IWMW, York, 17 July 2007
XCRI - syndicating the online prospectusScott Wilson, Institute of Educational Cybernetics, Bolton
Ben Ryan, KaiNao Ltd.
Mark Stubbs, MMU Business School
This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence
Why…
• Does every agency need your course information re-typing into yet another web form?
• Does every new initiative, e.g. 14-19, mean re-designing the course information data?
• Can’t we learn from the success of simple syndication techniques like RSS and stop this expensive nonsense?
• Enter XCRI!
xcri | what
• XCRI Course Advertising Profile: – A candidate XML specification for
enabling course descriptions to be aggregated by brokers
– Derived from the XCRI reference model, which describes the components of curriculum documents used in the curriculum development workflow
xcri | why
• National agenda of ‘informed choice’ about learning opportunities.
• Standards exist for exchanging information about people, groups and membership but
• no standard way to exchange information about courses.• Institutions developing ways to populate their prospectus
from definitive data but• resorting to primitive data entry to populate aggregator
sites, regional portals, ... etc.• Genuine interest from the community in a standard for
exchanging course information.
CourseAdvertising
Acquired/RequiredCompetence
EntryRequirements
EntryProfiles
PathwaysAdvice
Portfolio
CourseApproval
Evidence ofAchievement
TranscriptsPersonalDevelopmentPlanning
LearnerTrails
E-Admission
PersonalStatements
CurriculumManagement
CourseModification
E-Application
StudentRecords
AssessmentResults
References
ApplicantFeedback
LearnerGoals
AdmissionStats
CourseSearch
CourseDetails
xcri | history
Q1 2005 XCRI project devised by CETIS Enterprise SIG spin-off + UCAS
Q2 2005 Existing standards reviewed (Norway’s CDM closest)
Q3 2005 UK prospectus websites reviewed (161!)Case studies of existing practice produced from site visits
Q4 2005 R1.0 XML schema developed through prototyping & critique
Q1 2006 R1.0 XML schema tested with Plymouth-UCAS, Oxford Uni CPD, Reid Kerr Prospectus & Liverpool Learning Matrix Regional Portal. Searchable curriculum repository demonstrated
Q2 2006 XML used at Adam Smith College to generate PDF course brochuresReport produced on competence modelling and XCRI
Q3 2006 Existing XCRI deployments & authoring options reviewedOptimised Course Advertising Profile XML schema released
Q4 2006 JISC fund trials of the XCRI CAP + demonstration aggregator + support project
Q1 2007 XCRI-CAP 1.0 released, as is demonstration aggregator
Q2 2007 First feeds start to trickle in from Oxford and the OU…
Full spec at http://www.xcri.org/wikiXML schema at http://www.xcri.org/svn/trunk/bindings/cap.xsd
xcri | specification
Principles: • practical• based on today’s data and systems• real implementations• open community process driving spec development• as simple as we can make it
Structure: Catalog -> Provider -> Course -> Presentation (aka offering, instance…) ~36 total data elements, including vCard/DC/Atom “borrowings” Inheritance heuristics used to reduce repetition (& file size)
xcri | specification
xcri | specification
xcri | cap implementation patterns
http://www.xcri.org/wiki
• Pure aggregation, RSS/Atom style - “course info feeds” using XCRI-CAP
• OAI-PMH protocol carrying XCRI-CAP metadata
• Microformat
xcri | example implementation
xcri | example implementation
LearnersSearch theAggregator
Institutions PublishXCRI XMLGet the code via http://www.xcri.org/wiki
xcri | more mashups?
xcri | current projects
• GMSA• Learning Matrix Liverpool• SURF (not the Dutch one)• UCAS• JISC E-Admissions process
improvement programme• Mini-grants round 1
xcri | future work
• Continue to develop the spec based on community feedback
• Provide online validator for XCRI-CAP feeds• Submit CAP to a recognized standardization process by
the end of current project (Feb 2009)• Explore some of the terra incognita
xcri | find out more
• http://www.xcri.org
• http://www.xcri.org/blog
• http://www.xcri.org/forum
• http://www.xcri.org/wiki
• http://www.xcri.org/aggregator
xcri | get involved
• JISC mini-projects (10k grants)
• Contribute on forum and wiki
• Add your XML to the aggregator and see how it looks
• Build some interesting stuff and tell us about it