Enterprise at the JISC CETIS Conference 2004-2006

Back to Previous Enterprise SIG Meetings: Enterprise Sessions at the JISC CETIS Conference - 2004-2006.

Priorities and Progress: 3 Years of the Systems Strand at JISC-CETIS Conference
The first JISC-CETIS Conference in 2004 was a busy year for the Systems Integration Strand, which gathered together regular members of the CETIS Enterprise SIG, and other people interested in integrating educational systems. Presentations from the JISC projects NIIMLE and MUSCLE at the session demonstrated how the core Enterprise SIG remit of transferring learner information between systems was already being extended to transferring learner information between institutions in the cause of lifelong learning, using the relatively new Enterprise Services Specification. But the focus of the strand was on broader issues, identifying a wide range of institutional issues which could benefit from systems integration and the development of new toolkits, such as Admissions, Enrolment, Archiving, Resources Scheduling (e.g. for borrowing equipment such as OHPs), Learner Accounting (tracking achievement and attendance for funding purposes), Finances, and Timetabling. Jon Rowett’s presentation of the new Sweet.Net toolkit showed how some progress was already being made in timetabling, and demonstrated a useful new tool for exchanging learner data using the Enterprise Services Specification. It seemed that all these issues could possibly be drawn together under the theme of e-admin which JISC was already beginning to consider as a future priority.

The central priority to come out the session was a general feeling that the issue of standardising course descriptions (something we had already been discussing in the Enterprise SIG) really needed tackling cohesively. As one delegate pointed out, the IMS Enterprise “group” category was not intended for full course descriptions, and this was definitely an area which needed development. Notes from the day summarise the course information issue in capital letters: “NEEDS EXTRA WORK AND AGREED VOCAB.”

By 2005, progress was definitely being made. An informal meeting arranged by the Enterprise SIG and MMU in early 2005 had provided the springboard for the JISC funded XCRI (eXchanging Course Information) project, led by Mark Stubbs, and work to develop a standard way of formatting course information in the UK was well underway by the autumn JISC-CETIS conference. XCRI gave a presentation at the Systems strand, along with COVARM, a project looking at course validation, and Pathways for Progression, a project developing a tool for creating records to describe courses.

JISC had identified e-Admin as an area needing development, and the 2005 Systems Strand continued to explore the theme with a presentation from Paul Walk discussing a large project to integrate institutional information in London Met University, and a presentation from the JISC Information Environment Service Registry picking up on the theme of archiving identified the previous year.

The core business of transferring learner info was also progressing well, with NIIMLE’s work transferring learner data between institutions in Northern Ireland having being taken up in the Midlands by the SUNIWE project, which presented at the session; and a number of projects during the year having made use of Jon Rowett’s Sweet.net toolkit for exchanging learner information.

In 2006, most of the priorities identified in 2004, and underway in 2005, were beginning to make real headway, with XCRI holding a meeting earlier in the year to showcase several institutions and organizations already working with the course information schema. JISC had incorporated the e-admin theme into the Capital Programme call out in the autumn just before the conference, and a call was out for bids to implement XCRI in the second phase of the project. Integration of learner information continued to be an important theme throughout 2006, with Enterprise Web Services being used in a number of projects (and a new version of the spec being developed at IMS), Sweet.Net still popular, and NIIMLE up and running (see the online multimedia demonstration of NIIMLE).

In a reflection of the fact that a lot of the priorities identified were making good progress, and to avoid rehashing the same old ground, the session took a broader perspective in 2006, holding a general discussion on the theme of the Future of Educational Institutions. The discussion, aptly described as “eclectic” by Susannah’s Diamond’s blog, took in wide range of prominent issues currently affecting the future of education, and came to the conclusion that it was important not to let educational technologies result in overly standardised education, but to ensure that some sense of individuality and informality was retained across educational institutions and courses.