Supporting Further and Higher Education

Joint Information Systems Committee

TISR

• Aims and objectives –To produce a “student object” that represents a

meaningful subset of learner information held in institutional MIS systems that can be held in an object-oriented store such as an LDAP directory.

–To develop a “proof of concept” servlet that consumes data from disparate stores, and, using DSML, updates an LDAP directory and/or presents directory information for display.

Supporting Further and Higher Education

Joint Information Systems Committee

Progress to Date

• Diet TISR

–A “lite” object model, essentially biographical;

–XML initialisation that addresses access control and object model issues;

–Working now on the API of the servlet.

Supporting Further and Higher Education

Joint Information Systems Committee

Success and Problems

• Successes–Conceptually clean

–Good foundation for extensible application

–Clear insight into the issues

• Problems–A “techie” solution – arcadian and utopianist

–Organisational changes have hampered development of a richer data model

Supporting Further and Higher Education

Joint Information Systems Committee

Findings & Recommendations

• Buy-in– Build a wide-based team

– Ensure they are not “reorganised” out

• IMS– What can the IMS Spec offer you?

– Can your application sit on an IMS compliant layer?

• Keep it Simple– Modular, straight forward

– Don’t try to answer everything

• MLEs are a process