JISC

Summary

Part-time courses at the University of West London are an area of success and further development is planned, in particular for postgraduate courses. Our part-time courses have provided students with opportunities to improve their career prospect while being in employment, for example through using Saturday delivery. The aim of the LUCI project is to provide students with all the information necessary for making well-informed decisions on their choice of course. The project will mainly focus on part-time courses, however the XCRI-CAP feed will be generated for our full-time courses as well.

In this project, as well as providing our course data in XCRI_CAP format, we also aim to provide additional course data together with associated peripheral information such as transport, location, labour market, finance and learning resources, destination leaver employment data, placement or internship data etc. in a linked data format. Linked data technology represents emerging practice in the interconnect of information on the web. The project will investigate and prototype the implementation of technologies and practices for exposing and linking course data for students as well as surveying students to understand their data needs or desires.

The project will adopt an Enterprise Architecture (EA) approach to review the different sources, processes, and systems that are related to course information. We will build on the models that we started in stage 1 of this project.

Objectives

1. Exposing course information in XCRI-CAP format and linked data. Objective 2: Reengineer “the new course/course offering advertising” processes to allow more automation.
2. Integrate linked data to the institution processes to implement a sustainable approach to publish institutional data in linked data format.
3. Build a course information explorer to provide prospective students course information match system to their personal interests.
4. Disseminate and evaluate the value of the use of linked data in supporting higher education institutions.
5. Use EA to capture “what is happening” in the enterprise related to goals regarding course information.

Anticipated Outputs and Outcomes

• XCRI-CAP Feed; XCRI-CAP web services: will be provided for all courses though the project will mainly concentrate on part-time courses.
• Adaptation of Tabloid toolkit will be reported based on our experience of adapting the tool kit provided by Linked Universities.
• To-be EA models will be developed for the documentation and the implementation of the processes necessary to integrate course linked data.
• BPMN processes based on XCRI-CAP schema will include user activity form, student record interface and advertising DB interface.
• Case study /publication on Enterprise Architecture in higher education.
  Course data explorer application
• Build capacity and knowledge through the use of linked data