2005-04-15 Huddersfield
Following up plans made in Birmingham, I met with Ben Ryan and Charlie Cordeaux of the Pathways4Progression Regional Pilot at Kainao's offices in Huddersfield. We compared and contrasted CDM and EMIL with our understanding of UK need, and reviewed some prototype information models that Scott Wilson had developed based on our email conversations. We noted the following:
- EMIL distinguishes a 'StudySpecification' (EMIL:EducationInfo - how it is defined) from a 'StudyOffering' (EMIL:EducationEvent - where and when it is offered), which may fit UK need more closely than CDM's conflation of the two.
- CDM provides a mapping to the European Credit Transfer Scheme (ECTS), which will be an important test for any candidate specification.
- CDM models Programme and Course as distinct objects. In UK terminology, these might be known as Course and Module/Unit. We noted that many UK institutions, and some student record vendors, model hierarchies with more than two levels - see for instance the EU CUBER project's representation. We set the CDM Programme and Course objects side-by-side and noted strong similarities, suggesting that it might be possible to have a generic Study/CurriculumItem/UnitOfLearning that could be 'typed' to perform the required representation. I have emailed Tore and Dagfinn about this and the possibilities of a Specification/Offering distinction in future harmonization work with EMIL planned under a Commission-funded CEN/ISSS WS-LT project that would hopefully start this summer.
- Our discussions about UK StudySpecifications suggested that a schema would need to capture:
<StudySpec> <description /> general Dublin Core with more explicit description of the qualification/credit; persistent identification and versioning; more general marketing info; something about the intended audience and something about composition, eg: dc:relation isPart/hasPart <rationale /> Could appear multiple times <outcome /> Could appear multiple times <topic /> Could appear multiple times and perhaps link to IMS:RDCEO <activity /> Could appear multiple times <assessment /> Could appear multiple times <resource /> Could appear multiple times and perhaps links to IMS:RLI <assocation /> Could appear multiple times for each organisation/person associated with this, giving the nature of their association <rule /> Could appear multiple times for each composition, progression, calculation... rule governing this spec <fee /> Could appear multiple times for each fee associated with this <grant /> Could appear multiple times for each grant associated with this <adjustment /> Could appear multiple times for each DDA adjustment statement </StudySpec> Further, a <StudyOffering /> would <<realize>> a <StudySpec /> providing additional details about, for instance, the location, times, staffing and special arrangements of the particular offering
We agreed to test the outcome of our conversation against the real information needs of our respective institutions, and to compare our thoughts against those offered by the XCRI partners on the suitability of CDM to UK need. With the intention of firming up requirements for candidate schemas for curriculum services, I offered to look at QAA mappings; Ben offered to explore and prototype sample schemas; Charlie offered to look into ECTS mappings.
NB:
It is important to note here that Tore Hoel (CDM) and Peter Karlberg (EMIL) have expressed a keen interest in UK curriculum metadata requirements and I am endeavouring to ensure that CDM, EMIL and XCRI are as aware as possible of each other's efforts in this space. - Discussion about determining pathways for progression raised the issue that curriculum pathways are governed by both institutional properties and the learner's progress file. Institutional properties could be embodied as specific rule elements in a StudySpec or (somehow) inherited as more generic admission rules, but pathway availability would depend on an applicant's prior levels of achievement and/or experience. Strong arguments exist for including a <rule /> element in the criteria for a candidate StudySpec schema, which would allow for pre-requisites, co-requisites, exclusions and admission criteria to be modelled. However, we concluded that devising representations that could be used to calculate available pathways of study would be a major project in itself and was thus out of scope for the 12 month XCRI project.
