Aims and Objectives

The aims of the project were:

1. To implement and evaluate the NIMLE student portal infrastructure as a way of managing the delivery of flexible lifelong learning

2. To improve the learner experience by providing easy access to a personalised collection of essential information, applications and electronic resources.

3. To enable the learner to log in once to access all the information, applications and resources.

4. To provide a foundation for tracking flexible student learning plans across institutions.

5. To enable learner interaction in business processes such as learner data reconciliation.

6. To implement a service-oriented approach to integrate the enterprise applications in each consortium to provide dynamic data via web services.

7. To improve enrolment operations between student record systems and VLEs via services.

The objectives for the project were set out as a collection of envisaging scenarios to illustrate the functionality and services required from the point of view of the user. The scenarios are detailed in appendix A.

The SURF objectives were centred on utilising the existing work of NIIMLE to build personalised links between the portal and University and College systems to enable the following:

1. Display of current college course and university module titles and descriptions

2. Display of transcript / learner record information (course results, etc)

3. Display of personal information (name, address, telephone, etc)

4. Sending of learner requests to update personal information

5. Launching of course content in VLEs from links in the portal

6. Direct access to e-Resources from links in the portal

7. Direct access to library catalogue system from the portal to view books on load and reserved

8. Automation of enrolment operations between the student records system and VLEs.

A key objective was to implement Shibboleth to secure the portal, applications, e-resources and web services within each consortium to allow single sign-on access to all applications and resources accessed from the portal.

For WETN, additional objectives were:

1. To implement the portal as part of an integrated MLE involving six e-Training Network institutions

2. To evaluate the effectiveness of the implementation in the sharing of content and the management of delivery across institutional boundaries

3. To evaluate the ability of the system to dynamically maintain accurate student records

4. To trial Shibboleth technologies as part of the evaluation in order to achieve single sign-on capability

5. To test scalability by extrapolating to an all-Wales scenario

The Potential Benefits to NIIMLE were seen as:

Enhancement of the Enterprise Web Services implementation - The current implementation would be enhanced by the development of more of the operations specified by IMS. Also, additional application profiles developed would be useful in the provision of future NIIMLE services

Better integration of COSE with the portal, especially single sign-on between COSE and the portal. In addition, it was hoped that user preferences in the portal, for example colours and styles, could be made to extend to the COSE channel.