Context
As part
of the JISC Making the Most of Course Information – Stage 2 project Plymouth
College of Art has also been undertaking an additional project to develop an
XCRI-CAP Moodle block demonstrator. The College took the opportunity provided
by the ITT in order to build upon, and make use of, the existing work the
College is undertaking within the Making the Most of Course Information – Stage
2 Project.
As the
XCRI-CAP demonstrator project is now complete, this blog post provides an
outline of the project and our thoughts about how this project worked, how it
will assist the sector and the value that it has brought to the overall JISC
programme.
The
context of the JISC programme was to enable students to be better informed
through the provision of easy to see and comparable information relating to
future study opportunities. This is therefore the perspective from which the Moodle
block project was proposed.
Why the
Moodle block
We decided
to seek to develop the Moodle block as an XCRI-CAP demonstrator because we felt
this would clearly demonstrate to stakeholders within both our own institution
and across the sector the manner in which the XCRI-CAP feed can have value and
can be utilized by institutions in order to display course data in new ways.
The Moodle
block therefore sought to determine relevant learning opportunities available
for students who are on current undergraduate provision at the institution and
who would be seeking to progress to a new course. The Moodle block would
utilise the information contained within the XCRI-CAP feed to enable
personalized suggested “next steps” to be shown to students on their Moodle
home page.
As this
demonstrator was utilising Moodle this resulted in it being a usable
development for a wide range of institutions as any HEI or College utilising Moodle
and developing the XCRI-CAP feed would be able to use the code, uploaded to Github
https://github.com/ULCC/moodle-block_xcrisearch/ as both its
development and the nature of Moodle encourage community development and open
source work.
Project
Outline
This
project was due to be a short and rapid development project. Throughout the
project time delays have caused issues which resulted in the project
overrunning. The development was however able to be shown at the JSC Show and
Tell Event which was held in January 2013 at Aston University Birmingham.
The
objectives of the project were as follows:
· The creation of a Moodle
block which highlights progression opportunities available within the home
institution
· To ensure students are
able to access additional and relevant information from the block if they wish
to find out more information.
· Disseminate the
development of the Moodle block
To
determine which fields from the XCRI-CAP feed should be used
We were
also able to disseminate this development at the UK and Ireland Moodlemoot 2013
which was held in Dublin in February 2013. Through the peer review process this
development was described as:
“something new and cutting-edge….. something
innovative and potentially important for the future.”
Use
Cases
In order
to provide a bit more information about how the Moodle block works the
following case studies are provided. The first use case describes a “sunny use
case” in which everything is available within the block for a perfect result to
be seen. The second case presents a “rainy day case” in which there are no
specific courses for the Moodle block to suggest and how this is handled within
the Moodle block is shown.
The Moodle block is relatively simple to install and use for
developers who are familiar with Moodle already. The Moodle block requires a
unique ID to be present and the same in both the XCRI-CAP feed and Moodle in
order to combine the results from both. The Moodle block then uses the
following fields to make recommendations of the next suitable learning
opportunity.
<Subject>
<Creditlevel>
Both of these fields are mandatory within the XCRI-CAP 1.2 schema
and should contain data in all XCRI-CAP feeds.
If relevant suggestions can not be found the user will be given the
option to use the “course finder” to search the full course database for
opportunities.
In all cases a web URL will be required for students who wish to
access additional information.
Conclusions
and next steps
This
development is now ready to be used by other institutions who may be using
Moodle and the XCRI-CAP feed and interested institutions are invited to
download the code from Github https://github.com/ULCC/moodle-block_xcrisearch/ and try the block for
themselves.
It is
hoped as new institutions begin to create XCRI-CAP feeds that the Moodle block
will be more widely used and will enable students to see relevant learning
opportunities that they may have not been aware of and may wish to find out
more about before deciding to study at the next level.
