#coursedata Tested by design – ITT for XCRI-CAP test tools

There’s an ITT on the JISC funding site for testing tools to support the #coursedata call:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities/funding_calls/2011/09/JISC%20ITT%2…

The #coursedata call aims to get institutions to review their internal course data processes and will provide funding for them to re-engineer and streamline data flows. To provide an outward sign of the improved inner efficiency, #coursedata projects will be required to produce an XCRI-CAP feed. This shouldn’t be onerous if good data is available, and so should act as an proxy for the institutional readiness to do other things with their coursedata, in preparation for initiatives like KIS and HEAR.

To help institutions produce valid feeds, and think about their data, the ITT will commission testing tools.
A validator… to validate feeds… and provide meaningful feedback to help correct invalid feeds…
and an aggregator to pull registered feeds together, so simple comparison can be run against feeds, for sense checking.

The tools should be available from March 2012, and one of the aims is to use the underpinning code as a way to investigate what can be done with a rump of XCRI-CAP data.
I’m going to be at the JISC CETIS Design Bash in Oxford http://designbash11.eventbrite.com/ on the 30/9/11
And am happy to collect ideas for useful things to do with the data, dev days or competitions.

Rob