JISC

This project has now completed. See the project website and the final report available at the foot of this page.

Background / Context  

Many Further and Higher Education Institutions run a Student Record System (SRS) and a Learning Management System/Virtual Learning Environment (LMS) as two separate systems. Assessment and marks data is likely to be required in both systems. This can lead to duplication of effort for staff and potential confusion for all users of the two systems – an issue we were keen to address for our institution and others within the community. The “Toolkit and Demonstrators” strand of the JISC E-learning programme is intended for projects such as these, which are designed to improve integration between learning systems.

Aims and Objectives

The overall aim of the XMarks project is to facilitate the exchange of marks and assessment information between an institution’s SRS and LMS, using a web services model. It is also a key aim of the project to achieve this integration in a way that reduces the barriers to adoption of the web services model for other institutions.

The specific objectives are to:

• To make it possible for institutions to exchange data between systems using the approach that is most suitable for them
• To contribute to the overall JISC e-learning programme by addressing the management of marks data
• To provide a scalable, adaptable model for web services that will come with a software development kit (SDK) to support its use in other institutions
• To reduce any barriers that may exist for the adoption of web services by FE and HE institutions
• To make our product as accessible as possible   

Project Methodology

The project will be written in PHP 5, a popular programming language that provides support for many key object oriented programming concepts. The project will develop an overall architecture for building web services in PHP, and will make it as simple as possible for other institutions to adopt this approach by providing a “software development kit” – a collection of documentation, technical notes, example code and application protocol interfaces – that should make it adopting this approach as simple as possible. This diagram shows the basic architecture of the web service:

Implications/ Deliverables/ Stakeholders

The key deliverables will be

• Software development kit (SDK) to allow other institutions to deploy a web service for the exchange of marks and assessment data
• Data access layer code for building the SDK into Moodle, enabling easy and robust integration of marks data from Moodle to an SRS
• A model for implementing web services around data integration between learning management systems and student records systems
• Carefully pitched documentation to enable use of the toolkit for a wide range of FE and HE institutions