13 th July 2012 Course Data Online Meeting

1. 13th July 2012 Course Data Online Meeting Briefing session for Stage 2 projects of the Course Data Programme • Start time: 2 pm and will be recorded. Participant Link: https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=2009077&password=M.1832E0E97E69EBCEB5589E1840DD57 • Recordings (Table): https://sas.elluminate.com/mrtbl?suid=M.8DFF8EDDAF0A51ED5779603A95CEA8&sid=2009077 Run the Audio Set-up. You need a headset and microphone. Don’t use built-in to laptops or webcams microphones or speakers, as this causes echoing Download a participant's guide to Blackboard Collaborate3

2. How the session will work: audio • Only use your microphone when guided by a moderator • To ask a question, • Raise your virtual hand • When invited to, click on the TALK button in AUDIO and VIDEO box to speak, click again/off when finished speaking – to prevent echo • Or, type your question into the chat box and the moderators will ask it for you • When asked to respond to poll, use the tick/cross to indicate ‘yes’ or ‘no’ • Feel free to use the emoticons available

3. Who are we? • Ruth Drysdale JISC Programme manager • Rob Englebright JISC Tech Prog manager • Verena Weigert JISC PSO • Janette Hillicks JISC infoNet • Sandra Winfield Support Team PM • Alan Paull Technical Support • Kirstie Coolin Technical Support • Gill Ferrell Synthesis consultant • George Dafoulas Middlesex University

4. What you can expect in this briefing • Stage 2 Progress and Budget Report feedback feedback/summary • Ideas on evaluating impact • Update on Vocabularies and Validator • Hear from a few projects • Future meetings, including project led assemblies • Opportunity to ask questions through out • Ability to listen again to the presentation (as it’s recorded). http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/coursedata/stage2.aspx

5. #coursedata Any questions? • Asking a question • Raise your virtual hand • When invited to, click on the talk button to speak • Click on the talk button again when you have finished • Or, type your question into the chat box

6. Progress and Budget Sheet Reports feedback • Budget • People • Project Staffing Issues – delay in appointment, long term sick, maternity, left the job, workload reprioritised, redeployed etc • Stakeholder engagement successes but also issues • Effective Change Manage • Not just changing the process or IT system, but changing behaviour and culture

7. Progress and Budget Sheet Reports feedback • Most projects emphasised the importance of understanding the course information lifecycle and engaging those stakeholders in the project. • Some had anticipated this but others seemed to have discovered its importance in practice. They see these lifecycle/data prep concerns as important issues to address whereas, the technical task of publishing XCRI-CAP feeds was less problematic:- “One of the key lessons we have learnt is that it is important to ensure that we take a holistic view of the course information process. We recognise that it would be relatively simple to develop a system to produce an XCRI-CAP feed. However, to develop an effective and efficient system, which reduces duplication of data and data entry while aligning with the wider course information life cycle is more challenging.” • In some cases the peculiarities of the processes revealed by lifecycle mapping, meant significant changes had to be made to the project plans. OK to change the route as long as destination is the same!

8. Progress and Budget Sheet Reports feedback • In several cases there was a timeliness to the project because similar issues were being addressed by high level management for the KIS. Institutions are likely to be reviewing their provision, requirements for course development and business processes across the institution to ensure they are effective and efficient. This change activity impacts on the course information lifecycle and provides opportunities for using XCRI and XCRI-CAP. • Due to the existence of overlapping strands of work, several projects had made efforts to be included “in the loop” so they could contribute where XCRI-CAP work was relevant and so several projects have been incorporated into their institution wide change programme.

9. Progress to date • CPD courses can be difficult to deal with because of the (often) ad hoc and variable processes followed by different institutional entities. If vocational, academics perceived that they had specific target audiences, so it wasn’t necessary to go through central marketing. • There is a perceived need for an analysis and clarification of the relationship between the XCRI-CAP specification and the KIS and HEAR initiatives • HEAR Final Report – HEA website as single source for resources soon • HEAR mapping work between the Guidance document and Technical spec • KIS work progressing, don’t forget early evaluation of the institutional experience. This information should also be useful information to go into your project reports.

