Part-time courses at the University of West London are an area of success and further development is planned, in particular for postgraduate courses. Our part-time courses have provided students with opportunities to improve their career prospect while being in employment, for example through using Saturday delivery. The aim of the LUCI project is to provide students with all the information necessary for making well-informed decisions on their choice of course. The project will mainly focus on part-time courses, however the XCRI-CAP feed will be generated for our full-time courses as well.
In this project, as well as providing our course data in XCRI_CAP format, we also aim to provide additional course data together with associated peripheral information such as transport, location, labour market, finance and learning resources, destination leaver employment data, placement or internship data etc. in a linked data format. Linked data technology represents emerging practice in the interconnect of information on the web. The project will investigate and prototype the implementation of technologies and practices for exposing and linking course data for students as well as surveying students to understand their data needs or desires.
The institutional investigation has so far shown that the all course data is held in one single database and the mapping to the XCRI-CAP items can be easily supported. However the creation of this data requires the manual entry of the data at different stages of the process; for example, when a new course has been approved by the school, the course details will be sent to different parties (admissions, marketing, registrar) by email before the course gets created in the database. The project will look to provide automated support for activities related to course data creation in order to improve the efficiency of the process and improve the integrity of the data.
The project will adopt an Enterprise Architecture (EA) approach to review the different sources, processes, and systems that are related to course information. We will build on the models that we started in stage 1 of this project.