I attended the JISC Timetabling workshop on 14^th October 2008 in Manchester run by Oakleigh Consulting Limited, appointed JISC to run the study on timetabling and resource scheduling. This workshop included participants from HE and FE sectors. The workshop was divided into three main sessions. The first and the second covered the general positioning and the process model in timetabling whilst the third concentrated on drivers to it. The common processes involved in timetabling, problems in the current processes, how current and re-engineered processes are supported by technology and finally the actual links between timetabling, resource scheduling, and curriculum delivery and planning and course delivery were also discussed.

One of the sessions covered the position that most institutions take with regard to the three high level approaches/drivers to timetabling. The approaches/drivers are:

1. Distributed scheduling and requirements identification –central location allocation

2. Distributed scheduling and requirements identification and allocation of locally ‘owned ‘ locations – central location allocation of ‘high demand’ pooled locations

3. Distributed requirements identification –central scheduling and location allocation

The three high level approaches which are applicable to both central or distributed allocation, include factors such as depends on efficiency, curriculum complexity, locus of control, culture , student satisfaction (retention perspective), physical layout(environment) and so on. Most universities fall somewhere between the second and third but generally aim for the first one.

The workshop included a lot of participation from the audience. We were divided into groups to answer some scenarios on timetabling and resource scheduling. A sample is given below.

Scenario: Cross institutional delivery is becoming increasingly common.

Question: What process improvements can be made in this area to achieve benefits such as production of a single timetable for students, effective transfer of information etc?

Answer: Cross institutional delivery started in the FE sector. As the main challenge is the liaison between people and planning, then course development and resource planning must go hand in hand.

Oakleigh Consulting Services have published their final report with the ultimate deliverables from the timetabling study .

Recently, Enterprises started adopting more open source software. Bernard Golden, CEO of Navica, in Open source in the Enterprise, identifies six prime drivers for enterprises adopting more open source software systems are

• Agility and scale
• quality and security
• breaking vendor lock-in
• cost
• sovereignty
• innovation

In practical usage web 2.0 companies (You Tube and Face book) are built on open source software. Most of the IT Enterprise organisations are under stress with regards to the annual budget. The reason behind is that they focussed only the strategy part, migrating to new business models and so on.Also,the reason for the adoption to open source software is low cost and easy access.

Gartners report:

Gartner prediction is that by 2012, nearly 90% of the enterprise organisations will use open source software because of its attractive feature,massive scalability at no transaction cost, for whatever you are doing.

My personal feeling is that

(1) With regards to the adoption statistics,it is extremely a challenging task to assess the usage of open source software in Enterprise organisations.

(2) Many Enterprise organisations have already been using open source software to a very less degree. I would say because of the success of the web 2.0 companies, Enterprise organisations have started focussing on open source software to a high degree.

An enterprise architecture is an important instrument to address any organisation. It is a coherent description of products,services,processes in the organisation.The degree of coherence varies between organisations.Recently,organisations tend to focus on the strategy part and introduce new business models that really require high involvement of the integration of technology,the processes and the business itself.Organisations then realise a need for an enterprise architecture to

-aligh IT and Business.

-Control over IT costs.

-reach the expectations of customers. ( Supply versus Demand)

-To create a strategic vision over the organisation when the Information Technology (IT) has become such a powerful force and everything seems to be changing.

-Manage and control organisational changes.

Many frameworks are developed around the world to reach the criteria mentioned above.One of the frameworks that aims to provide the above integration is Archimate.Archimate is a modelling language like UML (Unified Modelling Language ) for describing the enterprise architectures.It visualises the relations which enhances the communication between the stakeholders. Though identifying the structure of each domains ,aligning them,highlighting their interdependencies, reaching the top level of management in any organisation, is possible through a modelling language like UML , archimate does pave a better path through physical visualisation.The general opinion from different attendencies in the 2 day

workshop organised by LJMU (Liverpool John Moores University) is that ‘Archimate is definitely in a reachable position to model their Enterprise Architecture within the institutions’.

Education has become more student centred. A main goal of institutions is to satisfy the needs of the students. Problem based learning is a student centred strategy taken by the institutions where students solve their problems or queries or puzzles based on authentic experiences. The aim is not necessarily to solve each problem but to get a deep understanding of it and figure out the ways of solving it. It is a method of building confidence in students. The seminar on the 19th June at UCLAN on problem based learning explored a lot. Currently the health sector is aware of PBL concepts. The conference concentrated on the SONIC and BRADTON projects. Carolyn Gibbon, the facilitator introduced the SONIC ( Students Online in Nursing Integrated Curricula ) project and ended up with the small discussion of extending it. SONIC points the users in right direction to identify the resources and scenarios,taking a blended learning approach. The main advantage is that the SONIC website is accessible to everyone andas a result they get hits from all over the world. The disadvantage is that they have an increase in the amount of spam when the website is accessible to all. The next session introduced us to the Bradton project which is currently between Blackboards and Webct. The process is almost similar to the SONIC project with the scenarios and resources being supplied and the patient journey are recorded using digital recorders.

Both projects found PBL does improve the attitude of the students and motivation towards learning. When these two factors are high there may be, more chance for any institution to achieve it’s goal.

The 3 in 1 SIG meeting (Assessment,Enterprise,Portfolio) was held at the University of Strathclyde on the 22nd of May.It was a good teamwork with the Assessment and Portfolio SIG co-ordinators.We did have six presentations,four in the morning session and two in the afternoon one.

