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

2. SWaNI Project

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

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

5. Student Information
Use of Welsh
Attainment
Lifelong learning log

6. Just for interest where (approximately) the colleges are located

7. 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

8. 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)

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

10. 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

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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

14. 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

15. So many standards and specifications to choose from - yipee

16. Stunningl, they all managed to use IMS

17. BUT

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

19. 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?

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

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