10. Key Themes from Reports • Diversity of stakeholders Who are you working with? A Comms/Marketing/Web Team B IT/MIS C Registry/Student Records D Admissions E CPD/Business Development/KT

11. Key Themes from Reports • Diversity of stakeholders Who are you working with? A Strategic Planning B Student Support C Academics D International Development E Quality Assurance

12. Key Themes from Reports • Change to admin systems Are you undergoing systems replacement/development? A Student Record System B CMS C Website D Course Management System E All of the above

13. Key Themes from Reports • Business Process Change Are you changing any processes/policies? A Course/Module validation/approval/specification B Data management C Website updating D Other E Too early to say

14. Evaluation • Do you have an evaluation plan? • Have you identified appropriate sources of evidence?

15. Evaluation Evaluation Question Types of Evidence Plan/actual spend Milestones being met Meetings/feedback Plan/PID documents Logs/visits/feedback • On time/budget? • On scope? • Stakeholders engaged? • Achievement of aims? • Outputs being used

16. Evaluation So What?

17. Benefits/Impact • What has actually changed? Systems/Processes/Culture/Behaviour/Attitudes/Policy • What are the benefits? Efficiency/Effectiveness/Education/Satisfaction/Growth • How will it be sustained?

18. a few Project Quotes ... Greenwich University ‘Particularly helpful has also been the examples of other universities’ feeds currently included in the aggregator ‘The sooner a project attempts to produce and validate an XML through the validator at http://validator.xcri.co.uk/ the quicker one gets a better understanding of what you need to achieve, and how achievable production of a feed will be. It is important that simple and complex example courses are mapped into the XML file. A simple one (i.e. a course with one presentation) is useful for the practice and easier to get a file which validates. A complex example (a course with many presentations/venues/etc) will inform you about the data you need to store, and will help identify elements you may have discounted initially with the simple example’.

19. a few Project Validator questions • Vocabularies and Validator issues raised in Progress reports • Validator Business rules: Good or too restricting ? • Sheffield University use JACS codes instead of UCAS codes Extending XCRI-CAP schema? How do institutions intend to incorporate other necessary course Information not included in the XCRI feed. Project quote on Vocabularies The main technical problem so far is that the data dictionary does not allow for a Study Mode of ‘Sandwich’. In the external feed, this is can be handled by mentioning the Sandwich option under Attendance Mode, but it presents more serious problems for our own internal use of the data (which needs separate Presentation of the sandwich version of programmes). We anticipate that we may come across other items that we need internally but which are not available within XCRI-CAP. We anticipate solving this by having a slightly wider internal feed, which is then cut down to an XCRI-CAP compliant external feed.

20. a few Project Validator questions • Leeds Met Question: How other institutions intend to review data quality and keep this at a high standard ? And how do institutions intend to incorporate other necessary course Information not included in the XCRI-CAP feed? • Review how we can incorporate matters related to employability (including the engagement of employers) within the project ? • The Courtauld Institute of Art: • Common vocabulary for a ‘creative’ language • To ensure that art, design, media and performance courses are appropriately referenced with the aggregators, and meet the specific requirements of creative courses • Opportunities for collaborative training would be warmly welcomed

21. Course Data Projects • University of East of London • Loughborough University • Kent University • Plymouth College of Arts • Brunel University

22. UEL JISC Course Data Project • Project Aim - Significant process improvements • Contracted an independent BA to map our processes & identify user requirements • Outcomes from BA – Identified inefficient processes & difficult to repurpose for other uses • Currently using the BA process maps and user requirements to inform spec for procuring SITS Curriculum Management module • Integrate our BI Programme Costing model into SITS module

23. Open Course Data at Loughborough University http://open.lboro.ac.uk

24. Open.Lboro

25. Open Course Data project Joint effort from Academic Registry, Marketing and Communications and IT Services. Exploring whether Terminal Four Site Manager CMS can be canonical source of course marketing information. Looking at process simplification more generally.

