Title: XCRI Implementation Models (XIM)
Link: Project website, JISC website page
Download resource: Final report, PDFDescription:
The project aimed to produce a set of good practice models for implementation of XCRI-CAP, so that Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and others could use the outputs for their own implementations. The project reviewed all current implementations and projects relating to the XCRI information model, together with existing material about institutional courses information management systems, in order to draw up characteristics of institutions, to identify relevant problems and solutions. The main project outcome was to provide practical solutions to facilitate the exchange and re-use of course advertising information for take up by HEIs and others. A subsidiary outcome (still to be completed) was a Service Usage Model or Service Genre for submission to the e-Framework.
Information was gathered from previous XCRI projects, from past and additional institutional visits, and from contact with other XCRI practitioners from HEIs, FEIs and data collecting organisations.
The project developed a method, based loosely on process improvement models, for characterising the attributes of an institution as a way of assessing its ‘XCRI readiness’. Thirteen different attributes were defined, ranging from the number of courses, through data structures, to availability of resources; each one having a defined scale from 0 to 4. Two templates, one textual and the other graphical, were designed and field tested, so that they could be used by other practitioners in future. The templates were validated by operational use and by review by XCRI and course information experts. Use of this method permitted the project to draw up visual representations of the XCRI readiness of ten institutions to illustrate issues. In addition a set of minimum characteristics for XCRI readiness was developed for comparative purposes.
Tags: JISC project, XIM, implementation models, support