The action plant for pilot project is based on the report made by Ursula
Reber, our consultant with IBM. The full report will be posted in
our archives shortly.
Phase
0: Design
Prior
to the definition of a repository pilot system a high-level Design Study
was held at Exeter to describe the use of the IBM Content Manager/MyCoRe
approach and discuss the possibilities of applying this setup within
Exeter University at large and for the School of Education in
particular. The university IT Department is responsible for the
technical side of the project. In what follows, the assumption is that
the university will decide to use the product IBM Content Manager (with
or without the MyCoRe Open Source application platform).
TheoWeb
repository
For
the pilot the following material is recommended:
-
materials
from existing modules in the Living Belief course (Dept. of Lifelong
Learning, S. Graham and M. Higton)
-
a
unit from the existing Web-CT course (LaTiS, N. Birbeck)
-
materials
from one or two of the partner institutions (Emmanuel and St. Chad,
B. Richards; others as ready)
-
base
materials, including audio and graphics, publications, other
available resources linked to the teaching and learning repository
(various content producers)
-
small
number of historical documents or manuscripts, held in a library
collection but not previously digitised
-
pilot
of an online, peer-reviewed journal of Biblical Studies and IT
(Computer-Assisted Research Section, Society of Biblical Literature)
-
link
with the Digital Bible Project
Datamodels
For
the pilot we need to discuss datamodels, such as Dublin Core, as well as
the use of SCORM and others. Methods of indexing will need to be agreed
among the partners.
Integration
with teaching environment
A big task during pilot phase will be the definition of interaction and
rules between a teaching environment (here WebCT and Blackboard) and the
IBM Content Manager. Some ‘glue code’ needs to be written. The new
version of Lotus LearningSpace will actually provide such code and it
needs to be discussed with the IT center, whether a pilot installation
should also include this learning environment (especially for the
Business School, as the program is widely used within banking and
insurance environments). In general integration with a teaching
environment should use standard APIs and definitely should be
application-independent. University of Essen and the federal country of
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (2 universities and 3 Fachhochschulen) will also
go forward in this field and should be considered partners in the pilot.
Exit
of Phase 0 is an agreement notice
to this document by all involved partners.
Phase
1: Choosing pilot partners and material and defining data models and
users
Choosing
the right material is important for a fast development of the pilot. The
pilot material should be free from copyright restrictions etc, unless
used for proof-of-concept regarding rights management and user access.
Later on obtaining material could be an automated process for
some objects or negotiation between parties with different dependencies.
For
the pilot a few representative users are chosen in order to run a user
test. A GUI (graphical user interface) will be developed at end of this
phase representing the requirements of the final project. However, for
the first few steps we will use the Miless/MyCoRe approach (with a
little facelifting).
Exit
Phase 1 is
the updated architecture document with the following content
(qualitative and quantitative):
-
Material
list, incl. definition of follow-on materials, base definition of
archiving rules
-
User
profiles and base conditions of user test
-
List
of requirements
-
Datamodel
definitions
-
List
of included international standards
-
Search
and presentation concept
-
Workflow
for data entry and migration
Phase 2: Programming, test data and user
test
First
test programs for
-
Data
entry GUI
-
Search
GUI
-
Basic
workflow
-
Data
migration
for
defined requirements. This may redefine the definition of the
application architecture document.
This
requires quite some involvement of the partners.
Exit
Phase 2: critical
mass of test documents, ready-to-use test programmes and finished
usability test.
Phase
3: Revision of architecture document based on findings
Usually
a 1 or 2-day meeting to map
the results to the original architecture document and possibly define
some changes.
Exit
Phase 3
Phase
4: Definition of total
project and cost
Based
on this final document the complete project can be planned and funded.
This may mean application for funding to more than one authority.
Ensuing cost in hardware, maintenance etc. will be described in detail
for a 5 year period of runtime.
Exit
Phase 4
Phase
5: Funds obtained, transfer of pilot to production system.
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