Nice post, though!

The JISC call doesn’t fit in with the KIS timeline – that’s not explicit or implicit, as far as I know. The two initiatives have separate masters and were launched with separate objectives. I, and others, have been trying to link them together, with varying degrees of success.

The KIS data and, what might be called ‘normal’ XCRI-CAP data, are different. The latter is primarily text-based descriptive data of the course content variety, whereas KIS data is primarily statistical and numerical. Pricing related information might be common to both sets in the future – with so little variation in HE fees in the past, it hasn’t been an issue in XCRI-CAP data. XCRI-CAP has a cost element for this information – KIS *may* be more sophisticated, but it’s a complicated area, owing to bursaries, scholarships, and so on.

“…if the information was openly licensed.” Indeed so.

“to what extent will it be possible to JOIN the two data sets (that is, how will we be able to link XCRI-CAP and KIS data? Via HEI+coursecode keys, presumably?).” UCAS course codes are poor course identifiers. In the XCRI-CAP standard we encourage institutions to use permanent course URIs. It would be useful if the KIS also used the same URIs.

The context of JISC’s proof-of-concept aggregator is that the call refers specifically to part-time, online / distance learning and CPD courses, rather than “UCAS courses” (UG FT). These course types are also relatively poorly covered by other third party services such as Hotcourses (though the OU courses are there of course).

“If there is such pent-up demand for aggregated course discovery services, then they should also be able to run as commercial services?” On the contrary, recently we’ve seen the loss of several aggregator services, and the reduction in the covering of the old National Learning Directory. However, we also add in the KIS (which is new) and the enhanced capability offered by linked data. It seems likely, to me, that we’ll get new services sprouting up, as long as the data is open.

“a comprehensive qualifcation catologue across the UK. UCAS do have this data, and they do sell it.” Well, in fact UCAS doesn’t have a comprehensive qualification catalogue – they have a database of course entry points. And at the moment it covers primarily undergraduate full time courses (with some small additions, such as postgrad teacher training). I’m not sure how much UCAS would benefit from more traffic – for applications to courses in the UCAS scheme, applicants are supposed to register at UCAS (and the vast majority do); for applications not in the UCAS scheme, the traffic is irrelevant. Many private universities are UCAS members; the marketing pull of UCAS is such that the vast majority of UK HEIs is in full membership – the OU is an exception for various reasons.

“I’m not sure an incentive is required.. just open access to the data, free in the first instance.” I don’t think there’s a particular incentive. Various XCRI-CAP feeds have been available for years, in particular the OU ones, but few have used them. A major problem may be the lack of a network effect. There’s not much point in being in a tiny network. The JISC call aims to resolve that problem. I totally agree that free and open access to the feeds is essential. Plus a number of people prepared to play with the data and create useful services. We have a group in the East Midlands (led by Kirstie Coolin at University of Nottingham’s Centre for International ePortfolio Development, and including myself) that has produced several joined up services using this type of data, and adding in LMI, jobs, etc, etc. Developing production level services and making it all sustainable is not simple however. Loss of the Lifelong Learning Networks and Aimhigher has severely dented the construction of local and regional networks.

JISC won’t own any of the data, the institutions will. The XCRI-CAP initiative makes no recommendations about copyright. Personally I’d expect every institution to want to make its courses data available freely, but I’ve heard arguments against it (mainly bad ones). So licencing will depend on institutions (as now for courses information on HEI websites).

The focus of the call is on getting institutions to put their data out there. Personally I think we need to also address community needs as well, in particular ‘communities of practice’ that might want data sliced and diced already, so that service construction can be simplified, and quality and consistency of data across feeds can be increased. My own view is that a community of practice could agree (more or less formally) a data specification that HEIs could serve up, possibly through brokers or other mapping and transformation services. My hope is that these will grow up organically – but there’s very little soil for this.

I think you’ve misunderstood the support and synthesis project. It’s a project within the JICS XCRI programme to support the projects and synthesise the project’s issues and lessons learned. It won’t be designed to do anything with data or to design services. With potentially 80 institutional based projects, it’s a way of giving support to those inexperienced with XCRI-CAP or with JISC project methods.

“Projects should allow at least 5 person-days in Stage 1 and 10 person-days in Stage 2.” This means that projects have to allow this amount of time for programme-level activities *in*addition*to* the project work. These are days for liaison with other projects and with the support and synthesis project. I suspect that the rates for these days will be very low.

Alan