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