26. Use of Graduate Interns Process review and documentation. • New to processes (open to new ideas) • Cost • Short term Future plans: • Testing and Quality Assurance • Cover other tasks enabling core staff to participate in the project

27. Data Mapping

28. Site Manager CMS

29. Site Manager CMS

30. Formatting as CSV

31. Baby Steps

32. Next Steps Maintain prospectus information locally in Site Manager. Investigate whether we can output from Site Manager directly as XML. Currently working with Terminal Four.

33. Next Steps

34. Excerpt from the Project PlanImproving administration/data entry system Developing a new Programmes Factory • Improve the look and feel of the system. Is it currently not very slick and is not deemed good enough to be rolled out more widely to schools • Allow direct editing by schools with a review/approval facility for admins • Improve the editing interface for multiple academic years, so that editors can work both on the current courses and next year's courses at the same time. • Change web publishing workflow to allow publishing directly to the web server.

35. Ground work • Commitment at a senior level from all stakeholder groups • Identifying a customer representative/product owner and ensuring they can commit sufficient time to the project • Regular feedback/reviews sessions with customer – incremental development • User access to prototype at an early stage • Matching XCRI data fields with Programme Factory fields

36. Developers invested a lot of time in evaluating platforms and looking at development choices: • enhance current system (Drupal); • buy in third party solution; • build bespoke application from the ground up. • Settled on a new PHP application using the Laravel framework • Code is open source (Git) • Iterative development with load testing at each stage

37. Programmes Factory screenshots

38. Programmes Factory screenshots

39. Programmes Factory screenshots

40. Programmes Factory screenshots

41. Content approval/compliance EMS Publishing Review by admin Approved Requires further editing Schools Edit/Create content On-line prospectus Web page

42. JISCMaking the most of Course Information Project Elaine Garcia & Kerry Dungay egarcia@plymouthart.ac.ukkdungay@plymouthart.ac.uk

43. Stage 2 – Dissemination of Research from Stage 1 • Survey included 29 Questions designed from pilot open ended question • 2 week window to respond • Utilised survey monkey • 94 HE Students responded • 29 FE Students responded • Questions such as….. When you first thought about choosing a course how important were the following factors to you……

44. First place students looked

45. When first thinking about choosing a course, factors that were important. FE Students HE Students Almost 100% of respondents said that course content and facilities and resources were very important Atmosphere and career related issues were also very important • The most important factor was course content • Other important factors were facilities and resources, atmosphere and career related issues • No one found course content unimportant

46. Location, Location, Location FE Students HE Students

47. Changing my mind…. • HE STUDENTS o Yes 33% o No 67% Have any of the factors that you thought were important / unimportant changed as you are getting closer to making a decision about where and what you wanted to study next? • FE STUDENTS o Yes 31% o No 69%

48. What changed? FE Students HE Students Tutors and course content became more important. Moving away and reputation became less important • Costs and course tutors became a more important factor

49. I needed to know about... HE Students • 79% said they did not need more information • Extra information on module information was the highest on the information agenda When you have been thinking about a course is there any information that you would have liked to have had relating to the course or institution that you have been unable to access so far? FE Students • 72% said they did not need more information. • Types of information required included: o Financial o Learning outcomes o Hours spent with staff and self study

50. Who’s opinion really matters? FE Students HE Students 94% said that previous students’ (not on same course) opinion was fairly important 83% said that parents were fairly important Students’ opinions already on the course were also rated as important • Almost half the respondents place importance on the opinion of their parents • Careers advisor opinion was largely fairly important • Followed by girlfriend/partner/ boyfriend