Turning Education Skills and Policy into Practice is not an easy one.A commercial consultancy with a group of well qualified and educated consultants, Alphaplus consultancy does really a very good job.John Winkley, working in the area of assessment with the JISC opened the meeting and gave us a good outline of the upcoming tenders in early june 2008.The deadline for the completion of projects will be march 2009.The main scope of these will be on the e-assessment techniques (like online surveys ) and then integrate with the eportfolio services.

The next interesting session was the award winning WebPA project.A good introduction by Nicola Wilkinson from Loughborough University.The JISC funded project is a moderated open source system.The most interesting fact is the qualitative and quantitative student and tutor evaluation system and their response.The online demonstration was really amazing. Hats off to WebPA.

The next presentation in the morning session included the TAG Learning.The main objective is to establish an open standard for the work done by the students in the schools to awarding bodies. (i.e) the submission of digital evidence. The standards consisits of an xml schema to describe the relationship between various components and this combined with the Application Programming Interface (API) is used to submit the digital evidence and marks to the awarding body.This work to create the standard is now undertaken by the British Standards Institute (BSI) .Based on the current success in school sector,it does largely have a positive impact if tried in HE/FE ones.

The last presentation in the morning session focussed on the admissions perspective.( i.e) ADOM and DELIA project by Alan Paull from APS ltd.The key fact, structured entry profile, improves the quality of the admission process by highlighting the role of the IT staff in it.This maps a relationship between the students and the University or Institution.

The afternoon session started up with the student retention stuff.Simon Grant from JISC CETIS lead the discussion.,”the right person for the right course” .The students choose a particular course out of personal interest,passion,natural attitude,need a degree,due to economic factors,parental advice and so on.The various issues and the outcomes were discussed.The retaining perspective of the students was led Helen Richardson, from JISC CETIS.The strategies of the STAR project and the findings from the National Audit report were presented.Also,the effective and early induction for the students before they join the University were highlighted.

We are thankful to our all the people who attended the meeting and hoping to look froward in the next one.

Finally managed to organise the 17^th Enterprise sig meeting. The notes and the presentations are available on the wiki page. A very good opportunity to meet and interact with the Enterprise SIG people .

The COVA project by Balbir Barn from Thames valley University. It mainly focussed on BPMN (Business Process Modelling Notation).From BPMN, the COVA Project switched over to use Intalio toolset. The comparison of both answered to the questions why and the reasons they prefer to use BPMN although it makes life easier it does not allow shared data across pools.

The enterprise sig is familiar with Phosphorix and presentations by Selwyn Lloyd.This session focussed on open source statement with respect to two lively demos on ionetworknode and course exchanges. Phosphorix is currently working on software related to JISC projects. They figured out the best policy for the open source statement when they finished the SHELL project. The main mission and strategy works out to be ˜any organisation can take their software and develop it with reduced cost and increased profit˜.The phosphorix website had changed over the last 12 months. They are working on projects based on ionetworknode and found Wikipedia a comfortable place to get hold of it. The live demo of both the ionetworknode and courseexchanges did inspire and we did have a good discussion for future expansion.

The PADDLE (Piloting A DecentraliseD Learning Environment) Project by Henry Blackman is exploring the uses of personal learning environments/user owned technology, and how this can pull technology delivery from IT departments into the hands of the user. The University of Chester has its own in-house VLE. This project is funded by the NHS and involves non “It students with a health informatics degree. The course modules are prepared well in advance and released. The PADDLE Project allows content to be created, sequenced, time released and then sent as an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed to the student’s home page.The personal home page uses netvibes.The project is currently in its first year and lets wait for the end result.

The last session that involved active participation was the Timetabling and resource scheduling in the university of Bolton by Andy dale followed by a discussion led by Sarah Davis. Currently JISC has released a tender to conduct a study on this aspect. Scheduling is the allocation of resources over time to perform a single or a collection of tasks. University of Bolton uses CELCAT software. The university at the moment does the very basic work of creating a timetable and importing to the database. The university hopes to introduce the Notifier, Autocal and the room booker in Sep 2008.

Many thanks to University of Bolton for hosting us, to the speakers and Sharon Perry-the Assessment SIG coordinator for helping me through out and making this event a successful one.

Small opportunities are often the beginning of great Enterprises.Carry on Enterprise as all future success depends on it.

currently i’m working in writing a review on the enterprise architectures like SOA,Batch processing, REST and so on.Found some interesting facts when i had a small telephone chat with Alex Little on JOININ and Carol Shergold on MINTED projects from SOA end. Sometimes when i start reading on SOA,i feel it goes endless.

The most interesting one was  on the SOA Infrastructure Blog

Catchy one —-> Is the ”A” in SOA the problem ?

Will update my experience soon when i complete the rest of the one to one meetings.

It’s been two months i joined CETIS. Organising my first SIG meeting with loads of help from sharon at the moment. Hope it goes on well. Initially had a feeling it’s too early to organise a meeting…… With a bit of confidence in me working on it.

In order to win, you must expect to win.

The meeting focussed on the upcoming XCRI projects.The presentations on XCRI from Westcheshire college,salford,kent was interesting and the XCRI implementation model by Alan was really impressive and informative.

A very good opportunity for me to meet Sarah Davies,the JISC programme manager and Mark Stubbs from MMU. The discussion on the way back with Scott and Mark was really useful.The proceddings were discussed.

Looking forward to see the completion of these XCRI projects .

A very good opportunity to meet the CETIS family.The meeting gave a good understanding of various existing roles and people working on it.Working on a new name for the Domain co-ordinators sounded quite interesting.The presentations from lorna,sheila,good update from christina about the web pages,exam paper from adam were quite useful.

Looking forward to the next CETIS meeting.