Academic Programme Management System

Allister Homes Case Study

I’ll try to keep this as much to the point as I can whilst giving you a good overview of the APMS project so far.

The University indicated that a project for an academic programme management system (which I’ll shorten to APMS) should begin. A Sponsor for the project, a senior University manager with a vested interest, was found (the University Registrar) and a Project Manager appointed (me!). Draft Business Case and Project Initiation Documents were written and a project board formed to steer the project.

I spent time with various parts of Registry to better understand and document the processes behind managing curricula and a team of us spent quite some time working out what was needed from a system and compiled a requirements specification. An Invitation to Tender (ITT) was written that included the requirements specification, and published so that potential suppliers could tender for the system.  The team reviewed the tenders received, but found that the costs exceeded the EU threshold for public sector procurement. This meant the Invitation to Tender must follow the EU tender process and be advertised through the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU).

The ITT was revised and submitted through the OJEU, and the documentation is available to download at the bottom of this post.  Several companies submitted tenders, and an evaluation panel reviewed tenders, saw demonstrations and after scoring each solution made a recommendation to select a particular supplier, which was accepted by the project board. There was a gateway review by the SMT to give the final go-ahead. After a period of contract negotiation, the contracts were signed.

The contract has been awarded to Worktribe Ltd, and work on delivering the system started in earnest in January.

In the meantime, the University undertook the first stage of the JISC project about making the most of course information, and was successful in its bid for stage two. The work will build on what we are putting in place in the APMS project to create examples of how the data can be used in other ways, including generating feeds for using curriculum data elsewhere.

The first workshop with the University project team and Worktribe was held in January, and was the first chance for both sides to get stuck in to the work together. A small group of us then spent another day with Worktribe in early February, going through the progress they’ve made so far on the system and talking through some more of the detail. It’s encouraging being able to see the software in action so early, though we have to remember there is a long way to go yet and a lot of work to be done.

We had some debate, both internally and with Worktribe, over the best approach to take for collating all the information that needs to go into the system ahead of the system being finished. The main data/information stores currently are:

  • The student management system, Agresso Students (formerly known as QLS), which holds programme and module structures at static (not related to year or session) and sessional level.
  • Definitive programme and module specifications, held in PDF/Word documents.

The information from Agresso Students, although in a database structure, only contains a small proportion of what needs to go into the APMS. The definitive documents hold a lot more information (but not necessarily all that is in the student management) but are obviously not in a format that can be imported into a database.

We need to start compiling and preparing all the data ready to go into the APMS now because it will take quite some time to do, and there simply isn’t enough time to wait until the system is finished and then start populating it manually. One idea was building a spreadsheet and gradually populating it with everything needed. This approach presents a number of difficulties though:

  • The data is more complex than a simple spreadsheet allows for.
  • Some fields contain large quantities of text; this is not easy to view or manipulate in a spreadsheet.
  • There would be a lot of columns and a lot of rows, making the spreadsheet difficult to manage.

Another option was to enter (type, copy/paste etc) the information directly into an unfinished implementation of the system.  The system could then be upgraded to eventually become the final version, or the information ported to a different version at the end. This approach means not having to worry about the format of the data or how to import it, and also gives valuable experience to those doing the work about how the system works (as well as potentially flagging any bugs early). It presents some challenges, though, too, including the need to make the system as ready as possible for real data; making sure it is not used as a test system, and real date being changed; how to cope with late changes in design once data has been input.

Ultimately, we all agreed that as soon as all the fields for information we think we need to capture are set up in the system, and the structure is reasonably stable, Worktribe will create an instance especially for us to start populating with real data. This will be carefully controlled to avoid being used as a test system! Although we all accept that we might need to make some more changes yet, and some extra information might be needed, it should be a reasonably final system in term of data.

Most recently, our small group met with Worktribe again late February to review the work that has been done for the first development round and prepare for the next. The progress so far is very positive. We have also been making ample use of the issue tracker, used to report bugs, ask questions or request changes to Worktribe.

We’re approaching some of the more challenging aspects at the moment – at least for Worktribe who have to develop it! In particular, the next phase includes:

  • Working out how to create new versions of programmes and modules when making modifications, rolling over to a new academic year or revalidating.
  • Making sure permissions are set so that people can access what they need to, but not change anything they shouldn’t. In parallel with this is making sure that throughout the approval and validation process for a programme (managed with a ‘workflow’ in the system), information can be changed at the appropriate time but also locked once certain stages.

Work is also taking place on the integration between Agresso Students and the Worktribe APMS. Following a day that Matt, Worktribe’s technical director, spent with us a couple of weeks ago, Worktribe are now working on how to extract the student, enrolment and assessment information from Agresso Students needed to generate diploma supplements.  Experimentation with a utility called Data Translation Centre (DTC) built into Agresso Students has also revealed a supported method of importing curriculum information into it.  DTC is a tool for importing data from third-party sources into Agresso Students without need to know the structures of the database and with checks in place to ensure the data is valid for the system and will not cause any problems.

Downloads:

Creating *Valid* Dummy Data

Jamie Mahoney Data, KIS, XCRI , , , ,

As this project is ‘piggybacking’ off another project being carried out in the university, we will be taking most of our data from another system that is in the process of being implemented. As such, it has been necessary to create some dummy datasets so that I can continue with this project while the other system is being implemented. Using data that has been taken from various sources, I have been able to create dummy data that resembles the data that will be made available through KIS and the XCRI-CAP feed.

