The XCRI Project Steering Group met on Tuesday, September 27 in Manchester, to review progress after six months against the base-lined project plan. In accordance with arrangements prescribed in the plan, the Steering Group was constituted in a light touch Prince 2 style:

• Chair and Project Executive: Professor Barry Plumb, Academic Director and Deputy Vice Chancellor, Manchester Metropolitan University
• Project Manager: Dr Mark Stubbs
• Project Research Assistant: Julie Hardman
• User QA: Alan Paull, E-Delivery Manager, UCAS, and Geoff Ramshaw, Information Manager, UCAS.
• Technical QA: Vashti Zarach, Enterprise SIG Coordinator, CETIS
• Unfortunately, prior commitments prevented Tish Roberts, JISC, from attending

Progress Report

The project manager had circulated in advance a written report reviewing work completed and work outstanding in terms of scope, risks, time, cost and quality. The full report is available here. The executive summary is reproduced below:

Observations and Action Points

The report was discussed and accepted. The following observations and action points were highlighted:

• In light of email discussion with JISC, the steering group confirmed that permission should be given to the project manager to re-allocate resources within budget headings to ensure overall deadlines were met. Options were identified in under-spent categories for sub-contracting documentation of use-cases and funding some additional hours for the project reseach assistant. Arrangements for mobile communications should also be reviewed.
• Top priority for the remaining 6 months is to develop a technical prototype (a schema and an illustrative web service) that will provide a concrete focus for discussion to drive the development and adoption of a national curriculum standard
• Using the proposed schema as the way to upload Entry Profile information to the UCAS website would be the killer application for widespread adoption of the schema amongst UK HE. The timing of this project in relation to developments within UCAS remains good, but efforts to raise its profile are still required.
• More effort is required in networking to raise the profile of the schema and supporting services amongst key partner organisations such as QAA, TQI, HERO and the MIAP initiative. UCAS offered suitable introductions, and CETIS identified several dissemination opportunities.
• Effort must also continue on European liaison, particularly with those keen to see a european-wide scheme for exchanging curriculum information electronically. Plans to disseminate project activity at Online Educa in Berlin later in the year were welcomed

Work in progress

The steering group received an update on work in progress:

• Work to gather evidence in support of the quality plan remained ongoing. Some evidence specified as quality criteria in the base-lined project plan had proved difficult to obtain - for instance, feedback on the utility of the website had been received verbally. The steering group accepted that the project manager's appreciation of appropriate acceptance criteria had shifted since the plan was drafted and saw no need to reject any deliverable identified as complete.
• A report from the state of the art survey of online prospectus content would be complete within the next month. Initial findings showed that elements identified for the emerging XML schema provided sufficient coverage and structure for all marketing copy.
• A XML Schema Definition would be published within two weeks. A high-level diagram of the emerging XML schema (reproduced below with some typos corrected), provided a focus for discussion and engagement of UCAS experience and expertise. The decision to permit a multi-tiered hierarchy of curriculum components (eg. Programme/Course/Stage/Module) was welcomed as was the decision to separate details of curriculum components (eg. information typically approved at a validation event) from details of specific offerings (eg. marketing and enrolment information about instances offered at particular times in particular places). The steering group noted a potentially difficult balance between flexibility and clarity of purpose for elements, but felt that a dublin-core style approach of substituting statements for a generic detail time deserved serious consideration.
  
  
  Several elements were identified as candidates for further structure above and beyond a base string or xhtml type. The prospect of optional additional structure was seen as a strong feature, particularly in areas such as admission (for codifying entry requirements), assessment (for specifying the relative weightings of assessment elements), awards (for specifying level, awarding body, title of award, etc), accreditations (for specifying the accrediting body and details of to what and for how long the accreditation applies), contact details (for email, phone, etc) and resources (for IMS RLI).

Summary

Although the project is about 6 weeks behind schedule, the steering group was pleased with project management, communication and progress, and confident that the latter half of the project should deliver on its ambitious promise of a candidate UK standard for exchanging curriculum information by March 2006. More networking, early technical prototypes, and flexible resource allocation will be critical success factors, but the trajectory of development for the emerging schema was considered very promising, particularly plans to separate curriculum components from offerings, and using an extensible dublin-core style approach for descriptive information.