Testing the XCRI-CAP Standard on Course Advertising Information at the

University of Worcester

Viv Bell

University of WorcesterMMU Meeting Monday 7th Sep 2009

What we did….

Successful bid to JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) for funding to trial XCRI-Cap.

Tested our “readiness” for XCRI-CAP at the University.

Created a course catalogue based on XCRI-CAP and published the results.

Implemented a test search tool for users

How we did it

Employed an XCRI consultant. Organised a team: registry, admissions,

marketing/communications, technical services, lifelong learning network members.

Analysed how “ready” or system was for XCRI-CAP and Alan produced a report

Mapped our course catalogue to the XCRI-CAP schema with help from the consultant.

XCRI-Readiness at UW

Challenges

Our web based course catalogue needed re-structuring to make it easier to map to XCRI – this took some time.

There were many benefits to the University so we persuaded them to go ahead and restructure (they had been thinking about doing it anyway)

How courses are structured

Our linkCourse

Route

Module

Award

Course Course

RouteRoute Route

Module Module Module Module

Original Course Page Template

multiple pages for each course

Revised Template

Tabs not multiple pages

Linking between data sets

We originally wanted to show how course data linked to module data in the results - but problems when we found there was currently no link maintained between the two data sets.

Made the decision to link the two sets together, this took time as had to be done by hand adding codes into our cms (content management system)

How we added the codes

<div id="contentleft"> <!--<div id="coursecodes">ABIOABUSS, ABIOACDES,

ABIOACDME, ABIOADRPS, ABIOAEDST, ABIOAHEST, ABIOAHGEO, ABIOAIDME, ABIOAPGEO, ABIOAPHYE, ABIOAPSCI,

ABIOASCSC, ABIOASOCI, ABIOATDME, ABIOAVART, ABIOWCDME, ART/BIA, BIA/BIH, BIA/ENM, BIA/GEO, BIA/PSY,

BIA/SPS, BIAWART, BIAWBIH, BIAWBUS, BIAWCOM, BIAWDRA, BIAWECO, BIAWEDS, BIAWENM, BIAWGEO, BIAWHES, BIAWHIS, BIAWMCS, BIAWPSY, BIAWSES, BIAWSOC, BIAWSPS, BSC/AB,

BSC/ABEC, BSC/ABIDM, BSC/ABIT, BSC/ABPE, BSC/ABPS, BSC/ABVA, BSC/ANBCD, BSC/ANHN, BSCBA/ABH, BSCBA/ABMC

Example course is Animal Biology: codes show all available route combinations

As a result of restructuring our cms

We can now retrieve all our website data as a single file.

We have shown that we can map this file to XCRI-CAP. (see example .xml file)

We could in theory link course advertising data to module data which would give more enriched search results for users

Implications

In the future, if UCAS accept our courses in XCRI-CAP format, it will be much easier to edit the information, we can send a single .xml file.

We currently fill in multiple web forms via UCAS website when we do updates this is time-consuming.

Challenges

We wanted to link our course information with data from another institution – problems with the quality of their web based course catalogue.

Decided not to do this at the present time. We wanted to enrich the quality of the course

descriptions – hope to do this in future (for example progression information to enable students to choose courses across institutions)

Project Outcomes

We have successfully mapped all our courses and modules to XCRI-CAP schema

We have published the XML file We have created a test search facility

based on this data.

Lessons Learnt

To persuade our partners to implement XCRI-CAP - UCAS should agree to receive course information in XCRI format.

Those providing course catalogues in the UK (Area Prospectus, Aim Higher etc) would need to come on board.

National/International guidelines and initiatives to test the standard. Especially in EU.

Future Plans

Share data with other providers, local, national and international…

Include data from others in our catalogue. “Live” XCRI-CAP feed that updates regularly

available from our website… Include progression information between

courses and across institutions. Develop a catalogue that links the courses to

routes and to modules.

Many thanks! Our course search tool:https://secure.worc.ac.uk/cgi-bin/xcri/xcri_search.pl All outputs can be viewed at the following

url:http://llnmoodle.worc.ac.uk/portalmoodle/course/view.php?id

=51

For Information on XCRI www.xcri.org contact at UW Viv Bell (v.bell@worc.ac.uk)