What are cetis communities

Background
The growth in importance and the rapid uptake of eLearning in recent years has given a great impetus to efforts in learning technology interoperability, notably in IMS but also in Europe with CEN/ISSS and in the IEEE and ISO. It rapidly became evident that CETIS core staff could not hope to play a major role in all of these bodies and also be involved in the whole gamut of interoperability standards areas, covering content, metadata, enterprise, question and test, learner information, accessibility and learning design.

To spread the workload across UK HE and FE institutions seemed a good idea, and so CETIS negotiated a Special Interest group programme with JISC, who agreed to fund coordinators for a number of CETIS Groups, each to run for 18 months. A call for proposals was made, and from these co-ordinators for the first three groups were chosen, covering Metadata, Question and Test, and Profiles and Enterprise.

As CETIS evolved, it became increasingly clear the important role these groups played in developing capacity in the community in the use of new technologies and standards, and in identifying new requirements that ought to be taken forward, both by CETIS core staff but also by JISC in future funded work.

When CETIS attained the status of a JISC Service in 2006, the focus altered within CETIS towards supporting a broader range of communities of interest, with funding and management of personnel to facilitate those communities. This decision was made in order to enable a bit more flexibility in the way that communities are supported in terms of staff resoures and funding for events and meetings.

Role
CETIS Domain Coordinators are the people employed by CETIS who have the responsibility to invite and organise participation from UK HE and FE colleges in CETIS communities. Depending on the state of any specification, these communities will:


 * represent UK arguments on the development of a specification
 * track all standardisation efforts in the particular area
 * test and evaluate any released specification, hopefully using real life examples
 * identify new opportunities for work that may have wide impact in that area
 * disseminate their work widely across UK HE and FE

CETIS employs coordinators, and ensures that there is coordination across the different communities through shared events and collaborations.

JISC CETIS wiki main