Over the last few weeks I have been looking at data models. This made me reminisce about the work I did back in the day with the Western Colleges Consortium. We had seven different college student record systems sending us student data which was then uploaded to a shared VLE. 

This was twenty five years ago, so though I am reminiscing, I this was some time ago, so I don’t remember all the details and I am probably misremembering some of this. The essence of what we did was that each night, each student record system would run a routine which would create an XML file of the student details, this would then be sent via secure FTP to our server which would collate all seven XML files into a single XML file and upload the student data to the VLE. It would both create new users, delete redundant users, and update where necessary.

What was key I think was that, though the student record systems had quite a lot of detail about the student, we didn’t need that information for the shared VLE. This was about accessing a system, we didn’t need ti know their date of birth, address and so on.

There were some challenges I remember in providing a course identification so that when the user was created on the VLE they would then have access to their courses only on the VLE.

It was certainly considered quite innovative at the time, and myself and others did a number of presentations about what we did.

Back then we didn’t have single sign on, so students would have to have another password in addition to the one they used to log into the college computers. Interoperability was something new to me back then and it was an interesting time in which I realised the many technical challenges in building an interoperable learning environment. One challenge for us was that the technical development in this area was very much focused on the single institution model and ensuring the institutional systems could talk (interoperate) with each other. The concept of a multi-institutional model was a step too far.

In the end the Western Colleges Consortium became defunct. The main reasons were college mergers, the seven became four, this made the financial model unsustainable. The shared platform wasn’t meeting the needs of the students and the requirements of the consortium. Finally, the compromises of collaboration were decided to be a barrier to further VLE usage and take up.

Today the core internal interoperability challenges appear to have been solved. Attending the 1EdTech conference in Delft earlier this year demonstrated to me how mature these educational standards have become.

With the changes in technology and the requirements of student mobility today (think LLE) means that the interoperability requirements have just gone up another level, as has the need for deeper collaboration. What does this mean, well that’s another blog post.