XCRI stands for eXchanging Course Related Information, and the XCRI Course Advertising Profile (XCRI-CAP) is an information model, supported by an

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

specification, used to share information about courses between UK education institutions and aggregators such as Prospects and other sites that advertise courses. XCRI is developed by a community-based group with no formal membership processes, similar to initiatives such as

Microformats Microformats (μF) are predefined HTML markup (like HTML classes) created to serve as descriptive and consistent metadata about HTML element, elements, designating them as representing a certain type of data (such as address book, contact info ...

. The infrastructure of its communications (website, forum and wiki) was run b
JISC-CETIS
and funded by

Jisc Jisc is a United Kingdom not-for-profit organisation that provides network and IT services and digital resources in support of further and higher education and research, as well as the public sector. Its head office is based in Bristol with ...

UK Standard

Th
Information Standards Board (ISB)
part of the UK's Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) approved XCRI-CAP 1.1 as the UK standard in January 2009.

Patents and open standards

Like many "informal" specifications, XCRI releases are under a Creative Commons license.

History

2005-2006

XCRI was originally developed as part of a project funded by

in April 2005. This project was focused around exploring how education institutions developed their portfolio of courses (also known as curriculum management) and the potential for new approaches to

interoperability Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader de ...

. The project created an information model and

schema for course management primarily aimed at use within universities and colleges.

2007-2008

In March 2007 an XCRI project received funding from

to focus primarily on developing a much more lightweight specification aimed at helping universities and colleges syndicate information about their courses to aggregators and brokerage services, such as services that handle applications to universities. The project was funded for two years, with the premise that at the end of the project in 2009, the resulting specification would be handed off to an open standards process. JISC also funded a handful of XCRI mini-projects during this period to pilot and experiment with the information model.

2009

XCRI-CAP version 1.1 was endorsed in January 2009 by th
UK's Information Standards Board (ISB)
as th
UK's eProspectus standard
The ISB is part of the Department For Education and is the official authority for information and data standards in education, skills and children's services.

European standardisation

In 2008 work began at the

European Committee for Standardization The European Committee for Standardization (CEN, ) is a public standards organization whose mission is to foster the economy of the European Single Market and the wider European continent in global trading, the welfare of European citizens an ...

(CEN) to develop a new standard for course descriptions to be used across Europe: EN 15982 -Metadata for Learning Opportunities- (MLO) Advertising. The XCRI Course Advertising Profile is one of several specifications, including Norway's Course Description Metadata submitted as part of this effort
XCRI-CAP 1.2
is a conformant profile of BS EN 15982, and was formalised a
BS 8581 parts 1 & 2
in October 2012.

Implementations

The XCRI Course Advertising Profile has been adopted at a number of UK education institutions, se
list of feeds

Criticisms

While XCRI has generally been considered a success by its funders and participants, there have been criticisms of the approach taken in developing the Course Advertising Profile. eLearning commentator

Stephen Downes Stephen Downes (born April 6, 1959) is a Canadian philosopher and commentator in the fields of online learning and new media. He has explored and promoted the educational use of computer and online technologies since 1995. He gave the 2004 Bun ...

has criticised XCRI for developing a new

specification rather than basing it on

RSS RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many ...

, which would enable courses to be aggregated using existing technologies. . The choice by the XCRI developers to be inspired by RDF design principles but not to use an RDF binding approach has also been slightly controversial; this approach was also taken by the developers of the Atom Syndication Format.

Notes

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