JISC

Overview

The objective of  BoXCRIP  is to implement and test the XCRI schema against the full University course catalogue containing undergraduate, postgraduate, FE, CPD and short courses and their sub-components. It is intended that the course catalogue will be driven from the SITS  student record system and will be created as a XML course repository which can be freely accessed using web services, through web mash-ups and aggregators. To this end it is proposed to develop the use of web services to access and retrieve information from the course repository.

This project piggy-backs on a current University project to develop a new course catalogue containing richer course information to support the University’s widening participation and CPD agendas. The emphasis is on enabling people (particularly those from traditionally under-represented groups) to gather rich course information privately, via the internet, without fear of embarrassment that some experience about making a direct course enquiry, in person. The potential to feed course information aggregators external to the University greatly enhances this objective.

Aims and objectives

The project is equally about investigating and aligning internal processes and systems to produce a rich and valid course description, which can then be presented using the Course advertising part of XCRI. The project aims to track the course from initial proposal, to validation, to marketing and enrolment through SITS identifying the course advertising value that is added in each process, to: 

• establish an easily searchable and comprehensive, web-based, University catalogue for the purposes of marketing courses to potential students, by June 2007
• test and use the XCRI schema to present the course catalogue in a way that can be consumed by external services including UCAS, mash-ups and aggregators
• eliminate the need to duplicate data entry relating to course advertising information 
• identify and take the opportunities to improve the automated collection of this information by describing  the existing processes through which course promotional information is built up, proposing improvements and creating the collection mechanisms
• create a single repository of information relating to the advertising and promotion of courses, including undergraduate, postgraduate, CPD modules, and short courses
• create a database structure that can hold a rich set of attributes relating to advertising courses and enable drill down from the course structure to sub-component modules

Project methodology

The BoXCRIP project is a sub project of our main course database project and is being managed through the same project mechanisms. The project has a steering group and a project group consisting of key stakeholders who are responsible for the processes that produce course information from validation, to marketing and enrolment. The XCRI work will be rolled into the first 2 phases of the larger project. Phase One deals with prototyping and testing: phase two deals with production.

Anticipated impact

The University is pursuing a professional University agenda with a greater emphasise on developing a wide variety of CPD provision. The currency, accuracy and timeliness  of data around CPD offering is important for  assisting  prospective students to make decisions about where and when to study. We believe that XCRI will drive improvements in access to course information through the University website and through other aggregating services. BoXCRIP will also try to represent the complete range of courses that the University can offer and the associated information, thereby providing a comprehensive test of the schema.

Lead institution

• University of Bolton