The XCRI Support Project

March sees the end of the JISC-funded XCRI Support Project as it signs off leaving the development of the XCRI (eXchanging Course Related Information) specification for sharing (and advertising) course information looking very healthy indeed.

The support project picked up where the original XCRI Reference Model project left off. Having identified the marketing and syndication of course descriptions as a significant opportunity for innovation – due to the general practice in this area being one of huge efforts around re-typing of information to accommodate various different systems, sites and services…then to have that information maintained separately in various places – the XCRI Reference Model project mapped out the spaces of course management, curriculum development and course marketing and provided the community with a common standard for exchanging course related information. This would streamline approaches to the syndication of such information and give us the benefits of cost savings when it comes to collecting and managing the data and opens up the opportunities for a more sustainable approach to lifelong learning services that rely on course information from learning providers. (more…)

Draft Reports / Final Reports

For those of you that are approaching the end of the project, your draft and final reports will soon be due. Make sure you get them to your nominated support project person in plenty of time for feedback. The template on the JISC website (here) is an excellent template, but you may find that some headings are not applicable and therefore it should be seen as a guide rather than prescriptive. Focus on the outputs and the learning that will be transferable to other HEIs.

Articulate in such a way as to show the benefits of the project, e.g. “as a result of implementing xxx, institutions will be able to save £xxx” or “because of this of this project there have been the following direct impact on xxx”. Currently I am working with the OUT team on some revised headings for the completion report and I will disseminate this in the near future.

Conferences

If you are presenting at a conference about your work, please send me the details (conference title, paper/session title, dates). This is so I get a picture of where we are being discussed and to look at where we could be in the future (l.phipps@jisc.ac.uk).

Senior Management videos

Is your SMT (PVC etc) involved or aware of the project? Are they impressed? It would be useful to see a few short video clips of them praising the work of the project and discussing the benefits of the project to the institution, especially as you should be nearing completion. If you can get these videos (lasting no more than 90 seconds – 2 minutes) I will get them appended to the project pages on the website.

And Finally

I just wanted to say thanks for the great participation that you gave at the programme meeting and for the high quality of benefits and products that were on show. As well as seeing this for myself at the meeting, I have also been hearing good things at various JISC meetings and from other institutions as I work on other programmes and visit senior staff elsewhere.

Lawrie Phipps

This session takes place on 4 November and will share a number of experiences of using PebblePad eportfolio at the University of Wolverhampton. Julie Hughes will give an in-depth practitioner perspective from the School of Education and will share numerous success stories of engaged communities of learners who are established and sustained through the use of eportfolio and blogs. Emma Purnell will share institutional perspectives, exploring strategy drivers and staff engagement and will give an overview of successes and challenges of providing support, encouraging community and addressing sustainability and scalability issues at institutional level. (more…)

On 30th September 2009 the University of East Anglia, Norwich hosted a workshop assembly with counterparts from the HE/FE community to discuss the options of shared services and the feasibility of regionally hosted data centres.

The two key objectives for the day were:

• To produce a framework which could be used by other institutions who are considering offering a hosted shared data centre solution.
• A business case for the University of East Anglia to offer a hosted shared data centre solution.

(more…)

Several Institutional Innovation projects presented at ALT-C 2009 including TELSTAR, ITS4SEA, and EdShare. Interestingly, of the phase 2 projects, TELSTAR, which had initial problems recruiting staff and is consequently one of the least advanced, was the only one to present; ITS4SEA and EdSpace are phase 1 projects.

TELSTAR reported on the concept underlying their project –to develop a way of porting essential citation data across the three main workspaces used for teaching and learning at the Open University: a course authoring tool, the moodle-based course website, and an e-portfolio platform. Hopefully the interest in their session will have enabled them to make links with other institutions that they might collaborate with in developing benefits realisation ideas. (more…)

Here is information about two conferences coming up very soon which may interest you.

Handheld Learning Conference 5-7 October, London

The Handheld Learning Conference is the world’s leading event about learning using mobile and inexpensive access technologies, attended by more than 1,500 international delegates.
http://www.circlespace.net/meeting.aspx?mid=1483&ln=2

ELESIG Digital Literacies Symposium 7 October, Birmingham

The HEA funded ELESIG is a growing community of researchers and practitioners involved in investigations and evaluations of learners’ experiences of e-learning. ELESIG is now organising its seventh face to face symposium, sponsored by JISC with contributions from a number of colleagues who have been researching the skills of the digital learner. More information from the ELESIG ning site http://elesig.ning.com/

JISC has funded 14 Workshops and Seminars exploring some of the achievements and challenges in Digitisation and e-Content. Covering a wide range of challenging and cutting-edge developments within digitisation these workshops address questions as diverse as visualising climate change data to digital performance, and issues around robot digitisation technology to Geographical Information Systems in history and heritage.

Here is a list of the Workshops, and where available, links to further information:
(more…)