JISC

UH recognises the challenges inherent in the increased demands on course data that the sector must respond to, specifically the need to provide up to date, transparent data to prospective students.  Via this project, UH seeks to provide standardised course information that can be easily accessed and understood by prospective students seeking to view course data across multiple institutions. 

This project will deliver a system-generated standard XCRI-CAP course feed using University course data for the courses defined below and provide this feed to support the JISC in its development of a proof of concept’ aggregator and discovery service for prospective students.

UH has defined the following courses for this project:

• Full time Undergraduate programmes as defined by the Key Information Set (KIS)
• A Part-time Postgraduate programme
• Computer Science Online programme
• A CPD Health programme

This includes a range of courses that applicants typically have difficulties finding.

By taking part in this initiative UH aims to conduct a review of the full course data life cycle at the University with particular emphasis on these courses.  UH will use the project to:

• Establishing our policies, processes and data flows for using our agreed authoritative sources of course information (Student Record System and Marketing System) to capture course information in the agreed standardised XCRI-CAP format and delivery of this information through data flows
• Define our standards for use of COOL URIs
• Use the processes to populate sustainable data flows from the agreed courses to the JISC aggregator
• To evaluate the potential of these policies and processes to support the management of course information and data flows for other requirements including the KIS and HEAR

UH has recently moved to a new Student Record System ‘Quercus’, which is provided by the supplier Campus IT.  We will use this opportunity to liaise with Campus IT to explore areas of development; this will be carried out in consultation with the other UK Institutions who use Quercus as their Student Record System.

Objectives

• Explore ways of adopting XCRI to produce standardised course information for the identified courses
• Establish policies, processes and data flows for using agreed authoritative sources of course information (Student Record System and Marketing System) to capture course information in the agreed standardised XCRI-CAP format and delivery of this information through a data flow
• Define institutional standards for use of COOL URIs
• Use the processes to populate sustainable data flows from the agreed courses to the JISC aggregator
• Evaluate the potential of these policies and processes to support the management of course information and data flows for other requirements including the KIS and HEAR

Anticipated Outputs and Outcomes

• Reports: Project Reports – Interim, final and completion, Evaluation Reports
• Demonstrators: Automated output of the aggregated agreed datasets in XCRI-CAP format to the JISC Aggregator
• Specifications: Standard definition for COOL URI
• Toolkits: Utilisation of Linking You Toolkit
• User Interfaces: User feedback on agreed aggregated datasets through University website