The Contemporary World: The Globalization of World Politics
WCC Presentation on MLEs
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
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