Wasn't sure which location to put this blog entry under as the week to which it refers was quite a hectic one: Monday UCAS in Cheltenham; Tuesday London Met to see the XCRI web service demonstrator; Thursday and Friday with our SURF e-Portfolio colleagues in Amsterdam. In the end, I decided to go for the most exotic: sorry Cheltenham and London.

UCAS and e-Portfolio: the Admission Officers' perspective

Peter Rees-Jones and Angela Smallwood had invited admissions officers from across the country to a meeting at UCAS to gather stakeholder perspectives on e-Portfolio. XCRI were kindly invited to provide the course information dimension - Mark Stubbs and Alan Paull were able to attend. The carefully-organised session gathered valuable feedback on priorities and challenges for the e-Portfolio reference model and its link to course information. A brief presentation of XCRI's work generated a lot of interest. There was strong support for the concept of a smart, non-monolithic course document in which data was entered once and then extracted and transformed to meet the needs of different audiences:

However, the slide that struck the strongest chord with all present was the one below. It was designed to illustrate the potential for sharing course data between student records, curriculum management and prospectus databases and passing it through to UCAS where it could be used to prompt applicants on how best to structure their personal statements to meet course entry requirements.

e-Admission was clearly seen as an area in which XCRI could make a valuable contribution, reducing effort and improving accuracy by linking course quality assurance to marketing and the application process.

London Met: preview of XCRI web service demonstrator

XCRI's base-lined project plan had ear-marked Q1 of 2006 for development activity. Experience developing the schema supported the contention that concrete realisation is essential for engaging expertise to refine conceptual models to more mature and useful artefacts. Feedback from release 1.0 schema deployments will inevitably lead to further refinements and more work is required to specify a WSDL for course information operations, but XCRI remains committed to delivering a course information web service demonstrator and has commissioned Paul Walk, Senior Web Services Developer at London Metropolitan University to produce it. XCRI's project manager (Mark Stubbs) and research assistant (Julie Hardman) met with him on 14/02/2006 for an advance viewing of a prototype that implements the REST design concepts discussed in the 11/11/2005 blog entry.

Paul demonstrated an impressive suite of java servlets that provided a management and web service interface to an underlying XML database (the open source BerkeleyDB from SleepyCat - a company recently acquired by Oracle). A webdav interface enabled batches of XCRI documents to be uploaded into a holding area from which only the valid ones would be added to the database. Content could then be queried using either XQuery, supported by a simple query manager tool, or via REST URLs incorporating XPath - exactly as discussed in the 11/11 blog. Queries returned fragments of valid XCRI XML. Or, put another way, the web service response was basically XCRI:any. This simple approach provided a surprisingly powerful tool with varied application

• List the learning outcomes for all geography courses
• List the reading lists for all units owned by a particular department
• List the range of assessment types used on the law courses
• ...

Paul was keen to re-factor the prototype code to improve its re-usability and estimated that this would be complete within a couple of weeks (subject to balancing XCRI work with other commitments). XCRI's web service demonstrator should provide a strong illustration of the potential of this light-weight REST approach for meeting XCRI's goals of serving course marketing, quality, reporting, enrolment, portfolio and admissions. XCRI expects the demonstrator to attract considerable attention at the CETIS Enterprise SIG on March 28 in Oxford where Paul plan to show it in action.

The Enterprise SIG will provide an opportunity to showcase XCRI deployments from across the UK and is being rightly billed as a celebration of what a community can achieve in 12 months. We would encourage anyone interested in this project to register early - places are limited, and the event is running back-to-back with the DeL Projects Collaboration Workshop.

Amsterdam: JISC-SURF e-Portfolio

4am alarm after working until gone midnight on a project plan, finally finding time to catch up with the logistics of the event in the taxi to the airport ... had I returned to my past life as a Management Consultant? No, this was JISC world, and a great opportunity to catch up with Dutch colleagues interested in e-Portfolio and to discover how course information fitted into their picture. Peter and Angela had arranged for an impressive gathering of people with strong UK insights on e-Portfolio (and XCRI's project manager) to meet their counterparts from across Holland under the umbrella of the recent JISC-SURF partnership. Damp weather failed to take the edge off the splendour of the meeting room in an old merchant's house complete with strong room and a Myst-like observation tower.

The intensive two day event covered a huge amount of ground around e-Portfolio and provided an excellent platform for sharing insight and experience. Full write-ups of the event will doubtless appear elsewhere, but key messages for XCRI were:

• There is an international need for a course information standard
• Richer information about study opportunities and better discovery tools will be important
• Entry requirements must be modelled in the same 'currency' as recognition of achievement to facilitate lifelong learning
• It would be extremely useful if entry requirements could prompt an applicant how to structure an application
• Learning outcomes must be mapped to competencies, which can then be mapped to industry/sector career pathways so learners can appreciate where learning opportunites might lead and what the requisite learning might be to support a chosen career move

Overall, a very interesting two days and many thanks to our Dutch hosts for making us all so welcome. Opportunities for collaboration seem particularly strong.