Tom Franklin Franklin Consulting Tom@franklin-consulting.co.uk Lessons from SWaNI Tom Franklin Franklin Consulting Tom@franklin-consulting.co.uk

SWaNI Project

Its all about MLEs at the time of this diagram that we are no longer allowed to use!

I wont be talking about the projects that used LIP for Personal Development Planning Nor the project that looked at reusable learning objects

Student Information Use of Welsh Attainment Lifelong learning log

Just for interest where (approximately) the colleges are located

Three ways to assemble systems Buy a ready made system that sort of meets your needs Doesn’t quite fit the space that it is intended for Inflexible Probably expensive to buy and implement Go to Ikea and get some ready made stuff that you assemble Doesn’t quite fit the space either Cheap and possibly cheerful May give problems putting it all together Custom build Fits perfectly Expensive May be problems when you want to move it

DITA What systems were being linked together VLEs (on the right) Teknical Skillnet – from SUfI WebCT LearnWise SRS EBS from FD Learning Unit-e from Capita SITS Dita from Capita QL Systems from Distinction Systems (formerly Microcompass)

Projects were asked to develop use cases Use case has 3 parts: The user action The system response Responses to errors

An example from Coleg Menai who produced 20 use cases in all. In theory these should inform the development work and ensure that the system meets user needs, however due to the nature of the projects it is not clear that this happened, and if they are not done at the beginning they are certainly capable of becomign post-hoc rationalisations

Having developed the use cases it becomes clear which systems need to share data for what purposes. This may have seemed obvious beforehand, but it may become much clearer that other systems are also involved. For instance, there may be authentication or authorisation being carried out via a third system which had not been considered beforehand.

Map the data between systems. This is worth looking at in a little detail, and while I will not take you through the next two slides box by box we do need to look at them.

Key points to note here are: Objectives 1.             Courses held within the VLE to be populated with students using MIS records a.      Authentication of learners b.      Validation of learners c.      Passing of biographical and course related data to Learnwise d.      Mapping of course codes to Learnwise courses/topics 2.             Student achievements returned from the VLE to the MIS records 3.             Information about student status (i.e. active/withdrawn) transferred between MLE components 4.             Use biographical information stored by MIS to modify the interface options presented to the learner 5.             Transfer information from the VLE to MIS about the use of learning materials and assessments in the medium of Welsh (important for drawing down funding related to Welsh language delivery) 2 Transfer route A               Transfer from QLS to Learnwise (one-way) via the DTC; B              Transfer from QLS into Learnwise, editable by student/tutor and passed back to QLS via the DTC; C              Transfer from QLS to Learnwise, editable by tutor and passed back to QLS via the DTC Key points to note here are: Several different routes for moving data as shown in yellow Lots of objectives (8 listed here) shown in pink Mapping not perfect an example shown in blue

Vocabularies do not map across systems note: Enterprise only has two status QLS and learnwise each have one that does not map across to the ofher Continuing not = to In progress

So many standards and specifications to choose from - yipee

Stunningl, they all managed to use IMS

BUT

Who used which spec 5 colleges use to different specs And 3 versions of 1 spec

All projects had intended to be nice and clean and use soap (Simple Object Access Protocol). By the official end of the projects NONE of the projects had SOAP working. Soap what happened?

Several vendors did not produce valid XML Or did not comply with the Application profile

Tom Franklin Franklin Consulting Tom@franklin-consulting.co.uk Lessons from SWaNI Tom Franklin Franklin Consulting Tom@franklin-consulting.co.uk