CETIS Enterprise Special Interest Group
| Site Pages |
|---|
| Home |
| Next SIG Meeting |
| SIG Meetings |
| Projects using Enterprise |
| Forthcoming Events |
| JISC E-Learning Prog |
| Acronyms & Glossary |
| Links |
| Discussion Lists |
| IMS-ENTERPRISE |
| CETIS-LIPSIG |
| External Websites |
| CETIS |
| JISC | IMS Enterprise Spec |
| IMS Ent. Services Spec |
| Contact Details |
| Contact details |
| Join the SIG |
| SIG Members |
| CETIS Contacts |
2nd Enterprise SIG Meeting
Notes, Presentations and Feedback
The 2nd CETIS Enterprise Special Interest Group Meeting was held on 28th July 2003 at Brockenhurst College, Hampshire. Brockenhurst College is a Further Education College located in a village in the New Forest. The venue was kindly provided by Robin Gadd, Head of ILT at Brockenhurst. Jon Rowett of Brockenhurst College also presented at the meeting.
26 people registered for the meeting, and a few more indicated interest but were away on holiday. 24 attended on the day.
Presentations and Notes
1. The world of Enterprise: meetings and developments (Powerpoint). Vashti Zarach, Enterprise SIG Coordinator..
My presentation gave a brief introduction to CETIS and the SIGs; and further information about the Enterprise SIG. I gave a brief summary of the Enterprise SIG launch meeting, before outlining the agenda for the 2nd meeting.
I then updated SIG members on recent relevant meetings I had attended, including a meeting in Belfast entitled "Getting your college MIS to talk to your VLE" and a DiVLE meeting in Oxford (on linking VLEs and digital libraries). I gave a rundown of current news relating to the Enterprise Specification, and mentioned two current projects working with the specification; both of which will be presenting their work at the 3rd SIG Meeting in September.2. Enterprise web services (Powerpoint).
Scott Wilson, Assistant Director of CETIS.
IMS Enterprise Services Web Services Group: "This effort is defining the Web Service-based approach for exchanging information about students, groups, and enrollments between system. It is in essence a Web Service binding for the IMS Enterprise Specification." ( http://www.imsglobal.org/workinprogress.cfm)
Scott's presentation was of great interest to SIG members, and comments on evaluation forms indicated an interest in more in-depth discussions and presentations in this subject area.
3. Restructuring a college registration system.
Jon Rowett, Brockenhurst College.
Jon Rowett gave a very interesting presentation on the Emily Project at Brockenhurst.
Emily was designed to be an electronic registration system, a messaging system, a student records portal and a central data store. Primary uses of the system are to enable online registration in classes, and improve college communication, as lecturers have been slow to adopt email. The online registers link to photographs of students, to assist lecturers in recognising new students (and also provide them with an "ID parade" to identify badly behaving students). The registers also incorporate an messaging system for lecturers to keep each other informed about students' behaviour, etc (and to encourage them to use electronic communication).
The Enterprise Specification is used for importing student, staff and timetable data into Emily from various college systems; and for exporting student data from Emily to the VLE (Learnwise). Jon recommended that people working with Enterprise wrote a conformance statement. He also mentioned they had needed to create a set of custom extensions for timetabling information for the specification.
Jon gave a short demo of Emily, which will be online from September at http://emily.brock.ac.uk/.
4. Enterprise and the MLE: Integrating
IMS Enterprise within the Managed Learning Environment (Powerpoint).
Steve Beech and Alan Glover, De Montfort University.
Steve and Alan's interesting presentation discussed how they had used Enterprise for transferring data within the MLE. They highlighted some elements missing from the specification. I suggested that it could be useful for the SIG to gather together custom extensions (such as Jon Rowett's timetabling extensions) and missing elements from the specification; and submit these to IMS. (I hope to allow some time for this type of activity at the next SIG meeting).
5. Facillitating VLE-library integration via IMS
Enterprise? (Powerpoint).
Alan Masson and Clare Uhomoibhi, University of Ulster.
Alan gave a thought-provoking discussion about integration of libraries and VLEs. He contended that linking from the VLE to a range of digitized library resources was not enough; this approach entirely bypassed the library, and the range of services libraries offer to users. Alan suggested instead that VLEs are integrated with a library environment, which link users to both resources and services; thereby recreating a library environment online.
As a former librarian, I thought this was a very important point. From experience; I know that some library users are happy to be left to their own devices when searching for resources, but others prefer and require lots of help from library staff.
Alan believed that the Enterprise Specification was ideal to use for defining library integration; but that additional work was needed to define library data structures.
6. The Coleg Menai SWANI Project
Finn Newick, Coleg Menai.
Finn gave a humourous presentation, punning on his project name by displaying his text over a beautiful background image of a swan.
The Coleg Menai Project; which is funded as one of the JISC SWANI Projects (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), has been attempting to transfer data between the college MIS (Distinction) and VLE (Learnwise). Finn claimed that interoperability had just been achieved!
7. CPCET MLE Project (Powerpoint).
Jane Fearnley, University of Huddersfield.
Jane finished off the day with a presentation which usefully reminded us how ineffective student enrolment procedures and subsequent access to library and VLE systems can be without technology to improve the speed and accuracy of the process.