Cetis was commissioned to undertake technical modelling work of the role of existing and currently developing Management Information Systems (MIS) deployments and to consider alternative future deployments, together with their advantages and disadvantages. This work identified existing and alternative models of operation, including a central software service given the changing context as Scottish FE transitions from 41 institutions to 15 regional colleges through a number of mergers and federations. The methodology developed was based the Enterprise Architecture approach to help businesses and educational organisations develop more efficient IT systems and processes.

Contact: Stephen Powell and Bill Olivier

In early 2014 Cetis was commissioned by Creative Commons to help manage the third phase of the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative project (LRMI). The initiative, which builds on the work of Schema.org, aims to support the discovery of relevant education resources on the web. LMRI is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and jointly lead by Creative Commons and the Association of American Publishers with the aim of making it easier to publish, discover, and deliver high quality educational resources on the web. With input from a wide range of organisations, from both the open and commercial spheres, involved in publishing and using educational resource LRMI successfully proposed additions to schema.org (an initiative of Google, Yahoo and Bing) allowing the description of educationally important properties of resources to be marked-up in web pages in a manner that is easily understood by search engines. This enables people to create search engines that support the filtering search results based on criteria such as their match to a specific part of a curriculum, or the age of the students, or one of several other characteristics.

After the completion of this project we remain represented on the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative LRMI Task Group

Key contact: Phil Barker
More information: LRMI terms

Subject coding is one of the key building blocks of student data that ought to have sector-wide and consistent applicability. The current method of classifying subjects is based on a scheme known as the Joint Academic Coding System (JACS). JACS has been in use for a number of years and now requires a major review.

Cetis is undertaking a project to develop a replacement for the JACS system which meets the needs of a broader group of stakeholders and reflects the diverse and dynamic nature of higher education in the twenty-first century. This builds on the JACS report published in 2013 which considered the varying requirements and uses of subject coding in HE and sets out options for the development of a replacement for JACS.

More information: HEDIIP Subject Coding

The Learning Analytics Community Exchange is an EU project in the 7th Framework Programme involving nine partners across Europe which started in 2014. LACE partners are passionate about the opportunities afforded by current and future views of learning analytics (LA) and educational data mining (EDM) but are concerned about missed opportunities, undesirable consequences of mis-application, investment funding failing to realise value, market failure, etc. The 30 month project aims to integrate disparate communities working on LA and EDM from the schools, workplace, and universities sectors, by sharing viable and effective solutions to real problems through creation of an evidence base, publishing white papers and running workshops and events.

More information: LACE Project

Phil Barker (HEDIIP project)