Curriculum mapping for medicine

Although recent effort has been focussed on course advertising rather than curriculum management, XCRI has been keen to develop a rich knowledge base of insights on the challenge of curriculum management and commissioned a report on requirements and possibilities in the area of medicine - generally regarded as one of the most mature in terms of linking curriculum content to a clear professional competence map.

XCRI commissioned Scott Hennessy to explore the rationale for mapping Leeds School of Medicine’s curriculum against competencies defined in the General Medical Council's Tomorrows Doctors scheme. Scott's report identified key benefits of curriculum mapping as: structuring learners' portfolios in terms of professional requirements and assisting curriculum managers in reviewing coverage and assessment of learning outcomes. He identified particular challenges posed by semantics and specificity of competencies and highlighted the potential of ISO 13250 Topic Mapping for managing and providing navigability for mappings:

Download Scott Hennessy's full report

XCRI transformation web services

Phosphorix’s pioneering work with early releases of the XCRI schema for regional portals identified the need for simple prospectus feeds from partner colleges. Most colleges lacked an IT development capability that was comfortable working with web services, so Phosphorix developed the idea an agent that would take simple, Comma-Separated-Values-style input, and transform it to create XCRI XML for feeding a portal. This transformation was named: ioMorph. XCRI extension funding enabled this service to be extended for use with the XCRI Course Advertising Profile Schema. A sample installation is available at:

http://lmxdev2.ionetwork.ac.uk:8180/ioMorph2WSClient/sampleIOMorph2PostProxy/TestClient.jsp

The sample installation exposes 4 methods:

• getEndpoint()
• setEndpoint(java.lang.String)
• getIOMorph2Post()
• ioMorphWSTransform(java.lang.String, java.lang.String, java.lang.String, java.lang.String, java.lang.String)

It can be demonstrated by:

• calling setEndpoint with: http://lmxdev2.ionetwork.ac.uk:8180/ioMorph2WS/services/IOMorph2Post
• calling ioMorphWSTransform with:
  • Transform – as the first string (the operation type)
  • course-info2 – as the second string (the type of transformation)
  • a plain text string of name-values to be transformed as the third string - formatted according to a naming convention that identifies the element to be populated and the values to be used. The following extract would populate the provider organisation’s address elements in the XCRI CAP:
    
    [providerorganisation.provideraddress (address)
    
    Values
    ('The Adam Smith College'),
    ('St Brycedale Campus'),
    ('St Brycedale Avenue'),
    ('Kirkcaldy'),
    ('Fife')
    ]
    
    
• xcri-cap.xsl – as the fourth string (the name of the stylesheet to apply)
• blank – as the fifth string (an output stylesheet if performing XML to XML transformation)

The ioMorph webservice then returns correctly-formatted, XCRI CAP XML for the course information supplied.

For those keen to participate in this open source development, demonstration clients, the ioMorph code for the transform, installation and Javadoc documentation, are available at:

http://iomorph.ionetwork.ac.uk/website/

Reid Kerr develops XCRI-CAP prospectus

Readers who have followed XCRI from the start will recall that Michael Aherne of Reid Kerr College, Paisley, Scotland, was instrumental in alerting the CETIS Enterprise SIG to the need for a standard for course information. Michael trialed the XCRI R1.0 schema and has recently developed an XCRI-CAP version of Reid Kerr's course information.

In an email to the project, Michael tells how his experience with XCRI-CAP was that "it really covers the aggregation use case quite comprehensively", and that for the Scottish FE Sector it made sense to split course advertising from curriculum management - "I think it was a great idea to separate the two".

Michael described how: "As with the other schema I created a page which produces the course spec as XML, and again the time it took was quite small- the fact that the schema is so well-commented helped a lot! If you're interested in having a look, an example is http://www.reidkerr.ac.uk/courses/B1"

He noticed a couple of comments that suggested elements were optional when they were actually mandatory, which will be corrected in the next release. He also provided a strong rationale for extending the course.description vocabulary to include a type for "Further Study" (or Articulation as it is known locally):

"From an FE point of view the lack of a description type for articulation ("Further Study"?) is very difficult to work around. I realise that this may not be an issue in HE, but because of FE's place as a stepping stone between school and university for many people it's essential for us to be able to clearly advertise routes into degree courses. If you're updating the schema it would be great to see something like this added to the vocabulary."

He also called for greater clarity on the purpose of an untyped course.description element - whether it should be used to summarise the course or merely provide additional information that could not be placed in a typed description. Such feedback is extremely useful, and will be responded to in guidance notes and revised schema comments.

Michael concluded by offering practical insight on the debate about course identifiers: "my take on the identifiers debate is that for aggregation it's absolutely necessary that the course identifier should be some kind of URI in a space controlled by the institution".

XCRI releases its 18 month Project Report

JISC's commendable emphasis on dissemination means a requirement on all projects to summarise their outputs and activity in the form of a report. XCRI's project report is now available to download

The XCRI Project Report Executive Summary is reproduced below: