Curriculum Design: X marks the spot?

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In her second post on Curriculum Design Lou McGill considers how institutions connect and manage course information, and the role that XCRI can play.

course-map2

This ‘middle earth’ style map produced by Professor Mark Stubbs, Managed Learning Environment Project Director at the Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) shows the extent of information about courses that exist in further and higher education institutions. What is missing on the map, and sometimes within institutions, are the paths which connect the breadth of processes and systems that link up this data. It would certainly make for a more complex picture but this is actually what many of the Institutional approaches to Curriculum Design projects are doing through business process mapping and through their baselining and early stakeholder engagement activities. The previous post introduced some of the approaches adopted by projects to map their processes. This post offers a bit more detail of the ways they managed their information and made sure that systems share and utilise this effectively.

Course information comprises a range of data from several fundamental processes including course creation, approval, validation, documentation, QA, resource management (timetabling, resource allocation), modification and review. It seems rather obvious to say that the management of this information presents many challenges but feedback from the projects has seen common use of terminology such as ‘grappling’ and ‘wrestling’ to describe their efforts to prevent duplication and disconnected silos of data. Projects also highlighted a need for different views and pathways into course information for different stakeholders. However, course information does not exist in isolation and projects really benefitted from taking a broad view of the whole institutional landscape and thinking about how the different processes and data across other functions connect. This rich picture emerging through conversations with several projects nicely highlights the need for joined-up thinking across organizational boundaries between Student Records, Quality Assurance, Marketing and Course Teams.

coursediscussions

Course approval, as an example, is a key activity in curriculum design and during baselining activities several projects identified challenges with existing processes as they involved formal (with a strong emphasis on QA) and well established paper-based methods. The format of this activity shaped the kinds of information collected and resulted in the need for augmentation and modification at later stages when inputting the data into different systems. Projects highlighted that many staff responded to the process as a ‘form-filling’ exercise rather than an opportunity to think about and re-consider their practice. At a practical level course related documents (such as handbooks, online module descriptions) were usually developed locally and quite separately to the course approval process. At a more strategic level, course-related information to support decision making and planning was often poorly collated and managed. How institutions utilise diverse course feedback information such as external examiners reports, evaluation data and broad market research is often subject to localised departmental approaches.

The UG-Flex project team carried out a business process review for the University of Greenwich’s existing Programme Approval and Review process in order to identify stakeholders, issues and inform system requirements. The resulting documents are now informing ongoing system review at Greenwich. Other course process maps from other projects are included in the previous post and more will eventually be available on JISC Design Studio.

Linking student and course information

Student data, which includes information about enrolment, admissions, registration, progression, assessment, records and e-portfolios, links to course information at several points and project activities have also included work in this area. A significant issue to emerge during the review process was that many existing institutional systems reflect the more traditional standard academic year course patterns. Departments which had adopted more flexible teaching approaches and models to respond to changing learner demands were frustrated by centralised systems that did not fit their needs and were using workarounds to fit their students in or developing parallel local systems. UG-Flex project stakeholders described cases where some students on short courses who had actually finished their course before gaining access to the VLE, which highlighted the need to organise their information differently to ensure timely access for different student cohorts.

Claire Eustance, Project Manager at UG-Flex emphasises the need to establish and maintain trust when undertaking business process mapping to ensure that initial talks with staff are followed-up, with them being shown the outcomes and solutions to problems and keeping them involved throughout the process.

‘When we first started talking to our stakeholders their perception tended to be that problems lay in the systems and what they could, or couldn’t do. Eventually though more people are beginning to understand that the systems merely reflect existing institutional mechanisms which have either simply evolved over a period of years or have been based on the needs of ‘mainstream’ students. I can’t stress enough how significant this has been. Now at Greenwich, at the highest level, there are moves to ensure that our organisational mechanisms and processes reflect the needs of all of our students. Once we have these in place then the systems will be redesigned around them.’

UG-Flex’s efforts to reveal and map Greenwich’s institutional processes and how systems support these have helped strategic and operational managers recognise and articulate the need for change. UG-Flex aspires to see this approach to business process review and mapping embedded into mainstream strategic planning at Greenwich, anticipating long term benefits as systems and processes develop through cycles of change and review. Whilst this can appear to be about efficiencies such as reducing the administrative burden, duplication and clerical error, the crux is the real value that comes from being able to enhance the experience for all students.

Where VLEs link into wider systems

One of the places that most learners connect with institutional systems is through the VLE, and whilst they may not be interested in the underlying processes and systems, their learning experience can be significantly affected by them. VLEs are just one of the systems that benefit from well managed course and student information.

The PREDICT project at City University have been looking at how course information links to student data with a particular emphasis on the admissions process and through linking information about student module choices to the VLE. The new student registration system at City has led to improved quality of information and significant reduction in administrative time (from 3 hours to 10 minutes) with about 90% of students registering online before their courses started. The vision is that on day one a student at City University will log into the VLE and see their own space with appropriate course information, discussion areas and content, and ultimately assessment and grading information. This will be achieved through the use of middleware to establish automatic links between the VLE , the admissions system, course information systems, the student record system, the library, finance and identify management functions to facilitate the sharing of data.

Quite apart from the cost efficiencies (saving £20K per year on printing postage and data entry) time is freed for staff to do other activities and the student experience at the very beginning of their relationship with the University is significantly enhanced. The way that information is now being made available across systems immediately is a vast improvement on the traditional data-dump scheduled transfer that those of us who have been around for a while are very familiar.

With an imperative to reduce duplication and the drive to enhance the student experience it is also possible to personalise the student view of their modules through the creation of rules which link content within the VLE. So, for example, a student registered on one course may automatically have relevant content from a different course or module revealed. There are also plans to incorporate module information so that students can select elective modules online, requiring links with timetabling and resource planning information. This can be quite a drawn out process as their selections may depend on results due in several months time – hence a need to incorporate attainment data. This currently necessitates some backward data exchange as marks entered into the VLE need to be seen by the student records system.

Like other projects the activities of the PREDICT team have resulted in revised documentation and data collection mechanisms. One example is their module and programme revision documents which are available on the project website. In the longer term the institution is also considering linking the VLE to the student application and enquiry processes and the potential of using university OERs to feed into broader marketing processes. Future plans also include addressing staff and research data. The pragmatic incremental approach taken by City has some merit making sure they achieved some quick wins and using those to push forward more challenging tasks.

The student experience can be greatly enhanced by quite pragmatic approaches to incorporating information into VLEs and making them transparent to learners. Some of the projects in the sister programme Transforming Curriculum Delivery Through Technology saw significant enhancement through these kinds of approaches, such as course enrolment and payment, timetabling, attendance data and assignment handling. At the heart of these achievements is the need to create core sets of data that can be exposed in number of places… Perhaps the most significant example of this in relation to course information is XCRI.

XCRI (Exchanging Course Related Information)

The value of XCRI as a standard to facilitate exchange of course related information is fairly obvious, but an imperative for implementing it on a wide scale in institutions has been lacking. However the HEFCE requirements for institutions to provide KIS (Key Information Sets) for all courses from September 2012 and to feed into the HEAR (Higher Education Achievement Report) recording student achievement have both provided strong drivers to encourage the implementation of XCRI.

Mark Stubbs, mentioned earlier, has been involved with both the SRC Project (Supporting Responsive Curricula) which was featured in the earlier blog post and with the development of XCRI said “Although being able to make prospectus information available on course comparison websites without retyping will doubtless become a plus, the real value of XCRI lies in re-thinking business processes used to manage course-related information so that definitive data are available freely for re-use: for transcripts, for course approval, to provide context for VLE activities, to support personal development and for business intelligence-driven continuous improvement”

I plan to talk in more detail about XCRI in a future post…

It’s hard to capture the range of activities of a whole programme in a few blog posts but some key issues to emerge from talking to projects and reading their outputs so far are:

  • need for creation of core data sets that can be exposed in a variety of places
  • technical systems are sometimes perceived as the root of problems but simply reflect traditional and sometimes outmoded practice
  • integrated technical solutions can have significant impact on reducing inefficiencies and duplication if based on institution-wide dialogue and examination of processes, and through streamlining systems to share data more effectively
  • need for changes to documentation to facilitate better data collection – and best done after business process modelling has been undertaken
  • value of integrating business process review into ongoing core practice
  • stakeholder engagement and ongoing involvement
  • utilising modelling methods that suit the organisation
  • curriculum design and delivery can become embedded into core institution planning by making sure that people involved in making key decisions start with the learning and teaching requirements
  • informed curriculum planning can result from streamlined systems and people that understand , engage with, view and contribute to curriculum development processes in more meaningful ways

Perhaps it is better said by the SRC Project from MMU when talking about the development of their central academic database…

‘The change to an authoritative single source of courses information from pre-validation through advertising, enrolment, teaching and learning, and to production of HEAR records and even alumni support is a powerful one. It involves breaking down self-standing silos of information and addressing information technology and process issues across the whole institution. It results in a deeper knowledge and understanding of curricula by staff in the institution, and potentially by partners, by students and other learners, by employers and employees. This knowledge and understanding can be used to develop new curriculum elements, both pro-active and reactive to demands from inside and outside the institution, from learners in general and from employers in particular. At the heart of this is a customer-centric view that sees the organisation’s processes from a student viewpoint, the student customer journey being an end-to-end lifecycle that cuts across institutional functional silos.’

Excerpt from SRC case study.

A shorter two year sister programme ran in parallel to the Institutional approaches to Curriculum Design programme which focussed on curriculum delivery – the space where students engage with the curriculum. Both programmes naturally involved some overlap with curriculum design and delivery having close synergies. The Transforming Curriculum Delivery Through Technology programme has now completed and outcomes (lessons learned) and outputs (case studies, guidelines, etc.) are incorporated into the JISC Design Studio. Both programmes are feeding into this resource which was created during the programmes to provide both a resource for projects and ultimately a source for the wider community. http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/page/40379712/Transforming-Curriculum-Delivery-through-Technology

http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/page/40489793/Institutional-Approaches-to-Curriculum-Design


About Lou

Lou McGill is currently working independently and has recently been involved in synthesis and evaluation activities for the HE Academy/JISC UKOER programme and the JISC Transforming Curriculum Delivery Through Technology programme. She lead the team that produced the Good Intentions report on business cases for sharing and worked on the LLiDA study (Learning Literacies in a Digital Age). She has experience of working in a range of HE institutions as a librarian, learning technologist and project manager and used to be a JISC Programme Manager on the eLearning team. In the distant past she worked for NIACE (the adult learning organisation) and in Health education for the NHS. Her interests and experience include digital literacy, information literacy, open education, distance learning, managing organisational change, and effective use of technologies to support learning. Further information on Lou’s work can be found at: http://loumcgill.co.uk

Curriculum Design: The Big Picture

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Guest Post

As part of our series of articles on the technical aspects of the e-Learning Programme over the next few weeks Lou McGill, e-learning consultant, will be focussing on the Institutional Approaches to Curriculum Design projects. Now three years in to the four year programme these twelve projects have been exploring the convoluted and sometimes opaque processes universities use to design, validate and deliver courses. In this first post Lou discovers just how useful modelling approaches have been to help projects clarify these curriculum processes.

Engaging with institutional processes and practice

Learning and teaching is of course the core business of our Universities and Colleges, but the processes around how courses are designed and developed are sometimes fragmented. Curriculum Design connects with several processes and systems within an educational institution and impacts on a range of stakeholders. It is difficult to engage with institutional processes without referring to ‘business’ language – and talking about curriculum design in this way can easily alienate the very people you need to engage. Taking a business process view of educational activities however can help to highlight technical and system requirements as well as supporting strategic planning and development. Similarly, focussing on efficiencies, reducing duplication and saving time can result in real enhancements for both the staff and student experience, as highlighted by the JISC Transforming Curriculum Delivery Through Technology programme which has just completed. (see end of this post for more information)

Projects taking part in the ongoing JISC funded Institutional approaches to Curriculum Design programme have become very familiar with the challenges of taking an institution-wide business process approach. How can you get academic staff who often see the course approval process as a ‘form-filling exercise’ to use it as an opportunity to re-imagine and re-think their curricula? How do you convince staff to see the bigger institution-wide picture and understand the links between the seemingly separate processes that support teaching and learning? How do you utilise technologies to take some of the burden of these processes away, leaving staff time to focus on more important activities?

Projects have been responding to these challenges by looking at ways to effectively integrate institutional systems to prevent duplication and streamline processes, particularly in relation to learning and teaching technologies such as institutional VLEs (Virtual Learning Environment) or e-portfolio systems. They have had to articulate and demonstrate the added value that linking these systems brings to a range or different stakeholders. Their experiences in identifying which technologies and standards can meet institutional needs and, perhaps more importantly, which people in the institution have the knowledge to inform these decisions are of value to other institutions. Key to streamlining these processes and integrating systems is the need to identify which data is central and how institutions collate, share and manage that information.

Like many Universities, project teams have also been grappling with the need to align curriculum design with external drivers such as employer needs, the widening participation agenda or practical things like UCAS or HERA requirements; institutional requirements for increased efficiency; and flexibility to respond to changing learner needs. Many institutional systems reflect a time when standard three year degrees where the norm. Modularisation of courses and increasing numbers of part-time, distance and work-based students has resulted in the need for more agile systems that can reflect changing learning patterns and the need for more flexible support mechanisms.

Sarah Knight, Programme Manager for the JISC e-Learning Team says ‘This is a difficult time for educational institutions as they struggle to make sure that they continue to offer high quality learning and teaching whilst responding to drivers for increased efficiency and the need to offer flexible learning choices. The projects in this programme are making excellent use of business process modelling and other innovative approaches to engage stakeholders, highlight their strengths and adapt their systems to be more effective. The wider HE and FE communities should find much to inform their own practice.’

For many projects the programme timing mirrored an institutional desire to review existing systems which provided an ideal opportunity to re-examine the processes affected by these systems.
The processes covered so far by the programme include:

  • course creation, approval, validation, documentation, QA, management (timetabling, resource allocation), modification;
  • student data – enrolment, admissions, registration, progression and assessment, records and e-portfolios;
  • marketing and advertising – recruitment

This range of processes is underpinned by a number of systems and data, many of which will have been developed over time in response to specific needs, and often without an institution-wide consideration. At City University the PREDICT Project (Promoting Realistic and Engaging Discussions in Curriculum Teams) proved timely as the Institution had identified a need for review of IS systems. The obvious practical value of the two things happening at the same time has been augmented by the long term benefits in raising the profile and understanding of curriculum planning requirements. John Gallagher, Enterprise Architect at City said,

‘Historically with IS our projects have ignored the impact of both Curriculum design and delivery unless that was the specific focus of the project. However now, thanks to the profile of PREDICT, we do try to assess any possible impact. An example of this recently was the introduction of a new Student Module Feedback system to provide additional information in order to assess academic performance. However this feedback is also essential for staff to review the design and delivery of the module. Prior to PREDICT we would have ignored this angle as it was not a specific deliverable of the project!’

Where to start?

As a four year programme projects had time to do a comprehensive baseline review and to invest significant time in engaging stakeholders. Project baselining activities or benchmarking are of high value to any change process as they offer time to look at and record where an institution is at the start of the change process and to really examine existing practice, identify strengths and highlight weaknesses. Having to explain something you do to others in detail provides an opportunity for questioning of activities that seem obvious but can be based on historical or traditional approaches that are no longer relevant.

When baselining is done across a programme of activities a picture of the sector begins to emerge and this one has highlighted issues relating to marketing, quality assurance and enhancement, understanding and responding to employer and learner needs and demands, issues around assessment and feedback and managing course information. These areas are discussed in more detail in a briefing paper produced in February 2011 and will, of course, be described in more detail in the final synthesis reports at the end of the programme. This series of blog posts will focus on issues around managing course information and how institutions link this to other data through a range of processes and systems.

Business process modelling

During the baselining stage many diagrams were developed to capture the various processes and data that result from these. One example is the process workflow diagram from the PIP project (Principles in Patterns) at the University of Strathclyde.

pip1-sm

It can be useful to see how other institutions visualise their activities and processes, even if they do tend to be context specific, but it is the process of developing the diagrams that has been of most significance to the institutions involved, such as this curriculum approval process mapping described by the PALET Project (Programme Approval Lean Electronic Toolset) from Cardiff university. The dialogue and learning to be had from identifying, recording and sharing how the various business processes link up has been noted by several projects. The SRC Project (Supporting Responsive Curricula) has produced an excellent case study detailing Manchester Metropolitan University’s stakeholder requirements for an Academic Database of programmes and units. This document describes the activities and includes examples of process diagrams. Engaging stakeholders through the use of rich pictures was a method adopted by the UG-Flex Project at the University of Greenwich – a diagramming technique developed to capture stakeholder views in a non-confrontational way. See this example – computer says no!

computersaysno

(A further explanation of developing rich pictures is available at:http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/page/24763278/Rich-Pictures)

It is clear from even these brief examples that Projects have adopted a range of modelling approaches. JISC CETIS ran a workshop in May 2009 to highlight the ArchiMate enterprise architechture modelling language for curriculum design processes. Discussions with projects at the end of the CETIS workshop highlighted that:

‘ In terms of cost-benefit, adopting a modelling approach for those projects that didn’t already use it, opinions differed. Some felt that the investment in software and skills acquisition were only worth it if an institution took the strategic decision to adopt a modelling approach. Others felt that a lightweight, iterative use of Archimate, perhaps using common drawing tools such as Visio during the trial stage, was a good first step. Yet others thought that modelling was worth doing only with considerable investment in tools and skills right at the beginning.’ Wilbert Kraan, JISC CETIS

The SRC Project used ArchiMate components to present visualisations during baselining activities and have also blogged about this. They presented at the CETIS workshop on their experiences with ARchiMate which they decided to try after finding the Course Validation Reference Model (COVARM) useful but a bit complex for most stakeholders. The SRC project also used UML (Unifying Modelling Language) to develop more detailed diagrams and examples are available in the SRC case study.

A range of project diagrams and process maps reflecting the different modelling approaches will be made available in the JISC Design Studio which is being added to as projects progress. The JISC CETIS Architecture and Modelling page provides an ongoing picture of developments in this area. It seems likely that these projects have significant potential to further our understanding of some key interoperability standards such as XCRI, learning design specifications, competency standards and qualification frameworks, particularly in relation to how these support data sharing across the range of institutional systems.

A shorter two year sister programme ran in parallel to the Institutional approaches to Curriculum Design programme which focussed on curriculum delivery – the space where students engage with the curriculum. Both programmes naturally involved some overlap with curriculum design and delivery having close synergies. The Transforming Curriculum Delivery Through Technology programme has now completed and outcomes (lessons learned) and outputs (case studies, guidelines, etc.) are incorporated into the JISC Design Studio. Both programmes are feeding into this resource which was created during the programmes to provide both a resource for projects and ultimately a source for the wider community. http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/page/40379712/Transforming-Curriculum-Delivery-through-Technology

http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/page/40489793/Institutional-Approaches-to-Curriculum-Design

About Lou

Lou McGill is currently working independently and has recently been involved in synthesis and evaluation activities for the HE Academy/JISC UKOER programme and the JISC Transforming Curriculum Delivery Through Technology programme. She lead the team that produced the Good Intentions report on business cases for sharing and worked on the LLiDA study (Learning Literacies in a Digital Age). She has experience of working in a range of HE institutions as a librarian, learning technologist and project manager and used to be a JISC Programme Manager on the eLearning team. In the distant past she worked for NIACE (the adult learning organisation) and in Health education for the NHS. Her interests and experience include digital literacy, information literacy, open education, distance learning, managing organisational change, and effective use of technologies to support learning. Further information on Lou’s work can be found at: http://loumcgill.co.uk

The Learning Registry: “Social Networking for Metadata”

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Guest post

Dan Rehak talks about the Learning Registry, a new initiative offering an alternative approach to learning resource discovery, sharing and usage tracking. The Learning Registry prioritizes sharing and second party usage data and analytics over first party metadata. It’s an enabling infrastructure accessible by anyone, has no mandated data standards, can be replicated worldwide and is open, cloud-based, and app ready.

Isn’t this all too hard?

Let’s imagine that you’re a secondary school physics teacher and you want to build a lesson on orbital mechanics which combines elements of physics, maths, the history of the space program and a writing assignment. Where would you go to find the learning resources you need, either lessons to reuse or individual pieces? A search engine might help in finding the individual pieces, but even formulating a query for the entire lesson is difficult. If you want images and primary historic source material, you’ll probably have to search individual collections: NASA, the US National Archives, Smithsonian, Library of Congress, and probably multiple repositories for each. Let’s assume you found several animations on orbital mechanics. Can you tell which of these are right for your students (without having to preview each)? Is there any information about who else has used them and how effective they were? How can you provide your feedback about the resources you used, both to other teachers and to the organizations that published or curated them? Is there any way to aggregate this feedback to improve discoverability?

The Learning Registry.

The Learning Registry (http://www.learningregistry.org/) is defining and building an infrastructure to help answer these questions. It provides a means for anyone to “publish” information about their learning resources (both resources specifically created for education along with primary source materials, including historic and cultural heritage resources). It allows anyone to use the published information. Beyond metadata and descriptions, this information includes usage data, feedback, rankings, likes, etc.; we call this paradata. It provides a metadata timeline—a stream of activity data about a learning resource. It enables building better discovery tools (search, recommender systems), but it’s not a search engine, a repository, or a registry in the conventional sense.

Share. Find. Use. Amplify.

With the Learning Registry, anyone can put any information into the timeline, anyone can get it from the timeline, anyone can filter parts of it for their communities, and anyone can provide feedback, all through a distributed infrastructure. NASA could “announce” a new animation. The PBS (US Public Broadcasting Service) Teachers portal could be watching for NASA publishing events, and add the resource to their secondary school “Science and Tech” stream. The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) could also provide it via one of their “Pathways”. A teacher using the PBS portal could find it, rank it, comment on it, or share it via the PBS portal. PBS can publish this paradata back into the timeline. NSDL would see this new paradata and could update their information about the resource. NSDL paradata also flows back into the timeline. NASA could monitor the timeline and see how and where their resource is being used; the timeline and cumulative paradata provides more contextual information than just server access logs. This enables resource and information sharing, discovery, access, integration and knowledge amplification among producers, consumers and brokers. We believe that this paradata timeline can be more valuable than traditional metadata for learning resource discovery and that collaborative publishing to the network amplifies the available knowledge about what learning resources are effective in which learning contexts.

Share Find Use Amplify

Share Find Use Amplify

The Infrastructure.

The operational Learning Registry is a light-weight learning resource information sharing network: a high-latency, loosely connected network of master-master synchronizing brokers (nodes) distributing resources, metadata and paradata. The network provides distributed publishing and access. There are simple RESTful+JSON core APIs (limited to publish, obtain, and distribute). You can publish anything to the timeline at any node and access it all from any other node. There is no central control, central registries or central repositories in the core resource distribution network. All data eventually flows to all nodes.

