The rare occasions I’ve looked to the XCRI feed as a possible source of information about eg how courses relate to each, or to qualifications, it’s not been relevant. And I know that’s not what it was originally intended for…;-)

However, there are other issues with it eg if the use case was to feed an aggregating course choice site, such as the amount of unstructured free text and the lack of identifiable *data* points that could be used in a third party, referral generating site (which might typically be expected to offer a *normalised* view over course data from different institutions. As it stands, such a site would have to scrape the XCRI feed elements to try and extract data points.)

There are also problems with the XCRI feed simply from the point of view of syndicating marketing produced course info. For example, I can offer course choice tools or qualification pathway modelling because I can’t (even with effort) work out what courses are associated with what qualifications. Aside from that is a lack of business model – if I as a third party service am going to syndicate course descriptions as a way of generating referrals back to the OU site, I might expect to be able to add in affiliate or tracking codes so you can pay me for leads generated ;-)

Out of interest, do you have any examples of how the OU XCRI feed has actually be used/consumed *anywhere*, and how much to date has been invested in producing the feed?;-)

However, to be more positive, we’re due to update the feed to XCRI-CAP 1.2 in the near future. This should enable a lot more flexibility (and additional data), and has much better defined data content. I don’t see any reason why we couldn’t add in module data of some sort – titles and credits at least ought to be possible. It depends on the technicalities of where that data is stored, and any political sensitivities about publishing it (the latter ought to be small beer).

Alan
alan@alanpaull.co.uk