MAKING SENSE OF COURSE DATA: TOWARDS THE STANDARDISATION OF CURRICULUM DESIGN AND COURSE RELATED INFORMATION

This paper provides a comprehensive description of the research conducted in a number of JISC funded projects in the past few years. The authors were involved in the development of educational planning tools supporting the direct comparison of course data. One of the main challenges in today's higher education is the lack of a consistent approach in the design and development of curriculum information. Although several quality assurance agencies exist world wide and ensure that there are certain criteria that must be adhered to when a new course is designed, there is still no widely acceptable format for documenting course data. This has allowed institutions to introduce their own templates, structures and techniques when producing information describing their courses. Furthermore, there are several terms that are frequently used interchangeably, causing confusion to the reader of course brochures (e.g. course, programme, class, module, lesson, learning experience). Typically, such readers involve several stakeholders of higher and further education courses such as applicants, students, parents and even academics. The paper describes the creation of a toolkit allowing the comparison of course data from different institutions based on semantic analysis of course description documents. The paper also discusses several contributions to research from the educational toolkit allowing the matching of user provided keywords to course content. Emphasis is given on explaining how the toolkit allows users to search course content by using several criteria including learning outcomes, indicative content, reading lists, etc. The paper also discusses how the project led to the enervation of a course data feed that can be used by any aggregator service allowing the creation of a national or even international repository of course data. Potentially the impact of the developed toolkit (that is based on the XCRI-CAP 1.2 standard) would support the harmonisation of course data representations and the exchange of course related data.