JISC

Background and Context 
Aims and Objectives
Project Methodology 
Implications / Deliverables / Stakeholders

Background and Context

The consortium consists of three of Northern Ireland's 16 further education colleges; Belfast Institute (lead institution), North Down & Ards Institute and North West Institute, and its two universities; Queen's University Belfast and the University of Ulster. With this composition there is the potential to make the project of relevance to the whole of the Northern Ireland tertiary sector. The consortium's strategic objective is to develop and drive a coherent post-16 education strategy for Northern Ireland: the chief plank is the provision of a smooth and seamless continuum of further and higher education. The project is particularly timely in that it will develop alongside a number of other significant regional projects including: the development of VLEs, the replacement of the colleges' MISs, the RSC(ni), the NIMAN and NICATS.

Aims and Objectives

The overall aim of the project is to demonstrate the potential of MLEs to support the development of a regional, student-focused post-16 education sector. More specifically, the objective is to encourage students to see FE and HE in a more holistic way - to look beyond their current course and explore progression routes to higher and complementary studies, and to facilitate their movement within the sector. Moreover, the system will allow institutions to share information about students' individual academic and pastoral needs.

The specific objectives are to help consortium members provide enhanced information and services for students including:·

• information about opportunities for progression from the student's current course
• information about ways of adding value to the student's current course, e.g. key skills accreditation
• information about facilities and services for students with disabilities
• access to appropriate on-line academic and pastoral support and advice
• on-line access to an identified on-line personal mentor/supporter

Project Methodology

The MLE will provide a secure environment for information about students and courses that individual institutions are prepared to publish to other consortium members. It will offer the potential to share materials, set up regional discussion lists and will promote the use of collective resources as a total regional resource. In order to have meaningful data exchange between institutions it is vital that an agreed common schema is established and that agents are developed to allow institutions to translate data to and from this schema. The schema will encompass the IMS enterprise and learner information standards. The development of intelligent agents to facilitate integration between non IMS compliant student record systems and the IMS datasets will provide a very open architecture. The project will make use of a Virtual Student Record that will be IMS compliant and it will be necessary to give students unique identifiers. The MLE will have to take into account local, national and international credit transfer schemes and, accordingly, will represent the very open, uppermost-level standard. To encourage academic and administrative staff to participate, there will be a direct correlation between the level of engagement with the MLE and the provision of enhanced services. At the minimum level, staff will have access to core data (e.g. names, addresses, modules taken, marks) but with increasing levels of engagement there will be access to expanded data (perhaps attendance at lectures, medical certificates, access to online journals).

Implications / Deliverables / Stakeholders

The Northern Ireland region replicates on a smaller scale all the important features in FE and HE in the rest of the UK. The deliverables have been selected to have generic value to the entire JISC community. The regional MLE will provide a communication and management system operating between the separate institutional MISs and the various VLEs.  The project will create an open system that builds on existing systems and will allow any group of institutions to replicate the project. It will demonstrate the benefits of interchanging information between institutions. It will report on the usefulness of IMS standards in effecting interoperability between systems. It will report on the experiences gained and the outcomes.  Case studies will be prepared demonstrating the impact of the MLE on business processes such as enrolment, progress monitoring, tracking achievement, student progression and transfer, communication and support. It will use a large local user base, and invite other colleges to bid to trial information exchange and course and student management using the MLE.