MUSKET

The Institutional Innovation Exchange is the JISC Institutional Innovation Programme meeting on 28-29 January 2010, which were held at the Aston University Lakeside Conference Centre in Birmingham. The central focus of this event is identifying and sharing the tangible outputs of the projects. All Phase 2 Institutional Innovation Projects displayed outputs at the “Trade Fair” as well as some Phase 3 Lifelong Learning and Workforce Development projects.

With this event, we discussed MUSKET outputs/ideas with other JISC projects member, for example, “CCLiP SUMMARY OF THE COURSE / EVENT DATA TEMPLATE HEADINGS” from Liverpool John Moores University, we do think  a lot of duplication efforts could be eliminated and we might be able to come up with a useful generic tool with the possible collaboration in future. MUSKET plan to organise an assembly on XCRI, follow it with a webinar.

The TELSTAR project hosted an APEL assembly funded by JISC which focused on current APEL processes and the potential use of e-portfolios to aid and support that process, the assembly were held at University of Central Lancashire on 1st February 2010. Within the assembly, people from different institutions shared what current processes they uses for APEL, and TELSTAR also presented the overview of PebblePad as well as how this package could be used for APEL. MUSKET currently is processing confidential accreditation and APEL documentation in order to retrieve suitable ontologies to be used for the transformation and mapping tools.

The reason is that XML was designed to carry data, not to display data, XML tags are not predefined, and XML is designed to be self-descriptive. Musket Semantic Tool needs to understand the schema and semantics of the XCRI XML files, it will be able to return informative responses and support the route planning. Within this research field, ontology (a) plays a key role for realizing the tool, (b) which provides a common; shared understanding of knowledge in this domain; (c) capture and formalize knowledge by connecting human understanding of symbols with their machine process ability, (d) and through the introduction of ontological reasoning, the approach are suitable for flexibly discovering abilities in using information, that were not specifically designed or intended for the particular use case.

The JISC CETIS conference 2009 held at Aston Business School hosted a workshop on the “Problems with Modelling”. The workshop was organised by Prof. Oleg Liber and participants were mainly from the BCE - CRM projects.
While the workshop was intended to be a more supporting activity on existing modelling practice it became clear that there was quite a chasm between those who wanted to produce models of their systems and those who were already expert practitioners. An introductory modelling activity around the InnovationBase artefacts was productive in helping people identify concepts but appeared less useful in helping delegates understand the relationships between concepts (from the IB perspective).
An earlier part of the workshop was more philosophical and simply pointed out the gulf of complexity in modelling.

In general, there was significant interest from the majority of the delegates that modelling was seen as an important activity but there was a real need for training and guidance of the sort that could be immediately useful. For example, people want to know: Should I use UML Activity Diagrams or BPMN? What about Archimate?

JISC has already done of a lot of work in supporting modelling activity particularly in the use of UML and BPMN so in many ways much existing material could packaged, re-organized and made more easily available. One piece could be a web flow chart that guides people to what models, what tools, what notations….

From a MUSKET perspective, we have an opportunity to be more visible in our modelling activity. We also need to find ways of capturing the modelling process (and not the end product) because that knowledge seems to be more useful then models themselves especially to people new to modelling.

On the 9th of September Mark Stubbs introduced the XCRI standard – providing an overview of the background of the original project and also a summary of the current standardisation activity across Europe.
In the UK, now XCRI-CAP 1.1 is the national e-prospectus standard and is also conformant to the MLO standard in Europe- meta data for learning opportunities.
Mark outlined XCRI contributions to EU activity related to Course descriptions and the resultant emerging EU standardisation artifacts. The resultant European Learner Mobility Information Model is now a standard about to go to approval and is implemented by conformant bindings e.g. XCRI-CAP.
For MUSKET, the XCRI activity presents an interesting opportunity for making further contribution to the validation and evaluation of XCRI. Following a discussion, it is clear that while XCRI-CAP is able to describe academic course offerings there is little or none empirical evidence of how well commercial course provision conforms to the XCRI-CAP model. This is something that MUSKET will explore as we are currently investigating commercial course descriptions from several companies.

JISC - Institutional innovation projects in lifelong learning and workforce development Design

Outline Project Description: The project aims to support employer engagement and workforce planning requirements by providing a CRM based integrated view of employer based, professional and tertiary sector education. The project will deliver models (documented in standards such as UML and BPMN) that will span employer engagement and course information in a unified and integrated manner. 

The project will deliver software tools that will allow non-technical specialists to import MS Word documents containing course descriptions from professional providers, employer specific training and HE and provide semantic markup to enable export into the JISC XCRI-CAP standard beyond simple XML editing. A second tool will support the defining of mappings and relationships between different sources and types of course information to support employer-led learner route planning. The resulting knowledge base will be accessible to employers in our MODNet network through enhanced CRM processes that are employer-knowledge aware. Through our partner QA-IQ Ltd (the UK’s leading provider of professional IT training) we will have access to over 300 courses that will provide us with authentic data to implement be-spoke workforce development to our employer community and beyond. The resulting models of CRM practhe wider HE community.