develop an Exchanging Course-Related Information (XCRI) compliant course advertising feed of all course promoted by the University of Bolton including undergraduate, postgraduate, short and continuous professional development courses.
Background
This project is a sub-project of a wider University course information project that aims to redevelop and refresh the course catalogue and to link the collection of course advertising information closer to the course development and maintenance cycle.
The University of Bolton is undertaking strategic repositioning, building on its curriculum and research strengths to develop into a new model called the Professional University. As well as refining undergraduate and postgraduate programmes around the new and "para" professions, the University is expanding continuous professional development (CPD) provision to support the regional and national skills agenda.
The University needed a new course catalogue which was capable of giving rich information to learners about learning opportunities and which could represent the full range of learning opportunities from programme to a single module of CPD. The previous web based course catalogue, was based on flat html files produced by hand and suffering from all the familiar problems of lack of timeliness, accuracy and consistency.
The University has a number of disconnected databases which contain information about course programmes: course and module validation database, SITS student record system, short course database, prospectus files, web course catalogue, course handbooks, module timetable. As these have been created and are maintained by different business functions to support their own activities, our current processes involve the passing of course information from one area to another by document. Information is re-keyed, is not adequately linked and cross verified. There was no common course reference system is not in place.
To address this, a course database project was started to consolidate information for advertising both validated and proposed courses. This project was extended with this project to create an XCRI conforming data feed for course advertising.
Conclusion
Through the project we quickly established that not much of the existing course catalogue data at Bolton could be easily harvested and represented through XCRI. The course descriptions produced for different stages of the course production cycle do not necessarily lend themselves to course advertising. There was a the legacy of poorly maintained course advertising information: where elements of course specifications had changed; where additional information was sent out by departments; where the communication on which courses were and weren’t running had dried up.
The structure of running courses is represented well on the SITS student record system but this does not contain any detailed description of the course suitable for advertising. When we investigated the origins of the course specification, we found that often the original description of the course established in the course validation process, is often incomplete or not updated. There are multiple points at which information on a course might be change but not be consistently recorded.
We therefore set about establishing a central course repository, capable of supporting the data requirements of courses through every stage of the production cycle upto the point of enrolment. This has been tested against a sample of different courses and an XCRI feed has been generated from this. In our wider project plan we understood the time, effort and difficulty there would be in obtaining and verifying the course advertising data and we are only now getting close to re-entering the bulk of course data