Managing course information infoKit Project ‘before and after’ quotes Organisation Before After The Arts University at An internal review was carried out which considered the information flow for short The project provided opportunities and resources to enable staff to carry out Bournemouth (AUB) course and MA information: it identified certain shortcomings in our processes and improvements to our data management and infrastructure which would not otherwise work flows which had tended to develop organically. have happened. It has saved considerable staff time and created clear and transparent processes enabling us to develop a feed which is of use internally and ready for external aggregators to use. Aston University The project created a repository of course information to address issues in Aston’s For the first time the course database provides the University with the means to current course data processes. create and maintain a definitive list of its courses across undergraduate, Varying data sources in central departments and Academic Schools postgraduate taught and professional development offerings. A long, manual and resource-intensive process for gathering and For producing the 2015 prospectuses, the ability to query course data directly will verifying course information driven by the production cycles of the printed replace a manual, e-mail-driven stage of information collation, reducing workloads undergraduate and postgraduate prospectuses and (hopefully) errors. The manual transfer of data from the printed prospectus to the University During the course of the project we have raised the importance of course data within website the institution. Through collaborations begun as a result of the course data initiative Limited version control of the collated data we have started the process of linking it to other related initiatives internally. Key Limited access to data once it has been collated stakeholders are now referring to ‘a managed data environment’ that will combine and expose information from various systems. The project has provided a valuable first step on a journey within the University to improve course data quality and course-related systems. Bath Spa University SITS was introduced at BSU in the early 1990’s. Since that time, both the SITS The project outcome we are most proud of is the sense of collegiate engagement database and the institution’s portfolio of courses have broadened and diversified so and willingness to work together for the longer term benefits that are now the shared that we are no longer utilising the functionality to best reflect what we now deliver vision of a wider range of stakeholders and not just the ‘data geeks’ in the project (and what we plan to deliver in the future). The issues include the following: [editor's team. This sense of engagement is not confined to BSU, but also embraces the note BSU goes on to describe issues with the current management of courses that project team’s sense of inclusion in a wider community across the sector. make reporting/querying difficult and impact on the production of statutory returns] University of We had, previously purchased the Institutional Programme Publishing (IPP) module The project work resulted in a valid feed in XCRI format detailing 499 courses. Bedfordshire from Tribal and implemented this in 2010 as part of a large scale project which The project work also enabled us to clearly identify a road map for future included the re-engineering of the commensurate business processes. improvements to our end-to-end course data information processes. In the original bid for the XCRI project, the objective was to make: 'Further significant The project also enabled us to clearly acknowledge the benefit of the work done on developments to manage the flow of course and associated data and improve the IPP [Institutional Programme Publishing module from Tribal] project in creating a course material, external expectations and course data flows within institution'. consistent centralised data source and clearly identified that it was a marked improvement from its original baseline of an entirely paper-based, disjointed and disparate business process. Managing course information infoKit Project ‘before and after’ quotes Organisation Before After Birkbeck, University Something else we have realised is just how critical this project is for the institution – We believe this project is going to have a critical impact on Birkbeck, particularly in of London not only because of the efficiencies to be gained by using the XCRI-CAP system, but relation to access to and promotion of our course data (although, as we haven’t yet also because of the vulnerabilities intrinsic to our current system. rolled out the new system, we don’t have the evidence to support this). We expect A vulnerability in our current course publishing system is the lack of documentation the following: relating to how we currently publish our course catalogue online (most of the Improved quality assurance: In the past, we have relied a great deal on information is held in the heads of critical course staff). free-text fields in Collage [CRM system] for inputting course data. This [Following process review]: means a possibility exists whereby, without rigorous checking, we could publish information that might not be compliant with quality-assured It became apparent that the various players in the system weren’t entirely programme information. aware of what the other players in the system did and how it all fitted Improved course quality: our school colleagues sometimes feel a together (namely, who did what and when, and how did our information get ‘disconnect’ with our published course information, and believe that it is published?). ‘owned’ by External Relations, rather than them. This has proven unhelpful It enabled us to identify both inefficiencies in our system (e.g. processes in the past and has led to the situation where our Schools have wanted to that duplicated other data entry points and therefore could lead to publish duplicate course information on their local School / department inaccuracies in our published content) and processes that could allow microsites, simply so they get immediate access to it. This has also led to incorrect information to be published on our web site. the situation whereby Schools didn’t always check their course data throughout the year, but rather only when prompted. Improved CMS experience: We are confident that Birkbeck staff, already familiar with Plone from their work elsewhere on the site, will find working on the new system an improvement over their experience of Collage. University of The complexity of the project was demonstrated by the multiple uses of the same The project was of great value to the institution in terms of providing the resource Birmingham core curriculum data as shown in the Curriculum Information Map; along side the and mandate to begin to better co-ordinate its programme and module information need for the same information to be written / displayed in different ways depending across a range of central services and functions. It also however highlighted that, in on the audience and the purpose. For example module descriptions for QAA order for the benefits of the project to be fully realised, further support will be purposes versus those for marketing and recruitment purposes. The project set out required across the sector in subsequent phases. to determine how this could be better managed. It was not clear at the start of the The work undertaken by the project is now becoming fully adopted into the activities project how difficult it would be, particularly when the project refocused, to keep the of the Curriculum Management Team, who are responsible for overseeing right lines of communication in place. This was overcome by ‘discovery’ sessions so programme and module information stored within Banner. Over the next six months, that colleagues from different areas of the institution, with different responsibility and they will work closely with Schools to improve the quality of centrally held data, as access to the data could meet together, for example the central Curriculum well as liaise much more closely with the central Web and Marketing Team on Management Team and the Web Co-ordinators in Colleges. recruitment data. The issues of data quality; data efficiency and data effectiveness will all continue to be considered, now that their complexity has been more fully understood and will be part of a much wider project on how the institution engages with the QAA Code on Public Information. Managing course information infoKit Project ‘before and after’ quotes Organisation Before After Bishop Burton Before the project, course information was stored in a variety of formats and ‘owned’ The immediate impact has been the improvement of current systems for collecting, College within various departments. The College’s Website and Prospectus, although modifying and approving course data within a single, central repository. sharing the vast majority of information, were produced as separate entities with We propose to expand the scope of the project to the whole of the College and the much duplication. Similarly, documents such as Course Manuals were created development of course information. This will involve the dissemination of project independently by Course Managers, again with course information that had been findings and the improvements made in processes to other teams outside of HE. produced elsewhere, leading