Summary of Business Cases

Disclaimer The summary provided are on no specific order, or with no intention of relevance and importance.

Stakeholders:

• European coordination centers_
  • Such as National Europass, CEDEFOP
• HE institutions:
  • Administration for the application for the Europass process
• Providers of learning opportunities
  • Universities
  • Colleges
  • Schools
  • Training organisations
  • In multiple business areas within a "global" company.
• Providers of employment opportunities
• Aggregators of learning opportunities
  • Ploteus, HotCourses, FastTomato
• Learners
  • Potential applicants within EU and beyond
  • Roaming learners (Mobile and non-mobile)
  • From Multiple business areas within a "global" company.
• Brokers - Providing added value-services:
  • Exploring work and learning opportunities
  • Advice, guidance and decision-making support e.g. UCAS, VHS Admission, Skoleverket, Graduat Prospects
  • Application management services e.g. UCAS, VHS Admission
  • Pre-assessment
  • Senior management of global company (HR - department?)
• Quality Assurance bodies and Institutions
• Governmental and other agencies that:
  • Benchmark offerings
  • Grade offerings
  • Perform quality management functions against existing and proposed offerings
• European Community commission

Opportunity for a standard

• ECTS and Europass:
  • Define standard information structure for paper based format (Description, Exchange, Comparison, Transcript of record information)
• Europass information need to be interchanged EU-Wide interoperating systems, administered at different levels
• Lack of interoperability delays reuse of information in LMS's
• Brokers need a standard information format for course and study program records
• Providers need to:
  • Advertise widely their offerings
  • Align their offerings
  • Have an easy way to gather and enter the descriptive data
  • Have common and comparable reporting on usage
  • Provide benchmarking data
  • Provide quality management functions
• Many brokers require manual data entry, or use of special tools
• Aggregators and brokers need reliable data.
• Offer a common process
• Brokers need reliable data
• Senior management wants:
  • Standardised offers
  • reduce and avoid redundancy of offers
  • Transparency of offers available
  • Comparable reporting on offers and usage
• Learners must be able to find and select an appropriate offer e.g. topic, region, suitability, prerequisites.
• Need for semantic interoperability, a common framework for description
• Higher Education Institutions need to program their course offering every academic year
• Ministries of Education need to evaluate each HEI's course offering proposal for the next academic year before it can be published (advertised) to the learners community
• There need to be a standard evaluation to ensure quality and adherence to the Bologna Process requirements in the learning opportunities offered
• The learning opportunities governing bodies (Ministries, QA bodies) need to control and monitor the aggregated domestic learning opportunities distribution and offering, to report to European Community and assess the comprehensiveness and validity of the learning opportunities offered.
• Standard technical specifications need to support the processes and data flows of this scenario
• the same process could be escalated and adapted to European Community level, whereby all European providers of learning opportunities need to report their offering to the EU commission.

A standard for MLO should

• Enable technical mapping of course and learning opportunity information
  • Accomodate ECTS and Europass
• Contribute to the consolidation of European transparency documents
• Support development of information system for implementing the Bologna process at the following levels:
  • Institutional
  • National
  • European
• Support Learner mobility and transparency
• Support Quality in the European educational settings
• Support availability of broker services in Europe
• Ensure data quality and data quality management
• Ensure data consistency
• Commodify information, leveling the playing field - enabling new entrants to the market e.g. web2 services etc.
• Reduce cost for providers
• Enable better consistency across multiple platforms
• Enable better consistency of course information provided for benchmarking
• Improve efficiency of benchmarking
• Support aggregator functionality
• Support provision of additional information (without adding complexity)
• Support emergence of new business cases
• Support the wider availability of application brokerage services across EU
• Support transparency and learner mobility by harmonising the application process
• Facilitate efficient gathering and entry in systems
• Facilitate mix of internal and external offerings
• Consider regional and cultural diversity
• Enable the technical mapping of course and other learning opportunities related information, accommodated into the ECTS and Europass transparency documents, to an interoperability specification.
• Contribute to the domestic adoption of a proactive quality evaluation and monitoring process for learning opportunities offered
• Support the development of monitoring systems for the implementation of the Bologna process, at institutional, national and European levels
• Support the analysis of the learning opportunities offered throughout the years.
• Enable control over the long term learning opportunities offered.

A standard must be:

• Lightweight
• Easy to implement (not create technology tax...)
• Fit in existing business processes, or improve existing business processes (not create process tax...)
• Support extensibility
• Support multiple encoding schemes
• Support simple architectures such as RSS etc.
• Accommodate identified and agreed-upon information structures of transparency documents, Ether through its core-elements or by extension mechanism
• Multilingual (i18n) (setup and configuration)
• Support official taxonomies
• Support core browse and search functionalities - discovery:
  • Cost, Start time, Duration, Minimum entry, Physical location, Qualification target, Subject, topic, prerequisites
• Be aligned with other existing standards
• Supported by system vendors
• Supported by tools
• Support multiple industries and their specifics
• Support / Include regulatory elements
• Support key reporting elements e.g. cost, training days ...
• Support inclusion of quality information via an extension capability
• Be able to acomodate and support domestic and European learning systems structures