2006-10-10 Birmingham
The extension phase of XCRI's original work is coming to a close and attention is shifting towards preparing for national trials of the new Course Advertising Profile. JISC will be investing 100K GBP in the trials, funded under Appendix D of the latest call. It is therefore important that lessons learned from the extension work are shared as widely as possible. XCRI's extension phase closing report will be published soon; in the meantime communications at recent events are summarised below.
CETIS Enterprise-Pedagogy SIG, University of Manchester 2006-09-12
This event brought together members of two CETIS SIGs to inform each other of key developments in the two domains and to explore cross-over activity and potential. Vashti Zarach has an excellent write-up of the event on the CETIS site. The challenge of communicating XCRI's work in a way that would appeal and be understandable to those working in the e-Portfolio field prompted the map shown below:
The map provided a good vehicle for explaining how XCRI's original work had tried to steer a middle ground between curriculum management and course advertising. The metaphor of gradually understanding more of the territory was used to show how XCRI had come to realise that curriculum management was best regarded as an exercise in assembling related fragments of information, whereas course advertising focused on a serialized extract of the elements relevant to potential applicants. The positioning of other key domains on the map (PDP, e-Admission, etc) prompted good debate about linkages between the various areas. Delegates were encouraged to download Simon Grant's recent report on competence modelling and XCRI, which was billed as insights from the swamp of acquired and required competence. Presenting Pathways Advice amongst the high peaks was used to alert delegates to the complexity that must be dealt with before that service could be achieved. Whilst the map might not have been in UML, it proved to be quite effective at focusing debate about linkages and challenges in these related domains and our thanks go to Helen Richardson and Vashti Zarach for creating this opportunity for rich dialogue.
JISC Reference Models End-of-Extension Presentations
The JISC Reference Model work was highly ambitious, and resulted in a diverse set of projects that really helped to progress understanding of what would be required to lay the foundations for a service-oriented architecture in education. Questions still remain unanswered on how rich domain insights gathered through the Reference Model work should best feed into the e-Framework initiative, but against Bill Olivier's expectations, it is clear that there has been considerable progress. Bill's introduction to the day explained how he had hoped the Reference Models would:
- Co-evolve software and practice
- Deliver benefits for the whole FE/HE community
- Building shared understanding in a particular domain of e-learning and e-admin
- Develop a knowledge base of materials to inform future work
- Facilitate lightweight, quick-win developments
Using these criteria to reflect upon XCRI's outputs, it is clear that considerable progress has been made. XCRI's Course Advertising Profile is moving along a trajectory towards a national standard. Scott Wilson's work on a demonstrator aggregator (featured recently on the elearning.ac.uk site and presented at IDEA 2006 in Melbourne) has already inspired debate about value-added services that could enhance the experience of those choosing courses. It was great to hear that an entrepreneur in the audience was contemplating potential business models for added-value services of various kinds that could build on XCRI course data, adding value through social feedback and annotation, rich searching, sorting and clustering, and automatically augmenting the data - e.g. by using Wikipedia entries to help describe concepts in the syllabus. This lightweight, quick-win approach is definitely the kind of territory in which software and practice can co-evolve.
XCRI evolved to meet a need identified by the community. In meeting that need it will be delivering value to the whole sector, and it is pleasing to see detailed analysis of requirements encapsulated in the XCRI CAP schema that is going forward to national trials. This site now contains a rich knowledge base of materials that explain how those requirements have been gathered, analysed and met through the standards proposed.
XCRI's presentation explained the journey so far, and was accompanied by a double-sided handout that will hopefully be a concise update for those keen to exploit our work.
