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Action Plan

 
Inside Work Plan
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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  • small number of historical documents or manuscripts, held in a library collection but not previously digitised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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