Alan Paull, Information Management Consultant, APS Ltd More information: 27 March 2009, Leeds, UK XCRI: eXchanging Course Related Information CAP: Course Advertising Profile

 The ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of XCRI  Current position across UK education organisations  National and European drivers  The business case XCRI Knowledge Base:

… the UK standard for describing course marketing information … a way of describing information about learning opportunities … about eXchanging Course Related Information. You can … … save money … … and simplify processes … … by implementing the XCRI-CAP standard… … to produce & distribute your courses information … … better.

structure definitions names specification providersproviders advertise coursescourses courses are presented for enrolment any number of times through presentationspresentations presentations instantiate coursescourses A presentation is a particular instance of the course offered at a particular time and place and is the entity to which learners apply. Alternative names for this type of structure include course offering and course instance.

Learning Provider’s system Information in XCRI-CAP format Course information system(s) Collect once use many times

Learning Provider UCASLLN Web Prospectus Provider re-keys & pushes for each aggregator Course Directory Learning Provider UCASLLN Web Prospectus XML Aggregators Poll & Harvest from Providers Provider publishes XCRI prospectus as well as web prospectus Course Directory

Pre Development of “Big XCRI” and refinement to XCRI-CAP over many projects (5-6 a year since 2005) 2011 Course Data Programme Stage 1 – over 90 institutions submit a proposal for implementing XCRI-CAP Course Data Programme Stage 2 – over 60 institutions accepted and receive funding to produce feeds. Many find that internal systems need extensive revisions before this is possible XCRI-CAP Demonstrator projects produce prototype uses for XCRI-CAP feeds including a Facebook app, validator, CourseExplorer, CareerExplorer and others JISC on hiatus as it restructures. Increasing interest from aggregators Graduate Prospects (Jisc sponsored) project to roll out to PG courses specifically, with tweaks to specification. Growing interest from HEIs and aggregators at the rise of a real world use case.

Informed choice Standards Interoperability Learners primitive data entry Learning provider community Govt depts British Standards Institution, Comité Européen de Normalisation JISC XCRI-enabled services Jobs Careers Qualifications

 Learning Providers  internal efficiency gains through process improvements  cost savings on data input  strategic capability through better understanding of its offerings  quality assurance, standardisation, and consolidation of duplicate offerings  Course Collecting Organisations  availability of more providers  better quality – more frequent update, better coverage, greater accuracy, better integrated ‘supply chain’  new value-added services

Alan Paull, Information Management Consultant, APS Ltd More information: 27 March 2009, Leeds, UK XCRI: eXchanging Course Related Information CAP: Course Advertising Profile