Driving Factors
There were a number of problems being experienced in the consortia which the project work attempted to address.
A difficulty that applied to all learners was the lack of relevant, collated, up to date information and links to applications. Essential resources for students were scattered across many web sites and applications. Learners had to remember several URLs or sequences of page links to navigate to the information and applications they needed on a regular basis. This often required logging in multiple times to different applications.
Another difficulty was the lack of systems to provide secure access to applications across institutions. VLEs were often used to provide authentication and authorisation services to allow secure access to distributed resources in the absence of a dedicated solution. This imposed an administration overhead for the maintainers of the VLEs and a complexity overhead for the learners who were required to use the VLE no matter how simple the resource.
A key difficulty experienced by managers of flexible on-line course delivery to lifelong learners was the maintenance of accurate student data. Conventional student record systems assumed campus-based students in cohorts following the normal academic year. A requirement existed for dynamic tracking of individual student learning plans with multiple start and finish times involving more than one institution.
Data reconciliation was also problematic. Personal data about each learner was held at each institution and the reconciliation process to confirm identities between institutions was a laborious manual process. More active involvement of the learners would benefit both sides.
Information of relevance to learners was often simply inaccessible, being locked away in ‘information silos’, monolithic corporate systems with specific roles which were difficult to integrate. Where information was available, it was spread across web sites and proprietary applications. There was a need to get these systems to communicate to allow the data they contained to be used flexibly in a range of contexts to provide a better environment for the learner.