At this stage, the data that I am dealing with focuses around 5 awards offered at the university, rather than trying to encompass every award currently offered. To try and get a grasp of how this information is presented in different departments and areas of the university, I have selected a range of awards, rather than focus on a specific school or college within the university. Hopefully this will mean that there won’t be too many surprises when I can get all of the ‘real’ data.

As part of the process of validating the data that I have collected, I’ve been using Craig Hawker’s XCRI-CAP 1.2 validator, which has proved invaluable in ensuring that the ‘test’ XCRI feed that I’ve been working with is actually valid, again reducing the amount of surprises I should get when I can use the full XCRI feed being made available by the university.

On top of the data being made available through the KIS and XCRI feed, the implementation of a new ‘Academic Programme Management System’ means that I should be able to easily get data regarding the modules/units that make up each of the courses offered by the university. This, in combination with the data available in the KIS and XCRI, should be more than enough data to produce services that are useful to students and present the information in meaningful ways.

Next step, the APIs to get at the data and documentation!!!!!!!

Key Information Sets (KIS) – A Summary!

Jamie Mahoney Data, KIS

One of the collections of data that is going to become available during the course of this project is the Key Information Sets (KIS) data. To quote HEFCE:

Key Information Sets are comparable sets of standardised information about undergraduate courses. They are designed to meet the information needs of prospective students and will be published ‘in context’ on the web-sites of universities and colleges.

As part of our wider work with partner organisations in response to the increasing importance of information about higher education, universities and colleges will be expected to publish these information sets on their web-sites from September 2012.

Students will be able to access facts and figures about undergraduate courses that will be drawn from a range of sources, including the NSS, DLHE and institutions. Some of these facts and figures will centre around these topics: student satisfaction,  course information, salary figures for graduates, cost of accommodation, fees etc. With such a wide range of data being provided by such a wide range of institutions, there really is going to be a lot of data for developers to utilise to provide services.

A very quick summary of what data is used by the KIS and where it is taken from, can be downloaded from the HEFCE site, along with a mock-up of how the KIS data may be presented (in the form of a widget) on institution’s websites. For those of you who want to read about the KIS in detail, are a glutton for punishment or need to read it, there’s a handy 108 page document which can also be downloaded. As part of the process of getting to grips with exactly what data will be available from the KIS, I’ve created a handy summary, which details the data available in the KIS, but summarises it down from 108 pages to a spreadsheet that is just a couple of pages long, which is available as a Google doc here. Some of the Google doc relates specifically to the University of Lincoln, but the main summary of the KIS data should be useful to anybody in a similar situation to myself. Obviously the summary is not intended to be a complete view of the KIS , so please don’t regard the summary I have created as ‘The Definitive Guide to KIS’, but rather a snapshot of just what might be available.

In terms of when this data *should* be submitted by institutions and when it *might* be available, I’ve taken the following table from HESA:

Date Action
June 2011 Provision of information about higher education: Outcomes of consultation and next steps, published by HEFCE, UUK and GuildHE (HEFCE 2011/18).
September 2011 Publication of technical guidance available on HESA web-site.
December 2011 Publication of updated technical guidance available on HESA web-site.
22 February/1 March 2012 HESA training seminars see HESA training.
February/March 2012 Submission system opens and validation kits issued for KISs to be published in September 2012. Institutions will have until August 2012 to finalise their data. The system will remain open throughout this period to allow institutions to manage their workloads and undertake quality assurance work.
March 2012 Publication of final update to technical guidance available HESA web-site.
July 2012 NSS 2012 and DLHE 2012 (C10018) data added by HEFCE to KIS submissions.
August 2012 Final deadline for submission of KIS data and sign off by head of institution. Institutions will be able to preview their full KIS data at this point.
September 2012 Institutions preview new official web-site with KIS and associated widgets.
New official web-site goes live; Unistats web-site closes.
KIS widgets to be embedded and visible on all institutional web-sites.
UCAS to include KIS data into course search web-site.
October 2012 KIS system re-opens for updates to September 2012 KIS, where necessary, for example to confirm fee information. Updates will be routinely published via the KIS widgets and official web-site.

 

Well, I hope that this summary of KIS is helpful! I’ll be posting something about XCRI-CAP soon.

Greetings!

Jamie Mahoney General ,

After being appointed as the web developer for the ON Course project on the 1st of  February, I thought it was about time that I wrote a blog post to introduce myself, so here goes!

For the past 6 months I’ve been working as a Web Developer Intern at the University of Lincoln, working on lots of different things, including open data visualisations and helping to organise the DevXS conference held in November 2011. During this time I’ve also been writing a blog, ‘Ramblings of a Developer’, documenting my work during the internship, discussing events and opportunities in the world of technology, as well as general ramblings or rants.    One of my main interests is open data, which is what makes this project exciting, I’ll be developing useful services and fun visualisations around new collection of open data sets for a full year!

The purpose of this blog is to document the steps that we take and the processes we go through during the course of this project over the next 12 months. The next couple of posts will deal with how I’ve been getting my head around the multitude of data sources that will be being made available over the next few months. Stay tuned!