Apps and APIs.

We’re also defining a small set of non-core APIs for integration with existing edge services, e.g., SWORD for repository publishing, OAI-PMH for harvest from the network to local stores, SiteMaps for search engine exposure, ATOM for syndication, and we encourage people to build and share more APIs. We don’t provide (and don’t plan to provide) a search engine, community portal, recommender system, etc. We want the community to build their own value-added services on top of the core network infrastructure and are exploring a variety of tools and social plug-ins (e.g., Fedora, DSpace, Moodle, SAKAI, WordPress, Facebook). Thus while we’re defining the transport network, we only expect that it will be used directly by application developers. Teachers and students will interact with the timeline via their local environments, and shouldn’t know or care about the Learning Registry infrastructure. Our aim is only to provide the essential core features and to be enabling.

Apps and APIs

Apps and APIs

No Metadata Standards.

We don’t mandate any metadata or paradata formats nor do we attempt to harmonize—that would be futile. We encourage simple hashtags and allow “legacy” metadata in any format. We assume some smart people will do some interesting (and unanticipated) things with the timeline data stream (e.g., consider the JISC CETIS OER Technical MiniProject on the Analysis of Learning Resource Metadata Records as an example) and that sub-communities will gravitate towards shared approaches.

Cool Tech.

Our initial implementation is built upon CouchDB (a NoSQL document-oriented database with RESTful JSON APIs, native JavaScript code execution, MapReduce support, and distributed data replication). Our design approach is influenced by its capabilities and design, but the APIs provides an abstraction layer on top of Couch. We’re using Python as an application layer when needed, but apps can be built in your favorite environment. You can install and run a node on your own hardware (Linux, Windows or Mac) or you can stand up a node in the cloud; we’re currently hosting nodes on Amazon EC2. We’re aiming for zero-config installers to make adding a node to the network simple and fast.

Learning Registry network infrastructure

Learning Registry network infrastructure

The Project.

The project leadership comes from the U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Department of Defense, but we aim to be fully open and collaborative: open documents (CC-BY-3.0 in a public Google Docs collection: http://goo.gl/8I9Gc), open process (join our discussion list, participate in our calls [announced on the list], http://groups.google.com/group/learningregistry), open metadata and paradata (CC-BY-3.0), open source (Apache 2.0, code @ http://git.learningregistry.org/, project tracking @ http://tracker.learningregistry.org/), Open Spec (OWF, draft Spec @ http://goo.gl/2Cf3L). We’re working with a number of Governmental, NGO and commercial organizations worldwide. An initial public beta network is planned for September 2011; interested parties can connect to the testbed in April.

Try it @ OER Hackday.

We’re coming to Manchester. We have a working infrastructure with several operational nodes, basic installers, functioning core APIs and basic SWORD and OAI-PMH integration. We want to test our baseline and our other assumptions. We are interested in connecting to various sources (testing our APIs) and building sufficient data to try “interesting things”. We want to understand what value-added APIs are useful, explore doing things with the paradata timeline and mashup the Learning Registry with other tools (e.g., we’re exploring IndexTank as an external search index). Our rule of thumb is that it should take at most two hours to understand an API and less than a day to build something useful with it. Are we on track?

About Dan

Daniel R. Rehak, Ph.D., is Senior Technical Advisor, Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative (ADL) where he provides technical expertise in the areas of systems design, information management and architecture, with emphasis on learning and training technologies. He provides technical leadership to the DoD for the development of the Learning Registry.

Welcome to OtherVoices

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Other Voices is the JISC CETIS guest blog. It gives us a chance to invite others to join the conversation and bring their perspective and expertise to our discussions.

We may not always agree with everything guest bloggers write but we think they are worth listening to and consider it important to ensure they are part of the conversation.