From a presentation delivered in 2003.

1. How we are building
an MLE…
 Western Colleges
Consortium

2. WCC Staff
 Anne Atkins
 Senior Projects Officer
 Vicky Crockett
 Campus Manager
 James Clay (not here)
 Director

3. System Specs
 System was designed and built under
the leadership of Richard Abrahams
 Information Systems Manager - City of
Bristol College
 Responsible for implementation of all
3rd part College Information systems &
 Development of all ‘in house’ CIS

4. The WCC database –
One small step for interoperability…

5. Working as a consortium: Shared VLE
 Do we want separate ‘containers’ for
each member college?
 Do we want to share content?
 Do we want to report on VLE usage
across the consortium?

6. Why connect Consortium MIS and VLE
 Ease of administration – automatic
account creation
 Student enrolment controls – only
enrolled students get an account
 Shared VLE – need for analysis of
‘cross consortium’ usage

7. Analysis of Consortium users
 VLE doesn’t store personal/student
level data such as
 age, ethnicity, post code, qual level,
qual type, achievement, etc
 How do we manage to report on this
data across the consortium?
 individual colleges prepare data set
and it’s aggregated
 develop a consortium databse

8. WCC System Dataflows
VLE
College MIS
Database
Systems
csv file
XML file
ftp
Consortium
Database

9. Consortium data issues
 Agreeing standards
 data sets
 coding standards
 naming conventions
 Methods for data extraction
 Systems for transferring files/data
 Routines for importing/validating data
 Procedures with VLE vendor for data
exchange

10. Our targets (& what’s currently possible!)
MIS VLE
 student account creation
 award (course creation)
 award membership
 group membership (coming soon)

11. Our targets (2)
MIS VLE
 What data can usefully be retrieved
at ILR level?
 at the moment – not much!
 completion/achievement data not yet
recorded in VLE
 will take some time (and significant
change in working culture/practice/
technology) to reach that point

12. Our targets (3)
MIS VLE
 What data can usefully be retrieved
for consortium reporting?
 Date of 1st login
 Date of most recent login
 Number of logins
 etc
 Not yet implemented

13. Implementation issues (1)
 Transfer file creation
 XML vs .csv
 capabilities of MIS
 Staff skills
 File transfer - network/firewall issues
 Batch vs Real Time

14. Implementation issues (2)
 WCC database
 resource/skills for development (at no
cost!)
 Data validation routines
 XML output requirement
 VLE supplier co-operation

15. Where’s IMS in all this?
 VLE vendor working towards IMS
compliance
 Data transfer to VLE in XML format
 spec supplied by vendor
 Data sent to VLE from WCC
database – not college MIS

16. Questions & Answers
?